Contents

COPYRIGHT INFO

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

THE MEGAPACK SERIES

INTRODUCTION: MEET DR. THORNDYKE, by R. Austin Freeman

THE BLUE SCARAB (1923)

THE NEW JERSEY SPHINX (1923)

THE TOUCHSTONE (1923)

A FISHER OF MEN (1923)

THE STOLEN INGOTS (1923)

THE FUNERAL PYRE (1923)

THE CAT’S EYE (1923) [Part 1]

THE CAT’S EYE (1923) [Part 2]

THE MYSTERY OF ANGELINA FROOD (1924) [Part 1]

THE MYSTERY OF ANGELINA FROOD (1924) [Part 2]

THE SHADOW OF THE WOLF (1925) [Part 1]

THE SHADOW OF THE WOLF (1925) [Part 2]

THE PUZZLE LOCK (1925)

THE GREEN CHECK JACKET (1925)

THE SEAL OF NEBUCHADNEZZAR (1925)

PHYLLIS ANNESLEY’S PERIL (1925)

A SOWER OF PESTILENCE (1925)

REX V. BURNABY (1925)

A MYSTERY OF THE SAND-HILLS (1925)

THE APPARITION OF BURLING COURT (1925)

THE MYSTERIOUS VISITOR (1925)

THE D’ARBLAY MYSTERY (1926) [Part 1]

THE D’ARBLAY MYSTERY (1926) [Part 2]

COPYRIGHT INFO

The Second R. Austin Freeman Megapack is copyright © 2014 by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

* * * *

Version 1.3

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

If you’ve purchased this Megapack, I assume you have already acquired the first volume, so I hope no further introduction is necessary to Dr. Thorndyke and R. Austin Freeman! But if this is your first experience with Freeman’s work, I suggest you start with his opening essay (written in 1941) which is a good introduction to his character, Dr. Thorndyke.

We had originally intended for this volume to contain all of Freeman’s late stories and novels, but due to the huge size, we are going to expand the series to a third and final volume—The Third R. Austin Freeman Megapack—which will contain the final set of R. Austin Freeman books.

—John Betancourt

Publisher, Wildside Press LLC

www.wildsidepress.com

ABOUT THE MEGAPACKS

Over the last few years, our “Megapack” series of ebook anthologies has grown to be among our most popular endeavors. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”

The Megapacks (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt (me), Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Bonner Menking, Colin Azariah-Kribbs, A.E. Warren, and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!)

A NOTE FOR KINDLE READERS

The Kindle versions of our Megapacks employ active tables of contents for easy navigation…please look for one before writing reviews on Amazon that complain about the lack! (They are sometimes at the ends of ebooks, depending on your reader.)

RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?

Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the Megapack series? We’d love your suggestions! You can post them on our message board at http://movies.ning.com/forum (there is an area for Wildside Press comments).

Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.

TYPOS

Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it’s been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.

If you spot a new typo, please let us know. We’ll fix it for everyone. You can email the publisher at wildsidepress@yahoo.com or use the message boards above.

THE MEGAPACK SERIES

MYSTERY

The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

The Charlie Chan Megapack*

The Craig Kennedy Scientific Detective Megapack

The Detective Megapack

The Father Brown Megapack

The Girl Detective Megapack

The First R. Austin Freeman Megapack

The Second R. Austin Freeman Megapack*

The Jacques Futrelle Megapack

The Anna Katharine Green Mystery Megapack

The First Mystery Megapack

The Second Mystery Megapack

The Penny Parker Megapack

The Philo Vance Megapack*

The Pulp Fiction Megapack

The Raffles Megapack

The Sherlock Holmes Megapack

The Victorian Mystery Megapack

The Wilkie Collins Megapack

GENERAL INTEREST

The Adventure Megapack

The Baseball Megapack

The Cat Story Megapack

The Second Cat Story Megapack

The Third Cat Story Megapack

The Third Cat Story Megapack

The Christmas Megapack

The Second Christmas Megapack

The Classic American Short Stories Megapack, Vol. 1.

The Classic Humor Megapack

The Dog Story Megapack

The Doll Story Megapack

The Horse Story Megapack

The Military Megapack

The Sea-Story Megapack

SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

The Edward Bellamy Megapack

The First Reginald Bretnor Megapack

The Fredric Brown Megapack

The Ray Cummings Megapack

The Philip K. Dick Megapack

The Dragon Megapack

The Randall Garrett Megapack

The Second Randall Garrett Megapack

The Edmond Hamilton Megapack

The C.J. Henderson Megapack

The Murray Leinster Megapack

The Second Murray Leinster Megapack

The Martian Megapack

The E. Nesbit Megapack

The Andre Norton Megapack

The H. Beam Piper Megapack

The Pulp Fiction Megapack

The Mack Reynolds Megapack

The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack

The Science-Fantasy Megapack

The First Science Fiction Megapack

The Second Science Fiction Megapack

The Third Science Fiction Megapack

The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack

The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack

The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack

The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack

The Eighth Science Fiction Megapack

The Robert Sheckley Megapack

The Steampunk Megapack

The Time Travel Megapack

The Wizard of Oz Megapack

HORROR

The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack

The E.F. Benson Megapack

The Second E.F. Benson Megapack

The Algernon Blackwood Megapack

The Second Algernon Blackwood Megapack

The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack

The Erckmann-Chatrian Megapack

The Ghost Story Megapack

The Second Ghost Story Megapack

The Third Ghost Story Megapack

The Haunts & Horrors Megapack

The Horror Megapack

The Lon Williams Weird Western Megapack

The M.R. James Megapack

The Macabre Megapack

The Second Macabre Megapack

The Third Macabre Megapack

The Arthur Machen Megapack**

The Mummy Megapack

The Occult Detective Megapack

The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack

The Vampire Megapack

The Weird Fiction Megapack

The Werewolf Megapack

WESTERNS

The B.M. Bower Megapack

The Max Brand Megapack

The Buffalo Bill Megapack

The Cowboy Megapack

The Zane Grey Megapack

The Lon Williams Weird Western Megapack

The Western Megapack

The Second Western Megapack

YOUNG ADULT

The Boys’ Adventure Megapack

The Dan Carter, Cub Scout Megapack

The Dare Boys Megapack

The Doll Story Megapack

The G.A. Henty Megapack

The Girl Detectives Megapack

The E. Nesbit Megapack

The Penny Parker Megapack

The Pinocchio Megapack

The Rover Boys Megapack

The Tom Corbett, Space Cadet Megapack

The Tom Swift Megapack

The Wizard of Oz Megapack

AUTHOR MEGAPACKS

The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

The H. Bedford-Jones Pulp Fiction Megapack

The Edward Bellamy Megapack

The B.M. Bower Megapack

The E.F. Benson Megapack

The Second E.F. Benson Megapack

The Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson Megapack

The Algernon Blackwood Megapack

The Second Algernon Blackwood Megapack

The Max Brand Megapack

The First Reginald Bretnor Megapack

The Fredric Brown Megapack

The Second Fredric Brown Megapack

The Wilkie Collins Megapack

The Ray Cummings Megapack

The Guy de Maupassant Megapack

The Philip K. Dick Megapack

The Erckmann-Chatrian Megapack

The F. Scott Fitzgerald Megapack

The First R. Austin Freeman Megapack

The Second R. Austin Freeman Megapack*

The Third R. Austin Freeman Megapack*

The Jacques Futrelle Megapack

The Randall Garrett Megapack

The Second Randall Garrett Megapack

The Anna Katharine Green Megapack

The Zane Grey Megapack

The Edmond Hamilton Megapack

The Dashiell Hammett Megapack

The C.J. Henderson Megapack

The M.R. James Megapack

The Selma Lagerlof Megapack

The Murray Leinster Megapack***

The Second Murray Leinster Megapack***

The Jonas Lie Megapack

The Arthur Machen Megapack**

The George Barr McCutcheon Megapack

The Talbot Mundy Megapack

The E. Nesbit Megapack

The Andre Norton Megapack

The H. Beam Piper Megapack

The Mack Reynolds Megapack

The Rafael Sabatini Megapack

The Saki Megapack

The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack

The Robert Sheckley Megapack

The Bram Stoker Megapack

The Lon Williams Weird Western Megapack

The Virginia Woolf Megapack

* Not available in the United States

** Not available in the European Union

***Out of print.

OTHER COLLECTIONS YOU MAY ENJOY

The Great Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany (it should have been called “The Lord Dunsany Megapack”)

The Wildside Book of Fantasy

The Wildside Book of Science Fiction

Yondering: The First Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories

To the Stars—And Beyond! The Second Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories

Once Upon a Future: The Third Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories

Whodunit?—The First Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories

More Whodunits—The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories

X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries

INTRODUCTION: MEET DR. THORNDYKE, by R. Austin Freeman

My subject is Dr. John Thorndyke, the hero or central character of most of my detective stories. So I’ll give you a short account of his real origin; of the way in which he did in fact come into existence.

To discover the origin of John Thorndyke I have to reach back into the past for at least fifty years, to the time when I was a medical student preparing for my final examination. For reasons which I need not go into I gave rather special attention to the legal aspects of medicine and the medical aspects of law. And as I read my text-books, and especially the illustrative cases, I was profoundly impressed by their dramatic quality. Medical jurisprudence deals with the human body in its relation to all kinds of legal problems. Thus its subject matter includes all sorts of crime against the person and all sorts of violent death and bodily injury: hanging, drowning, poisons and their effects, problems of suicide and homicide, of personal identity and survivorship, and a host of other problems of the highest dramatic possibilities, though not always quite presentable for the purposes of fiction. And the reported cases which were given in illustration were often crime stories of the most thrilling interest. Cases of disputed identity such as the Tichbourne Case, famous poisoning cases such as the Rugeley Case and that of Madeline Smith, cases of mysterious disappearance or the detection of long-forgotten crimes such as that of Eugene Aram; all these, described and analysed with strict scientific accuracy, formed the matter of Medical Jurisprudence which thrilled me as I read and made an indelible impression.

But it produced no immediate results. I had to pass my examinations and get my diploma, and then look out for the means of earning my living. So all this curious lore was put away for the time being in the pigeon-holes of my mind—which Dr. Freud would call the Unconscious—not forgotten, but ready to come to the surface when the need for it should arise. And there it reposed for some twenty years, until failing health compelled me to abandon medical practice and take to literature as a profession.

It was then that my old studies recurred to my mind. A fellow doctor, Conan Doyle, had made a brilliant and well-deserved success by the creation of the immortal Sherlock Holmes. Considering that achievement, I asked myself whether it might not be possible to devise a detective story of a slightly different kind; one based on the science of Medical Jurisprudence, in which, by the sacrifice of a certain amount of dramatic effect, one could keep entirely within the facts of real life, with nothing fictitious excepting the persons and the events. I came to the conclusion that it was, and began to turn the idea over in my mind.

But I think that the influence which finally determined the character of my detective stories, and incidentally the character of John Thorndyke, operated when I was working at the Westminster Ophthalmic Hospital. There I used to take the patients into the dark room, examine their eyes with the ophthalmoscope, estimate the errors of refraction, and construct an experimental pair of spectacles to correct those errors. When a perfect correction had been arrived at, the formula for it was embodied in a prescription which was sent to the optician who made the permanent spectacles.

Now when I was writing those prescriptions it was borne in on me that in many cases, especially the more complex, the formula for the spectacles, and consequently the spectacles themselves, furnished an infallible record of personal identity. If, for instance, such a pair of spectacles should have been found in a railway carriage, and the maker of those spectacles could be found, there would be practically conclusive evidence that a particular person had travelled by that train. About that time I drafted out a story based on a pair of spectacles, which was published some years later under the title of The Mystery of 31 New Inn, and the construction of that story determined, as I have said, not only the general character of my future work but of the hero around whom the plots were to be woven. But that story remained for some years in cold storage. My first published detective novel was The Red Thumb-mark, and in that book we may consider that John Thorndyke was born. And in passing on to describe him I may as well explain how and why he came to be the kind of person that he is.

I may begin by saying that he was not modelled after any real person. He was deliberately created to play a certain part, and the idea that was in my mind was that he should be such a person as would be likely and suitable to occupy such a position in real life. As he was to be a medico-legal expert, he had to be a doctor and a fully trained lawyer. On the physical side I endowed him with every kind of natural advantage. He is exceptionally tall, strong, and athletic because those qualities are useful in his vocation. For the same reason he has acute eyesight and hearing and considerable general manual skill, as every doctor ought to have. In appearance he is handsome and of an imposing presence, with a symmetrical face of the classical type and a Grecian nose. And here I may remark that his distinguished appearance is not merely a concession to my personal taste but is also a protest against the monsters of ugliness whom some detective writers have evolved.

These are quite opposed to natural truth. In real life a first-class man of any kind usually tends to be a good-looking man.

Mentally, Thorndyke is quite normal. He has no gifts of intuition or other supernormal mental qualities. He is just a highly intellectual man of great and varied knowledge with exceptionally acute reasoning powers and endowed with that invaluable asset, a scientific imagination (by a scientific imagination I mean that special faculty which marks the born investigator; the capacity to perceive the essential nature of a problem before the detailed evidence comes into sight). But he arrives at his conclusions by ordinary reasoning, which the reader can follow when he has been supplied with the facts; though the intricacy of the train of reasoning may at times call for an exposition at the end of the investigation.

Thorndyke has no eccentricities or oddities which might detract from the dignity of an eminent professional man, unless one excepts an unnatural liking for Trichinopoly cheroots. In manner he is quiet, reserved and self-contained, and rather markedly secretive, but of a kindly nature, though not sentimental, and addicted to occasional touches of dry humour. That is how Thorndyke appears to me.

As to his age. When he made his first bow to the reading public from the doorway of Number 4 King’s Bench Walk he was between thirty-five and forty. As that was thirty years ago, he should now be over sixty-five. But he isn’t. If I have to let him “grow old along with me” I need not saddle him with the infirmities of age, and I can (in his case) put the brake on the passing years. Probably he is not more than fifty after all!

Now a few words as to how Thorndyke goes to work. His methods are rather different from those of the detectives of the Sherlock Holmes school. They are more technical and more specialized. He is an investigator of crime but he is not a detective. The technique of Scotland Yard would be neither suitable nor possible to him. He is a medico-legal expert, and his methods are those of medico-legal science. In the investigation of a crime there are two entirely different methods of approach. One consists in the careful and laborious examination of a vast mass of small and commonplace detail: inquiring into the movements of suspected and other persons; interrogating witnesses and checking their statements particularly as to times and places; tracing missing persons, and so forth—the aim being to accumulate a great body of circumstantial evidence which will ultimately disclose the solution of the problem. It is an admirable method, as the success of our police proves, and it is used with brilliant effect by at least one of our contemporary detective writers. But it is essentially a police method.

The other method consists in the search for some fact of high evidential value which can be demonstrated by physical methods and which constitutes conclusive proof of some important point. This method also is used by the police in suitable cases. Finger-prints are examples of this kind of evidence, and another instance is furnished by the Gutteridge murder. Here the microscopical examination of a cartridge-case proved conclusively that the murder had been committed with a particular revolver; a fact which incriminated the owner of that revolver and led to his conviction.

This is Thorndyke’s procedure. It consists in the interrogation of things rather than persons; of the ascertainment of physical facts which can be made visible to eyes other than his own. And the facts which he seeks tend to be those which are apparent only to the trained eye of the medical practitioner.

I feel that I ought to say a few words about Thorndyke’s two satellites, Jervis and Polton. As to the former, he is just the traditional narrator proper to this type of story. Some of my readers have complained that Dr. Jervis is rather slow in the uptake. But that is precisely his function. He is the expert misunderstander. His job is to observe and record all the facts, and to fail completely to perceive their significance. Thereby he gives the reader all the necessary information, and he affords Thorndyke the opportunity to expound its bearing on the case.

Polton is in a slightly different category. Although he is not drawn from any real person, he is associated in my mind with two actual individuals. One is a Mr. Pollard, who was the laboratory assistant in the hospital museum when I was a student, and who gave me many a valuable tip in matters of technique, and who, I hope, is still to the good. The other was a watch-and clock-maker of the name of Parsons—familiarly known as Uncle Parsons—who had premises in a basement near the Royal Exchange, and who was a man of boundless ingenuity and technical resource. Both of these I regard as collateral relatives, so to speak, of Nathaniel Polton. But his personality is not like either. His crinkly countenance is strictly his own copyright.

To return to Thorndyke, his rather technical methods have, for the purposes of fiction, advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that his facts are demonstrably true, and often they are intrinsically interesting. The disadvantage is that they are frequently not matters of common knowledge, so that the reader may fail to recognize them or grasp their significance until they are explained. But this is the case with all classes of fiction. There is no type of character or story that can be made sympathetic and acceptable to every kind of reader. The personal equation affects the reading as well as the writing of a story.

—R. A. F.

1941

THE BLUE SCARAB (1923)

Medico-legal practice is largely concerned with crimes against the person, the details of which are often sordid, gruesome and unpleasant. Hence the curious and romantic case of the Blue Scarab (though really outside our speciality) came as somewhat of a relief. But to me it is of interest principally as illustrating two of the remarkable gifts which made my friend, Thorndyke as an investigator: his uncanny power of picking out the one essential fact at a glance, and his capacity to produce, when required, inexhaustible stores of unexpected knowledge of the most out-of-the-way subjects.

It was late in the afternoon when Mr. James Blowgrave arrived, by appointment, at our chambers, accompanied by his daughter, a rather strikingly pretty girl of about twenty-two; and when we had mutually introduced ourselves, the consultation began without preamble.

“I didn’t give any details in my letter to you,” said Mr. Blowgrave. “I thought it better not to, for fear you might decline the case. It is really a matter of a robbery, but not quite an ordinary robbery. There are some unusual and rather mysterious features in the case. And as the police hold out very little hope, I have come to ask if you will give me your opinion on the case and perhaps look into it for me. But first I had better tell you how the affair happened.

“The robbery occurred just a fortnight ago, about half-past nine o’clock in the evening. I was sitting in my study with my daughter, looking over some things that I had taken from a small deed-box, when a servant rushed in to tell us that one of the outbuildings was on fire. Now, my study opens by a French window on the garden at the back, and, as the outbuilding was in a meadow at the side of the garden, I went out that way, leaving the French window open; but before going I hastily put the things back in the deed-box and locked it.

“The building—which I used partly as a lumber store and partly as a workshop—was well alight and the whole household was already on the spot, the boy working the pump and the two maids carrying the buckets and throwing water on the fire. My daughter and I joined the party and helped to carry the buckets and take out what goods we could reach from the burning building. But it was nearly half an hour before we got the fire completely extinguished, and then my daughter and I went to our rooms to wash and tidy ourselves up. We returned to the study together, and when I had shut the French window my daughter proposed that we should resume our interrupted occupation. Thereupon I took out of my pocket the key of the deed-box and turned to the cabinet on which the box always stood.

“But there was no deed-box there.

“For a moment I thought I must have moved it, and cast my eyes round the room in search of it. But it was nowhere to be seen, and a moment’s reflection reminded me that I had left it in its usual place. The only possible conclusion was that during our absence at the fire, somebody must have come in by the window and taken it. And it looked as if that somebody had deliberately set fire to the outbuilding for the express purpose of luring us all out of the house.”

“That is what the appearances suggest,” Thorndyke agreed. “Is the study window furnished with a blind, or curtains?”

“Curtains,” replied Mr. Blowgrave. “But they were not drawn. Anyone in the garden could have seen into the room; and the garden is easily accessible to an active person who could climb over a low wall.”

“So far, then,” said Thorndyke, “the robbery might be the work of a casual prowler who had got into the garden and watched you through the window, and assuming that the things you had taken from the box were of value, seized an easy opportunity to make off with them. Were the things of any considerable value?”

“To a thief they were of no value at all. There were a number of share certificates, a lease, one or two agreements, some family photographs and a small box containing an old letter and a scarab. Nothing worth stealing, you see, for the certificates were made out in my name and were therefore unnegotiable.”

“And the scarab?”

“That may have been lapis lazuli, but more probably it was a blue glass imitation. In any case it was of no considerable value. It was about an inch and a half long. But before you come to any conclusion, I had better finish the story. The robbery was on Tuesday, the 7th of June. I gave information to the police, with a description of the missing property, but nothing happened until Wednesday, the 15th, when I received a registered parcel bearing, the Southampton postmark. On opening it I found, to my astonishment, the entire contents of the deed-box, with the exception of the scarab, and this rather mysterious communication.”

He took from his pocket and handed to Thorndyke an ordinary envelope addressed in typewritten characters, and sealed with a large, elliptical seal, the face of which was covered with minute hieroglyphics.

“This,” said Thorndyke,” I take to be an impression of the scarab; and an excellent impression it is.”

“Yes,” replied Mr. Blowgrave,” I have no doubt that it is the scarab. It is about the same size.”

Thorndyke looked quickly at our client with an expression of surprise. “But,” he asked, “don’t you recognise the hieroglyphics on it?”

Mr. Blowgrave smiled deprecatingly. “The fact is,” said he, “I don’t know anything about hieroglyphics, but I should say, as far as I can judge, these look the same. What do you think, Nellie?”

Miss Blowgrave looked at the seal vaguely and replied, “I am in the same position. Hieroglyphics are to me just funny things that don’t mean anything. But these look the same to me as those on our scarab, though I expect any other hieroglyphics would, for that matter.”

Thorndyke made no comment on this statement, but examined the seal attentively through his lens. Then he drew out the contents of the envelope, consisting of two letters, one typewritten and the other in a faded brown handwriting. The former he read through and then inspected the paper closely, holding it up to the light to observe the watermark.

“The paper appears to be of Belgian manufacture,” he remarked, passing it to me. I confirmed this observation and then read the letter, which was headed “Southampton” and ran thus:

DEAR OLD PAL,

I am sending you back some trifles removed in error. The ancient document is enclosed with this, but the curio is at present in the custody of my respected uncle. Hope its temporary loss will not inconvenience you, and that I may be able to return it to you later. Meanwhile, believe me,

Your ever affectionate,

RUDOLPHO.

“Who is Rudolpho?” I asked.

“The Lord knows,” replied Mr. Blowgrave. “A pseudonym of our absent friend, I presume. He seems to be a facetious sort of person.”

“He does,” agreed Thorndyke. “This letter and the seal appear to be what the schoolboys would call a leg-pull. But still, this is all quite normal. He has returned you the worthless things and has kept the one thing that has any sort of negotiable value. Are you quite clear that the scarab is not more valuable than you have assumed?”

“Well,” said Mr. Blowgrave, “I have had an expert’s opinion on it. I showed it to M. Fouquet, the Egyptologist, when he was over here from Brussels a few months ago, and his opinion was that it was a worthless imitation. Not only was it not a genuine scarab, but the inscription was a sham, too; just a collection of hieroglyphic characters jumbled together without sense or meaning.”

“Then,” said Thorndyke, taking another look at the seal through his lens, “it would seem that Rudolpho, or Rudolpho’s uncle, has got a bad bargain. Which doesn’t throw much light on the affair.”

At this point Miss Blowgrave intervened. “I think, father,” said she, “you have not given Dr. Thorndyke quite all the facts about the scarab. He ought to be told about its connection with Uncle Reuben.”

As the girl spoke Thorndyke looked at her with curious expression of suddenly awakened interest. Later I understood the meaning of that look, but at the time there seemed to me nothing particularly arresting in her words.

“It is just a family tradition,” Mr. Blowgrave said deprecatingly. “probably it is all nonsense.”

“Well, let us have it, at any rate,” said Thorndyke. “We may get some light from it.”

Thus urged, Mr. Blowgrave hemmed a little shyly and began:

“The story concerns my great-grandfather Silas Blowgrave, and his doings during the war with France. It seems that he commanded a privateer of which he and his brother Reuben were the joint owners, and that in the course of their last cruise they acquired a very remarkable and valuable collection of jewels. Goodness knows how they got them; not very honestly, I suspect, for they appear to have been a pair of precious rascals. Something has been said about the loot from a South American church or cathedral, but there is really nothing known about the affair. There are no documents. It is mere oral tradition and very vague and sketchy. The story goes that when they had sold off the ship, they came down to live at Shawstead in Hertfordshire, Silas occupying the manor house—in which I live at present—and Reuben a farm adjoining. The bulk of the loot they shared out at the end of the cruise, but the jewels were kept apart to be dealt with later—perhaps when the circumstances under which they had been acquired had been forgotten. However, both men were inveterate gamblers and it seems—according to the testimony of a servant of Reuben’s who overheard them—that on a certain night when they had been playing heavily, they decided to finish up by playing for the whole collection of jewels as a single stake. Silas, who had the jewels in his custody, was seen to go to the manor house and return to Reuben’s house carrying a small, iron chest.

“Apparently they played late into the night, after everyone else but the servant had gone to bed, and the luck was with Reuben, though it seems probable that he gave luck some assistance. At any rate, when the play was finished and the chest handed over, Silas roundly accused him of cheating, and we may assume that a pretty serious quarrel took place. Exactly what happened is not clear, for when the quarrel began Reuben dismissed the servant, who retired to her bedroom in distant part of the house. But in the morning it was discovered that Reuben and the chest of jewels had both disappeared, and there were distinct traces of blood in the room in which the two men had been playing. Silas professed to know nothing about the disappearance; but a strong—and probably just—suspicion arose that he had murdered his brother and made away with the jewels. The result was that Silas also disappeared, and for a long time his whereabouts was not known even by his wife.

“Later it transpired that he had taken up his abode under an assumed name, in Egypt, and that he had developed an enthusiastic interest in the then new science of Egyptology—the Rosetta Stone had been deciphered only a few years previously. After a time he resumed communication with his wife, but never made any statement as to the mystery of his brother’s disappearance. A few months before his death he visited his home in disguise and he then handed to his wife a little sealed packet which was to be delivered to his only son, William, on his attaining the age of twenty-one. That packet contained the scarab and the letter which you have taken from the envelope.”

“Am I to read it?” asked Thorndyke.

“Certainly, if you think it worth while,” was the reply. Thorndyke opened the yellow sheet of paper and, glancing through the brown and faded writing, read aloud:

Cairo, 4 March, 1833.

My Dear Son,

I am sending you, as my last gift, a valuable scarab and a few words of counsel on which I would bid you meditate. Believe me, there is much wisdom in the lore of Old Egypt. Make it your own. Treasure the scarab as a precious inheritance. Handle it often but show it to none. Give your Uncle Reuben Christian burial. It is your duty, and you will have your reward. He robbed your father, but he shall make restitution.

Farewell!

Your affectionate father,

Silas Blowgrave.

As Thorndyke laid down the letter he looked inquiringly at our client.

“Well,” he said, “here are some plain instructions. How have they been carried out?

“They haven’t been carried out at all,” replied Mr. Blowgrave. “As to his son William, my grandfather, he was not disposed to meddle in the matter. This seemed to be a frank admission that Silas killed his brother and concealed the body, and William didn’t choose to reopen the scandal. Besides, the instructions are not so very plain. It is all very well to say, ‘Give your Uncle Reuben Christian burial,’ but where the deuce is Uncle Reuben?”

“It is plainly hinted,” said Thorndyke,” that whoever gives the body Christian burial will stand to benefit, and the word ‘restitution’ seems to suggest a clue to the whereabouts of the jewels. Has no one thought it worth while to find out where the body is deposited?”

“But how could they?” demanded Blowgrave. “He doesn’t give the faintest clue. He talks as if his son knew where the body was. And then, you know, even supposing Silas did not take the jewels with him, there was the question, whose property were they? To begin with, they were pretty certainly stolen property, though no one knows where they came from. Then Reuben apparently got them from Silas by fraud, and Silas got them back by robbery and murder. If William had discovered them he would have had to give them up to Reuben’s sons, and yet they weren’t strictly Reuben’s property. No one had an undeniable claim to them, even if they could have found them.”

“But that is not the case now,” said Miss Blowgrave.

“No,” said Mr. Blowgrave, in answer to Thorndyke’s look of inquiry. “The position is quite clear now. Reuben’s grandson, my cousin Arthur, has died recently, and as he had no children, he has dispersed his property. The old farm-house and the bulk of his estate he has left to a nephew, but he made a small bequest to my daughter and named her as the residuary legatee. So that what ever rights Reuben had to the jewels are now vested in her, and on my death she will be Silas’s heir, too. As a matter of fact,” Mr. Blowgrave continued, “we were discussing this very question on the night of the robbery. I may as well tell you that my girl will be left pretty poorly off when I go, for there is a heavy mortgage on our property and mighty little capital. Uncle Reuben’s jewels would have made the old home secure for her if we could have laid our hands on them. However, I mustn’t take up your time with our domestic affairs.”

“Your domestic affairs are not entirely irrelevant,” said Thorndyke. “But what is it that you want me to do in the matter?”

“Well,” said Blowgrave, “my house has been robbed and my premises set fire to. The police can apparently do nothing. They say there is no clue at all unless the robbery was committed by somebody in the house, which is absurd, seeing that the servants were all engaged in putting out the fire. But I want the robber traced punished, and I want to get the scarab back. It may be intrinsically valueless, as M. Fouquet said, but Silas’s testamentary letter seems to indicate that it had some value. At any rate, it is an heirloom, and I am loath to lose it. It seems a presumptuous thing to ask you to investigate a trumpery robbery, but I should take it as a great kindness if you would look into the matter.”

“Cases of robbery pure and simple,” replied Thorndyke, “are rather alien to my ordinary practice, but in this one there are certain curious features that seem to make an investigation worth while. Yes, Mr. Blowgrave, I will look into the case, and I have some hope that we may be able to lay our hands on the robber, in spite of the apparent absence of clues. I will ask you to leave both these letters for me to examine more minutely, and I shall probably want to make an inspection of the premises—perhaps tomorrow.”

“Whenever you like,” said Blowgrave. “I am delighted that you are willing to undertake the inquiry. I have heard so much about you from my friend Stalker, of the Griffin Life Assurance Company, for whom you have acted on several occasions.”

“Before you go,” said Thorndyke,” there is one point that we must clear up. Who is there besides yourselves that knows of the existence of the scarab and this letter and the history attaching to them?”

“I really can’t say,” replied Blowgrave. “No one has seen them but my cousin Arthur. I once showed them to him, and he may have talked about them in the family. I didn’t treat the matter as a secret.”

When our visitors had gone we discussed the bearings of the case.

“It is quite a romantic story,” said I, “and the robbery has its points of interest, but I am rather inclined to agree with the police—there is mighty little to go on.”

“There would have been less,” said Thorndyke, “if our sporting friend hadn’t been so pleased with himself. That typewritten letter was a piece of gratuitous impudence. Our gentleman overrated his security and crowed too loud.”

“I don’t see that there is much to be gleaned from the letter, all the same,” said I.

“I am sorry to hear you say that, Jervis,” he exclaimed, “because I was proposing to hand the letter over to you to examine and report on.”

“I was only referring to the superficial appearances,” I said hastily. “No doubt a detailed examination will bring something more distinctive into view.”

“I have no doubt it will,” he said, “and as there are reasons for pushing on the investigation as quickly as possible, I suggest that you get to work at once. I will occupy myself with the old letter and the envelope.”

On this I began my examination without delay, and as a preliminary I proceeded to take a facsimile photograph of the letter by putting it in a large printing frame with a sensitive plate and a plate of clear glass. The resulting negative showed not only the typewritten lettering, but also the watermark and wire lines of the paper, and a faint grease spot. Next I turned my attention to the lettering itself, and here I soon began to accumulate quite a number of identifiable peculiarities. The machine was apparently a Corona, fitted with the, small “Elite” type, and the alignment was markedly defective. The “lower case”—or small—“a” was well below the line, although the capital “A” appeared to be correctly placed; the “u” was slightly above the line, and the small “m” was partly clogged with dirt.

Up to this point I had been careful to manipulate the letter with forceps (although it had been handled by at least three persons, to my knowledge), and I now proceeded to examine it for fingerprints. As I could detect none by mere inspection, I dusted the back of the paper with finely powdered fuchsin, and distributed the powder by tapping the paper lightly. This brought into view quite a number of fingerprints, especially round the edges of the letter, and though most of them were very faint and shadowy, it was possible to make out the ridge pattern well enough for our purpose. Having blown off the excess of powder, I took the letter to the room where the large copying camera was set up, to photograph it before developing the fingerprints on the front. But here I found our laboratory assistant, Polton, in possession, with the sealed envelope fixed to the copying easel. “I shan’t be a minute, sir,” said he. “The doctor wants an enlarged photograph of this seal. I’ve got the plate in.”

I waited while he made his exposure and then proceeded to take the photograph of the letter, or rather of the fingerprints on the back of it. When I had developed the negative I powdered the front of the letter and brought out several more fingerprints—thumbs this time. They were a little difficult to see where they were imposed on the lettering, but, as the latter was bright blue and the fuchsin powder was red, this confusion disappeared in the photograph, in which the lettering was almost invisible while the fingerprints were more distinct than they had appeared to the eye. This completed my examination, and when I had verified the make of typewriter by reference to our album of specimens of typewriting, I left the negatives for Polton to dry and print and went down to the sitting-room to draw up my little report. I had just finished this and was speculating on what had become of Thorndyke, when I heard his quick step on the stair and a few moments later he entered with a roll of paper in his hand. This he unrolled on the table, fixing it open with one or two lead paper-weights, and I came round to inspect it, when I found it to be a sheet of the Ordnance map on the scale of twenty-five inches to the mile.

“Here is the Blowgraves’ place,” said Thorndyke, “nearly in the middle of the sheet. This is his house—Shawstead Manor—and that will probably be the out-building that was on fire. I take it that the house marked Dingle Farm is the one that Uncle Reuben occupied.”

“Probably,” I agreed. “But I don’t see why you wanted this map if you are going down to the place itself tomorrow.”

“The advantage of a map,” said Thorndyke, “is that you can see all over it at once and get the lie of the land well into your mind; and you can measure all distances accurately and quickly with a scale and a pair of dividers. When we go down tomorrow, we shall know our way about as well as Blowgrave himself.”

“And what use will that be?” I asked. “Where does the topography come into the case?

“Well, Jervis,” he replied, “there is the robber, for instance; he came from somewhere and he went somewhere. A study of the map may give us a hint as to his movements. But here comes Polton ‘with the documents,’ as poor Miss Flite would say. What have you got for us, Polton?

“They aren’t quite dry, sir,” said Polton, laying four large bromide prints on the table. “There’s the enlargement of the seal—ten by eight, mounted—and three unmounted prints of Dr. Jervis’s.”

Thorndyke looked at my photographs critically. “They’re excellent, Jervis,” said he. “The finger prints are perfectly legible, though faint. I only hope some of them are the right ones. That is my left thumb. I don’t see yours. The small one is presumably Miss Blowgrave’s. We must take her fingerprints tomorrow, and her father’s, too. Then we shall know if we have got any of the robber’s.” He ran his eye over my report and nodded approvingly. “There is plenty there to enable us to identify the typewriter if we can get hold of it, and the paper is very distinctive. What do you think of the seal?” he added, laying the enlarged photograph before me.

It is magnificent,” I replied, with a grin. “Perfectly monumental.”

“What are you grinning at?” he demanded.

“I was thinking that you seem to be counting your chickens in pretty good time,” said I. “You are making elaborate preparations to identify the scarab, but you are rather disregarding the classical advice of the prudent Mrs. Glasse.”

“I have a presentiment that we shall get that scarab,” said he. “At any rate we ought to be in a position to 926 identify it instantly and certainly if we are able to get a sight of it.”

“We are not likely to,” said I. “Still, there is no harm in providing for the improbable.”

This was evidently Thorndyke’s view, and he certainly made ample provision for this most improbable contingency; for, having furnished himself with a drawing-board and a sheet of tracing-paper, he pinned the latter over the photograph on the board and proceeded, with a fine pen and hectograph ink, to make a careful and minute tracing of the intricate and bewildering hieroglyphic inscription on the seal. When he had finished it he transferred it to a clay duplicator and took off half-a-dozen copies, one of which he handed to me. I looked at it dubiously and remarked: “You have said that the medical jurist must make all knowledge his province. Has he got to be an Egyptologist, too?”

“He will be the better medical jurist if he is,” was the reply, of which I made a mental note for my future guidance. But meanwhile Thorndyke’s proceedings were, to me, perfectly incomprehensible. What was his object in making this minute tracing? The seal itself was sufficient for identification. I lingered, awhile hoping that some fresh development might throw a light on the mystery. But his next proceeding was like to have reduced me to stupefaction. I saw him go to the book-shelves and take down a book. As he laid it on the table I glanced at the title, and when I saw that it was Raper’s Navigation Tables I stole softly out into the lobby, put on my hat and went for a walk.

When I returned the investigation was apparently concluded, for Thorndyke was seated in his easy chair, placidly reading The Compleat Angler. On the table lay a large circular protractor, a straight-edge, an architect’s scale and a sheet of tracing-paper on which was a tracing in hectograph ink of Shawstead Manor.

“Why did you make this tracing?” I asked. “Why not take the map itself?”

“We don’t want the whole of it,” he replied, “and I dislike cutting up maps.”

By taking an informal lunch in the train, we arrived at Shawstead Manor by half-past two. Our approach up the drive had evidently been observed, for Blowgrave and his daughter were waiting at the porch to receive us. The former came forward with outstretched hand, but a distinctly woebegone expression, and exclaimed:

“It is most kind of you to come down; but alas! you are too late.”

“Too late for what?” demanded Thorndyke.

“I will show you,” replied Blowgrave, and seizing my colleague by the arm, he strode off excitedly to a little wicket at the side of the house, and, passing through it, hurried along a narrow alley that skirted the garden wall and ended in a large meadow, at one end of which stood a dilapidated windmill. Across this meadow he bustled, dragging my colleague with him, until he reached a heap of freshly-turned earth, where he halted and pointed tragically to a spot where the turf had evi dently been raised and untidily replaced.

“There!” he exclaimed, stooping to pull up the loose turfs and thereby exposing what was evidently a large hole, recently and hastily filled in. “That was done last night or early this morning, for I walked over this meadow only yesterday evening and there was no sign of disturbed ground then.”

Thorndyke stood looking down at the hole with a faint smile. “And what do you infer from that?” he asked.

“Infer!” shrieked Blowgrave. “Why, I infer that whoever dug this hole was searching for Uncle Reuben and the lost jewels!”

“I am inclined to agree with you,” Thorndyke said calmly. “He happened to search in the wrong place, but that is his affair.”

“The wrong place!” Blowgrave and his daughter exclaimed in unison. “How do you know it is the wrong place?”

“Because,” replied Thorndyke, “I believe I know the right place, and this is not it. But we can put the matter to the test, and we had better do so. Can you get a couple of men with picks and shovels? Or shall we handle the tools ourselves?”

“I think that would be better,” said Blowgrave, who was quivering with excitement. “We don’t want to take anyone into our confidence if we can help it.”

“No,” Thorndyke agreed. “Then I suggest that you fetch the tools while I locate the spot.”

Blowgrave assented eagerly and went off at a brisk trot, while the young lady remained with us and watched Thorndyke with intense curiosity.

“I mustn’t interrupt you with questions,” said she “but I can’t imagine how you found out where Uncle Reuben was buried.”

“We will go into that later,” he replied; “but first we have got to find Uncle Reuben.” He laid his research case down on the ground, and opening it, took out three sheets of paper, each bearing a duplicate of his tracing of the map; and on each was marked a spot on this meadow from which a number of lines radiated like the spokes of a wheel.

“You see, Jervis,” he said, exhibiting them to me “the advantage of a map. I have been able to rule off these sets of bearings regardless of obstructions, such as those young trees, which have arisen since Silas’s day, and mark the spot in its correct place. If the recent obstructions prevent us from taking the bearings, we can still find the spot by measurements with the land-chain or tape.”

“Why have you got three plans?” I asked.

“Because there are three imaginable places. No. 1 is the most likely; No. 2 less likely, but possible; No. 3 is impossible. That is the one that our friend tried last night. No. 1 is among those young trees, and we will now see if we can pick up the bearings in spite of them.”

We moved on to the clump of young trees, where Thorndyke took from the research-case a tall, folding camera-tripod and a large prisma compass with an aluminium dial. With the latter he one or two trial bearings and then, setting up the tripod, fixed the compass on it. For some minutes Miss Blowgrave and I watched him as he shifted the tripod from spot to spot, peering through the sight-vane of the compass and glancing occasionally at the map. At length he turned to us and said: “We are in luck. None of these trees interferes with our bearings.” He took from the research-case a surveyor’s arrow, and sticking it in the ground under the tripod, added: “That is the spot. But we may have to dig a good way round it, for a compass is only a rough instrument.”

At this moment Mr. Blowgrave staggered up, breathing hard, and flung down on the ground three picks, two shovels and a spade. “I won’t hinder you, doctor, by asking for explanations,” said he, “but I am utterly mystified. You must tell us what it all means when we have finished our work.”

This Thorndyke promised to do, but meanwhile he took off his coat, and rolling up his shirt sleeves, seized the spade and began cutting out a large square of turf. As the soil was uncovered, Blowgrave and I attacked it with picks and Miss Blowgrave shovelled away the loose earth.

“Do you know how far down we have to go?” I asked.

“The body lies six feet below the surface,” Thorndyke replied; and as he spoke he laid down his spade, and taking a telescope from the research-case, swept it round the margin of the meadow and finally pointed it at a farm house some six hundred yards distant, of which he made a somewhat prolonged inspection, after which he took the remaining pick and fell to work on the opposite corner of the exposed square of earth.

For nearly half-an-hour we worked on steadily, gradually eating our way downwards, plying pick and shovel alternately, while Miss Blowgrave cleared the loose earth away from the edges of the deepening pit. Then a halt was called and we came to the surface, wiping our faces.

“I think, Nellie,” said Blowgrave, divesting himself of his waistcoat, “a jug of lemonade and four tumblers would be useful, unless our visitors would prefer beer.”

We both gave our votes for lemonade, and Miss Nellie tripped away towards the house, while Thorndyke, taking up his telescope, once more inspected the farm house.

“You seem greatly interested in that house,” I remarked.

“I am,” he replied, handing me the telescope “Just take a look at the window in the right-hand gable, but keep under the tree.”

I pointed the telescope at the gable and there observed an open window at which a man was seated. He held a binocular glass to his eyes and the instrument appeared to be directed at us.

“We are being spied on, I fancy,” said I, passing the telescope to Blowgrave, “but I suppose it doesn’t matter. This is your land, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” replied Blowgrave, “but still, we didn’t want any spectators. That is Harold Bowker,” he added steadying the telescope against a tree, “my cousin Arthur’s nephew, whom I told you about as having inherited the farm-house. He seems mighty interested in us; but small things interest one in the country.”

Here the appearance of Miss Nellie, advancing across the meadow with an inviting-looking basket, diverted our attention from our inquisitive watcher. Six thirsty eyes were riveted on that basket until it drew near and presently disgorged a great glass jug and four tumblers, when we each took off a long and delicious draught and then jumped down into the pit to resume our labours.

Another half-hour passed. We had excavated in some places to nearly the full depth and were just discussing the advisability of another short rest when Blowgrave, who was working in one corner, uttered a loud cry and stood up suddenly, holding something in his fingers. A glance at the object showed it to be a bone, brown and earth-stained, but evidently a bone. Evidently, too, a human bone, as Thorndyke decided when Blowgrave handed it to him triumphantly.

“We have been very fortunate,” said he, “to get so near at the first trial. This is from the right great toe, so we may assume that the skeleton lies just outside this pit, but we had better excavate carefully in your corner and see exactly how the bones lie.” This he proceeded to do himself, probing cautiously with the spade and clearing the earth away from the corner. Very soon the remaining bones of the right foot came into view and then the ends of the two leg-bones and a portion of the left foot.

“We can see now,” said he, “how the skeleton lies, and all we have to do is to extend the excavation in that direction. But there is only room for one to work down here. I think you and Mr. Blowgrave had better dig down from the surface.”

On this, I climbed out of the pit, followed reluctantly by Blowgrave, who still held the little brown bone in his hand and was in a state of wild excitement and exultation that somewhat scandalised his daughter.

“It seems rather ghoulish,” she remarked, “to be gloating over poor Uncle Reuben’s body in this way.”

“I know,” said Blowgrave, “it isn’t reverent. But I didn’t kill Uncle Reuben, you know, whereas—well it was a long time ago.” With this rather inconsequent conclusion he took a draught of lemonade, seized his pick and fell to work with a will. I, too, indulged in a draught and passed a full tumbler down to Thorndyke. But before resuming my labours I picked up the telescope and once more inspected the farm-house. The window was still open, but the watcher had apparently become bored with the not very thrilling spectacle. At any rate he had disappeared.

From this time onward every few minutes brought some discovery. First, a pair of deeply rusted steel shoe buckles; then one or two buttons, and presently a fine gold watch with a fob-chain and a bunch of seals, looking uncannily new and fresh and seeming more fraught with tragedy than even the bones themselves In his cautious digging, Thorndyke was careful not to disturb the skeleton; and looking down into the narrow trench that was growing from the corner of the pit, I could see both legs, with only the right foot missing, projecting from the miniature cliff. Meanwhile our of the trench was deepening rapidly, so that Thorndyke presently warned us to stop digging and bade us come down and shovel away the earth as he disengaged it.

At length the whole skeleton, excepting the head, was uncovered, though it lay undisturbed as it might have lain in its coffin. And now, as Thorndyke picked away the earth around the head, we could see that the skull was propped forward as if it rested on a high pillow. A little more careful probing with the pick-point served to explain this appearance. For as the earth fell away and disclosed the grinning skull, there came into view the edge and ironbound corners of a small chest.

It was an impressive spectacle; weird, solemn and rather dreadful. There for over a century the ill-fated gambler had lain, his mouldering head pillowed on the booty of unrecorded villainy, booty that had been won by fraud, retrieved by violence, and hidden at last by the final winner with the witness of his crime.

“Here is a fine text for a moralist who would preach on the vanity of riches,” said Thorndyke.

We all stood silent for a while, gazing, not without awe, at the stark figure that lay guarding the ill-gotten treasure. Miss Blowgrave—who had been helped down when we descended—crept closer to her father and murmured that it was “rather awful,” while Blowgrave himself displayed a queer mixture of exultation and shuddering distaste.

Suddenly the silence was broken by a voice from above, and we all looked up with a start. A youngish man was standing on the brink of the pit, looking down on us with very evident disapproval.

“It seems that I have come just in the nick of time,” observed the newcomer. “I shall have to take pos session of that chest, you know, and of the remains, too, I suppose. That is my ancestor, Reuben Blowgrave.”

“Well, Harold,” said Blowgrave, “you can have Uncle Reuben if you want him. But the chest belongs to Nellie.”

Here Mr. Harold Bowker—I recognised him now as the watcher from the window—dropped down into the pit and advanced with something of a swagger.

“I am Reuben’s heir,” said he, “through my Uncle Arthur, and I take possession of this property and the remains.”

“Pardon me, Harold,” said Blowgrave, “but Nellie is Arthur’s residuary legatee, and this is the residue of the estate.”

“Rubbish!” exclaimed Bowker. “By the way, how did you find out where he was buried?”

Oh, that was quite simple,” replied Thorndyke with unexpected geniality. “I’ll show you the plan.” He climbed up to the surface and returned in a few moments with the three tracings and his letter-case. “This is how we located the spot.” He handed the plan numbered 3 to Bowker, who took it from him and stood looking at it with a puzzled frown.

“But this isn’t the place,” he said at length.

“Isn’t it?” queried Thorndyke. “No, of course; I’ve given you the wrong one. This is the plan.” He handed Bowker the plan marked No. 1, and took the other from him, laying it down on a heap of earth. Then, as Bowker pored gloomily over No. 1, he took a knife and a pencil from his pocket, and with his back to our visitor; scraped the lead of the pencil, letting the black powder fall on the plan that he had just laid down. I watched him with some curiosity; and when I observed that the black scrapings fell on two spots near the edges of the paper, a sudden suspicion flashed into my mind, which j was confirmed when I saw him tap the paper lightly with his pencil, gently blow away the powder, and quickly producing my photograph of the typewritten letter from his case, hold it for a moment beside the plan.

“This is all very well,” said Bowker, looking up i from the plan, “but how did you find out about these bearings?”

Thorndyke swiftly replaced the letter in his case, and turning round, replied, “I am afraid I can’t give you any further information.”

“Can’t you, indeed!” Bowker exclaimed insolently. “Perhaps I shall compel you to. But, at any rate, I forbid any of you to lay hands on my property.”

Thorndyke looked at him steadily and said in an ominously quiet tone: “Now, listen to me, Mr. Bowker. Let us have an end of this nonsense. You have played a risky game and you have lost. How much you have lost I can’t say until I know whether Mr. Blowgrave intends to prosecute.”

“To prosecute!” shouted Bowker. “What the deuce do you mean by prosecute?”

“I mean,” said Thorndyke, “that on the 7th of June, after nine o’clock at night, you entered the dwelling-house of Mr. Blowgrave and stole and carried away certain of his goods and chattels. A part of them you have restored, but you are still in possession of some of the stolen property, to wit, a scarab and a deed-box.”

As Thorndyke made this statement in his calm, level tones, Bowker’s face blanched to a tallowy white, and he stood staring at my colleague, the very picture of astonishment and dismay. But he fired a last shot.

“This is sheer midsummer madness,” he exclaimed huskily; “and you know it.”

Thorndyke turned to our host. “It is for you to settle, Mr. Blowgrave,” said he. “I hold conclusive evidence that Mr. Bowker stole your deed-box. If you decide to prosecute I shall produce that evidence in court and he will certainly be convicted.”

Blowgrave and his daughter looked at the accused man with an embarrassment almost equal to his own.

I am astounded,” the former said at length; “but I don’t want to be vindictive. Look here, Harold, hand over the scarab and we’ll say no more about it.”

“You can’t do that,” said Thorndyke. “The law doesn’t allow you to compound a robbery. He can return the property if he pleases and you can do as you think best about prosecuting. But you can’t make conditions.”

There was silence for some seconds; then, without another word, the crestfallen adventurer turned, and scrambling up out of the pit, took a hasty departure.

It was nearly a couple of hours later that, after a leisurely wash and a hasty, nondescript meal, we carried the little chest from the dining-room to the study. Here, when he had closed the French window and drawn the curtains, Mr. Blowgrave produced a set of tools and we fell to work on the iron fastenings of the chest. It was no light task, though a century’s rust had thinned the stout bands, but at length the lid yielded to the thrust of a long case-opener and rose with a protesting creak. The chest was lined with a double thickness of canvas, apparently part of a sail, and contained a number of small leathern bags, which, as we lifted them out, one by one, felt as if they were filled with pebbles. But when we untied the thongs of one and emptied its contents into a wooden bowl, Blowgrave heaved a sigh of ecstasy and Miss Nellie uttered a little scream of delight. They were all cut stones, and most of them of exceptional size; rubies, emeralds, sapphires and a few diamonds. As to their value, we could forn but the vaguest guess; but Thorndyke, who was a fair, judge of gem-stones, gave it as his opinion that they were fine specimens of their kind, though roughly cut, and that they had probably formed the enrichment of some shrine.

“The question is,” said Blowgrave, gazing gloatingly on the bowl of sparkling gems, “what are we to do with them?”

“I suggest,” said Thorndyke, “that Dr. Jervis stay here tonight to help you to guard them and that in the morning you take them up to London and deposit them, at your bank.”

Blowgrave fell in eagerly with this suggestion, which I seconded. “But,” said he, “that chest is a queer-looking package to be carrying abroad. Now, if we only had that confounded deed-box—”

“There’s a deed-box on the cabinet behind you,” said Thorndyke.

Blowgrave turned round sharply. “God bless us!” he exclaimed. “It has come back the way it went. Harold must have slipped in at the window while we were at tea. Well, I’m glad he has made restitution. When I look at that bowl and think what he must have narrowly missed, I don’t feel inclined to be hard on him. I suppose the scarab is inside—not that it matters much now.”

The scarab was inside in an envelope; and as Thorndyke turned it over in his hand and examined the hieroglyphics on it through his lens, Miss Blowgrave asked: “Is it of any value, Dr. Thorndyke? It can’t have any connection with the secret of the hiding-place, because you found the jewels without it.”

“By the way, doctor, I don’t know whether it is permissible for me to ask, but how on earth did you find out where the jewels were hidden? To me it looks like black magic.”

Thorndyke laughed in a quiet, inward fashion. “There is nothing magical about it,” said he. “It was a perfectly simple, straightforward problem. But Miss Nellie is wrong. We had the scarab; that is to say we had the wax impression of it, which is the same thing. And the scarab was the key to the riddle. You see,” he continued, “Silas’s letter and the scarab formed together a sort of intelligence test.”

“Did they?” said Blowgrave. “Then he drew a blank every time.”

Thorndyke chuckled. “His descendants were certainly a little lacking in enterprise,” he admitted. “Silas’s instructions were perfectly plain and explicit. Whoever would find the treasure must first acquire some knowledge of Egyptian lore and must study the scarab attentively. It was the broadest of hints, but no one—excepting Harold Bowker, who must have heard about the scarab from his Uncle Arthur—seems to have paid any attention to it.

“Now it happens that I have just enough elementary knowledge of the hieroglyphic characters to enable me to spell them out when they are used alphabetically; and as soon as I saw the seal, I could see that these hieroglyphics formed English words. My attention was first attracted by the second group of signs, which spelled the word ‘Reuben,’ and then I saw that the first group spelled ‘Uncle.’ Of course, the instant I heard Miss Nellie speak of the connection between the scarab and Uncle Reuben, the murder was out. I saw at a glance that the scarab contained all the required information. Last night I made a careful tracing of the hieroglyphics and then rendered them into our own alphabet. This is the result.”

He took from his letter-case and spread out on the table a duplicate of the tracing which I had seen him make, and of which he had given me a copy. But since I had last seen it, it had received an addition; under each group of signs the equivalents in modern Roman lettering had been written, and these made the following words:

“UNKL RUBN IS IN TH MILL FIELD SKS FT DOWN CHURCH SPIR NORTH TEN THIRTY EAST DINGL SOUTH GABL NORTH ATY FORTY FIF WEST GOD SAF KING JORJ.”

Our two friends gazed at Thorndyke’s transliteration in blank astonishment. At length Blowgrave remarked: “But this translation must have demanded a very profound knowledge of the Egyptian writing.”

“Not at all,” replied Thorndyke. “Any intelligent person could master the Egyptian alphabet in an hour. The language, of course, is quite another matter. The spelling of this is a little crude, but it is quite intelligible and does Silas great credit, considering how little was known in his time.”

“How do you suppose M. Fouquet came to overlook this?” Blowgrave asked.

“Naturally enough,” was the reply. “He was looking for an Egyptian inscription. But this is not an Egyptian inscription. Does he speak English?”

“Very little. Practically not at all.”

“Then, as the words are English words and imperfectly spelt, the hieroglyphics must have appeared to him mere nonsense. And he was right as to the scarab being an imitation.”

“There is another point,” said Blowgrave. “How was it that Harold made that extraordinary mistake about the place? The directions are clear enough. All you had to do was to go out there with a compass and take the bearings just as they were given.”

“But,” said Thorndyke,” that is exactly what he did, and hence the mistake. He was apparently unaware of the phenomenon known as the Secular Variation of the Compass. As you know, the compass does not—usually—point to true north, hut to the Magnetic North; and the Magnetic North is continually changing its position. When Reuben was buried—about 1810—it was twenty-four degrees, twenty-six minutes west of true north; at the present time it is fourteen degrees, forty-eight minutes west of true north. So Harold’s bearings would be no less than ten degrees out, which of course, gave him a totally wrong position. But Silas was a ship-master, a navigator, and of course knew all about the vagaries of the compass; and, as his directions were intended for use at some date unknown to him, I assumed that the bearings that he gave were true bearings—that when he said ‘north’ he meant true north, which is always the same; and this turned out to be the case. But I also prepared a plan with magnetic bearings corrected up to date. Here are the three plans: No. 1—the one we used—showing true bearings; No. 2, showing corrected magnetic bearings which might have given us the correct spot; and No. 3, with uncorrected magnetic bearings, giving us the spot where Harold dug, and which could not possibly have been the right spot.”

On the following morning I escorted the deed-box, filled with the booty and tied up and sealed with the scarab, to Mr. Blowgrave’s bank. And that ended our connection with the case; excepting that, a month or two later, we attended by request the unveiling in Shawstead churchyard of a fine monument to Reuben Blowgrave. This took the slightly inappropriate form of an obelisk, on which were cut the name and approximate dates, with the added inscription: “Cast thy bread upon the waters and it shall return after many days,” concerning which Thorndyke remarked dryly that he supposed the exhortation applied equally even if the bread happened to belong to someone else.

THE NEW JERSEY SPHINX (1923)

“A rather curious neighbourhood this, Jervis,” my friend Thorndyke remarked as we turned into Upper Bedford Place; “a sort of aviary for cosmopolitan birds of passage, especially those of the Oriental variety. The Asiatic and African faces that one sees at the windows of these Bloomsbury boarding houses almost suggest an overflow from the ethnographical galleries of the adjacent British Museum.”

“Yes,” I agreed,” there must be quite a considerable population of Africans, Japanese and Hindus in Bloomsbury; particularly Hindus.”

As I spoke, and as if in illustration of my statement, a dark-skinned man rushed out of one of the houses farther down the street and began to advance towards us in a rapid, bewildered fashion, stopping to look at each street door as he came to it. His hatless condition—though he was exceedingly well dressed—and his agitated manner immediately attracted my attention, and Thorndyke’s too, for the latter remarked, “Our friend seems to be in trouble. An accident, perhaps, or a case of sudden illness.”

Here the stranger, observing our approach, ran for ward to meet us and asked in an agitated tone, “Can you tell me, please, where I can find a doctor?”

“I am a medical man,” replied Thorndyke, “and so is my friend.”

Our acquaintance grasped Thorndyke’s sleeve and exclaimed eagerly, “Come with me, then, quickly, if you please. A most dreadful thing has happened.”

He hurried us along at something between a trot and a quick walk, and as we proceeded he continued excitedly, “I am quite confused and terrified; it is all so strange and sudden and terrible.”

“Try,” said Thorndyke, “to calm yourself a little and tell us what has happened.”

“I will,” was the agitated reply. “It is my cousin, Dinanath Byramji—his surname is the same as mine. Just now I went to his room and was horrified to find him lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling and blowing—like this,” and he puffed out his cheeks with a soft blowing noise. “I spoke to him and shook his hand, but he was like a dead man. This is the house.”

He darted up the steps to an open door at which a rather scared page-boy was on guard, and running along the hall, rapidly ascended the stairs. Following him closely, we reached a rather dark first-floor landing where, at a half-open door, a servant-maid stood listening with an expression of awe to a rhythmical snoring sound that issued from the room.

The unconscious man lay as Mr. Byramji had said staring fixedly at the ceiling with wide-open, glazy eyes, puffing out his cheeks slightly at each breath. But the breathing was shallow and slow, and it grew perceptibly slower, with lengthening pauses. And even as I was timing it with my watch while Thorndyke examined the pupils with the aid of a wax match, it stopped. I laid my finger on the wrist and caught one or two slow, flickering beats. Then the pulse stopped too.

“He is gone, said I. “He must have burst one of the large arteries.”

“Apparently,” said Thorndyke, “though one would not have expected it at his age. But wait! What is this?”

He pointed to the right ear, in the hollow of which a few drops of blood had collected, and as he spoke he drew his hand gently over the dead man’s head and moved it slightly from side to side.

“There is a fracture of the base of the skull,” said he, “and quite distinct signs of contusion of the scalp.” He turned to Mr. Byramji, who stood wringing his hand and gazing incredulously at the dead man, and asked: “Can you throw any light on this?”

The Indian looked at him vacantly. The sudden tragedy seemed to have paralysed his brain. “I don’t understand,” said he. “What does it mean?”

“It means,” replied Thorndyke, “that he has received a heavy blow on the head.”

For a few moments Mr. Byramji continued to stare vacantly at my colleague. Then he seemed suddenly to realise the import of Thorndyke’s remark, for he started up excitedly and turned to the door, outside which the two servants were hovering.

“Where is the person gone who came in with my cousin?” he demanded.

“You saw him go out, Albert,” said the maid. “Tell Mr. Byramji where he went to.”

The page tiptoed into the room with a fearful eye fixed on the corpse, and replied falteringly, “I only see the back of him as he went out, and all I know is that he turned to the left. P’raps he’s gone for a doctor.”

“Can you give us any description of him?” asked Thorndyke.

“I only see the back of him,” repeated the page. “He was a shortish gentleman and he had on a dark suit of clothes and a hard felt hat. That’s all I know.”

“Thank you,” said Thorndyke. “We may want to ask you some more questions presently,” and having conducted the page to the door, he shut it and turned to Mr. Byramji.

“Have you any idea who it was that was with your cousin?” he asked.

“None at all,” was the reply. “I was sitting in my room opposite, writing, when I heard my cousin come up the stairs with another person, to whom he was talking. I could not hear what he was saying. They went into his room—this room—and I could occasionally catch the sound of their voices. In about a quarter of an hour I heard the door open and shut, and then someone went downstairs, softly and rather quickly. I finished the letter that I was writing, and when I had addressed it I came in here to ask my cousin who the visitor was. I thought it might be someone who had come to negotiate for the ruby.”

“The ruby!” exclaimed Thorndyke. “What ruby do you refer to?”

“The great ruby,” replied Byramji. “But of course you have not—” He broke off suddenly and stood for a few moments staring at Thorndyke with parted lips and wide-open eyes; then abruptly he turned, and kneeling beside the dead man he began, in a curious, caressing, half-apologetic manner, first to pass his hands gently over the body at the waist and then to unfasten the clothes. This brought into view a handsome, soft leather belt, evidently of native workmanship, worn next to the skin and furnished with three pockets. Mr. Byramji unbuttoned and explored them in quick succession, and it was evident that they were all empty.

“It is gone!” he exclaimed in low, intense tones, “Gone! Ah! But how little would it signify! But thou, dear Dinanath, my brother, my friend, thou art gone, too!”

He lifted the dead man’s hand and pressed it to his cheek, murmuring endearments in his own tongue. Presently he laid it down reverently, and sprang up, and I was startled at the change in his aspect. The delicate, gentle, refined face had suddenly become the face of a Fury—fierce, sinister, vindictive.

“This wretch must die!” he exclaimed huskily. “This sordid brute who, without compunction, has crushed out a precious life as one would carelessly crush a fly, for the sake of a paltry crystal—he must die, if I have to follow him and strangle him with my own hands!”

Thorndyke laid his hand on Byramji’s shoulder. “I sympathise with you most cordially,” said he. “If it is as you think, and appearances suggest, that your cousin has been murdered as a mere incident of robbery, the murderer’s life is forfeit, and Justice cries aloud for retribution. The fact of murder will be determined, for or against, by a proper inquiry. Meanwhile we have to ascertain who this unknown man is and what happened while he was with your cousin.”

Byramji made a gesture of despair. “But the man has disappeared, and nobody has seen him! What can we do?”

“Let us look around us,” plied Thorndyke, “and see if we can judge what has happened in this room. What, for instance, is this?”

He picked up from a corner near the door a small leather object, which he handed to Mr. Byramji. The Indian seized it eagerly, exclaiming: “Ah! It is the little bag in which my cousin used to carry the ruby. So he had taken it from his belt.”

“It hasn’t been dropped, by any chance?” I suggested.

In an instant Mr. Byramji was down on his knees, peering and groping about the floor, and Thorndyke and I joined in the search. But, as might have been expected there was no sign of the ruby, nor, indeed, of anything else, excepting a hat which I picked up from under the table.

“No,” said Mr. Byramji, rising with a dejected air. “It is gone—of course it is gone, and the murderous villain—”

Here his glance fell on the hat, which I had laid on the table, and he bent forward to look at it.

“Whose hat is this?” he demanded, glancing at the chair on which Thorndyke’s hat and mine had been placed.

“Is it not your cousin’s?” asked Thorndyke. “No, certainly not. His hat was like mine—we bought them both together. It had a white silk lining with his initials, D. B., in gold. This has no lining and is a much older hat. It must be the murderer’s hat.”

“If it is,” said Thorndyke, “that is a most important fact—important in two respects. Could you let us see your hat?”

“Certainly,” replied Byramji, walking quickly, but with a soft tread, to the door. As he went out, shutting the door silently behind him, Thorndyke picked up the derelict hat and swiftly tried it on the head of the dead man. As far as I could judge, it appeared to fit, and this Thorndyke confirmed as he replaced it on the table.

“As you see,” said he, “it is at least a practical fit, which is a fact of some significance.”

Here Mr. Byramji returned with his own hat, which he placed on the table by the side of the other, and thus placed, crown uppermost, the two hats were closely similar. Both were black, hard felts of the prevalent “bowler” shape, and of good quality, and the difference in their age and state of preservation was not striking; but when Byramji turned them over and exhibited their interiors it was seen that whereas the strange hat was unlined save for the leather head-band, Byramji’s had a white silk lining and bore the owner’s initials in embossed gilt letters.

“What happened,” said Thorndyke, when he had carefully compared the two hats, “seems fairly obvious. The two men, on entering, placed their hats crown upwards on the table. In some way—perhaps during a struggle—the visitor’s hat was knocked down and rolled under the table. Then the stranger, on leaving, picked up the only visible hat—almost identically similar to his own—and put it on.”

“Is it not rather singular,” I asked, “that he should not have noticed the different feel of a strange hat?”

“I think not,” Thorndyke replied. “If he noticed anything unusual he would probably assume that he had put it on the wrong way round. Remember that he would be extremely hurried and agitated. And when once he had left the house he would not dare to take the risk of returning, though he would doubtless realise the gravity of the mistake. And now,” he continued, “would you mind giving us a few particulars? You have spoken of a great ruby, which your cousin had, and which seems to be missing.”

“Yes. You shall come to my room and I will tell you about it; but first let us lay my poor cousin decently on his bed.”

“I think,” said Thorndyke, “the body ought not to be moved until the police have seen it.”

“Perhaps you are right,” Byramji agreed reluctantly, “though it seems callous to leave him lying there.” With a sigh he turned to the door, and Thorndyke fol lowed, carrying the two hats.

“My cousin and I,” said our host, when we were seated in his own large bed-sitting-room, “were both interested in gem-stones. I deal in all kinds of stones that are found in the East, but Dinanath dealt almost exclusively in rubies. He was a very fine judge of those beautiful gems, and he used to make periodical tours in Burma in search of uncut rubies of unusual size or quality. About four months ago he acquired at Mogok, in Upper Burma, a magnificent specimen over twenty-eight carats in weight, perfectly flawless and of the most gorgeous colour. It had been roughly cut, but my cousin was intending to have it recut unless he should receive an advantageous offer for it in the meantime.”

“What would be the value of such a stone?” I asked.

“It is impossible to say. A really fine large ruby of perfect colour is far, far more valuable than the finest diamond of the same size. It is the most precious of all gems, with the possible exception of the emerald. A fine ruby of five carats is worth about three thousand pounds, but of course, the value rises out of all proportion with increasing size. Fifty thousand pounds would be a moderate price for Dinanath’s ruby.”

During this recital I noticed that Thorndyke, while listening attentively, was turning the stranger’s hat over in his hands, narrowly scrutinising it both inside and outside. As Byramji concluded, he remarked:

“We shall have to let the police know what has happened, but, as my friend and I will be called as witnesses, I should like to examine this hat a little more closely before you hand it over to them. Could you let me have a small, hard brush? A dry nail-brush would do.” Our host complied readily—in fact eagerly. Thorndyke’s authoritative, purposeful manner had clearly impressed him, for he said as he handed my colleague a new nail-brush: “I thank you for your help and value it. We must not depend on the police only.”

Accustomed as I was to Thorndyke’s methods, his procedure was not unexpected, but Mr. Byramji watched him with breathless interest and no little surprise as, laying a sheet of notepaper on the table, he brought the hat close to it and brushed firmly but slowly, so that the dust dislodged should fall on it. As it was not a very well-kept hat, the yield was considerable, especially when the brush was drawn under the curl of the brim, and very soon the paper held quite a little heap. Then Thorndyke folded the paper into a small packet and having written “outside” on it, put it in his pocket book.

“Why do you do that? “Mr. Byramji asked. “What will the dust tell you?”

“Probably nothing,” Thorndyke replied. “But this hat is our only direct clue to the identity of the man who was with your cousin, and we must make the most of it. Dust, you know, is only a mass of fragments detached from surrounding objects. If the objects are unusual the dust may be quite distinctive. You could easily identify the hat of a miller or a cement worker.” As he was speaking he reversed the hat and turned down the leather head-lining, whereupon a number of strips of folded paper fell down into the crown.

“Ah!” exclaimed Byramji, “perhaps we shall learn something now.”

He picked out the folded slips and began eagerly to open them out, and we examined them systematically one by one. But they were singularly disappointing and uninforming. Mostly they consisted of strips of newspaper, with one or two circulars, a leaf from a price list of gas stoves, a portion of a large envelope on which were the remains of an address which read “—n—don, W.C.,” and a piece of paper evidently cut down vertically and bearing the right-hand half of some kind of list. This read:

“—el 3 oz. 5 dwts.

—eep 9½ oz.”

“Can you make anything of this?” I asked, handing the paper to Thorndyke.

He looked at it reflectively, and answered, as he copied it into his notebook: “It has, at least, some character. If we consider it with the other data we should get some sort of hint from it. But these scraps of paper don’t tell us much. Perhaps their most suggestive feature is their quantity and the way in which, as you have no doubt noticed, they were arranged at the sides of the hat. We had better replace them as we found them for the benefit of the police.”

The nature of the suggestion to which he referred was not very obvious to me, but the presence of Mr. Byramji rendered discussion inadvisable; nor was there any opportunity, for we had hardly reconstituted the hat when we became aware of a number of persons ascending the stairs, and then we heard the sound of rather peremptory rapping at the door of the dead man’s room.

Mr. Byramji opened the door and went out on to the landing, where several persons had collected, including the two servants and a constable.

“I understand,” said the policeman, “that there is something wrong here. Is that so?”

“A very terrible thing has happened,” replied Byramji. “But the doctors can tell you better than I can.” Here he looked appealingly at Thorndyke, and we both went out and joined him.

“A gentleman—Mr. Dinanath Byramji—has met with his death under somewhat suspicious circumstances,” said Thorndyke, and, glancing at the knot of naturally curious persons on the landing, he continued: “If you will come into the room where the death occurred, I will give you the facts so far as they are known to us.”

With this he opened the door and entered the room with Mr. Byramji, the constable, and me. As the door opened, the bystanders craned forward and a middle-aged woman uttered a cry of horror and followed us into the room.

“This is dreadful!” she exclaimed, with a shuddering glance at the corpse. “The servants told me about it when I came in just now and I sent Albert for the police at once. But what does it mean? You don’t think poor Mr. Dinanath has been murdered?”

“We had better get the facts, ma’am,” said the constable, drawing out a large black notebook and laying his helmet on the table. He turned to Mr. Byramji, who had sunk into a chair and sat, the picture of grief, gazing at his dead cousin. “Would you kindly tell me what you know about how it happened?”

Byramji repeated the substance of what he had told us, and when the constable had taken down his statement, Thorndyke and I gave the few medical particulars that we could furnish and handed the constable our cards. Then, having helped to lay the corpse on the bed and cover it with a sheet, we turned to take our leave.

“You have been very kind,” Mr. Byramji said as he shook our hands warmly. “I am more than grateful. Perhaps I may be permitted to call on you and hear if—if you have learned anything fresh,” he concluded discreetly.

“We shall be pleased to see you,” Thorndyke replied, “and to give you any help that we can,” and with this we took our departure, watched inquisitively down the stairs by the boarders and the servants who still lurked in the vicinity of the chamber of death.

“If the police have no more information than we have,” I remarked as we walked homeward, “they won’t have much to go on.”

“No,” said Thorndyke. “But you must remember that this crime—as we are justified in assuming it to be—is not an isolated one. It is the fourth of practically the same kind within the last six months. I understand that the police have some kind of information respecting the presumed criminal, though it can’t be worth much, seeing that no arrest has been made. But there is some new evidence this time. The exchange of hats may help the police considerably.”

“In what way? What evidence does it furnish?”

“In the first place it suggests a hurried departure, which seems to connect the missing man with the crime. Then, he is wearing the dead man’s hat, and though he is not likely to continue wearing it, it may be seen and furnish a clue. We know that that hat fits him fairly well and we know its size, so that we know the size of his head. Finally, we have the man’s own hat.”

“I don’t fancy the police will get much information from that,” said I.

“Probably not,” he agreed. “Yet it offered one or two interesting suggestions, as you probably observed.”

“It made no suggestions whatever to me,” said I.

“Then,” said Thorndyke, “I can only recommend you to recall our simple inspection and consider the significance of what we found.”

This I had to accept as closing the discussion for the time being, and as I had to make a call at my bookseller’s concerning some reports that I had left to be bound, I parted from Thorndyke at the corner of Chichester Rents and left him to pursue his way alone. My business with the bookseller took me longer than I had expected, for I had to wait while the lettering on the backs was completed, and when I arrived at our chambers in King’s Bench Walk, I found Thorndyke apparently at the final stage of some experiment evidently connected with our late adventure. The microscope stood on the table with one slide on the stage and a second one beside it; but Thorndyke had apparently finished his microscopical researches, for as I entered he held in his hand a test-tube filled with a smoky-coloured fluid.

“I see that you have been examining the dust from the hat,” said I. “Does it throw any fresh light on the case?”

“Very little,” he replied. “It is just common dust—assorted fibres and miscellaneous organic and mineral particles. But there are a couple of hairs from the in side of the hat—both lightish brown, and one of the atrophic, note-of-exclamation type that one finds at the margin of bald patches; and the outside dust shows minute traces of lead, apparently in the form of oxide. What do you make of that?”

“Perhaps the man is a plumber or a painter,” I suggested.

“Either is possible and worth considering,” he replied; but his tone made clear to me that this was not his own inference; and a row of five consecutive Post Office Directories, which I had already noticed ranged along the end of the table, told me that he had not only formed a hypothesis on the subject, but had probably either confirmed or disproved it. For the Post Office Directory was one of Thorndyke’s favourite books of reference; and the amount of curious and recondite information that he succeeded in extracting from its matter-of-fact pages would have surprised no one more than it would the compilers of the work.

At this moment the sound of footsteps ascending our stairs became audible. It was late for business callers, but we were not unaccustomed to late visitors; and a familiar rat-tat of our little brass knocker seemed to explain the untimely visit.

“That sounds like Superintendent Miller’s knock,” said Thorndyke, as he strode across the room to open the door. And the superintendent it turned out to be. But not alone.

As the door opened the officer entered with two gentlemen, both natives of India, and one of whom was our friend Mr. Byramji.

“Perhaps,” said Miller,” I had better look in a little later.”

“Not on my account,” said Byramji. “I have only a few words to say and there is nothing secret about my business. May I introduce my kinsman, Mr. Khambata, a student of the Inner Temple?”

Byramji’s companion bowed ceremoniously. “Byramji came to my chambers just now,” he explained, “to consult me about this dreadful affair, and he chanced to show me your card. He had not heard of you, but supposed you to be an ordinary medical practitioner. He did not realise that he had entertained an angel unawares. But I, who knew of your great reputation, advised him to put his affairs in your hands—without prejudice to the official investigations,” Mr. Khambata added hastily, bowing to the superintendent.

“And I,” said Mr. Byramji, “instantly decided to act on my kinsman’s advice. I have come to beg you to leave no stone unturned to secure the punishment of my cousin’s murderer. Spare no expense. I am a rich man and my poor cousin’s property will come to me. As to the ruby, recover it if you can, but it is of no consequence. Vengeance—justice is what I seek. Deliver the wretch into my hands, or into the hands of justice, and I give you the ruby or its value, freely—gladly.”

“There is no need,” said Thorndyke, “of such extraordinary inducement. If you wish me to investigate this case, I will do so and will use every means at my disposal, without prejudice, as your friend says, to the proper claims of the officers of the law. But you under stand that I can make no promises. I cannot guarantee success.”

“We understand that,” said Mr. Khambata. “But we know that if you undertake the case, everything that is possible will be done. And now we must leave you to your consultation.”

As soon as our clients had gone, Miller rose from his chair with his hand in his breast pocket. “I dare say, doctor,” said he, “you can guess what I have come about. I was sent for to look into this Byramji case and I heard from Mr. Byramji that you had been there and that you had made a minute examination of the missing man’s hat. So have I; and I don’t mind telling you that I could learn nothing from it.”

“I haven’t learnt much myself,” said Thorndyke.

“But you’ve picked up something,” urged Miller, “if it is only a hint; and we have just a little clue. There is very small doubt that this is the same man—‘The New Jersey Sphinx,’ as the papers call him—that committed those other robberies; and a very difficult type of criminal he is to get hold of. He is bold, he is wary, he plays a lone hand, and he sticks at nothing. He has no confederates, and he kills every time. The American police never got near him but once; and that once gives us the only clues we have.”

“Finger-prints?” inquired Thorndyke.

“Yes, and very poor ones, too. So rough that you can hardly make out the pattern. And even those are not absolutely guaranteed to be his; but in any case, fingerprints are not much use until you’ve got the man. And there is a photograph of the fellow himself. But it is only a snapshot, and a poor one at that. All it shows is that he has a mop of hair and a pointed beard—or at least he had when the photograph was taken. But for identification purposes it is practically worthless. Still, there it is; and what I propose is this: we want this man and so do you; we’ve worked together before and can trust one another. I am going to lay my cards on the table and ask you to do the same.”

“But, my dear Miller,” said Thorndyke, “I haven’t any cards. I haven’t a single solid fact.”

The detective was visibly disappointed. Nevertheless, he laid two photographs on the table and pushed them towards Thorndyke, who inspected them through his lens and passed them to me.

“The pattern is very indistinct and broken up,” he remarked.

“Yes,” said Miller; “the prints must have been made on a very rough surface, though you get prints something like those from fitters or other men who use files and handle rough metal. And now, doctor, can’t you give us a lead of any kind?”

Thorndyke reflected a few moments. “I really have not a single real fact,” said he, “and I am unwilling to make merely speculative suggestions.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Miller replied cheerfully. “Give us a start. I shan’t complain if it comes to nothing.”

“Well,” Thorndyke said reluctantly, “I was thinking of getting a few particulars as to the various tenants of No. 51 Clifford’s Inn. Perhaps you could do it more easily and it might be worth your while.”

“Good!” Miller exclaimed gleefully. “He ‘gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.’”

“It is probably the wrong name,” Thorndyke reminded him.

“I don’t care,” said Miller. “But why shouldn’t we go together? It’s too late tonight, and I can’t manage tomorrow morning. But say tomorrow after noon. Two heads are better than one, you know, especially when the second one is yours. Or perhaps,” he added, with a glance at me, “three would be better still.”

Thorndyke considered for a moment or two and then looked at me.

“What do you say, Jervis?” he asked.

As my afternoon was unoccupied, I agreed with enthusiasm, being as curious as the superintendent to know how Thorndyke had connected this particular locality with the vanished criminal, and Miller departed in high spirits with an appointment for the morrow three o’clock in the afternoon.

For some time after the superintendent’s depart I sat wrapped in profound meditation. In some mysterious way the address, 51 Clifford’s Inn, had emerged from the formless data yielded by the derelict hat. But what had been the connection? Apparently the fragment of the addressed envelope had furnished the clue. But how had Thorndyke extended “—n” into “51, Clifford’s Inn”? It was to me a complete mystery.

Meanwhile, Thorndyke had seated himself at writing-table, and I noticed that of the two letters which he wrote, one was written on our headed paper and other on ordinary plain notepaper. I was speculating on the reason for this when he rose, and as he stuck on the stamps, said to me, “I am just going out to post these two letters. Do you care for a short stroll through the leafy shades of Fleet Street? The evening is still young.”

“The rural solitudes of Fleet Street attract me I all hours,” I replied, fetching my hat from the adjoining office, and we accordingly sallied forth together, strolling up King’s Bench Walk and emerging into Fleet Street by way of Mitre Court. When Thorndyke had dropped his letters into the post office box he stood awhile gazing up at the tower of St. Dunstan’s Church.”

“Have you ever been in Clifford’s Inn, Jervis?” he inquired.

“Never,” I replied (we passed through it together on an average a dozen times a week), “but it is not too late for an exploratory visit.”

We crossed the road, and entering Clifford’s Inn Passage, passed through the still half-open gate, crossed the outer court and threaded the tunnel-like entry by the hall to the inner court, in the middle of which Thorndyke halted, and lookj up at one of the ancient houses, remarked, “No. 51.”

“So that is where our friend hangs out his flag,” said I.

“Oh come, Jervis,” he protested, “I am surprised at you; you are as bad as Miller. I have merely suggested a possible connection between these premises and the hat that was left at Bedford Place. As to the nature of that connection I have no idea, and there may be no connection at all. I assure you, Jervis, that I am on the thinnest possible ice. I am working on a hypo thesis which is in the highest degree speculative, and I should not have given Miller a hint but that he was so eager and so willing to help—and also that I wanted his fingerprints. But we are really only at the beginning, and may never get any farther.”

I looked up at the old house. It was all in darkness excepting the top floor, where a couple of lighted windows showed the shadow of a man moving rapidly about the room. We crossed to the entry and inspected the names painted on the door-posts. The ground floor was occupied by a firm of photo-engravers, the first floor by a Mr. Carrington, whose name stood out conspicuously on its oblong of comparatively fresh white paint, while the tenants of the second floor—old residents, to judge by the faded and discoloured paint in which their names were announced—were Messrs. Burt & Highley, metallurgists.

“Burt has departed,” said Thorndyke, as I read out the names; and he pointed to two red lines of erasure which I had not noticed in the dim light, “so the active gentleman above is presumably Mr. Highley, and we may take it that he has residential as well as business premises. I wonder who and what Mr. Carrington is—but I dare say we shall find out tomorrow.”

With this he dismissed the professional aspects of Clifford’s Inn, and, changing the subject to its history and associations, chatted in his inimitable, picturesque manner until our leisurely perambulations brought us at length to the Inner Temple Gate.

On the following morning we bustled through our work in order to leave the afternoon free, making several joint visits to solicitors from whom we were taking instructions. Returning from the last of these—a City lawyer—Thorndyke turned into St. Helen’s Place and halted at a doorway bearing the brass plate of a firm of assayists and refiners. I followed him into the outer office, where, on his mentioning his name, an elderly man came to the counter.

“Mr. Grayson has put out some specimens for you, sir,” said he. “They are about thirty grains to the ton—you said that the content was of no importance—I am to tell you that you need not return them. They are not worth treating.” He went to a large safe from which he took a canvas bag, and returning to the counter, turned out on it the contents of the bag, consisting of about a dozen good-sized lumps of quartz and a glittering yellow fragment, which Thorndyke picked out and dropped in his pocket.

“Will that collection do?” our friend inquired.

“It will answer my purpose perfectly,” Thorndyke replied, and when the specimens had been replaced the bag, and the latter deposited in Thorndyke’s handbag, my colleague thanked the assistant and we went on our way.

“We extend our activities into the domain of mineralogy,” I remarked.

Thorndyke smiled an inscrutable smile. “We also employ the suction pump as an instrument of research,” he observed. “However, the strategic uses of chunks of quartz—otherwise than as missiles—will develop themselves in due course, and the interval may be used for reflection.”

It was. But my reflection brought no solution. I noticed, however, that when at three o’clock we set forth in company with the superintendent, the bag went with us; and having offered to carry it and having had my offer accepted with a sly twinkle, its weight assured me that the quartz was still inside.

“Chambers and Offices to let,” Thorndyke read aloud as we approached the porter’s lodge. “That lets us in, I think. And the porter knows Dr. Jervis and me by sight, so he will talk more freely.”

“He doesn’t know me,” said the superintendent, “but I’ll keep in the background, all the same.”

A pull at the bell brought out a clerical-looking man in a tall hat and a frock coat, who regarded Thorndyke and me through his spectacles with an amiable air of recognition.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Larkin,” said Thorndyke. “I am asked to get particulars of vacant chambers. What have you got to let?

Mr. Larkin reflected. “Let me see. There’s a ground floor at No. 5—rather dark—and a small second-pair set at No. 12. And then there is—oh, yes, there is a good first-floor set at No. 51. They wouldn’t have been vacant until Michaelmas, but Mr. Carrington, the tenant, has had to go abroad suddenly. I had a letter from him this morning, enclosing the key. Funny letter, too.” He dived into his pocket, and hauling out a bundle of letters, selected one and handed it to Thorndyke with a broad smile.

Thorndyke glanced at the postmark (“London, E.”), and having taken out the key, extracted the letter, which he opened and held so that Miller and I could see it. The paper bore the printed heading, “Baltic Shipping Company, Wapping,” and the further written heading, “S.S. Gothenburg,” and the letter was brief and to the point:

DEAR SIR,

I am giving up my chambers at No. 51, as I have been suddenly called abroad. I enclose the key, but am not troubling you with the rent. The sale of my costly furniture will more than cover it, and the surplus can be expended on painting the garden railings,

Yours sincerely,

A. CARRINGTON.

Thorndyke smilingly replaced the letter and the key in the envelope and asked: “What is the furniture like?”

“You’ll see,” chuckled the porter, “if you care to look at the rooms. And I think they might suit. They’re a good set.”

“Quiet?”

“Yes, pretty quiet. There’s a metallurgist overhead—Highley—used to be Burt & Highley, but Burt has gone to the City, and I don’t think Highley does much business now.”

“Let me see,” said Thorndyke, “I think I used to meet Highley sometimes—a tall, dark man, isn’t he?”

“No, that would be Burt. Highley is a little, fairish man, rather bald, with a pretty rich complexion”—here Mr. Larkin tapped his nose knowingly and raised his little finger—“which may account for the falling off of business.”

“Hadn’t we better have a look at the rooms?” Miller interrupted a little impatiently.

“Can we see them, Mr. Larkin?” asked Thorndyke.

“Certainly,” was the reply. “You’ve got the key. Let me have it when you’ve seen the rooms; and whatever ever you do,” he added with a broad grin, “be careful of the furniture.”

“It looks,” the superintendent remarked as we crossed the inner court, “as if Mr. Carrington had done a mizzle. That’s hopeful. And I see,” he continued, glancing at the fresh paint on the door-post as we passed through the entry, “that he hasn’t been here long. That’s hopeful, too.”

We ascended to the first floor, and as Thorndyke unlocked and threw open the door, Miller laughed aloud. The “costly furniture” consisted of a small kitchen table, a Windsor chair and a dilapidated deck-chair. The kitchen contained a gas ring, a small saucepan and a frying-pan, and the bedroom was furnished with a camp-bed devoid of bed-clothes, a wash-hand basin on a packing-case, and a water can.

“Hallo!” exclaimed the superintendent. “He’s left a hat behind. Quite a good hat, too.” He took it down from the peg, glanced at its exterior and then, turning it over, looked inside. And then his mouth opened with a jerk.

“Great Solomon Eagle!” he gasped. “Do you see, doctor? It’s the hat.”

He held it out to us, and sure enough on the white silk lining of the crown were the embossed, gilt letters, D.B., just as Mr. Byramji had described them.

“Yes,” Thorndyke agreed, as the superintendent snatched up a greengrocer’s paper bag from the kitchen floor and persuaded the hat into it, “it is undoubtedly the missing link. But what are you going to do now?”

“Do!” exclaimed Miller. “Why, I am going to collar the man. These Baltic boats put in at Hull and Newcastle—perhaps he didn’t know that—and they are pretty slow boats, too. I shall wire to Newcastle to have the ship detained and take Inspector Badger down to make the arrest. I’ll leave you to explain to the porter, and I owe you a thousand thanks for your valuable tip.”

With this he bustled away, clasping the precious hat and from the window we saw him hurry across the court and dart out through the postern into Fetter Lane.

“I think Miller was rather precipitate,” said Thorndyke. “He should have got a description of the man and some further particulars.”

“Yes,” said I. “Miller had much better have waited until you had finished with Mr. Larkin. But you can get some more particulars when we take back the key.”

“We shall get more information from the gentleman who lives on the floor above, and I think we will go up and interview him now. I wrote to him last night and made a metallurgical appointment, signing myself W. Polton. Your name, if he should ask, is Stevenson.”

As we ascended the stairs to the next floor, I meditated on the rather tortuous proceedings of my usually straightforward colleague. The use of the lumps of quartz was now obvious; but why these mysterious tactics? And why, before knocking at the door, did Thorndyke carefully take the reading of the gas meter on the landing?

The door was opened in response to our knock—a shortish, alert-looking, clean-shaved man in a white overall, who looked at us keenly and rather forbiddingly. But Thorndyke was geniality personified.

“How do you do, Mr. Highley?” said he, holding out his hand, which the metallurgist shook coolly. “You got my letter, I suppose?”

“Yes. But I am not Mr. Highley. He’s away and I am carrying on. I think of taking over his business if there is any to take over. My name is Sherwood. Have you got the samples?”

Thorndyke produced the canvas bag, which Mr. Sherwood took from him and emptied out on a bench, picking up the lumps of quartz one by one and examining them closely. Meanwhile Thorndyke took a rapid survey of the premises. Against the wall were two cupel furnaces and a third larger furnace like a small pottery kiln. On a set of narrow shelves were several rows of bone-ash cupels, looking like little white flower-pots, and near them was the cupel-press—an appliance into which powdered bone-ash was fed and compressed by a plunger to form the cupels—while by the side of the press was a tub of bone-ash—a good deal coarser, I noticed, than the usual fine powder. This coarseness was also observed by Thorndyke, who edged up to the tub and dipped his hand into the ash and then wiped his fingers on his handkerchief.

“This stuff doesn’t seem to contain much gold,” said Mr. Sherwood. “But we shall see when we make the assay.”

“What do you think of this?” asked Thorndyke, taking from his pocket the small lump of glittering, golden-looking mineral that he had picked out at the assayist’s. Mr. Sherwood took it from him and examined it closely. “This looks more hopeful,” said he; “rather rich, in fact.”

Thorndyke received this statement with an unmoved countenance; but as for me, I stared at Mr. Sherwood in amazement. For this lump of glittering mineral was simply a fragment of common iron pyrites! It would not have deceived a schoolboy, much less a metallurgist.

Still holding the specimen, and taking a watchmaker’s lens from a shelf, Mr. Sherwood moved over to the window. Simultaneously, Thorndyke stepped softly to the cupel shelves and quickly ran his eye along the rows of cupels. Presently he paused at one, examined it more closely, and then, taking it from the shelf, began to pick at it with his fingernail.

At this moment Mr. Sherwood turned and observed him; and instantly there flashed into the metallurgist’s face an expression of mingled anger and alarm.

“Put that down!” he commanded peremptorily, and then, as Thorndyke continued to scrape with his finger nail, he shouted furiously, “Do you hear? Drop it!”

Thorndyke took him literally at his word and let the cupel fall on the floor, when it shattered into innumerable fragments, of which one of the largest separated itself from the rest. Thorndyke pounced upon it, and in an instantaneous glance, as he picked it up, I recognised it as a calcined tooth.

Then followed a few moments of weird, dramatic silence. Thorndyke, holding the tooth between his finger and thumb, looked steadily into the eyes of the metallurgist; and the latter, pallid as a corpse, glared at Thorndyke and furtively unbuttoned his overall.

Suddenly the silence broke into a tumult as bewildering as the crash of a railway collision. Sherwood’s right hand darted under his overall. Instantly, Thorndyke snatched up another cupel and hurled it with such truth of aim that it shattered on the metallurgist’s forehead. And as he flung the missile, he sprang forward, and delivered a swift upper-cut. There was a thunderous crash, a cloud of white dust, and an automatic pistol clattered along the floor.

I snatched up the pistol and rushed to my friend’s assistance. But there was no need. With his great strength and his uncanny skill—to say nothing of the effects of the knock-out blow—Thorndyke had the man pinned down immovably.

“See if you can find some cord, Jervis,” he said a calm, quiet tone that seemed almost ridiculously out of character with the circumstances.

There was no difficulty about this, for several corded boxes stood in a corner of the laboratory. I cut off two lengths, with one of which I secured the prostrate man’s arms, and with the other fastened his knees and ankles.

“Now,” said Thorndyke, “if you will take charge of his hands, we will make a preliminary inspection. Let us first see if he wears a belt.”

Unbuttoning the man’s waistcoat, he drew up the shirt, disclosing a broad, webbing belt furnished with several leather pockets, the buttoned flaps of which he felt carefully, regardless of the stream of threats and imprecations that poured from our victim’s swollen lips. From the front pockets he proceeded to the back, passing an exploratory hand under the writhing body.

“Ah!” he exclaimed suddenly, “just turn him over, and look out for his heels.”

We rolled our captive over, and as Thorndyke “skinned the rabbit,” a central pocket came into view, into which, when he had unbuttoned it, he inserted his fingers. “Yes,” he continued, “I think this is what we are looking for.” He withdrew his fingers, between which he held a small packet of Japanese paper, and with feverish excitement I watched him open out layer after layer of the soft wrapping. As he turned back the last fold a wonderful crimson sparkle told me that the “great ruby” was found.

“There, Jervis,” said Thorndyke, holding the magnificent gem towards me in the palm of his hand, “look on this beautiful, sinister thing, charged with untold potentialities of evil—and thank the gods that it is not yours.”

He wrapped it up again carefully and, having bestowed it in an inner pocket, said, “And now give me the pistol and run down to the telegraph office and see if you can stop Miller. I should like him to have the credit for this.”

I handed him the pistol and made my way out into Fetter Lane and so down to Fleet Street, where at the post office my urgent message was sent off to Scotland Yard immediately. In a few minutes the reply came that Superintendent Miller had not yet left and that he was starting immediately for Clifford’s Inn. A quarter of an hour later he drove up in a hansom to the Fetters Lane gate and I conducted him up to the second floor, where Thorndyke introduced him to his prisoner and witnessed the official arrest.

“You don’t see how I arrived at it,” said Thorndyke as we walked homeward after returning the key. “Well, I am not surprised. The initial evidence was of the weakest; it acquired significance only by cumulative effect. Let us reconstruct it as it developed.

“The derelict hat was, of course, the starting-point. Now, the first thing one noticed was that it appeared to have had more than one owner. No man would buy a new hat that fitted so badly as to need all that packing; and the arrangement of the packing suggested a long-headed man wearing a hat that had belonged to a man with a short head. Then there were the suggestions offered by the slips of paper. The fragmentary address referred to a place the name of which ended in ‘n’ and the remainder was evidently ‘London, W.C.’ Now what West Central place names end in ‘n’? It was not a street, a square or a court, and Barbican is not in the W.C. district. It was almost certainly one of the half-dozen surviving Inns of Court or Chancery. But, of course, it was not necessarily the address of the owner of the hat.

“The other slip of paper bore the end of a word ending in ‘el,’ and another word ending in ‘eep,’ and connected with these were quantities stated in ounces and pennyweights troy weight. But the only persons who I troy weight are those who deal in precious metals. I inferred therefore that the ‘el’ was part of ‘lemel,’ and that the ‘eep’ was part of ‘floor-sweep,’ an inference that was supported by the respective quantities, three ounces five pennyweights of lemel and nine and a half ounces of floor-sweep.”

“What is lemel?” I asked.

“It is the trade name for the gold or silver filings that collect in the ‘skin’ of a jeweller’s bench. Floor-sweep is, of course, the dust swept up on the floor of a jeweller’s or goldsmith’s workshop. The lemel is actual metal, though not of uniform fineness, but the sweep is a mixture of dirt and metal. Both are saved and sent to the refiners to have the gold and silver extracted.

“This paper, then, was connected either with a gold smith or a gold refiner—who might call himself an assayist or a metallurgist. The connection was supported by the leaf of a price list of gas stoves. A metallurgist would be kept well supplied with lists of gas stoves and furnaces. The traces of lead in the dust from the hat gave us another straw blowing the same direction, for gold assayed by the dry process is fused in the cupel furnace with lead; and as the lead oxidises and the oxide is volatile, traces of lead would tend to appear in the dust deposited in the laboratory.

“The next thing to do was to consult the directory; and when I did so, I found that there were no goldsmiths in any of the Inns and only one assayist—Mr. Highley, of Clifford’s Inn. The probabilities therefore, slender as they were, pointed to some connection between this stray hat and Mr. Highley. And this was positively all the information that we had when we came out this afternoon.

“As soon as we got to Clifford’s Inn, however, the evidence began to grow like a rolling snowball. First there was Larkin’s contribution; and then there was the discovery of the missing hat. Now, as soon as I saw that hat my suspicions fell upon the man upstairs. I felt a conviction that the hat had been left there purposely and that the letter to Larkin was just a red herring to create a false trail. Nevertheless, the presence of that hat completely confirmed the other evidence. It showed that the apparent connection was a real connection.”

“But,” I asked, “what made you suspect the man upstairs?”

“My dear Jervis!” he exclaimed, “consider the facts. That hat was enough to hang the man who left it there. Can you imagine this astute, wary villain making such an idiot’s mistake—going away and leaving the means of his conviction for anyone to find? But you are forgetting that whereas the missing hat was found on the first floor, the murderer’s hat was connected with the second floor. The evidence suggested that it was Highley’s hat. And now, before we go on to the next stage, let me remind you of those fingerprints. Miller thought that their rough appearance was due to the surface on which they had been made. But it was not. They were the prints of a person who was suffering from ichthyosis, palmar psoriasis or sonic dry dermatitis.

“There is one other point. The man we were looking for was a murderer. His life was already forfeit. To such a man another murder more or less is of no consequence. If this man, having laid the false trail, had determined to take sanctuary in Highley’s rooms, it was probable that he had already got rid of Highley. And remember that a metallurgist has unrivalled means disposing of a body; for not only is each of his muffle furnaces a miniature crematorium, but the very residue of a cremated body—bone-ash—is one of the materials of his trade.

“When we went upstairs, I first took the reading of the gas meter and ascertained that a large amount of gas had been used recently. Then, when we entered I took the opportunity to shake hands with Mr. Sherwood, and immediately I became aware that he suffered from a rather extreme form of ichthyosis. That was the first point of verification. Then we discovered that he actually could not distinguish between iron pyrites and auriferous quartz. He was not a metallurgist at all. He was a masquerader. Then the bone-ash in the tub was mixed with fragments of calcined bone, and the cupels all showed similar fragments. In one of them I could see part of the crown of a tooth. That was pure luck. But observe that by that time I had enough evidence to justify an arrest. The tooth served only to bring the affair to a crisis; and his response to my unspoken accusation saved us the trouble of further search for confirmatory evidence.”

“What is not quite clear to me,” said I, “is when and why he made away with Highley. As the body has been completely reduced to bone-ash, Highley must have been dead at least some days.”

“Undoubtedly,” Thorndyke agreed. “I take it that the course of events was like this: The police have been searching eagerly for this man, and every new crime must have made his position more unsafe—for a criminal can never be sure that he has not dropped some clue. It began to be necessary for him to make some arrangements for leaving the country and mean while to have a retreat in case his whereabouts should chance to be discovered. Highley’s chambers were admirable for both purposes. Here was a solitary man who seldom had a visitor, and who would probably not be missed for some considerable time; and in those chambers were the means of rapidly and completely disposing of the body. The mere murder would be a negligible detail to this ruffian.

“I imagine that Highley was done to death at least a week ago, and that the murderer did not take up his new tenancy until the body was reduced to ash. With that large furnace in addition to the small ones, this would not take long. When the new premises were ready, he could make a sham disappearance to cover his actual flight later; and you must see how perfectly misleading that sham disappearance was. If the police had discovered that hat in the empty room only a week later, they would have been certain that he had escaped to one of the Baltic ports; and while they were following his supposed tracks, he could have gone off comfortably via Folkestone or Southampton.”

“Then you think he had only just moved into Highley’s rooms?”

“I should say he moved in last night. The murder of Byramji was probably planned on some information that the murderer had picked up, and as soon as it was accomplished he began forthwith to lay down the false tracks. When he reached his rooms yesterday afternoon, he must have written the letter to Larkin and gone off at once to the East End to post it. Then he probably had his bushy hair cut short and shaved off his beard and moustache—which would render him quite unrecognisable by Larkin—and moved into Highley’s chambers, from which he would have quietly sallied forth in a few days’ time to take his passage to the Continent. It was quite a good plan, and but for the accident of taking the wrong hat, would almost certainly have succeeded.”

Once every year, on the second of August, there is delivered with unfailing regularity at No. 5A King’s Bench Walk a large box of carved sandal-wood filled with the choicest Trichinopoly cheroots and accompanied by an affectionate letter from our late client, Mr. Byramji. For the second of August is the anniversary of the death (in the execution shed at Newgate) of Cornelius Barnett, otherwise known as the “New Jersey Sphinx.”

THE TOUCHSTONE (1923)

It happened not uncommonly that the exigencies of practice committed my friend Thorndyke to investigations that lay more properly within the province of the police. For problems that had arisen as secondary consequences of a criminal act could usually not be solved until the circumstances of that act were fully elucidated and, incidentally, the identity of the actor established. Such a problem was that of the disappearance of James Harewood’s will, a problem that was propounded to us by our old friend, Mr. Marchmont, when he called on us, by appointment, with the client of whom he had spoken in his note.

It was just four o’clock when the solicitor arrived at our chambers, and as I admitted him he ushered in a gentlemanly-looking man of about thirty-five, whom he introduced as Mr. William Crowhurst.

“I will just stay,” said he with an approving glance at the tea-service on the table, “and have a cup of tea with you, and give you an outline of the case. Then I must run away and leave Mr. Crowhurst to fill in the details.”

He seated himself in an easy chair within comfortable reach of the table, and as Thorndyke poured out the tea, he glanced over a few notes scribbled on a sheet of paper.

“I may say,” he began, stirring his tea thoughtfully, “that this is a forlorn hope. I have brought the case to you, but I have not the slightest expectation that you will be able to help us.”

“A very wholesome frame of mind,” Thorndyke commented with a smile. “I hope it is that of your client also.”

It is indeed,” said Mr. Crowhurst; “in fact, it seems to me a waste of your time to go into the matter. Probably you will think so too, when you have heard the particulars.”

“Well, let us hear the particulars,” said Thorndyke. “A forlorn hope has, at least, the stimulating quality of difficulty. Let us have your outline sketch, Marchmont.”

The solicitor, having emptied his cup and pushed it towards the tray for replenishment, glanced at his notes and began: “The simplest way in which to present the problem is to give a brief recital of the events that have given rise to it, which are these: The day before yesterday—that is last Monday—at a quarter to two in the afternoon, Mr. James Harewood executed a will at his house at Merbridge, which is about two miles from Welsbury. There were present four persons: two of his servants, who signed as witnesses, and the two principal beneficiaries—Mr. Arthur Baxfield, a nephew of the testator, and our friend here, Mr. William Crowhurst. The will was a holograph written on the two pages of a sheet of letter-paper. When the witnesses signed, the will was covered by another sheet of paper so that only the space for the signatures was exposed. Neither of the witnesses read the will, nor did either of the beneficiaries; and so far as I am aware, no one but the testator knew what were its actual provisions, though, after the servants had left the room, Mr. Harewood explained its general purport to the beneficiaries.”

“And what was its general purport?” Thorndyke asked.

“Broadly speaking,” replied Marchmont, “it divided the estate in two very unequal portions between Mr. Baxfield and Mr. Crowhurst. There were certain small legacies of which neither the amounts nor the names of the legatees are known. Then, to Baxfield was given a thousand pounds to enable him either to buy a partnership or to start a small factory—he is a felt hat manufacturer by trade—and the remainder to Crowhurst, who was made executor and residuary legatee. But, of course, the residue of the estate is an unknown quantity, since we don’t know either the number or the amounts of the legacies.

“Shortly after the signing of the will, the parties separated. Mr. Harewood folded up the will and put it in a leather wallet which he slipped into his pocket, stating his intention of taking the will forthwith to deposit with his lawyer at Welsbury. A few minutes after his guests had departed, he was seen by one of the servants to leave the house, and afterwards was seen by a neighbour walking along a footpath which, after passing through a small wood, joins the main road about a mile and a quarter from Welsbury. From that time, he was never again seen alive. He never visited the lawyer, nor did anyone see him at or near Welsbury or elsewhere else.

“As he did not return home that night, his housekeeper (he was a widower and childless) became extremely alarmed, and in the morning she communicated with the police. A search-party was organised, and, following the path on which he was last seen, explored the wood—which is known as Gilbert’s Copse—and here, at the bottom of an old chalk-pit, they found him lying dead with a fractured skull and a dislocated neck. How he came by these injuries is not at present known; but as the body had been robbed of all valuables, including his watch, purse, diamond ring and the wallet containing the will, there is naturally a strong suspicion that he has been murdered. That, however, is not our immediate concern—at least not mine. I am concerned with the will, which, as you see, has disappeared, and as it has presumably been carried away by a thief who is under suspicion of murder, it is not likely to be returned.”

“It is almost certainly destroyed by this time,” said Mr. Crowhurst.

“That certainly seems probable,” Thorndyke agreed. “But what do you want me to do? You haven’t come for counsel’s opinion?”

“No,” replied Marchmont. “I am pretty clear about the legal position. I shall claim, as the will has presumably been destroyed, to have the testator’s wishes carried out in so far as they are known. But I am doubtful as to the view the court may take. It may decide that the testator’s wishes are not known, that the provisions of the will are too uncertain to admit of administration.”

“And what would be the effect of that decision?” asked Thorndyke.

“In that case,” said Marchmont, “the entire estate would go to Baxfield, as he is the next of kin and there was no previous will.”

“And what is it that you want me to do?”

Marchmont chuckled deprecatingly. “You have to pay the penalty of being a prodigy, Thorndyke. We are asking you to do an impossibility—but we don’t really expect you to bring it off. We ask you to help us to recover the will.”

“If the will has been completely destroyed, it can’t be recovered,” said Thorndyke. “But we don’t know that it has been destroyed. The matter is, at least, worth investigating; and if you wish me to look into it, I will.”

The solicitor rose with an air of evident relief.

“Thank you, Thorndyke,” said he. “I expect nothing—at least, I tell myself that I do—but I can now feel that everything that is possible will be done. And now I must be off. Crowhurst can give you any details that you want.”

When Marchmont had gone, Thorndyke turned to our client and asked, “What do you suppose Baxfield will do, if the will is irretrievably lost? Will he press his claim as next of kin?”

“I should say yes,” replied Crowhurst. “He is a business man and his natural claims are greater than mine. He is not likely to refuse what the law assigns to him as his right. As a matter of fact, I think he felt that his uncle had treated him unfairly in alienating the property.”

“Was there any reason for this diversion of the estate?”

“Well,” replied Crowhurst, “Harewood and I have been very good friends and he was under some obligations to me; and then Baxfield had not made himself very acceptable to his uncle. But the principal factor, I think, was a strong tendency of Baxfield’s to gamble. He had lost quite a lot of money by backing horses, and a careful, thrifty man like James Harewood doesn’t care to leave his savings to a gambler. The thousand pounds that he did leave to Baxfield was expressly for the purpose of investment in a business.”

“Is Baxfield in business now?”

“Not on his own account. He is a sort of foreman or shop-manager in a factory just outside Welsbury, and I believe he is a good worker and knows his trade thoroughly.”

“And now,” said Thorndyke, “with regard to Mr. Harewood’s death. The injuries might, apparently, have been either accidental or homicidal. What are the probabilities of accident—disregarding the robbery?

“Very considerable, I should say. It is a most dangerous place. The footpath runs close beside the edge of a disused chalk-pit with perpendicular or over hanging sides, and the edge is masked by bushes and brambles. A careless walker might easily fall over—or be pushed over, for that matter.”

“Do you know when the inquest is to take place?”

“Yes. The day after tomorrow. I had the subpoena this morning for Friday afternoon at 2.30, at the Welsbury Town Hall.”

At this moment footsteps were heardhurriedly ascend ing the stairs and then came a loud and peremptory rat-tat at our door. I sprang across to see who our visitor was, and as I flung open the door, Mr. Marchmont rushed in, breathing heavily and flourishing a newspaper.

“Here is a new development,” he exclaimed. “It doesn’t seem to help us much, but I thought you had better know about it at once.” He sat down, and putting on his spectacles, read aloud as follows: “A new and curious light has been thrown on the mystery of the death of Mr. James Harewood, whose body was found yesterday in a disused chalk-pit near Merbridge. It appears that on Monday—the day on which Mr. Harewood almost certainly was killed—a passenger alighting from a train at Barwood Junction before it had stopped, slipped and fell between the train and the platform. He was quickly extricated, and as he had evidently sustained internal injuries, he was taken to the local hospital, where he was found to be suffering from a fractured pelvis. He gave his name as Thomas Fletcher, but refused to give any address, saying that he had no relatives. This morning he died, and on his clothes being searched for an address, a parcel, formed of two handkerchiefs tied up with string, was found in his pocket. When it was opened it was found to contain five watches, three watch-chains, a tie-pin and a number of bank-notes. Other pockets contained a quantity of loose money—gold and silver mixed—and a card of the Welsbury Races, which were held on Monday. Of the five watches, one has been identified as the one taken from Mr. Harewood; and the bank-notes have been identified as a batch handed to him by the cashier, of his bank at Welsbury last Thursday and presumably carried in the leather wallet which was stolen from his pocket. This wallet, by the way, has also been found. It was picked up—empty—last night on the railway embankment just outside Welsbury Station. Appearances thus suggest that the man, Fletcher, when on his way to the races, encountered Mr. Harewood in the lonely copse, and murdered and robbed him; or perhaps found him dead in the chalk-pit and robbed the body—a question that is now never likely to be solved.”

As Marchmont finished reading, he looked up at Thorndyke. “It doesn’t help us much, does it?” said he. “As the wallet was found empty, it is pretty certain that the will has been destroyed.”

“Or perhaps merely thrown away,” said Thorndyke. “In which case an advertisement offering a substantial reward may bring it to light.”

The solicitor shrugged his shoulders sceptically, but agreed to publish the advertisement. Then, once more he turned to go; and as Mr. Crowhurst had no further information to give, he departed with his lawyer.

For some time after they had gone, Thorndyke sat with his brief notes before him, silent and deeply reflective. I, too, maintained a discreet silence, for I knew from long experience that the motionless pose and quiet, impassive face were the outward signs of a mind in swift and strenuous action. Instinctively, I gathered that this apparently chaotic case was being quietly sorted out and arranged in a logical order; that Thorndyke, like a skilful chess-player, was “trying over the moves” before he should lay his hand upon the pieces.

Presently he looked up. “Well?” he asked. “What do you think, Jervis? Is it worth while?”

“That,” I replied,” depends on whether the will is or is not in existence. If it has been destroyed, an investigation would be a waste of our time and our client’s money.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “But there is quite a good chance that it has not been destroyed. It was probably dropped loose into the wallet, and then might have been picked out and thrown away before the wallet was examined. But we mustn’t concentrate too much on the will. If we take up the case—which I am inclined to do—we must ascertain the actual sequence of events. We have one clear day before the inquest. If we run down to Merbridge tomorrow and go thoroughly over the ground, and then go on to Barwood and find out all we can about the man Fletcher, we may get some new light from the evidence at the inquest.”

I agreed readily to Thorndyke’s proposal, not that I could see any way into the case, but I felt a conviction that my colleague had isolated some leading fact and had a definite line of research in his mind. And this conviction deepened when, later in the evening, he laid his research-case on the table, and rearranged its contents with evident purpose. I watched curiously the apparatus that he was packing in it and tried—not very successfully—to infer the nature of the proposed investigation. The box of powdered paraffin wax and the spirit blowpipe were obvious enough; but the “dust-aspirator”—a sort of miniature vacuum cleaner—the portable microscope, the coil of Manila line, with an eye spliced into one end, and especially the abundance of blank-labelled microscope slides, all of which I saw him pack in the case with deliberate care, defeated me utterly.

About ten o’clock on the following morning we stepped from the train in Welsbury Station, and having recovered our bicycles from the luggage van, wheeled them through the barrier and mounted. During the train journey we had both studied the one-inch Ordnance map to such purpose that we were virtually in familiar surroundings and immune from the necessity of seeking directions from the natives. As we cleared the town we glanced up the broad by-road to the left which led to the race-course; then we rode on briskly for a mile, which brought us to the spot where the footpath to Merbridge joined the road. Here we dismounted and, lifting our bicycles over the stile, followed the path towards a small wood which we could see ahead, crowning a low hill.

“For such a good path,” Thorndyke remarked as we approached the wood, “it is singularly unfrequented. I haven’t seen a soul since we left the road.” He glanced at the map as the path entered the wood, and when we had walked on a couple of hundred yards, he halted and stood his bicycle against a tree. “The chalk-pit should be about here,” said he, “though it is impossible to see. He grasped a stem of one of the small bushes that crowded on to the path and pulled it aside. Then he uttered an exclamation.

“Just look at that, Jervis. It is a positive scandal that a public path should be left in this condition.”

Certainly Mr. Crowhurst had not exaggerated. It was a most dangerous place. The parted branches revealed a chasm some thirty feet deep, the brink of which, masked by the bushes, was but a matter of inches from the edge of the path.

“We had better go back,” said Thorndyke,” and find the entrance to the pit, which seems to be to the right. The first thing is to ascertain exactly where Harewood fell. Then we can come back and examine the place from above.”

We turned back, and presently found a faint track which we followed until, descending steeply, it brought us out into the middle of the pit. It was evidently an ancient pit, for the sides were blackened by age, and the floor was occupied by a trees, some of considerable size. Against one of these we leaned our bicycles and then walked slowly round at the foot of the frowning cliff.

“This seems to be below the path,” said Thorndyke, glancing up at the grey wall which jutted out above in stages like an inverted flight of steps. “Somewhere hereabouts we should find some traces of the tragedy.”

Even as he spoke my eye caught a spot of white on a block of chalk, and on the freshly fractured surface a significant brownish-red stain. The block lay opposite the mouth of an artificial cave—an old wagon-shelter but now empty and immediately under a markedly overhanging part of the cliff.

“This is undoubtedly the place where he fell,” said Thorndyke. “You can see where the stretcher was placed—an old-pattern stretcher with wheel-runners—and there is a little spot of broken soil at the top where he came over. Well, apart from the robbery, a clear fall of over thirty feet is enough to account for a fractured skull. Will you stay here, Jervis, while I run up and look at the path?”

He went off towards the entrance, and presently I heard him above, pulling aside the bushes, and after one or two trials, he appeared directly overhead.

“There are plenty of footprints on the path,” said he, “but nothing abnormal. No trampling or signs of a struggle. I am going on a little farther.”

He withdrew behind the bushes, and I proceeded to inspect the interior of the cave, noting the smoke-blackened roof and the remains of a recent fire, which, with a number of rabbit bones and a discarded tea of the kind used by the professional tramp, seemed not without a possible bearing on our investigation. I was thus engaged when I heard Thorndyke hail me from above and coming out of the cave, I saw his head thrust between the branches. He seemed to be lying down, for his face was nearly on a level with the top of the cliff.

“I want to take an impression,” he called out. “Will you bring up the paraffin and the blower? And you might bring the coil of line, too.”

I hurried away to the place where our bicycles were standing, and opening the research-case, took out the coil of line, the tin of paraffin wax and the spirit blowpipe, and having ascertained that the container of the latter was full, I ran up the incline and made my way along the path. Some distance along, I found my colleague nearly hidden in the bushes, lying prone, with his head over the edge of the cliff.

“You see, Jervis,” he said, as I crawled alongside and looked over, “this is a possible way down, and someone has used it quite recently. He climbed down with his face to the cliff—you can see the clear impression of the toe of a boot in the loam of that projection, and you can even make out the shape of an iron toe-tip. Now the problem is how to get down to take the impression without, dislodging the earth above it. I think I will secure myself with the line.”

“It is hardly worth the risk of a broken neck,” said I. “Probably the print is that of some schoolboy.”

“It is a man’s foot,” he replied. “Most likely it has no connection with our case. But it may have, and as a shower of rain would obliterate it we ought to secure it.” As he spoke, he passed the end of the cord through eye and slipped the loop over his shoulders, drawing tight under his arms. Then, having made the line fast to the butt of a small tree, he cautiously lowered himself over the edge and climbed down to the projection. A soon as he had a secure footing, I passed the spare cord through the ring on the lid of the wax tin and lowered it to him, and when he had unfastened it, I drew up the cord and in the same way let down the blowpipe. Then I watched his neat, methodical procedure. First he took out a spoonful of the powdered, or grated, wax and very delicately sprinkled it on the toe-print until the latter was evenly but very thinly covered. Next he lit the blowlamp, and as soon as the blue flame began to roar from the pipe, he directed it on to the toe-print. Almost instantly the powder melted, glazing the impression like a coat of varnish. The flame was removed and the film of wax at once solidified and became dull and opaque. A second, heavier, sprinkling with the powder, followed by another application of the flame, thickened the film of wax, and this process, repeated four or five times, eventually produced a solid cake. Then Thorndyke extinguished the blowlamp, and securing it and the tin to the cord, directed me to pull them up. “And you might send me down the field-glasses,” he added. “There is something farther down that I can’t quite make out.”

I slipped the glasses from my shoulder, and opening the case, tied the cord to the leather sling and lowered it down the cliff; and then I watched with some curiosity as Thorndyke stood on his insecure perch steadily gazing through the glasses (they were Zeiss 8-prismatics) at a clump of wallflowers that grew from a boss of chalk about half-way down. Presently he lowered the glasses and, slinging them round his neck by their lanyard, turned his attention to the cake of wax. It was by this time quite solid, and when he had tested it, he lifted it carefully, and placed it in the empty binocular case, when I drew it up.

“I want you, Jervis,” Thorndyke called up, “to steady the line. I am going down to that wallflower clump.”

It looked extremely unsafe, but I knew it was useless to protest, so I hitched the line around a massive stump and took a firm grip of the “fall.”

“Ready,” I sang out; and forthwith Thorndyke began to creep across the face of the cliff with feet and hands clinging to almost invisible projections. Fortunately, there was at this part no overhang, and though my heart was in my mouth as I watched, I saw him cross the perilous space in safety. Arrived at the clump, he drew an envelope from his pocket, stooped and picked up some small object, which he placed in the envelope, returning the latter to his pocket. Then he gave me another bad five minutes while he recrossed the nearly vertical surface to his starting-point; but at length this, too, was safely accomplished, and when he finally climbed up over the edge and stood beside me on solid earth, I drew a deep breath and turned to revile him.

“Well?” I demanded sarcastically, “what have you gathered at the risk of your neck? Is it samphire or edelweiss?”

He drew the envelope from his pocket, and dipping into it, produced a cigarette-holder—a cheap bone affair, black and clammy with long service and still holding the butt of a hand-made cigarette—and handed it to me. I turned it over, smelled it and hastily handed it back. “For my part,” said I, “I wouldn’t have risked the cervical vertebra of a yellow cat for it. What do you expect to learn from it?”

“Of course, I expect nothing. We are just collecting facts on the chance that they may turn out to be relevant. Here, for instance, we find that a man has descended, within a few yards of where Harewood fell, by this very inconvenient route, instead of going round to the entrance to the pit. He must have had some reason for adopting this undesirable mode of descent. Possibly he was in a hurry, and probably he belonged to the district, since a stranger would not know of the existence of this short cut. Then it seems likely that this was his cigarette tube. If you look over, you will see by those vertical scrapes on the chalk that he slipped and must have nearly fallen. At that moment he probably dropped the tube, for you notice that the wallflower clump is directly under the marks of his toes.”

“Why do you suppose he did not recover the tube?”

“Because the descent slopes away from the position of the clump, and he had no trusty Jervis with a stout cord to help him to cross the space. And if he went down this way because he was hurried, he would not have time to search for the tube. But if the tube was not his, still it belonged to somebody who has been here recently.”

“Is there anything that leads you to connect this man with the crime?”

“Nothing but time and place,” he replied. “The man has been down into the pit close to where Harewood was robbed and possibly murdered, and as the traces are quite recent, he must have been there near about the time of the robbery. That is all. I am considering the traces of this man in particular because there are no traces of any other. But we may as well have a look at the path, which, as you see, yields good impressions.”

We walked slowly along the path towards Merbridge, keeping at the edges and scrutinising the surface closely. In the shady hollows, the soft loam bore prints of many feet, and among them we could distinguish one with an iron toe-tip, but it was nearly obliterated by another studded with hob-nails.

“We shan’t get much information here,” said Thorndyke as he turned about. “The search-party have trodden out the important prints. Let us see if we can find out where the man with the toe-tips went to.”

We searched the path on the Welsbury side of the chalk-pit, but found no trace of him. Then we went into the pit, and having located the place where he descended, sought for some other exit than the track leading to the path. Presently, half-way up the slope, we found a second track, bearing away in the direction of Merbridge. Following this for some distance, we came to a small hollow at the bottom of which was a muddy space. And here we both halted abruptly, for in the damp ground were the clear imprints of a pair of boots which we could sec had, in addition to the toe-tips, half-tips to the heels.

“We had better have wax casts of these,” said Thorndyke, “to compare with the boots of the man Fletcher. I will do them while you go back for the bicycles.”

By the time that I returned with the machines two of the footprints were covered with a cake each of wax, and Thorndyke had left the track, and was peering among the bushes. I inquired what he was looking for.

“It is a forlorn hope, as Marchmont would say,” he replied, “but I am looking to see if the will has been thrown away here. It was quite probably jettisoned at once, and this is the most probable route for the robber to have taken, if he knew of it. You see by the map that it must lead nearly directly to the race-course, and it avoids both the path and the main road. While the wax is setting we might as well look round.”

It seemed a hopeless enough proceeding and I agreed to it without enthusiasm. Leaving the track on the opposite side to that which Thorndyke was searching, I wandered among the bushes and the little open spaces, peering about me and reminding myself of that “aged, aged man” who

“Sometimes searched the grassy knolls,

For wheels of hansom cabs.”

I had worked my way nearly back to where I could see Thorndyke, also returning, when my glance fell on a small, brown object caught among the branches of a bush. It was a man’s pigskin purse; and as I picked it out of the bush I saw that it was open and empty.

With my prize in my hand, I hastened to the spot where Thorndyke was lifting the wax casts. He looked up and asked, “No luck, I suppose?”

I held out the purse, on which he pounced eagerly. “But this is most important, Jervis,” he exclaimed. “It is almost certainly Harewood’s purse. You see the initials, ‘J. H.,’ stamped on the flap. Then we were right as to the direction that the robber took. And it would pay to search this place exhaustively for the will, though we can’t do that now, as we have to go to Barwood, I wrote to say we were coming. We had better get back to the path now and make for the road. Barwood is only half-an-hour’s run.”

We packed the casts in the research-case (which was strapped to Thorndyke’s bicycle), and turning back, made our way to the path. As it was still deserted, we ventured to mount, and soon reached the road, along which we started at a good pace toward Barwood.

Half-an-hour’s ride brought us into the main Street of the little town, and when we dismounted at the police station we found the Chief Constable himself waiting to receive us, courteously eager to assist us, but possessed by a devouring curiosity which was somewhat inconvenient.

“I have done as you asked me in your letter, sir,” he said. “Fletcher’s body is, of course, in the mortuary, but I have had all his clothes and effects brought here; and I have had them put in my private office, so that you can look them over in comfort.”

“It is exceedingly good of you,” said Thorndyke, “and most helpful.” He unstrapped the research-case, and following the officer into his sanctum, looked round with deep approval. A large table had been cleared for the examination, and the dead pickpocket’s clothes and effects neatly arranged at one end.

Thorndyke’s first proceeding was to pick up the dead man’s boots—a smart but flimsy pair of light brown leather, rather down at heel and in need of re-soling. Neither toes nor heels bore any tips or even nails excepting the small fastening brads. Having exhibited them to me without remark, Thorndyke placed them on a sheet of white paper and made a careful tracing of the soles, a proceeding that seemed to surprise the Chief Constable, for he remarked, “I should hardly have thought that the question of footprints would arise in this case. You can’t charge a dead man.”

Thorndyke agreed that this seemed to be true; and then he proceeded to an operation that fairly made the officer’s eyes bulge. Opening the research-case—into which the officer cast an inquisitive glance—he took out the dust-aspirator, the nozzle of which he inserted into one after another of the dead thief’s pockets while I worked the pump. When he had gone through them all, he opened the receiver and extracted quite a considerable ball of dusty fluff. Placing this on a glass slide, he tore it in halves with a pair of mounted needles and passing one half to me, when we both fell to work “teasing,” it out into an open mesh, portions of which we separated and laid—each in a tiny pool of glycerine—on blank labelled glass slides, applying to each slide its cover-glass and writing on the label, “Dust from Fletcher’s pockets.”

When the series was complete, Thorndyke brought out the microscope, and fitting on a one-inch objective, quickly examined the slides, one after another, and then pushed the microscope to me. So far as I could see, the dust was just ordinary dust—principally made up of broken cotton fibres with a few fibres of wool, linen, wood, jute, and others that I could not name and some undistinguishable mineral particles. But I made no comment, and resigning the microscope to the Chief Constable—who glared through it, breathing hard, and remarked that the dust was “rummy-looking stuff “—watched Thorndyke’s further proceedings. And very odd proceedings they were.

First he laid the five stolen watches in a row, and with a Coddington lens minutely examined the dial of each. Then he opened the back of each in turn and copied into his notebook the watch-repairers’ scratched inscriptions. Next he produced from the case a number of little vulcanite rods, and laying out five labelled slides, dropped a tiny drop of glycerine on each, covering it at once with a watch-glass to protect it from falling dust. Then he stuck a little label on each watch, wrote a number on it and similarly numbered the five slides. His next proceeding was to take out the glass of watch No. 1 and pick up one of the vulcanite rods, which he rubbed briskly on a silk handkerchief and passed across and around the dial of the watch, after which he held the rod close to the glycerine on slide No. 1 and tapped it sharply with the blade of his pocket-knife. Then he dropped a cover-glass on to the glycerine and made a rapid inspection of the specimen through the microscope.

This operation he repeated on the other four watches, using a fresh rod for each, and when he had finished he turned to the open-mouthed officer. “I take it,” said he, “that the watch which has the chain attached to it is Mr. Harewood’s watch?”

“Yes, sir. That helped us to identify it.” Thorndyke looked at the watch reflectively. Attached to the bow by a short length of green tape was a small, rather elaborate key. This my friend picked up, and taking a fresh mounted needle, inserted it into the barrel of the key, from which he then withdrew it with a tiny ball of fluff on its point. I hastily prepared a slide and handed it to him, when, with a pair of dissecting scissors, he cut off a piece of the fluff and let it fall into the glycerine. He repeated this manoeuvre with two more slides and then labelled the three “Key, outside,” “middle” and “inside,” and in that order examined them under the microscope.

My own examination of the specimens yielded very little. They all seemed to be common dust, though that from the face of watch No. 3 contained a few broken fragments of what looked like animal hairs—possibly cat’s—as also did the key-fluff marked “outside.” But if this had any significance, I could not guess what it was. As to the Chief Constable, he clearly looked on the whole proceeding as a sort of legerdemain with no obvious purpose, for he remarked, as we were packing up to go, “I am glad I’ve seen how you do it, sir. But all the same, I think you are flogging a dead horse. We know who committed the crime and we know he’s beyond the reach of the law.”

“Well,” said Thorndyke, “one must earn one’s fee, you know. I shall put Fletcher’s boots and the five watches in evidence at the inquest tomorrow, and I will ask you to leave the labels on the watches.” With renewed thanks and a hearty handshake he bade the courteous officer adieu, and we rode off to catch the train to London.

That evening, after dinner, we brought out the specimens and went over them at our leisure; and Thorndyke added a further specimen by drawing a knotted piece of twine through the cigarette-holder that he had salved from the chalk-pit, and teasing out the unsavoury, black substance that came out on the string in glycerine on a slide. When he had examined it, he passed it to me. The dark, tarry liquid somewhat obscured the detail, but I could make out fragments of the same animal hairs that I had noted in the other specimens, only here they were much more numerous. I mentioned my observation to Thorndyke. “They are certainly parts of mammalian hairs,” I said, “and they look like the hairs of a cat. Are they from a cat?”

“Rabbit,” Thorndyke replied curtly; and even then, I am ashamed to admit, I did not perceive the drift of the investigation.

The room in the Welsbury Town Hall had filled up some minutes before the time fixed for the opening of the inquest, and in the interval, when the jury had retired to view the body in the adjacent mortuary, I looked round the assembly. Mr. Marchmont and Mr. Crowhurst were present, and a youngish, horsey-looking man in cord breeches and leggings, whom I correctly guessed to be Arthur Baxfield. Our friend the Chief Constable of Barwood was also there, and with him Thorndyke exchanged a few words in a retired corner. The rest of the company were strangers.

As soon as the coroner and the jury had taken their places the medical witness was called. The cause of death, he stated, was dislocation of the neck, accompanied by a depressed fracture of the skull. The fracture have been produced by a blow with a heavy weapon, or by the deceased falling on his head. The witness adopted the latter view, as the dislocation showed that deceased had fallen in that manner.

The next witness was Mr. Crowhurst, who repeated to the court what he had told us, and further stated that on leaving deceased’s house he went straight home, as he had an appointment with a friend. He was followed by Baxfield, who gave evidence to the same effect, and stated that on leaving the house of the deceased he went to his place of business at Welsbury. He was about to retire when Thorndyke rose to cross-examine.

“At what time did you reach your place of business?” he asked.

The witness hesitated for a few moments and then replied, “Half-past four.”

“And what time did you leave deceased’s house?”

“Two o’clock,” was the reply.

“What is the distance?”

“In a direct line, about two miles. But I didn’t go direct. I took a round in the country by Lenfield.”

“That would take you near the race-course on the way back. Did you go to the races?

“No. The races were just over when I returned.”

There was a slight pause and then Thorndyke asked, “Do you smoke much, Mr. Baxfield?”

The witness looked surprised, and so did the jury, but the former replied, “A fair amount. About fifteen cigarettes a day.”

“What brand of cigarettes do you smoke, and what kind of tobacco is it?”

“I make my own cigarettes. I make them of shag.”

Here protesting murmurs arose from the jury, and the coroner remarked stiffly, “These questions do not appear to have much connection with the subject of this inquiry.”

“You may take it, sir,” replied Thorndyke, “that they have a very direct bearing on it.” Then, turning to the witness he asked, “Do you use a cigarette-tube?

“Sometimes I do,” was the reply.

“Have you lost a cigarette-tube lately?”

The witness directed a startled glance at Thorndyke and replied after some hesitation, “I believe I mislaid one a little time ago.”

“When and where did you lose that tube?” Thorndyke asked.

“I—I really couldn’t say,” replied Baxfield, turning perceptibly pale.

Thorndyke opened his dispatch-box, and taking out the tube that he had salved at so much risk, handed it to the witness. “Is that the tube that you lost?” he asked.

At this question Baxfield turned pale as death, and the hand in which he received the tube shook as if with a palsy. “It may be,” he faltered. “I wouldn’t swear to it. It is like the one I lost.”

Thorndyke took it from him and passed it to the coroner. “I am putting this tube in evidence, sir,” said he. Then addressing the witness, he said, “You stated that you did not go to the races. Did you go on the course or inside the grounds at all?”

Baxfield moistened his lips and replied, “I just went in for a minute or two, but I didn’t stay. The races were over, and there was a very rough crowd.”

“While you were in that crowd, Mr. Baxfield, did you have your pocket picked?”

There was an expectant silence in the court as Baxfield replied in a low voice: “Yes. I lost my watch.”

Again Thorndyke opened the dispatch-box, and taking out a watch (it was the one that had been labelled 3), handed it to the witness. “Is that the watch that you lost?” he asked.

Baxfield held the watch in his trembling hand and replied hesitatingly, “I believe it is, but I won’t swear to it.”

There was a pause. Then, in grave, impressive tones, Thorndyke said,” Now, Mr. Baxfield, I am going to ask you a question which you need not answer if you consider that by doing so you would prejudice your position in any way. That question is, When your pocket was picked, were any articles besides this watch taken from your person? Don’t hurry. Consider your answer carefully.”

For some moments Baxfield remained silent, regarding Thorndyke with a wild, affrighted stare. At length he began falteringly, “I don’t remember missing any thing—” and then stopped.

“Could the witness be allowed to sit down, sir?” Thorndyke asked. And when the permission had been given and a chair placed, Baxfield sat down heavily and cast a bewildered glance round the court. “I think,” he said, addressing Thorndyke, “I had better tell you exactly what happened and take my chance of the consequences. When I left my uncle’s house on Monday, I took a circuit through the fields and then entered Gilbert’s Copse to wait for my uncle and tell him what I thought of his conduct in leaving the bulk of his property to a stranger. I struck the path that I knew my uncle would take and walked along it slowly to meet him. I did meet him—on the path, just above where he was found—and I began to say what was in my mind. But he wouldn’t listen. He flew into a rage, and as I was standing in the middle of the path, he tried to push past me. In doing so he caught his foot in a bramble and staggered back, then he disappeared through the bushes and a few seconds after I heard a thud down below. I pulled the bushes aside and looked down into the chalk-pit, and there I saw him lying with his head all on one side. Now, I happened to know of a short cut down into the pit. It was rather a dangerous climb, but I took it to get down as quickly as possible. It was there that I dropped the cigarette-tube. When I got to my uncle I could see that he was dead. His skull was battered and his neck was broken. Then the devil put into my head the idea of making away with the will. But I knew that if I took the will only, suspicion would fall on me. So I took most of his valuables—the wallet, his watch and chain, his purse and his ring. The purse I emptied and threw away, and flung the ring after it. I took the will out of the wallet—it had just been dropped in loose—and put it in an inner pocket. Then I dropped the wallet and the watch and chain into my outside coat pocket.

“I struck across country, intending to make for the race-course and drop the things among the crowd, so that they might be picked up and safely carried away. But when I got there a gang of pickpockets saved me the trouble; they mobbed and hustled me and cleared my pockets of everything but my keys and the will.”

“And what has become of the will?” asked Thorndyke.

“I have it here.” He dipped into his breast pocket and produced a folded paper, which he handed to Thorndyke, who opened it, and having glanced at it, passed it to the coroner.

That was practically the end of the inquest. The jury decided to accept Baxfield’s statement and recorded a verdict of “Death by Misadventure,” leaving Baxfield to be dealt with by the proper authorities.

“An interesting and eminently satisfactory case,” remarked Thorndyke, as we sat over a rather late dinner. “Essentially simple, too. The elucidation turned, as you probably noticed, on a single illuminating fact.”

“I judged that it was so,” said I, “though the illumination of that fact has not yet reached me.”

“Well,” said Thorndyke, “let us first take the general aspect of the case as it was presented by Marchmont. The first thing, of course, that struck one was that the loss of the will might easily have converted Baxfield from a minor beneficiary to the sole heir. But even if the court agreed to recognise the will, it would have to be guided by the statements of the only two men to whom its provisions were even approximately known, and Baxfield could have made any statement he pleased. It was impossible to ignore the fact that the loss of the will was very greatly to Baxfield’s advantage.

“When the stolen property was discovered in Fletcher’s possession it looked, at the first glance, as if the mystery of the crime were solved. But there were several serious inconsistencies. First, how came Fletcher to be in this solitary wood, remote from any railway or even road? He appeared to be a London pickpocket. When he was killed he was travelling to London by train. It seemed probable that he had come from London by train to ply his trade at the races. Then, as you know, criminological experience shows that the habitual criminal is a rigid specialist. The burglar, the coiner, the pickpocket, each keeps strictly to his own special line Now, Fletcher was a pickpocket, and had evidently be picking pockets on the race-course. The probabilities were against his being the original robber and in favour of his having picked the pocket of the person who robbed Harewood. But if this were so, who was that person? Once more the probabilities suggested Baxfield. There was the motive, as I have said, and further, the pocket-picking had apparently taken place on the race-course, and Baxfield was known to be a frequenter of race-courses. But again, if Baxfield were the person robbed by Fletcher, then one of the five watches was probably Baxfield’s watch. Whether it was so or not might have been very difficult to prove, but here came in the single illuminating fact that I have spoken of.

“You remember that when Marchmont opened the case he mentioned that Baxfield was a manufacturer of felt hats, and Crowhurst told us that he was a sort of foreman or manager of the factory.”

“Yes, I remember, now you speak of it. But what is the bearing of the fact?”

“My dear Jervis!” exclaimed Thorndyke. “Don’t you see that it gave us a touchstone? Consider, now. What is a felt hat? It is just a mass of agglutinated rabbits’ hair. The process of manufacture consists in blowing a jet of the more or less disintegrated hair on to a revolving steel cone which is moistened by a spray of an alcoholic solution of shellac. But, of course, a quantity of the finer and more minute particles of the broken hairs miss the cone and float about in the air. The air of the factory is thus charged with the dust of broken rabbit hairs; and this dust settles on and penetrates the clothing of the workers. But when clothing becomes charged with dust, that dust tends to accumulate in the pockets and find its way into the hollows and interstices of any object carried in those pockets. Thus, if one of the five watches was Baxfield’s it would almost certainly show traces where this characteristic dust had crept under the bezel and settled on the dial. And so it turned out to be. When I inspected those five watches through the Coddington lens, on the dial of No. 3 I saw a quantity of dust of this character. The electrified vulcanite rod picked it all up neatly and transferred it to the slide, and under the microscope its nature was obvious. The owner of this watch was therefore, almost certainly, employed in a felt hat factory. But, of course, it was necessary to show not only the presence of rabbit hair in this watch but its absence in the others and in Fletcher’s pockets; which I did.

“Then with regard to Harewood’s watch. There was no rabbit hair on the dial, but there was a small quantity on the fluff from the key barrel. Now, if that rabbit hair had come from Harewood’s pocket it would have been uniformly distributed through the fluff. But it was not. It was confined exclusively to the part of the fluff that was exposed. Thus it had come from some pocket other than Harewood’s and the owner of that pocket was almost certainly employed in a felt hat factory, and was most probably the owner of watch No. 3. Then there was the cigarette-tube. Its bore was loaded with rabbit hair. But its owner had unquestionably been at the scene of the crime. There was a clear suggestion that his was the pocket in which the stolen watch had been carried and that he was the owner of watch No. 3. The problem was to piece this evidence together and prove definitely who this person was. And that I was able to do by means of a fresh item of evidence, which I acquired when I saw Baxfield at the inquest. I suppose you noticed his boots?”

“I am afraid I didn’t,” I had to admit.

“Well, I did. I watched his feet constantly, and when he crossed his legs I could see that he had iron toe-tips on his boots. That was what gave me confidence to push the cross-examination.”

“It was certainly a rather daring cross-examination and rather irregular, too,” said I.

It was extremely irregular,” Thorndyke agreed. “The coroner ought not to have permitted it. But it was all for the best. If the coroner had disallowed my questions we should have had to take criminal proceedings against Baxfield, whereas now that we have recovered the will, it is possible that no one will trouble to prosecute him.”

Which, I subsequently ascertained, is what actually happened.

A FISHER OF MEN (1923)

“The man,” observed Thorndyke, “who would successfully practise the scientific detection of crime must take all knowledge for his province. There is no single fact which may not, in particular circumstances, acquire a high degree of evidential value; and in such circumstances success or failure is determined by the possession or non-possession of the knowledge wherewith to interpret the significance of that fact.”

This obiter dictum was thrown off apropos of our investigation of the case rather magniloquently referred to in the press as “The Blue Diamond Mystery,” and more particularly of an incident which occurred in the office of our old friend, Superintendent Miller, at Scotland Yard. Thorndyke had called to verify the few facts which had been communicated to him, and having put away his notebook and picked up his green canvas-covered research-case, had risen to take his leave, when his glance fell on a couple of objects on a side-table—a leather handbag and a walking-stick, lashed together with string, to which was attached a descriptive label.

He regarded them for a few moments reflectively and then glanced at the superintendent.

“Derelicts?” he inquired, “or jetsam?”

“Jetsam,” the superintendent replied, “literally jetsam—thrown overboard to lighten the ship.”

Here Inspector Badger, who had been a party to the conference, looked up eagerly.

“Yes,” he broke in. “Perhaps the doctor wouldn’t mind having a look at them. It’s quite a nice little problem, doctor, and entirely in your line.”

“What is the problem?” asked Thorndyke.

“It’s just this,” said Badger. “Here is a bag. Now the question is, whose bag is it? What sort of person is the owner? Where did he come from and where has he gone to?”

Thorndyke chuckled. “That seems quite simple,” said he. “A cursory inspection ought to dispose of trivial details like those. But how did you come by the bag?”

“The history of the derelicts,” said Miller, “is this: About four o’clock this morning, a constable on duty in King’s Road, Chelsea, saw a man walking on the opposite side of the road, carrying a handbag. There was nothing particularly suspicious in this, but still the constable thought he would cross and have a closer look at him. As he did so the man quickened his pace and, of course, the constable quickened his. Then the man broke into a run, and so did the constable, and a fine, stern chase started. Suddenly the man shot down a by-street, and as the constable turned the corner he saw his quarry turn into a sort of alley. Following him into this, and gaining on him perceptibly, he saw that the alley ended in a rather high wall. When the fugitive reached the wall he dropped his bag and stick and went over like a harlequin. The constable went over after him, but not like a harlequin—he wasn’t dressed for the part. By the time he got over, into a large garden with a lot of fruit trees in it, my nabs had disappeared. He traced him by his footprints across the garden to another wall, and when he climbed over that he found himself in by-street. But there was no sign of our agile friend. The constable ran up and down the street to the next crossings, blowing his whistle, but of course it was no go. So he went back across the garden and secured the bag and stick, which were at once sent here for examination.”

“And no arrest has been made?”

“Well,” replied Miller with a faint grin, “a constable in Oakley Street who had heard the whistle arrested a man who was carrying a suspicious-looking object. But he turned out to be a cornet player coming home from the theatre.”

“Good,” said Thorndyke. “And now let us have a look at the bag, which I take it has already been examined?”

“Yes, we’ve been through it,” replied Miller, “but everything has been put back as we found it.”

Thorndyke picked up the bag and proceeded to make a systematic inspection of its exterior.

“A good bag,” he commented; “quite an expensive one originally, though it has seen a good deal of service. You noticed the muddy marks on the bottom?”

“Yes,” said Miller. “Those were probably made when he dropped the bag to jump over the wall.”

“Possibly,” said Thorndyke, “though they don’t look like street mud. But we shall probably get more information from the contents.” He opened the bag, and after a glance at its interior, spread out on the table a couple of sheets of foolscap from the stationery rack, on which he began methodically to deposit the contents of the bag, accompanying the process with a sort of running commentary on their obvious characteristics.

“Item one: a small leather dressing-wallet. Rather shabby, but originally of excellent quality. It contains two Swedish razors, a little Washita hone, a diminutive strop, a folding shaving-brush, which is slightly damp to the fingers and has a scent similar to that of the stick of shaving soap. You notice that the hone is distinctly concave in the middle and that the inscription on the razors, ‘Arensburg, Eskilstuna, Sweden,’ is partly ground away. Then there is a box containing a very dry cake of soap, a little manicure set, a well-worn toothbrush, a nailbrush, dental-brush, button-hook, corn-razor, a small clothesbrush and a pair of small hairbrushes. It seems to me, Badger, that this wallet suggests—mind, I only say ‘suggests’—a pretty complete answer to one of your questions.”

“I don’t see how,” said the inspector. “Tell u what it suggests to you.”

“It suggests to me,” replied Thorndyke, laying down the lens through which he had been inspecting the hair-brushes, “a middle-aged or elderly man with a shaven upper lip and a beard; a well-preserved, healthy man, neat, orderly, provident and careful as to his appearance; a man long habituated to travelling, and—though I don’t insist on this, but the appearances suggest that he had been living for some time in a particular households and that at the time when he lost the bag, he was changing his residence.”

“He was that,” cackled the inspector, “if the constable’s account of the way he went over that wall is to be trusted. But still, I don’t see how you have arrived at all those facts.”

“Not facts, Badger,” Thorndyke corrected. “I said suggestions. And those suggestions may be quite misleading. There may be some factor, such as change of ownership of the wallet, which we have not allowed for. But, taking the appearances at their face value, that is what they suggest. There is the wallet itself, for instance—strong, durable, but shabby with years of wear. And observe that it is a travelling-wallet and would be subjected to wear only during travel. Then further, as to the time factor, there are the hone and the razors. It takes a good many years to wear a Washita hone hollow or to wear away the blade of a Swedish razor until the maker’s mark is encroached on. The state of health, and to some extent the age, are suggested by the tooth brush and the dental-brush. He has lost some teeth, since he wears a plate, but not many; and he is free from pyorrhoea and alveolar absorption. You don’t wear a toothbrush down like this on half a dozen rickety survivors. But a man whose teeth will bear hard brushing is probably well-preserved and healthy.”

“You say that he shaves his upper lip but wears a beard,” said the inspector. “How do you arrive at that?”

“It is fairly obvious,” replied Thorndyke. “We see that he has razors and uses them, and we also see that he has a beard.”

“Do we?” exclaimed Badger. “How do we?”

Thorndyke delicately picked a hair from one of the hairbrushes and held it up. “That is not a scalp hair,” said he. “I should say that it came from the side of the chin.”

Badger regarded the hair with evident disfavour. “Looks to me,” he remarked,” as if a small tooth-comb might have been useful.”

It does,” Thorndyke agreed, “but the appearance is deceptive. This is what is called a moniliform hair—like a string of beads. But the bead-like swellings are really parts of the hair. It is a diseased, or perhaps we should say an abnormal, condition.” He handed me the hair together with his lens, through which I examined it and easily recognised the characteristic swellings.

“Yes,” said I, “it is an early case of tricliorrexis nodosa.”

“Good Lord!” murmured the inspector. “Sounds like a Russian nobleman. Is it a common complaint?

“It is not a rare disease—if you can call it a disease,” I replied,” but it is a rare condition, taking the population as a whole.”

It is rather a remarkable coincidence that it should happen to occur in this particular case,” the superintendent observed.

“My dear Miller,” exclaimed Thorndyke, “surely your experience must have impressed on you the astonishing frequency of the unusual and the utter failure of the mathematical laws of probability in practice. Believe me, Miller, the bread-and-butterfly was right. It is the exceptional that always happens.”

Having discharged this paradox, he once more dived into the bag, and this time handed out a singular and rather unsavoury-looking parcel, the outer investment of which was formed by what looked like an excessively dirty towel, but which, as Thorndyke delicately unrolled it, was seen to be only half a towel which was supplemented by a still dirtier and excessively ragged coloured handkerchief. This, too, being opened out, disclosed an extremely soiled and rather frayed collar (which, like the other articles, bore no name or mark), and a mass of grass, evidently used as packing material.

The inspector picked up the collar and quoted reflectively, “He is a man, neat, orderly and careful as to his appearance,” after which he dropped the collar and ostentatiously wiped his fingers.

Thorndyke smiled grimly but refrained from repartee as he carefully separated the grass from the contained objects, which turned out to be a small telescopic jemmy, a jointed auger, a screwdriver and a bunch of skeleton keys.

“One understands his unwillingness to encounter the constable with these rather significant objects in his possession,” Thorndyke remarked. “They would have been difficult to explain away.” He took up the heap of grass between his hands and gently compressed it to test its freshness. As he did so a tiny, cigar-shaped object dropped on the paper.

“What is that?” asked the superintendent. “It looks like a chrysalis.”

It isn’t,” said Thorndyke. “It is a shell, a species of Clausilia, I think.” He picked up the little shell and closely examined its mouth through his lens. “Yes,” he continued, “it is a Clausilia. Do you study our British mollusca, Badger?”

“No, I don’t,” the inspector replied with emphasis.

“Pity,” murmured Thorndyke. “If you did, you would be interested to learn that the name of this little shell is Clausilia biplicata.”

“I don’t care what its beastly name is,” said Badger. “I want to know whose bag this is; what the owner is like; and where he came from and where he has gone to. Can you tell us that?”

Thorndyke regarded the inspector with wooden gravity. “It is all very obvious,” said he, “very obvious. But still, I think I should like to fill in a few details before making a definite statement. Yes, I think I will reserve my judgment until I have considered the matter a little further.”

The inspector received this statement with a dubious grin. He was in somewhat of a dilemma. My colleague was addicted to a certain dry facetiousness, and was probably pulling the inspector’s leg. But, on the other hand, I knew, and so did both the detectives, that it was perfectly conceivable that he had actually solved Badger’s problem, impossible as it seemed, and was holding back his knowledge until he had seen whither it led.

“Shall we take a glance at the stick?” said he, picking it up as he spoke and running his eye over its not very distinctive features. It was a common ash stick, with a crooked handle polished and darkened by prolonged contact with an apparently ungloved hand, and it was smeared for about three inches from the tip with a yellowish mud. The iron shoe of the ferrule was completely worn away and the deficiency had been made good by driving a steel boot-stud into the exposed end.

“A thrifty gentleman, this,” Thorndyke remarked, pointing to the stud as he measured the diameter of the ferrule with his pocket calliper-gauge. “Twenty-three thirty-seconds is the diameter,” he added, looking gravely at the inspector. “You had better make a note of that, Badger.”

The inspector smiled sourly as Thorndyke laid down the stick, and once more picking up the little green canvas case that contained his research outfit, prepared to depart.

“You will hear from us, Miller,” he said, “if we pick up anything that will be useful to you. And now, Jervis, we must really take ourselves off.”

As the tinkling hansom bore us down Whitehall towards Waterloo, I remarked, “Badger half suspects you of having withheld from him some valuable information in respect of that bag.”

“He does,” Thorndyke agreed with a mischievous smile; “and he doesn’t in the least suspect me of having given him a most illuminating hint.”

“But did you?” I asked, rapidly reviewing the conversation and deciding that the facts elicited from the dressing-wallet could hardly be described as hints.

“My learned friend,” he replied, “is pleased to counterfeit obtuseness. It won’t do, Jervis. I’ve known you too long.”

I grinned with vexation. Evidently I had missed the point of a subtle demonstration, and I knew that it was useless to ask further questions; and for the remainder of our journey, in the cab I struggled vainly to recover the “illuminating hint” that the detectives—and I—had failed to note. Indeed, so preoccupied was I with this problem that I rather overlooked the fact that the jettisoned bag was really no concern of ours, and that we were actually engaged in the investigation of a crime of which, at present, I knew practically nothing. It was not until we had secured an empty compartment and the train had begun to move that this suddenly dawned on me; whereupon I dismissed the bag problem and applied to Thorndyke for details of the “Brentford Train Mystery.”

To call it a mystery,” said he, “is a misuse of words. It appears to be a simple train robbery. The identity of the robber is unknown, but there is nothing very mysterious in that; and the crime otherwise is quite commonplace. The circumstances are these:

“Some time ago, Mr. Lionel Montague, of the firm, Lyons, Montague & Salaman, art dealers, bought from a Russian nobleman a very valuable diamond necklace and pendant. The peculiarity of this necklace was that the stones were all of a pale blue colour and pretty accurately matched, so that in addition to the aggregate value of the stones—which were all of large size and some very large—was the value of the piece as a whole due to this uniformity of colour. Mr. Montague gave £70,000 for it, and considered that he had made an excellent bargain. I should mention that Montague was the chief buyer for the firm, and that he spent most of his time travelling about the Continent in search of works of art and other objects suitable for the purposes of his firm, and that, naturally, he was an excellent judge of such things. Now, it seems that he was not satisfied with the settings of this necklace, and as soon as he had purchased it he handed it over to Messrs. Binks, of Old Bond Street, to have the settings replaced by others of better design. Yesterday morning he was notified by Binks that the resetting was completed, and in the afternoon he called to inspect the work and take the necklace away if it was satisfactory. The interview between Binks and Montague took place in a room behind the shop, but it appears that Montague came out into the shop to get a better light for his inspection and Mr. Binks states that as his customer stood facing the door, examining the new settings, he, Binks, noticed a man standing by the doorway furtively watching Mr. Montague.”

“There is nothing very remarkable in that,” said I. “If a man stands at a shop door with a necklace of blue diamonds in his hand, he is rather likely to attract attention.”

“Yes,” Thorndyke agreed. “But the significance of an antecedent is apt to be more appreciated after the consequences have developed. Binks is now very emphatic about the furtive watcher. However, to continue: Mr. Montague, being satisfied with the new settings, replaced the necklace in its case, put the latter into his bag—which he had brought with him from the inner room—and a minute or so later left the shop. That was about 5 P.M.; and he seems to have gone direct to the flat of his partner, Mr. Salaman, with whom he had been staying for a fortnight, at Queen’s Gate. There he remained until about half-past eight, when he came out accompanied by Mr. Salaman. The latter carried a small suitcase, while Montague carried a handbag in which was the necklace. It is not known whether it contained anything else.

“From Queen’s Gate the two men proceeded to Waterloo, walking part of the way and covering the remainder by omnibus.”

“By omnibus!” I exclaimed, “with seventy thousand pounds of diamonds about them!”

“Yes, it sounds odd. But people who habitually handle portable property of great value seem to resemble those who habitually handle explosives. They gradually become unconscious of the risks. At any rate, that is how they went, and they arrived safely at Waterloo in time to catch the 9.15 train for Isleworth. Mr. Salaman saw his partner established in an empty first-class compartment and stayed with him, chatting, until the train started.

“Mr. Montague’s destination was Isleworth, in which rather unlikely neighbourhood Mr. Jacob Lowenstein, late of Chicago, and now of Berkeley Square, has a sort of river-side villa with a motor boat-house attached. Lowenstein had secured the option of purchasing the blue diamond necklace, and Montague was taking it down to exhibit it and carry out the deal. He was proposing to stay a few days with Lowenstein, and then he was proceeding to Brussels on one of his periodic tours. But he never reached Isleworth. When the train stopped at Brentford, a porter noticed a suitcase on the luggage-rack of an apparently empty first-class compartment. He immediately entered to take possession of it, and was in the act of reaching up to the rack when his foot came in contact with something soft under the seat. Considerably startled, he stooped and peered under, when, to his horror, he perceived the body of a man, quite motionless and apparently dead. Instantly he darted out and rushed up the platform in a state of wild panic until he, fortunately, ran against the station master, with whom and another porter he returned to the compartment. When they drew the body out from under the seat it was found to be still breathing, and they proceeded at once to apply such restoratives as cold water and fresh air, pending the arrival of the police and the doctor, who had been sent for.

“In a few minutes the police arrived accompanied by the police surgeon, and the latter, after a brief examination, decided that the unconscious man was suffering from the effects of a large dose of chloroform, violently and unskilfully administered, and ordered him to be carefully removed to a local nursing home. Mean while, the police had been able, by inspecting the contents of his pockets, to identify him as Mr. Lionel Montague.”

“The diamonds had vanished, of course?” said I.

“Yes. The handbag was not in the compartment, and later an empty handbag was picked up on the permanent way between Barnes and Chiswick, which seems to indicate the locality where the robbery took place.”

“And what is our present objective?”

“We are going, on instructions from Mr. Salaman, to the nursing home to see what information we can pick up. If Montague has recovered sufficiently to give an account of the robbery, the police will have a description of the robber, and there may not be much for us to do. But you will have noticed that they do not seem to have any information at Scotland Yard at present, beyond what I have given you. So there is a chance yet that we may earn our fees.”

Thorndyke’s narrative of this somewhat commonplace crime, with the discussion which followed it, occupied us until the train stopped at Brentford Station. A few minutes later we halted in one of the quiet by-streets of this old-world town, at a soberly painted door on which was a brass plate inscribed “St. Agnes Nursing Home.” Our arrival had apparently been observed, for the door was opened by a middle-aged lady in a nurse’s uniform.

“Dr. Thorndyke?” she inquired; and as my colleague bowed assent she continued: “Mr. Salaman told me you would probably call. I am afraid I haven’t very good news for you. The patient is still quite unconscious.”

“That is rather remarkable,” said Thorndyke.

“It is. Dr. Kingston, who is in charge of the case, is somewhat puzzled by this prolonged stupor. He is inclined to suspect a narcotic—possibly a large dose of morphine—in addition to the effects of the chloroform and the shock.”

“He is probably right,” said I; “and the marvel is that the man is alive at all after such outrageous treatment.”

“Yes,” Thorndyke agreed. “He must be pretty tough. Shall we be able to see him?”

“Oh, yes,” the matron replied. “I am instructed to give you every assistance. Dr. Kingston would like to have your opinion on the case.”

With this she conducted us to a pleasant room on the first floor, where, in a bed placed opposite a large window—left uncurtained—with the strong light falling full on his face, a man lay with closed eyes, breathing quietly and showing no sign of consciousness when we somewhat noisily entered the room. For some time Thorndyke stood by the bedside, looking down at the unconscious man, listening to the breathing and noting its frequency by his watch. Then he felt the pulse, and raising both eyelids, compared the two pupils.

“His condition doesn’t appear alarming,” was his conclusion. “The breathing is rather shallow, but it is quite regular, and the pulse is not bad though slow. The contracted pupils strongly suggest opium, or more probably morphine. But that could easily be settled by a chemical test. Do you notice the state of the face, Jervis?”

“You mean the chloroform burns? Yes, the handkerchief or pad must have been saturated. But I was also noticing that he corresponds quite remarkably with the description you were giving Badger of the owner of the dressing-wallet. He is about the age you mentioned—roughly about fifty—and he has the same old-fashioned treatment of the beard, the shaven upper lip and the monkey-fringe under the chin. It is rather an odd coincidence.”

Thorndyke looked at me keenly. “The coincidence is closer than that, Jervis. Look at the beard itself.”

He handed me his lens, and, stooping down, I brought it to bear on the patient’s beard. And then I started back in astonishment; for by the bright light I could see plainly that a considerable proportion of the hairs were distinctly moniliform. This man’s beard, too, was affected by an early stage of trichorrexis nodosa!

“Well!” I exclaimed, “this is really an amazing coincidence. I wonder if it is anything more.”

“I wonder,” said Thorndyke. “Are those Mr. Montague’s things, Matron?”

“Yes,” she replied, turning to the side table on which the patient’s effects were neatly arranged. “Those are his clothes and the things which were taken from his pockets, and that is his bag. It was found on the line and sent on here a couple of hours ago. There is nothing in it.”

Thorndyke looked over the various objects—keys, card-case, pocket-book, etc.—that had been turned out of the patient’s pockets, and then picked up the bag, which he turned over curiously and then opened to inspect the interior. There was nothing distinctive about it. It was just a plain, imitation leather bag, fairly new, though rather the worse for its late vicissitudes, lined with coarse linen to which two large, wash-leather pockets had been roughly stitched. As he laid the bag down and picked up his own canvas case, he asked: “What time did Mr. Salaman come to see the patient?”

“He came here about ten o’clock this morning, and he was not able to stay more than half an hour as he had an appointment. But he said he would look in again this evening. You can’t stay to see him, I suppose?”

“I’m afraid not,” Thorndyke replied; “in fact we must be off now, for both Dr. Jervis and I have some other matters to attend to.”

“Are you going straight back to the chambers, Jervis?” Thorndyke asked, as we walked down the main street towards the station.

“Yes,” I replied in some surprise. “Aren’t you?”

“No. I have a little expedition in view.”

“Oh, have you?” I exclaimed, and as I spoke it began to dawn on me that I had overestimated the importance of my other business.

“Yes,” said Thorndyke “the fact is that—ha! excuse me one moment, Jervis.” He had halted abruptly outside a fishing-tackle shop and now, after a brief glance in through the window, entered with an air of business. I immediately bolted in after him, and was just in time to hear him demand a fishing-rod of a light and inexpensive character. When this had been supplied he asked for a line and one or two hooks; and I was a little surprised—and the vendor was positively scandalised—at his indifference to the quality or character of these appliances. I believe he would have accepted cod-line and a shark-hook if they had been offered.

“And now I want a float,” said he.

The shopkeeper produced a tray containing a varied assortment of floats over which Thorndyke ran a critical eye, and finally reduced the shopman to stupefaction by selecting a gigantic, pot-bellied scarlet-and-green atrocity that looked like a juvenile telegraph buoy.

I could not let this outrage pass without comment. “You must excuse me, Thorndyke,” I said, “if I venture to point out that the Greenland whale no longer frequents the upper reaches of the Thames.”

“You mind your own business,” he retorted, stolidly pocketing the telegraph buoy when he had paid for his purchases. “I like a float that you can see.”

Here the shopman, recovering somewhat from the shock of surprise, remarked deferentially that it was a long time since a really large pike had been caught in the neighbourhood; whereupon Thorndyke finished him off by replying: “Yes, I’ve no doubt. They don’t use the right sort of floats, you know. Now, when the pike see my float, they will just come tumbling over one another to get on the hook.” With this he tucked the rod under his arm and strolled out, leaving the shopman breathing hard and staring harder.

“But what on earth,” I asked, as we walked down the street (watched by the shopman who had come out on the pavement to see the last of us), “do you want with such an enormous float? Why, it will be visible a quarter of a mile away.”

“Exactly,” said Thorndyke. “And what more could a fisher of men require?”

This rejoinder gave me pause. Evidently Thorndyke had something in hand of more than common interest; and again it occurred to me that my own business engagements were of no special urgency. I was about to mention this fact when Thorndyke again halted—at an oilshop this time.

“I think I will step in here and get a little burnt umber,” said he.

I followed him into the shop, and while the powder-colour was being weighed and made up into a little packet I reflected profoundly. Fishing-tackle and burnt umber had no obvious associations. I began to be mystified and correspondingly inquisitive.

“What do you want the burnt umber for?” I asked as soon as we were outside.

“To mix with plaster,” he replied readily.

“But why do you want to colour the plaster? And what are you going to do with it?”

“Now, Jervis,” he admonished with mock severity, “you are not doing yourself justice. An investigator of your experience shouldn’t ask for explanations of the obvious.”

“And why,” I continued, “did you want to know if I was going straight back to the chambers?

“Because I may want some assistance later. Probably Polton will be able to do all that I want, but I wished to know that you would both be within reach of a telegram.”

“But,” I exclaimed, “what nonsense it is to talk of sending a telegram to me when I’m here!”

“But I may not want any assistance, after all.”

“Well,” I said doggedly, “you are going to have it whether you want it or not. You’ve got something on and I’m going to be in it.”

“I like your enthusiasm, Jervis,” he chuckled; “but it is quite possible that I shall merely find a mare’s nest.”

“Very well,” said I. “Then I’ll help you to find it. I’ve had plenty of experience in that line, to say nothing of my natural gifts. So lead on.”

He led on, with a resigned smile, to the station, where we were fortunate enough to find a train just ready to start. But our journey was not a long one, for at Chiswick Thorndyke got out of the train, and on leaving the station struck out eastward with a very evident air of business. As we entered the outskirts of Hammersmith he turned into a by-street which presently brought us out into Bridge Road. Here he turned sharply to the right and, at the same brisk pace, crossed Hammersmith Bridge and made his way to the towing path. As he now slowed down perceptibly, I ventured to inquire whether this was the spot on which he proposed to exhibit his super-float.

“This, I think, will be our fishing-ground,” he replied; “but we will look over it carefully and select a suitable pitch.”

He continued to advance at an easy pace, and I noticed that, according to his constant habit, he was studying the peculiarities of the various feet that had trodden the path within the last day or two, keeping, for this purpose on the right-hand side, where the shade of a few pollard willows overhanging an indistinct dry ditch had kept the ground soft. We had walked on for nearly half a mile when he halted and looked round.

“I think we had better turn back a little way,” said he. “We seem to have overshot our mark.”

I made no comment on this rather mysterious observation, and we retraced our steps for a couple of hundred yards, Thorndyke still walking on the side farthest from the river and still keeping his eyes fixed on the ground. Presently he again halted, and looking up and down the path, of which we were at the moment the only occupants, placed the canvas case on the ground and unfastened its clasps.

“This, I think, will be our pitch,” said he.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I am going to make one or two casts. And mean while you had better get the fishing-rod fixed together so as to divert the attention of any passers-by.”

I proceeded to make ready the fishing-tackle, but at the same time kept a close watch on my colleague’s proceedings. And very curious proceedings they were. First he dipped up a little water from the river in the rubber mixing bowl with which he mixed a bowlful of plaster, and into this he stirred a few pinches of burnt umber, whereby its dazzling white was changed to a muddy buff. Then, having looked up and down the path, he stooped and carefully poured the plaster into a couple of impressions of a walking-stick that were visible at the edge of the path and finished up by filling a deep impression of the same stick, at the margin of the ditch, where it had apparently been stuck in the soft, clayey ground.

As I watched this operation, a sudden suspicion flashed into my mind. Dropping the fishing-rod, I walked quickly along the path until I was able to pick up another impression of the stick. A very brief examination of it confirmed my suspicion. At the centre of the little shallow pit was a semicircular impression—clearly that of a half-worn boot-stud.

“Why!” I exclaimed, “this is the stick that we saw at Scotland Yard!”

“I should expect it to be and I believe it is,” said Thorndyke. “But we shall be better able to judge from the casts. Pick up your rod. There are two men coming down the path.”

He closed his “research-case” and drawing the fishing-line from his pocket, began meditatively to unwind it.

“I could wish,” said I, “that our appearance was more in character with the part of the rustic angler; and for the Lord’s sake keep float out of sight, or we shall collect a crowd.”

Thorndyke laughed softly. “The float,” said he, “was intended for Polton. He would have loved it. And the crowd would have been rather an advantage—as you will appreciate when you come to use it.”

The two men—builder’s labourers, apparently—now passed us with a glance of faint interest at the fishing-tackle; and as they strolled by I appreciated the value of the burnt umber. If the casts had been made of the snow-white plaster they would have stared conspicuously from the ground and these men would almost certainly have stopped to examine them and see what we were doing. But the tinted plaster was practically invisible.

“You are a wonderful man, Thorndyke,” I said, as I announced my discovery. “You foresee everything.”

He bowed his acknowledgments, and having tenderly felt one of the casts and ascertained that the plaster had set hard, he lifted it with infinite care, exhibiting a perfect facsimile of the end of the stick, on which the worn boot-stud was plainly visible, even to the remains of the pattern. Any doubt that might have remained as to the identity of the stick was removed when Thorndyke produced his calliper-gauge.

“Twenty-three thirty-seconds was the diameter, I think,” said he as he opened the jaws of the gauge and consulted his notes. He placed the cast between the jaws, and as they were gently slid into contact, the index marked twenty-three thirty-seconds.

“Good,” said Thorndyke, picking up the other two casts and establishing their identity with the one which we had examined. “This completes the first act.” Dropping one cast into his case and throwing the other two into the river, he continued: “Now we proceed to the next and hope for a like success. You notice that he stuck his stick into the ground. Why do you suppose he did that?”

“Presumably to leave his hands free.”

“Yes. And now let us sit down here and consider why he wanted his hands free. Just look around and tell me what you see.”

I gazed rather hopelessly at the very indistinctive surroundings and began a bald catalogue. “I see a shabby-looking pollard willow, an assortment of suburban vegetation, an obsolete tin saucepan—unserviceable—and a bald spot where somebody seems to have pulled up a small patch of turf.”

“Yes,” said Thorndyke. “You will also notice a certain amount of dry, powdered earth distributed rather evenly over the bottom of the ditch. And your patch of turf was cut round with a large knife before it was pulled up. Why do you suppose it was pulled up?”

I shook my head. “It’s of no use making mere guesses.”

“Perhaps not,” said he, “though the suggestion is fairly obvious when considered with the other appearances. Between the roots of the willow you notice a patch of grass that looks denser than one would expect from its position. I wonder—”

As he spoke, he reached forward with his stick and prised vigorously at the edge of the patch, with the result that the clump of grass lifted bodily; and when I picked it up and tried it on the bald spot, the nicety with which it fitted left no doubt as to its origin.

“Ha!” I exclaimed, looking at the obviously disturbed earth between the roots of the willow, which the little patch of turf had covered; “the plot thickens. Something seems to have been either buried or dug up there; more probably buried.”

“I hope and believe that my learned friend is correct,” said Thorndyke, opening his case to abstract a large, powerful spatula.

“What do you expect to find there?” I asked.

“I have a faint hope of finding something wrapped in the half of a very dirty towel,” was the reply.

“Then you had better find it quickly,” said I, “for there is a man coming along the path from the Putney direction.”

He looked round at the distant figure, and driving the spatula into the loose earth stirred it up vigorously.

“I can feel something,” he said, digging away with powerful thrusts and scooping the earth out with his hands. Once more he looked round at the approaching stranger—who seemed now to have quickened his pace but was still four or five hundred yards distant. Then, thrusting his hands into the hole, he gave a smart pull. Slowly there came forth a package, about ten inches by six, enveloped in a portion of a peculiarly filthy towel and loosely secured with string. Thorndyke rapidly cast off the string and opened out the towel, disclosing a handsome morocco case with an engraved gold plate.

I pounced on the case and, pressing the catch, raised the lid; and though I had expected no less, it was with something like a shock of surprise that I looked on the glittering row and the dazzling cluster of steely-blue diamonds.

As I closed the casket and deposited it in the green canvas case, Thorndyke, after a single glance at the treasure and another along the path, crammed the towel into the hole and began to sweep the loose earth in on top of it. The approaching stranger was for the moment hidden from us by a bend of the path and a near clump of bushes, and Thorndyke was evidently working to hide all traces before he should appear. Having filled the hole, he carefully replaced the sod of turf and then, moving over to the little bare patch from whence the turf had been removed, he began swiftly to dig it up.

“There,” said he, flinging on the path a worm which he had just disinterred, “that will explain our activities. You had better continue the excavation with your pocket knife, and then proceed to the capture of the leviathans. I must run up to the police station and you must keep possession of this pitch. Don’t move away from here on any account until I come back or send somebody to relieve you. I will hand you over the float; you’ll want that.” With a malicious smile he dropped the gaudy monstrosity on the path, and having wiped the spatula and replaced it in the case, picked up the latter and moved away towards Putney.

At this moment the stranger reappeared, walking as if for a wager, and I began to peck up the earth with my pocket-knife.

As the man approached he slowed down by degrees until he came up at something like a saunter. He was followed at a little distance by Thorndyke, who had turned as if he had changed his mind, and now passed me with the remark that “Perhaps Hammersmith would be better.” The stranger cast a suspicious glance at him and then turned his attention to me.

“Lookin’ for worms?” he inquired, halting and surveying me inquisitively.

I replied by picking one up (with secret distaste) and holding it aloft, and he continued, looking wistfully at Thorndyke’s retreating figure: “Your pal seems to have had enough.”

“He hadn’t got a rod,” said I; “but he’ll be back presently.”

“Ah!” said he, looking steadily over my shoulder in the direction of the willow. “Well, you won’t do any good here. The place where they rises is a quarter of a mile farther down—just round the bend there. That’s a prime pitch. You just come along with me and I’ll show you.”

“I must stay here until my friend comes back,” said I. “But I’ll tell him what you say.”

With this I seated myself stolidly on the bank and, having flung the baited hook into the stream, sat and glared fixedly at the preposterous float. My acquaintance fidgeted about me uneasily, endeavouring from time to time to lure me away to the “prime pitch” round the bend. And so the time dragged on until three-quarters of an hour had passed.

Suddenly I observed two taxicabs crossing the bridge, followed by three cyclists. A minute or two later Thorndyke reappeared, accompanied by two other men, and then the cyclists came into view, approaching at a rapid pace.

“Seems to be a regular procession,” my friend remarked, viewing the new arrivals with evident uneasiness. As he spoke, one of the cyclists halted and dismounted to examine his tyre, while the other two approached and shot past us. Then they, too, halted and dismounted, and having deposited their machines in the ditch, they came back towards us. By this time I was able—with a good deal of surprise—to identify Thorndyke’s two companions as Inspector Badger and Superintendent Miller. Perhaps my acquaintance also recognised them, or possibly the proceedings of the third cyclist—who had also laid down his machine and was approaching on foot—disturbed him. At any rate he glanced quickly from the one group to the other and, selecting the smaller one, sprang suddenly between the two cyclists and sped away along the path like a hare.

In a moment there was a wild stampede. The three cyclists, remounting their machines, pedalled furiously after the fugitive, followed by Badger and Miller on foot. Then the fugitive, the cyclists, and finally the two officers disappeared round the bend of the path.

“How did you know that he was the man?” I asked, when my colleague and I were left alone.

“I didn’t, though I had pretty strong grounds for suspicion. But I merely brought the police to set a watch on the place and arrange an ambush. Their encircling movement was just an experimental bluff; they might have been chary of arresting the fellow if he hadn’t taken fright and bolted. We have been fortunate all round, for, by a lucky chance, Badger and Miller were at Chiswick making inquiries and I was able to telephone to them to meet me at the bridge.”

At this moment the procession reappeared, advancing briskly; and my late adviser marched at the centre securely handcuffed. As he was conducted past me he glared savagely and made some impolite references to a “blooming nark.”

“You can take him in one of the taxis,” said Miller, “and put your bicycles on top.” Then, as the procession moved on towards the bridge he turned to Thorndyke. “I suppose he’s the right man, doctor, but he hasn’t got any of the stuff on him.”

“Of course he hasn’t,” said Thorndyke.

“Well, do you know where it is?”

Thorndyke opened his case and taking out the casket, handed it to the superintendent. “I shall want a receipt for it,” said he.

Miller opened the casket, and at the sight of the glittering jewels both the detectives uttered an exclamation of amazement, and the superintendent demanded: “Where did you get this, sir?

“I dug it up at the foot of that willow.”

“But how did you know it was there?”

“I didn’t,” replied Thorndyke; “but I thought I might as well look, you know,” and he bestowed a smile of exasperating blandness on the astonished officer.

The two detectives gazed at Thorndyke, then they looked at one another and then they looked at me; and Badger observed, with profound conviction, that it was a “knock-out.”

“I believe the doctor keeps a tame clairvoyant,” he added.

“And may I take it, sir,” said Miller, “that you can establish a prima facie case against this man, so that we can get a remand until Mr. Montague is well enough to identify him?”

“You may,” Thorndyke replied. “Let me know when and where he is to be charged and I will attend and give evidence.”

On this Miller wrote out a receipt for the jewels and the two officers hurried off to their taxicab, leaving us, as Badger put it, “to our fishing.”

As soon as they were out of sight, Thorndyke opened his case and mixed another bowlful of plaster. “We want two more casts,” said he; “one of the right foot of the man who buried the jewels and one of the right foot of the prisoner. They are obviously identical, as you can see by the arrangement of the nails and the shape of the new patch on the sole. I shall put the casts in evidence and compare them with the prisoner’s right boot.”

I understood now why Thorndyke had walked away towards Putney and then returned in rear of the stranger. He had suspected the man and had wanted to get a look at his footprints. But there was a good deal in this case that I did not understand at all.

* * * *

“There,” said Thorndyke, as he deposited the casts, each with its pencilled identification, in his canvas case, “that is the end of the Blue Diamond Mystery.”

“I beg your pardon,” said I, “but it isn’t. I want a full explanation. It is evident that from the house at Brentford you made a bee line to that willow. You knew then pretty exactly where the necklace was hidden. For all I know, you may have had that knowledge when we left Scotland Yard.”

“As a matter of fact, I had,” he replied. “I went to Brentford principally to verify the ownership of the wallet and the bag.”

“But what was it that directed you with such certainty to the Hammersmith towing-path?”

It was then that he made the observation that I have quoted at the beginning of this narrative.

“In this case,” he continued, “a curious fact, well known to naturalists, acquired vital evidential importance. It associated a bag, found in one locality, with another apparently unrelated locality. It was the link that joined up the two ends of a broken chain. I offered that fact to Inspector Badger, who, lacking the knowledge wherewith to interpret it, rejected it with scorn.”

“I remember that you gave him the name of that little shell that dropped out of the handful of grass.”

“Exactly,” said Thorndyke. “That was the crucial fact. It told us where the handful of grass had been gathered.”

“I can’t imagine how,” said I. “Surely you find shells all over the country?”

“That is, in general, quite true,” he replied, “but Clausilia biplicata is one of the rare exceptions. There are four British species of these queer little univalves (which are so named from the little spring door with which the entrance of the shell is furnished): Clausilia laminata, rolphii, rugosa and biplicata. The first three species have what we may call a normal distribution, whereas the distribution of biplicata is abnormal. This seems to be a dying species. It is in process of becoming extinct in this island. But when a species of animal or plant becomes extinct, it does not fade away evenly over the whole of its habitat, but it disappears in patches, which gradually extend, leaving, as it were, islands of survival. This is what has happened to Clausilia biplicata. It has disappeared from this country with the exception of two localities; one of these is in Wiltshire, and the other is the right bank of the Thames at Hammersmith. And this latter locality is extraordinarily restricted. Walk down a few hundred yards towards Putney, and you have walked out of its domain; walk up a few hundred yards towards the bridge, and again you have walked out of its territory. Yet within that little area it is fairly plentiful. If you know where to look—it lives on the bark or at the roots of willow trees—you can usually find one or two specimens. Thus, you see, the presence of that shell associated the handful of grass with a certain willow tree, and that willow was either in Wiltshire or by the Hammersmith towing-path. But there was nothing otherwise to connect it with Wiltshire, whereas there was something to connect it with Hammersmith. Let us for a moment dismiss the shell and consider the other suggestions offered by the bag and stick.

“The bag, as you saw, contained traces of two very different persons. One was a middle-class man, probably middle-aged or elderly, cleanly, careful as to his appearance and of orderly habits; the other, uncleanly, slovenly and apparently a professional criminal. The bag itself seemed to appertain to the former person. It was an expensive bag and showed signs of years of careful use. This, and the circumstances in which it was found, led us to suspect that it was a stolen bag. Now, we knew that the contents of a bag had been stolen. We knew that an empty bag had been picked up on the line between Barnes and Chiswick, and it was probable that the thief had left the train at the latter station. The empty bag had been assumed to be Mr. Montague’s, whereas the probabilities—as for instance, the fact of its having been thrown out on the line—suggested that it was the thief’s bag, and that Mr. Montague’s had been taken away with its contents.

“The point, then, that we had to settle when we left Scotland Yard was whether this apparently stolen bag had any connection with the train robbery. But as soon as we saw Mr. Montague it was evident that he corresponded exactly with the owner of the dressing-wallet; and when we saw the bag that had been found on the line—a shoddy, imitation leather bag—it was practically certain that it was not his, while the roughly-stitched leather pockets, exactly suited to the dimensions of house-breaking tools, strongly suggested that it was a burglar’s bag. But if this were so, then Mr. Montague’s bag had been stolen, and the robber’s effects stuffed into it.

“With this working hypothesis we were now able to take up the case from the other end. The Scotland Yard bag was Montague’s bag. It had been taken from Chiswick to the Hammersmith towpath, where—judging from the clay smears on the bottom—it had been laid on the ground, presumably close to a willow tree. The use of the grass as packing suggested that something had been removed from the bag at this place—something that had wedged the tools together and prevented them from rattling; and there appeared to be half a towel missing. Clearly, the towpath was our next field of exploration.

“But, small as this area was geographically, it would have taken a long time to examine in detail. Here, however, the stick gave us invaluable aid. It had a perfectly distinctive tip, and it showed traces of having been stuck about three inches into earth similar to that on the bag. What we had thus to look for was a hole in the ground about three inches deep, and having at the bottom the impression of a half-worn boot-stud. This hole would probably be close to a willow.

“The search turned out even easier than I had hoped. Directly we reached the towpath I picked up the track of the stick, and not one track only, but a double track, showing that our friend had returned to the bridge. All that remained was to follow the track until it came to an end and there we were pretty certain to find the hole in the ground, as, in fact, we did.”

“And why,” I asked, “do you suppose he buried the stuff?”

“Probably as a precaution, in case he had been seen and described. This morning’s papers will have told him that he had not been. Probably, also, he wanted to make arrangements with a fence and didn’t want to have the booty about him.”

There is little more to tell. When the case was heard on the following morning, Thorndyke’s uncannily precise and detailed description of the course of events, coupled with the production of the stolen property, so unnerved the prisoner that he pleaded guilty forthwith.

As to Mr. Montague, he recovered completely in a few days, and a handsome pair of Georgian silver candlesticks may even to this day be seen on our mantelpiece testifying to his gratitude and appreciation of Thorndyke’s brilliant conduct of the case.

THE STOLEN INGOTS (1923)

“In medico-legal practice,” Thorndyke remarked, “one must be constantly on one’s guard against the effects of suggestion, whether intentional or unconscious. When the facts of a case are set forth by an informant, they are nearly always presented, consciously or unconsciously, in terms of inference. Certain facts, which appear to the narrator to be the leading facts, are given with emphasis and in detail, while other facts, which appear to be subordinate or trivial, are partially suppressed. But this assessment of evidential value must never be accepted. The whole case must be considered and each fact weighed separately, and then it will commonly happen that the leading fact turns out to be the one that had been passed over as negligible.”

The remark was made apropos of a case, the facts of which had just been stated to us by Mr. Halethorpe, of the Sphinx Assurance Company. I did not quite perceive its bearing at the time, but looking back when the case was concluded, I realised that I had fallen into the very error against which Thorndyke’s warning should have guarded me.

“I trust,” said Mr. Halethorpe, “that I have not come at an inconvenient time. You are so tolerant of unusual hours—”

“My practice,” interrupted Thorndyke, “is my recreation, and I welcome you as one who comes to furnish entertainment. Draw your chair up to the fire, light a cigar and tell us your story.”

Mr. Halethorpe laughed, but adopted the procedure suggested, and having settled his toes upon the kerb and selected a cigar from the box, he opened the subject of his call.

“I don’t quite know what you can do for us,” he began, “as it is hardly your business to trace lost property, but I thought I would come and let you know about our difficulty. The fact is that our company looks like dropping some four thousand pounds, which the directors won’t like. What has happened is this:

“About two months ago the London House of the Akropong Gold Fields Company applied to us to insure a parcel of gold bars that were to be consigned to Minton and Borwell, the big manufacturing jewellers. The bars were to be shipped at Accra and landed at Bellhaven, which is the nearest port to Minton and Borwell’s works. Well, we agreed to underwrite the risk—we have done business with the Akropong people before—and the matter was settled. The bars were put on board the Labadi at Accra, and in due course were landed at Belhaven, where they were delivered to Minton’s agents. So far, so good. Then came the catastrophe. The case of bars was put on the train at Belhaven, consigned to Anchester, where Minton’s have their factory. But the line doesn’t go to Anchester direct. The junction is at Garbridge, a small country station close to the river Crouch, and here the case was put out and locked up in the station-master’s office to wait for the Anchester train. It seems that the station-master was called away and detained longer than he had expected, and when the train was signalled he hurried back in a mighty twitter. However, the case was there all right, and he personally superintended its removal to the guard’s van and put it in the guard’s charge. All went well for the rest of the journey. A member of the firm was waiting at Anchester station with a closed van. The case was put into it and taken direct to the factory, where it was opened in the private office—and found to be full of lead pipe.”

“I presume,” said Thorndyke, “that it was not the original case.”

“No,” replied Halethorpe, “but it was a very fair imitation. The label and the marks were correct, but the seals were just plain wax. Evidently the exchange had been made in the station office, and it transpires that although the door was securely locked there was an unfastened window which opened on to the garden, and there were plain marks of feet on the flower-bed outside.”

“What time did this happen?” asked Thorndyke.

“The Anchester train came in at a quarter past seven, by which time, of course, it was quite dark.”

“And when did it happen?”

“The day before yesterday. We heard of it yesterday morning.”

“Are you contesting the claim?”

“We don’t want to. Of course, we could plead negligence, but in that case I think we should make a claim on the railway company. But, naturally, we should much rather recover the property. After all, it can’t be so very far away.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Thorndyke. “This was no impromptu theft. The dummy case was prepared in advance, and evidently by somebody who knew what the real case was like, and how and when it was to be despatched from Belhaven. We must assume that the disposal of the stolen case has been provided for with similar completeness. How far is Garbridge from the river?”

Less than half a mile across the marshes. The detective-inspector—Badger, I think you know him—asked the same question.”

“Naturally,” said Thorndyke. “A heavy object like this case is much more easily and inconspicuously conveyed by water than on land. And then, see what facilities for concealment a navigable river offers. The case could be easily stowed away on a small craft, or even in a boat; or the bars could be taken out and stowed amongst the ballast, or even, at a pinch, dropped over board at a marked spot and left until the hue and cry was over.”

“You are not very encouraging,” Halethorpe remarked gloomily. “I take it that you don’t much expect that we shall recover those bars.”

“We needn’t despair,” was the reply, “but I want you to understand the difficulties. The thieves have got away with the booty, and that booty is an imperishable material which retains its value even if broken up into unrecognisable fragments. Melted down into small ingots, it would be impossible to identify.”

“Well,” said Halethorpe, “the police have the matter in hand—Inspector Badger, of the C.I.D., is in charge of the case—but our directors would be more satisfied if you would look into it. Of course we would give you any help we could. What do you say?”

“I am willing to look into the case,” said Thorndyke, “though I don’t hold out much hope. Could you give me a note to the shipping company and another to the consignees, Minton and Borwell?”

“Of course I will. I’ll write them now. I have some of our stationery in my attaché case. But, if you will pardon my saying so, you seem to be starting your inquiry just where there is nothing to be learned. The case was stolen after it left the ship and before it reached the consignees—although their agent had received it from the ship.”

“The point is,” said Thorndyke, “that this was a preconcerted robbery, and that the thieves possessed special information. That information must have come either from the ship or from the factory. So, while we must try to pick up the track of the case itself, we must seek the beginning of the clue at the two ends—the ship and the factory one of which it must have started.”

“Yes, that’s true,” said Halethorpe. “Well, I’ll write those two notes and then I must run away; and we’ll hope for the best.”

He wrote the two letters asking for facilities from the respective parties, and then took his departure in a somewhat chastened frame of mind.

“Quite an interesting little problem,” Thorndyke remarked, as Halethorpe footsteps died away on the stairs, “but not much in our line. It is really a police case—a case for patient and intelligent inquiry. And that is what we shall have to do—make some careful inquiries on the spot.”

“Where do you propose to begin?” I asked.

“At the beginning,” he replied. “Belhaven. I propose that we go down there tomorrow morning and pick up the thread at that end.”

“What thread?” I demanded. “We know that the package started from there. What else do you expect to learn?”

“There are several curious possibilities in this case, as you must have noticed,” he replied “The question is, whether any of them are probabilities. That is what I want to settle before we begin a detailed investigation.”

“For my part,” said I,” I should have supposed that the investigation would start from the scene of the robbery. But I presume that you have seen some possibilities that I have overlooked.”

Which eventually turned out to be the case.

* * * *

“I think,” said Thorndyke as we alighted at Belhaven on the following morning, “we had better go first to the Customs and make quite certain, if we can, that the bars were really in the case when it was delivered to the consignees’ agents. It won’t do to take it for granted that the substitution took place at Garbridge, although that is by far the most probable theory.” Accordingly we made our way to the harbour, where an obliging mariner directed us to our destination.

At the Custom House we were received by a genial officer, who, when Thorndyke had explained his connection with the robbery, entered into the matter with complete sympathy and a quick grasp of the situation.

“I see,” said he. “You want clear evidence that the bars were in the case when it left here. Well, I think we can satisfy you on that point. Bullion is not a customable commodity, but it has to be examined and reported. If it is consigned to the Bank of England or the Mint, the case is passed through with the seals unbroken, but as this was a private consignment, the seals will have been broken and the contents of the case examined. Jeffson, show these gentlemen the report on the case of gold bars from the Labadi.”

“Would it be possible,” Thorndyke asked, “for us to have a few words with the officer who opened the case? You know the legal partiality for personal testimony.”

“Of course it would. Jeffson, when these gentlemen have seen the report, find the officer who signed it and let them have a talk with him.”

We followed Mr. Jeffson into an adjoining office, where he produced the report and handed it to Thorndyke. The particulars that it gave were in effect those that would be furnished by the ship’s manifest and the bill of lading. The case was thirteen inches long by twelve wide and nine inches deep, outside measurement; and its gross weight was one hundred and seventeen pounds three ounces, and it contained four bars of the aggregate weight of one hundred and thirteen pounds two ounces.

“Thank you,” said Thorndyke, handing back the report. “And now can we see the officer—Mr. Byrne, I think—just to fill in the details?”

“If you will come with me,” replied Mr. Jeffson, “I’ll find him for you. I expect he is on the wharf.”

We followed our conductor out on to the quay among a litter of cases, crates and barrels, and eventually, amidst a battalion of Madeira wine casks, found the officer deep in problems of “content and ullage,” and other customs mysteries. As Jeffson introduced us, and then discreetly retired, Mr. Byrne confronted us, with a mahogany face and truculent blue eye.

“With reference to this bullion,” said Thorndyke,” I understand that you weighed the bars separately from the case?”

“Oi did,” replied Mr. Byrne.

“Did you weigh each bar separately?”

“Oi did not,” was the concise reply.

“What was the appearance of the bars—I mean as to shape and size? Were they of the usual type?

“Oi’ve not had a great deal to do with bullion,” said Mr. Byrne, “but Oi should say that they were just ordinary gold bars, about nine inches long by four wide and about two inches deep.”

“Was there much packing material in the case?”

“Very little. The bars were wrapped in thick canvas and jammed into the case. There wouldn’t be more than about half an inch clearance all round to allow for the canvas. The case was inch and half stuff strengthened with iron bands.”

“Did you seal the case after you had closed it up?”

“Oi did. ’Twas all shipshape when it was passed back to the mate. And Oi saw him hand it over to the consignees’ agent; so ’twas all in order when it left the wharf.”

“That was what I wanted to make sure of,” said Thorndyke; and, having pocketed his notebook and thanked the officer, he turned away among the wilderness of merchandise.

So much for the Customs,” said he. “I am glad we went there first. As you have no doubt observed, we have picked up some useful information.”

“We have ascertained,” I replied, “that the case was intact when it was handed over to the consignees’ agents, so that our investigations at Garbridge will start from a solid basis. And that, I take it, is all you wanted to know.”

“Not quite all,” he rejoined. “There are one or two little details that I should like to fill in. I think we will look in on the shipping agents and present Halethorpe’s note. We may as well learn all we can before we make our start from the scene of the robbery.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t see what more there is to learn here. But apparently you do. That seems to be the office, past those sheds.”

The manager of the shipping agent’s office looked us up and down as he sat at his littered desk with Halethorpe’s letter in his hand.

“You’ve come about that bullion that was stolen,” he said brusquely. “Well, it wasn’t stolen here. Hadn’t you better inquire at Garbridge, where it was?”

“Undoubtedly,” replied Thorndyke. “But I am making certain preliminary inquiries. Now, first, as to the bill of lading, who has that—the original, I mean?

“The captain has it at present, but I have a copy.”

“Could I see it?” Thorndyke asked.

The manager raised his eyebrows protestingly, but produced the document from a file and handed it to Thorndyke, watching him inquisitively as he copied the particulars of the package into his notebook.

“I suppose,” said Thorndyke as he returned the document, “you have a copy of the ship’s manifest?”

“Yes,” replied the manager, “but the entry in the manifest is merely a copy of the particulars given in the bill of lading.”

“I should like to see the manifest, if it is not troubling you too much.”

“But,” the other protested impatiently,” the manifest contains no information respecting this parcel of bullion excepting the one entry, which, as I have told you, has been copied from the bill of lading.”

“I realise that,” said Thorndyke; “but I should like to look over it, all the same.”

Our friend bounced into an inner office and presently returned with a voluminous document, which he slapped down on a side-table.

“There, sir,” he said. “That is the manifest. This is the entry relating to the bullion that you are inquiring about. The rest of the document is concerned with the cargo, in which I presume you are not interested.”

In this, however, he was mistaken; for Thorndyke, having verified the bullion entry, turned the leaves over and began systematically, though rapidly, to run his eye over the long list from the beginning, a proceeding that the manager viewed with frenzied impatience.

“If you are going to read it right through, sir,” the latter observed, “I shall ask you to excuse me. Art is long but life is short,” he added with a sour smile.

Nevertheless he hovered about uneasily, and when Thorndyke proceeded to copy some of the entries into his notebook, he craned over and read them without the least disguise, though not without comment.

“Good God, sir!” he exclaimed. “What possible bearing on this robbery can that parcel of scrivelloes have? And do you realise that they are still in the ship’s hold?”

“I inferred that they were, as they are consigned to London,” Thorndyke replied, drawing his finger down the “description” column and rapidly scanning the entries in it. The manager watched that finger, and as it stopped successively at a bag of gum copal, a case of quartz specimens, a case of six-inch brass screw-bolts, a bag of beni-seed and a package of kola nuts, he breathed hard and muttered like an angry parrot. But Thorndyke was quite unmoved. With calm deliberation he copied out each entry, conscientiously noting the marks, descriptions of packages and contents, gross and net weights, dimensions, names of consignors and consignees, ports of shipment and discharge, and, in fact, the entire particulars. It was certainly an amazing proceeding, and I could make no more of it than could our impatient friend.

At last Thorndyke closed and pocketed his notebook, and the manager heaved a slightly obtrusive sigh. “Is there nothing more, sir?” he asked. “You don’t want to examine the ship, for instance?”

The next moment, I think, he regretted his sarcasm, for Thorndyke inquired, with evident interest: “Is the ship still here?

“Yes,” was the unwilling admission. “She finishes unloading here at midday today and will probably haul into the London Docks tomorrow morning.”

“I don’t think I need go on board,” said Thorndyke, “but you might give me a card in case I find that I want to.”

The card was somewhat grudgingly produced, and when Thorndyke had thanked our entertainer for his help, we took our leave and made our way towards the station.

“Well,” I said, “you have collected a vast amount of curious information, but I am hanged if I can see that any of it has the slightest bearing on our inquiry.”

Thorndyke cast on me a look of deep reproach. “Jervis!” he exclaimed, “you astonish me; you do, indeed. Why, my dear fellow, it stares you in the face!”

“When you say ‘it,’” I said a little irritably, “you mean—?”

“I mean the leading fact from which we may deduce the modus operandi of this robbery. You shall look over my notes in the train and sort out the data that we have collected. I think you will find them extremely illuminating.”

“I doubt it,” said I. “But, meanwhile, aren’t we wasting a good deal of time? Halethorpe wants to get the gold back; he doesn’t want to know how the thieves contrived to steal it.”

“That is a very just remark,” answered Thorndyke. My learned friend displays his customary robust common sense. Nevertheless, I think that a clear understanding of the mechanism of this robbery will prove very helpful to us, though I agree with you that we have spent enough time on securing our preliminary data. The important thing now is to pick up a trail from Garbridge. But I see our train is signalled. We had better hurry.”

As the train rumbled into station, we looked out for an empty smoking compartment, and having been fortunate enough to secure one, we settled ourselves in opposite corners and lighted our pipes. Then Thorndyke handed me his notebook and as I studied, with wrinkled brows, the apparently disconnected entries, he sat and observed me thoughtfully and with the faintest suspicion of a smile. Again and again I read through those notes with ever-dwindling hopes of extracting the meaning that “stared me in the face.” Vainly did I endeavour to connect gum copal, scrivelloes or beni-seed with the methods of the unknown robbers. The entries in the notebook persisted obstinately in remaining totally disconnected and hopelessly irrelevant. At last I shut the book with a savage snap and handed it back to its owner.

“It’s no use, Thorndyke,” I said. “I can’t see the faintest glimmer of light.”

“Well,” said he,” it isn’t of much consequence. The practical part of our task is before us, and it may turn out a pretty difficult part. But we have got to recover those bars if it is humanly possible. And here we are at our jumping-off place. This is Garbridge Station—and I see an old acquaintance of ours on the platform.”

I looked out, as the train slowed down, and there, sure enough, was no less a person than Inspector Badger of the Criminal Investigation Department.

“We could have done very well without Badger,” I remarked.

“Yes,” Thorndyke agreed, “but we shall have to take him into partnership, I expect. After all, we are on his territory and on the same errand. How do you do, inspector?” he continued, as the officer, having observed our descent from the carriage, hurried forward with unwonted cordiality.

“I rather expected to see you here, sir,” said he. “We heard that Mr. Halethorpe had consulted you. But this isn’t the London train.”

“No,” said Thorndyke. “We’ve been to Belhaven, just to make sure that the bullion was in the case when it started.”

“I could have told you that two days ago,” said Badger. “We got on to the Customs people at once. That was all plain sailing; but the rest of it isn’t.”

“No clue as to how the case was taken away?”

“Oh, yes; that is pretty clear. It was hoisted out, and the dummy hoisted in, through the window of the Station-master’s office. And the same night, two men were seen carrying a heavy package, about the size of the bullion-case, towards the marshes. But there the clue ends. The stuff seems to have vanished into thin air. Of course our people are on the lookout for it in various likely directions, but I am staying here with a couple of plain-clothes men. I’ve a conviction that it is still somewhere in this neighbourhood, and I mean to stick here in the hope that I may spot somebody trying to move it.”

As the inspector was speaking we had been walking slowly from the station towards the village, which was on the opposite side of the river. On the bridge Thorndyke halted and looked down the river and over the wide expanse of marshy country.

“This is an ideal place for a bullion robbery,” he remarked. “A tidal river near to the sea and a network of creeks, in any one of which one could hide a boat or sink the booty below tide-marks. Have you heard of any strange craft having put in here?”

“Yes. There’s a little ramshackle bawley from Leigh—but her crew of two ragamuffins are not Leigh men. And they’ve made a mess of their visit—got their craft on the mud on the top of the spring tide. There here she’ll be till next spring tide. But I’ve been over her carefully and I’ll swear the stuff isn’t aboard her. I had all the ballast out and emptied the lazarette and the chain locker.”

“And what about the barge?”

“She’s a regular trader here. Her crew—the skipper and his son—are quite respectable men and they belong here. There they go in that boat; I expect they are off on this tide. But they seem to be making for the bawley.”

As he spoke the inspector produced a pair of glasses, through which he watched the movement of the barge’s jolly, and a couple of elderly fishermen, who were crossing the bridge, halted to look on. The barge’s boat ran alongside the stranded bawley, and one of the rowers hailed; whereupon two men tumbled up from the cabin and dropped into the boat, which immediately pushed off and headed for the barge.

“Them bawley blokes seems to be taking a passage along of old Bill Somers,” one of the fishermen remarked, levelling a small telescope at the barge as the boat drew alongside and the four men climbed on board. “Going to work their passage, too,” he added as the two passengers proceeded immediately to man the windlass while the crew let go the brails and hooked the main block to the traveller.

“Rum go,” commented Badger, glaring at the barge through his glasses; “but they haven’t taken anything aboard with them. I could see that.”

“You have overhauled the barge, I suppose?” said Thorndyke.

“Yes. Went right through her. Nothing there. She’s light. There was no place aboard her where you could hide a split-pea.”

“Did you get her anchor up?”

“No,” replied Badger. “I didn’t. I suppose I ought to have done so. However, they’re getting it up themselves now.” As he spoke, the rapid clink of a windlass-pawl was borne across the water, and through my prismatic glasses I could see the two passengers working for all they were worth at the cranks. Presently the clink of the pawl began to slow down somewhat and the two bargemen, having got the sails set, joined the toilers at the windlass, but even then there was no great increase of speed.

“Anchor seems to come up uncommon heavy,” one of the fishermen remarked.

“Aye,” the other agreed. “Got foul of an old mooring, maybe.”

“Look out for the anchor, Badger,” Thorndyke said in a low voice, gazing steadily through his binocular. “It is out of the ground. The cable is up and down and the barge is drifting off on the tide.”

Even as he spoke the ring and stock of the anchor rose slowly out of the water, and now I could see that a second chain was shackled loosely to the cable, down which it had slid until it was stopped by the ring of the anchor. Badger had evidently seen it too, for he ejaculated, “Hallo!” and added a few verbal flourishes which I need not repeat. A few more turns of the windlass brought the flukes of the anchor clear of the water, and dangling against them was an undeniable wooden case, securely slung with lashings of stout chain. Badger cursed volubly, and, turning to the fishermen, exclaimed in a rather offensively peremptory tone:

“I want a boat. Now. This instant.”

The elder piscator regarded him doggedly and replied “All right. I ain’t got no objection.”

“Where can I get a boat?” the inspector demanded, nearly purple with excitement and anxiety.

“Where do you think?” the mariner responded, evidently nettled by the inspector’s masterful tone. “Pastrycook’s? Or livery stables?”

“Look here,” said Badger. “I’m a police officer and I want to board that barge, and I am prepared to pay handsomely. Now where can I get a boat?”

“We’ll put you aboard of her,” replied the fisherman, “that is, if we can catch her. But I doubt it. She’s off, that’s what she is. And there’s something queer a-going on aboard of her,” he added in a somewhat different tone.

There was. I had been observing it. The case had been, with some difficulty, hoisted on board, and then suddenly there had broken out an altercation between the two bargees and their passengers, and this had now developed into what look like a free fight. It was difficult to see exactly what was happening, for the barge was drifting rapidly down the river, and her sails, blowing out first on one side and then on the other, rather obscured the view. Presently, however, the sails filled and a man appeared at the wheel; then the barge jibed round, and with a strong ebb tide and a fresh breeze, very soon began to grow small in the distance.

Meanwhile the fishermen had bustled off in search of a boat, and the inspector had raced to the bridge-head, where he stood gesticulating frantically and blowing his whistle, while Thorndyke continued placidly to watch the receding barge through his binocular.

“What are we going to do?” I asked, a little sur prised at my colleague’s inaction.

“What can we do?” he asked in reply. “Badger will follow the barge. He probably won’t overtake her, but he will prevent her from making a landing until they get out into the estuary, and then he may possibly get assistance. The chase is in his hands.”

“Are we going with him?”

“I am not. This looks like being an all-night expedition, and I must be at our chambers tomorrow morning. Besides, the chase is not our affair. But if you would like to join Badger there is no reason why you shouldn’t. I can look after the practice.”

Well,” I said, “I think I should rather like to be in at the death, if it won’t inconvenience you. But it is possible that they may get away with the booty.”

“Quite,” he agreed; “and then it would be useful to know exactly how and where it disappears. Yes, go with them, by all means, and keep a sharp lookout.”

At this moment Badger returned with the two plain clothes men whom his whistle had called from their posts, and simultaneously a boat was seen approaching the steps by the bridge, rowed by the two fishermen. The inspector looked at us inquiringly. “Are you coming to see the sport?” he asked.

“Doctor Jervis would like to come with you,” Thorndyke replied. “I have to get back to London But you will be a fair boat-load without me.”

This appeared to be also the view of the two fishermen, as they brought up at the steps and observed the four passengers; but they made no demur beyond inquiring if there were not any more; and when we had taken our places in the stern sheets, they pushed off and pulled through the bridge and away down stream. Gradually, the village receded and the houses and the bridge grew small and more distant, though they remained visible for a long time over the marshy levels; and still, as I looked back through my glasses, I could see Thorndyke on the bridge, watching the pursuit with his binocular to his eyes.

Meanwhile the fugitive barge, having got some two miles start, seemed to be drawing ahead. But it was only at intervals that we could see her, for the tide was falling fast and we were mostly hemmed in by the high, muddy banks. Only when we entered a straight reach of the river could we see her sails over the land; and every time that she came into view, she appeared perceptibly smaller.

When the river grew wider, the mast was stepped and a good-sized lug-sail hoisted, though one of the fishermen continued to ply his oar on the weather side, while the other took the tiller. This improved our pace appreciably; but still, whenever we caught a glimpse of the barge, it was evident that she was still gaining.

On one of these occasions the man at the tiller, standing up to get a better view, surveyed our quarry intently for nearly a minute and then addressed the inspector.

“She’s a-going to give us the go-by, mister,” he observed with conviction.

“Still gaining?” asked Badger.

“Aye. She’s a-going to slip across the tail of Foulness Sand into the deep channel. And that’s the last we shall see of her.”

“But can’t we get into the channel the same way?” demanded Badger.

“Well, d’ye see,” replied the fisherman, “’tis like this. Tide’s a-running out, but there’ll be enough for her. It’ll just carry her out through the Whitaker Channel and across the spit. Then it’ll turn, and up she’ll go, London way, on the flood. But we shall catch the flood-tide in the Whitaker Channel, and a rare old job we’ll have to get out; and when we do get out, that barge’ll be miles away.”

The inspector swore long and earnestly. He even alluded to himself as a “blithering idiot.” But that helped matters not at all. The fisherman’s dismal prophecy was fulfilled in every horrid detail. When we were approaching the Whitaker Channel the barge was just crossing the spit, and the last of the ebb-tide was trickling out. By the time we were fairly in the Channel the tide had turned and was already flowing in with a speed that increased every minute; while over the sand we could see the barge, already out in the open estuary, heading to the west on the flood-tide at a good six knots.

Poor Badger was frantic. With yearning eyes fixed on the dwindling barge, he cursed, entreated, encouraged and made extravagant offers. He even took an oar and pulled with such desperate energy that he caught a crab and turned a neat back somersault into the fisherman’s lap. The two mariners pulled until their oars bent like canes; but still the sandy banks crept by, inch by inch, and ever the turbid water seemed to pour up the channel more and yet more swiftly. It was a fearful struggle and seemed to last for hours; and when, at last, the boat crawled out across the spit and the exhausted rowers rested on their oars, the sun was just setting and the barge had disappeared into the west.

I was really sorry for Badger. His oversight in respect of the anchor was a very natural one or a landsman, and he had evidently taken infinite pains over the case and shown excellent judgment in keeping a close watch on the neighbourhood of Garbridge; and now, after all his care, it looked as if both the robbers and their booty had slipped through his fingers. It was desperately bad luck.

“Well,” said the elder fisherman, “they’ve give us a run for our money; but they’ve got clear away. What’s to be done now, mister?”

Badger had nothing to suggest excepting that we should pull or sail up the river in the hope of getting some assistance on the way. He was in the lowest depths of despair and dejection. But now, when Fortune seemed to have deserted us utterly, and failure appeared to be an accomplished fact, Providence intervened.

A small steam vessel that had been approaching from the direction of the East Swin suddenly altered her course and bore down as if to speak us. The fisherman who had last spoken looked at her attentively for a few moments and then slapped his thigh. “Saved by gum!” he exclaimed. “This’ll do your trick, mister. Here comes a Customs cruiser.”

Instantly the two fishermen bent to their oars to meet the oncoming craft, and in a few minutes we were alongside, Badger hailing like a bull of Bashan. A brief explanation to the officer in charge secured a highly sympathetic promise of help. We all scrambled up on deck; the boat was dropped astern at the scope of her painter; the engine-room bell jangled merrily, and the smart, yacht-like vessel began to forge ahead.

“Now then,” said the officer, as his craft gathered way, “give us a description of this barge. What is she like?

She’s a small stumpy,” the senior fisherman explained, “flying light; wants paint badly; steers with a wheel; green transom with Bluebell, Maldon, cut in and gilded. Seemed to be keeping along the north shore.”

With these particulars in his mind, the officer explored the western horizon with a pair of night-glasses, although it was still broad daylight. Presently he reported: “There’s a stumpy in a line with the Blacktail Spit buoy. Just take a look at her.” He handed his glasses to the fisherman, who, after a careful inspection of the stranger, gave it as his opinion that she was our quarry. “Probably makin’ for Southend or Leigh,” said he, and added: “I’ll bet she’s bound for Benfleet Creek. Nice quiet place, that, to land the stuff.”

Our recent painful experience was now reversed, for as our swift little vessel devoured the miles of water, the barge, which we were all watching eagerly, loomed up larger every minute. By the time we were abreast of the Mouse Lightship, she was but a few hundred yards ahead, and even through my glasses, the name Bluebell was clearly legible. Badger nearly wept with delight; the officer in charge smiled an anticipatory smile; the deck-hands girded up their loins for the coming capture and the plain-clothes men each furtively polished a pair of handcuffs.

At length the little cruiser came fairly abreast of the barge—not unobserved by the two men on her deck. Then she sheered in suddenly and swept alongside. One hand neatly hooked a shroud with a grappling iron and made fast while a couple of preventive officers, the plain men and the inspector jumped down simultaneously on to the barge’s deck. For a moment, the two bawley men were inclined to show fight; but the odds were too great. After a perfunctory scuffle they both submitted to be handcuffed and were at once hauled up on board the cruiser and lodged in the fore-peak under guard. Then the chief officer, the two fishermen and I jumped on board the barge and followed Badger down the companion hatch to the cabin.

It was a curious scene that was revealed in that little cupboard-like apartment by the light of Badger’s electric torch. On each of the two lockers was stretched man, securely lashed with lead-line and having drawn over his face a knitted stocking cap, while on the little triangular fixed table rested an iron-bound box which I instantly identified by my recollection of the description of the bullion-case in the ship’s manifest. It was but the work of a minute to liberate the skipper and his son and send them up, wrathful but substantially uninjured, to refresh on the cruiser; and then the ponderous treasure-chest was borne in triumph by two muscular deck-hands, up the narrow steps, to be hoisted to the Government vessel.

“Well, well,” said the inspector, mopping his face with his handkerchief, “all’s well that ends well, but I thought I had lost the men and the stuff that time. What are you going to do? I shall stay on board as this boat is going right up to the Custom House in London; but if you want to get home sooner, I dare say the chief officer will put you ashore at Southend.”

I decided to adopt this course, and I was accordingly landed at Southend Pier with a telegram from Badger to his head-quarters; and at Southend I was fortunate enough to catch an express train which brought me to Fenchurch Street while the night was still young.

When I reached our chambers, I found Thorndyke seated by the fire, serenely studying a brief. He stood up as I entered and, laying aside the brief, remarked: “You are back sooner than I expected. How sped the chase? Did you catch the barge?”

“Yes. We’ve got the men and we’ve got the bullion. But we very nearly lost both,” and here I gave him an account of the pursuit and the capture, to which he listened with the liveliest interest. “That Customs cruiser was a piece of sheer luck,” said he, when I had concluded. “I am delighted. This capture simplifies the case for us enormously.”

It seems to me to dispose of the case altogether,” said L “The property is recovered and the thieves are in custody. But I think most of the credit belongs to Badger.”

Thorndyke smiled enigmatically. “I should let him have it all, Jervis,” he said; and then, after a reflective pause, he continued: “We will go round to Scotland Yard in the morning to verify the capture. If the package agrees with the description in the bill of lading, the case, as you say, is disposed of.”

“It is hardly necessary,” said I. “The marks were all correct and the Customs seals were unbroken—but still, I know you won’t be satisfied until you have verified everything for yourself. And I suppose you are right.”

It was past eleven in the following forenoon when we invaded Superintendent Miller’s office at Scotland Yard. That genial officer looked up from his desk as we entered and laughed joyously. “I told you so, Badger,” he chuckled, turning to the inspector, who had also looked up and was regarding us with a foxy smile. “I knew the doctor wouldn’t be satisfied until he had seen it with his own eyes. I suppose that is what you have come for, sir?”

“Yes,” was the reply. “It is a mere formality, of course, but, if you don’t mind—”

“Not in the least,” replied Miller. “Come along, Badger, and show the doctor your prize.”

The two officers conducted us to a room, which the superintendent unlocked, and which contained a small table, a measuring standard, a weighing machine, a set of Snellen’s test-types, and the now historic case of bullion. The latter Thorndyke inspected closely, checking the marks and dimensions by his notes.

“I see you haven’t opened it,” he remarked.

“No,” replied Miller. “Why should we? The Customs seals are intact.”

“I thought you might like to know what was inside,” Thorndyke explained.

The two officers looked at him quickly and the inspector exclaimed: “But we do know. It was opened and checked at the Customs.”

“What do you suppose is inside?” Thorndyke asked.

“I don’t suppose,” Badger replied testily. “I know. There are four bars of gold inside.”

“Well,” said Thorndyke, “as the representative of the Insurance Company, I should like to see the contents of that case.”

The two officers stared at him in amazement, as also, I must admit, did I. The implied doubt seemed utterly contrary to reason.

“This is scepticism with a vengeance!” said Miller. “How on earth is it possible—but there, I suppose if you are not satisfied, we should be justified—”

He glanced at his subordinate, who snorted impatiently: “Oh, open it and let him see the bars. And then, I suppose, he will want us to make an assay of the metal.”

The superintendent retired with wrinkled brows and presently returned with a screwdriver, a hammer and a case-opener. Very deftly he broke the seals, extracted the screws and prised up the lid of the case, inside which were one or two folds of thick canvas. Lifting these with something of a flourish, he displayed the upper pair of dull, yellow bars.

“Are you satisfied now, sir?” demanded Badger. “Or do you want to see the other two?”

Thorndyke looked reflectively at the two bars, and the two officers looked inquiringly at him (but one might as profitably have watched the expression on the face of a ship’s figure). Then he took from his pocket a folding foot-rule and quickly measured the three dimensions of one of the bars.

“Is that weighing machine reliable?” he asked.

“It is correct to an ounce,” the superintendent replied, gazing at my colleague with a slightly uneasy expression. “Why?”

By way of reply Thorndyke lifted out the bar that he had measured and carrying it across to the machine, laid it on the platform and carefully adjusted the weights.

“Well?” the superintendent queried anxiously, as Thorndyke took the reading from the scale.

“Twenty-nine pounds, three ounces,” replied Thorndyke.

“Well?” repeated the superintendent. “What about it?”

Thorndyke looked at him impassively for a moment, and then, in the same quiet tone, answered: “Lead.”

“What!” the two officers shrieked in unison, darting across to the scale and glaring at the bar of metal. Then Badger recovered himself and expostulated, not without temper, “Nonsense, sir. Look at it. Can’t you see that it is gold?”

“I can see that it is gilded,” replied Thorndyke.

“But,” protested Miller, “the thing is impossible! What makes you think it is lead?”

“It is just a question of specific gravity,” was the reply. “This bar contains seventy-two cubic inches of metal and it weighs twenty pounds, three ounces. Therefore it is a bar of lead. But if you are still doubtful, it is quite easy to settle the matter. May I cut a small piece off the bar?”

The superintendent gasped and looked at his subordinate. “I suppose,” said he, “under the circumstances, eh, Badger? Yes. Very well, doctor.”

Thorndyke produced a strong pocket-knife and, having lifted the bar to the table, applied the knife to one corner and tapped it smartly with the hammer. The blade passed easily through the soft metal, and as the detached piece fell to the floor, the two officers and I craned forward eagerly. And then all possible doubts were set at rest. There was no mistaking the white, silvery lustre of the freshly-cut surface.

“Snakes!” exclaimed the superintendent. “This is a fair knock-out! Why, the blighters have got away with the stuff, after all! Unless,” he added, with a quizzical look at Thorndyke, “you know where it is, doctor. I expect you do.”

“I believe I do,” said Thorndyke, “and if you care to come down with me to the London Docks, I think I can hand it over to you.”

The superintendent’s face brightened appreciably. Not so Badger’s. That afflicted officer flung down the chip of metal that he had been examining, and turning to Thorndyke, demanded sourly: “Why didn’t you tell us this before, sir? You let me go off chivvying that damn barge, and you knew all the time that the stuff wasn’t on board.”

“My dear Badger,” Thorndyke expostulated, “don’t you see that these lead bars are essential to our case? They prove that the gold bars were never landed and that they are consequently still on the ship. Which empowers us to detain any gold that we may find on her.”

“There, now, Badger,” said the superintendent, “it’s no use for you to argue with the doctor. He’s like a giraffe. He can see all round him at once. Let us get on to the Docks.”

Having locked the room, we all sallied forth, and, taking a train at Charing Cross Station, made our way by Mark Lane and Fenchurch Street to Wapping, where, following Thorndyke, we entered the Docks and proceeded straight to a wharf near the Wapping entrance. Here Thorndyke exchanged a few words with a Customs official, who hurried away and presently returned, accompanied by an officer of higher rank. The latter, having saluted Thorndyke and cast a slightly amused glance at our little party, said: “They’ve landed that package that you spoke about. I’ve had it put in my office for the present. Will you come and have a look at it?”

We followed him to his office behind a long row of sheds, where, on a table, was a strong wooden case, somewhat larger than the “bullion”-case, while on the desk a large, many-leaved document lay open.

“This is your case, I think,” said the official; “but you had better check it by the manifest. Here is the entry: ‘One case containing seventeen and three-quarter dozen brass six-inch by three-eighths screw-bolts with nuts. Dimensions, sixteen inches by thirteen by nine. Gross weight a hundred and nineteen pounds; net weight a hundred and thirteen pounds.’ Consigned to ‘Jackson and Walker, 593 Great Alie Street, London, E.’ Is that the one?”

“That is the one,” Thorndyke replied.

“Then,” said our friend,” we’ll get it open and have a look at those brass screw-bolts.”

With a dexterity surprising in an official of such high degree, he had the screws out in a twinkling, and prising up the lid, displayed a fold of coarse canvas. As he lifted this the two police officers peered eagerly into the case; and suddenly the eager expression on Badger’s face changed to one of bitter disappointment.

“You’ve missed fire this time, sir,” he snapped. “This is just a case of brass bolts.”

“Gold bolts, inspector,” Thorndyke corrected, placidly. He picked out one and handed it to the astonished detective. “Did you ever feel a brass bolt of that weight?” he asked.

“Well, it certainly is devilish heavy,” the inspector admitted, weighing it in his hand and passing it on to Miller.

“Its weight, as stated on the manifest,” said Thorndyke, “works out at well over eight and a half ounces, but we may as well check it.” He produced from his pocket a little spring balance, to which he slung the bolt. “You see,” he said, “it weighs eight ounces and two-thirds. But a brass bolt of the same size would weigh only three ounces and four-fifths. There is not the least doubt that these bolts are gold; and as you see that their aggregate weight is a hundred and thirteen while the weight of the four missing bars is a hundred and thirteen pounds, two ounces, it is a reasonable inference that these bolts represent those bars; and an uncommonly good job they made of the melting to lose only two ounces. Has the consignee’s agent turned up yet?

“He is waiting outside,” replied the officer, with a pleased smile, “hopping about like a pea in a frying-pan. I’ll call him in.”

He did so, and a small, seedy man of strongly Semitic aspect approached the door with nervous caution and a rather pale face. But when his beady eye fell on the open case and the portentous assembly in the office, he turned about and fled along the wharf as if the hosts of the Philistines were at his heels.

“Of course it is all perfectly simple, as you say,” I replied to Thorndyke as we strolled back up Nightingale Lane, “but I don’t see where you got your start. What made you think that the stolen case was a dummy?”

“At first,” Thorndyke replied, “it was just a matter of alternative hypotheses. It was purely speculative. The robbery described by Halethorpe was a very crude affair. It was planned in quite the wrong way. Noting this, I naturally asked myself: What is the right way to steal a case of gold ingots? Now, the outstanding difficulty in such a robbery arises from the ponderous nature of the thing stolen, and the way to overcome that difficulty is to get away with the booty at leisure before the robbery is discovered—the longer the better. It is also obvious that if you can delude someone into stealing your dummy you will have covered up your tracks most completely; for if that someone is caught, the issues are extremely confused, and if he is not caught, all the tracks lead away from you. Of course, he will discover the fraud when he tries to dispose of the swag, but his lips are sealed by the fact that he has, himself, committed a felony. So that is the proper strategical plan and, though it was wildly improbable, and there was nothing whatever to suggest it, still, the possibility that this crude robbery might cover a more subtle one had to be borne in mind. It was necessary to make absolutely certain that the gold bars were really in the case when it left Belhaven. I had practically no doubt that they were. Our visit to the Custom House was little more than a formality, just to give us an undeniable datum from which to make our start. We had to find somebody who had actually seen the case open and verified the contents, and when we found that man—Mr. Byrne—it instantly became obvious that the wildly improbable thing had really happened. The gold bars had already disappeared. I had calculated the approximate size of the real bars. They would contain forty-two cubic inches, and would be about seven inches by three by two. The dimensions given by Byrne—evidently correct, as shown by those of the case, which the bars fitted pretty closely—were impossible. If those bars had been gold, they would have weighed two hundred pounds, instead of the hundred and thirteen pounds shown on his report. The astonishing thing is that Byrne did not observe the discrepancy. There are not many Customs officers who would have let it pass.”

“Isn’t it rather odd,” I asked, “that the thieves should have gambled on such a remote chance?”

“It is pretty certain,” he replied, “that they were unaware of the risk they were taking. Probably they assumed—as most persons would have done—that a case of bullion would be merely inspected and passed. Few persons realise the rigorous methods of the Customs officers. But to resume: It was obvious that the ‘gold’ bars that Byrne had examined were dummies. The next question was, where were the real bars? Had they been made away with, or were they still on the ship? To settle this question I decided to go through the manifest and especially through the column of net weights. And there, presently, I came upon a package the net weight of which was within two ounces of the weight of stolen bars. And that package was a parcel of brass screw-bolts—on a homeward-bound ship! But who on earth sends brass bolts from Africa to London? The anomaly was so striking that I examined the entry more closely, and then I found—by dividing the net weight by the number of bolts—that each of these little bolts weighed over half a pound. But, if this were so, those bolts could be of no other metal than gold or platinum, and were almost certainly gold. Also, their aggregate weight was exactly that of the stolen bars, less two ounces, which probably represented loss in melting.”

“And the scrivelloes,” said I, “and the gum copal and the kola nuts; what was their bearing on the inquiry? I can’t, even now, trace any connection.”

Thorndyke cast an astonished glance at me, and then replied with a quiet chuckle: “There wasn’t any. Those notes were for the benefit of the shipping gentleman. As he would look over my shoulder, I had to give him something to read and think about. If I had noted only the brass bolts, I should have virtually informed him of the nature of my suspicions.”

“Then, really, you had the case complete when we left Belhaven?”

“Theoretically, yes. But we had to recover the stolen case, for without those lead ingots we could not prove that the gold bolts were stolen property, any more than one could prove a murder without evidence of the death of the victim.”

“And how do you suppose the robbery was carried out? How was the gold got out of the ship’s strong-room?”

“I should say it was never there. The robbers, I suspect, are the ship’s mate, the chief engineer and possibly the purser. The mate controls the stowage of cargo, and the chief engineer controls the repair shop and has the necessary skill and knowledge to deal with the metal. On receiving the advice of the bullion consignment, I imagine they prepared the dummy case in agreement with the description. When the bullion arrived, the dummy case would be concealed on deck and the exchange made as soon as the bullion was put on board. The dummy would be sent to the strong-room and the real case carried to a prepared hiding place. Then the engineer would cut up the bars, melt them piecemeal and cast them into bolts in an ordinary casting flask, using an iron bolt as a model, and touching up the screw-threads with a die. The mate could enter the case on the manifest when he pleased, and send the bill of lading by post to the nominal consignee. That is what I imagine to have been the procedure.”

Thorndyke’s solution turned out to be literally correct. The consignee, pursued by Inspector Badger along the quay, was arrested at the dock gates and immediately volunteered King’s evidence. Thereupon the mate, the chief engineer and the purser of the steamship Labadi were arrested and brought to trial; when they severally entered a plea of guilty and described the method of the robbery almost in Thorndyke’s words.

THE FUNERAL PYRE (1923)

Thorndyke did not often indulge in an evening paper, and was even disposed to view that modern institution with some disfavour; whence it happened that when I entered our chambers shortly before dinner time with a copy of the Evening Gazette in my hand, he fixed upon the folded news-sheet an inquiring and slightly disapproving eye.

“’Orrible discovery near Dartford,” I announced, quoting the juvenile vendor.

The disapproval faded from his face, but the inquiring expression remained.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied; “but it seems t be something in our line.”

“My learned friend does us an injustice,” he rejoined, with his eye riveted on the paper. “Still, if you are going to make my flesh creep, I will try to endure it.”

Thus invited, I opened the paper and read out as follows:

“A shocking tragedy has come to light in a meadow about a mile from Dartford. About two o’clock this morning, a rural constable observed a rick on fire out on the marshes near the creek. By the time he reached it the upper half of the rick was burning fiercely in the strong wind, and as he could do nothing alone, he rent to the adjacent farm-house and gave the alarm. The farmer and two of his sons accompanied the constable to the scene of the conflagration, but the rick was now a blazing mass, roaring in the wind and giving out an intense heat. As it was obviously impossible to save any part of it, and as there were no other ricks near, the farmer decided to abandon it to its fate and went home.

“At eight o’clock he returned to the spot and found the rick still burning, though reduced to a heap of glowing cinders and ashes, and approaching it, he was horrified to perceive a human skull grinning out from the cindery mass. Closer examination showed other bones—all calcined white and chalky—and close to the skull a stumpy clay pipe. The explanation of this dreadful occurrence seems quite simple. The rick was not quite finished, and when the farm hands knocked off work they left the ladder in position. It is assumed that some tramp, in search of a night’s lodging, observed the ladder, and climbing up it, made himself comfortable in the loose hay at the top of the rick, where he fell asleep with his lighted pipe in his mouth. This ignited the hay and the man must have been suffocated by the fumes without awakening from his sleep.”

“A reasonable explanation,” was Thorndyke’s comment, “and quite probable; but of course it is pure hypothesis. As a matter of fact, any one of the three conceivable causes of violent death is possible in this case—accident, suicide or homicide.”

“I should have supposed,” said I, “that we could almost exclude suicide. It is difficult to imagine a man electing to roast himself to death.”

“I cannot agree with my learned friend,” Thorndyke rejoined. “I can imagine a case—and one of great medico-legal interest—that would exactly fit the present circumstances. Let us suppose a man, hopelessly insolvent, desperate and disgusted with life, who decides to provide for his family by investing the few pounds that he has left in insuring his life heavily and then making away with himself. How would he proceed? If he should commit suicide by any of the orthodox methods he would simply invalidate his policy. But now, suppose he knows of a likely rick; that he provides himself with some rapidly-acting poison, such as potassium cyanide—he could even use prussic acid if he carried it in a rubber or celluloid bottle, which would be consumed in the fire; that he climbs on to the rick; sets fire to it, and as soon as it is fairly alight, takes his dose of poison and falls back dead among the hay. Who is to contest his family’s claim? The fire will have destroyed all traces of the poison, even if they should be sought for. But it is practically certain that the question would never be raised. The claim would be paid without demur.”

I could not help smiling at this calm exposition of a practicable crime. “It is a mercy, Thorndyke,” I remarked, “that you are an honest man. If you were not—”

“I think,” he retorted, “that I should find some better means of livelihood than suicide. But with regard to this case: it will be worth watching. The tramp hypothesis is certainly the most probable; but its very probability makes an alternative hypothesis at least possible. No one is likely to suspect fraudulent suicide; but that immunity from suspicion is a factor that increases the probability of fraudulent suicide. And so, to a less extent, with homicide. We must watch the case and see if there are any further developments.”

Further developments were not very long in appearing. The report in the morning paper disposed effectually of the tramp theory without offering any other. “The tragedy of the burning rick,” it said, “is taking a some what mysterious turn. It is now clear that the unknown man, who was assumed to have been a tramp, must have been a person of some social position, for careful examination of the ashes by the police have brought to light various articles which would have been carried only by a man of fair means. The clay pipe was evidently one of a pair—of which the second one has been recovered—probably silver-mounted and carried in a case, the steel frame of which has been found. Both pipes are of the ‘Burns Cutty’ pattern and have neatly scratched on the bowls the initials ‘R. R.’ The following articles have also been found:—Remains of a watch, probably gold, and a rather singular watch-chain, having alternate links of platinum and gold. The gold links have partly disappeared, but numerous beads of gold have been found, derived apparently from the watch and chain. The platinum links are intact and are fashioned of twisted square wire. A bunch of keys, partly fused; a rock crystal seal, apparently from a ring; a little porcelain mascot figure, with a hole for suspension—possibly from the watch-chain—and a number of artificial teeth. In connection with the latter, a puzzling and slightly sinister aspect has been given to the case by the finding of an upper dental plate by a ditch some two hundred yards from the rick. The plate has two gaps and, on comparison with the skull of the unknown man, these have been found by the police surgeon to correspond with two groups of remaining teeth. Moreover, the artificial teeth found in the ashes all seem to belong to a lower plate. The presence of this plate, so far from the scene of the man’s death, is extremely difficult to account for.”

As Thorndyke finished reading the extract he looked at me as if inviting some comment.

“It is a most remarkable and mysterious affair,” said I, “and naturally recalls to my mind the hypothetical case that you suggested yesterday. If that case was possible then, it is actually probable now. It fits these new facts perfectly not only in respect of the abundant means of identification but even to this dental plate—if we assume that he took the poison as he was approaching the rick, and that the poison was of an acrid or irritating character which caused him to cough or retch. And I can think of no other plausible explanation.”

“There are other possibilities,” said Thorndyke, but fraudulent suicide is certainly the most probable theory on the known facts. But we shall see. As you say, the body can hardly fail to be identified at a pretty early date.”

As a matter of fact it was identified in the course of that same day. Both Thorndyke and I were busily engaged until evening in the courts and elsewhere and had not had time to give this curious case any consideration. But as we walked home together, we encountered Mr. Stalker of the Griffin Life Assurance Company pacing up and down King’s Bench Walk near the entry of our chambers.

“Ha!” he exclaimed, striding forward to meet us near the Mitre Court gateway, “you are just the very men I wanted to see. There is a little matter that I want to consult you about. I shan’t detain you long.”

“It won’t matter much if you do,” said Thorndyke. “We have finished our routine work for the day and our time is now our own.” He led the way up to our chambers, where, having given the fire a stir, he drew up three arm-chairs.

“Now, Stalker,” said he. “Warm your toes and tell us your troubles.”

Mr. Stalker spread out his hands to the blaze began reflectively: “It will be enough, I think, if I give you the facts—and most of them you probably know already. You have heard about this man whose remains were found in the ashes of a burnt rick? Well, it turns out that he was a certain Mr. Reginald Reed, an outside broker, as I understand; but what is of more interest to us is that he was a client of ours. We have issued a policy on his life for three thousand pounds. I thought I remembered the name when I saw it in the paper this afternoon, so I looked up our b and there it was, sure enough.”

“When was the policy issued?” Thorndyke asked.

“Ah!” exclaimed Stalker. “That’s the exasperating feature of the case. The policy was issued less than a year ago. He has only paid a single premium. So we stand to drop practically the whole three thousand. Of course, we have to take the fat with the lean, but we don’t like to take it in such precious large lumps.”

“Of course you don’t,” agreed Thorndyke. “But now you have come to consult me—about what?”

“Well,” replied Stalker, “I put it to you: isn’t there something obviously fishy about the case? Are the circumstances normal? For instance, how the devil came a respectable city gentleman to be smoking his pipe in a haystack out in a lonely meadow at two o’clock in the morning, or thereabouts?

“I agree,” said Thorndyke, “that the circumstances are highly abnormal. But there is no doubt that the man is dead. Extremely dead, lf I may use the expression. What is the point that you wish to raise?”

“I am not raising any point,” replied Stalker. “We should like you to attend the inquest and watch the case for us. Of course, in our policies, as you know, suicide is expressly ruled out; and if this should turn out to have been a case of suicide—”

“What is there to suggest that it was?” asked Thorndyke.

“What is there to suggest that it wasn’t?” retorted Stalker.

“Nothing,” rejoined Thorndyke. “But a negative plea is of no use to you. You will have to furnish positive proof of suicide, or else pay the claim.”

“Yes, I realise that,” said Stalker, “and I am not suggesting—But there, it is of no use discussing the matter while we know so little. I leave the case in your hands. Can you attend the inquest?”

“I shall make it my business to do so,” replied Thorndyke.

“Very well,” said Stalker, rising and putting on his gloves, “then we will leave it at that; and we couldn’t leave it in better case.”

When our visitor had gone I remarked to Thorndyke: “Stalker seems to have conceived the same idea as my learned senior—fraudulent suicide.”

It is not surprising,” he replied. “Stalker is a shrewd man and he perceives that when an abnormal thing has happened we may look for an abnormal explanation. Fraudulent suicide was a speculative possibility yesterday: today, in the light of these new facts, it is the most probable theory. But mere probabilities won’t help Stalker. If there is no direct evidence of suicide—and there is not likely to be any—the verdict will be Death by Misadventure, and the Griffin Company will have to pay.”

“I suppose you won’t do anything until you have heard what transpires at the inquest?”

“Yes,” he replied. “I think we should do well to go down and just go over the ground. At present we have the facts at third hand, and we don’t know what may have been overlooked. As tomorrow is fairly free I propose that we make an early start and see the place ourselves.”

“Is there any particular point that you want to clear up?”

“No; I have nothing definite in view. The circumstances are compatible with either accident, suicide or homicide, with an undoubted leaning towards suicide. But, at present, I have a completely open mind. I am, in fact, going down to Dartford in the hope of getting a lead in some definite direction.”

When we alighted at Dartford Station on the following morning, Thorndyke looked inquiringly up and down the platform until he espied an inspector, when he approached the official and asked for a direction to the site of the burnt rick.

The official glanced at Thorndyke’s canvas-covrered research-case and at my binocular and camera as he replied with a smile: “You are not the first, by a long way, that has asked that question. There has been a regular procession of Press gentlemen that way this morning. The place is about a mile from here. You take the foot-path to Joyce Green and turn off towards the creek opposite Temple Farm. This is about where the rick stood,” he added, as Thorndyke produced his one-inch Ordnance map and a pencil, “a few yards from that dyke.”

With this direction and the open map we set forth from the station, and taking our way along the unfrequented path soon left the town behind. As we crossed the second stile, where the path rejoined the road, Thorndyke paused to survey the prospect.

“Stalker’s question,” he remarked, “was not unreasonable. This road leads nowhere but to the river, and one does rather wonder what a city man can have been doing out on these marshes in the small hours of the morning. I think that will be our objective, where you see those men at work by the shepherd’s hut, or whatever it is.”

We struck off across the level meadows, out of which arose the red sails of a couple of barges, creeping down the invisible creek; and as we approached our objective the shepherd’s hut resolved itself into a contractor’s office van, and the men were seen to be working with shovels and sieves on the ashes of the rick. A police inspector was superintending the operations, and when we drew near he accosted us with a civil inquiry as to our business.

Thorndyke presented his card and explained that he was watching the case in the interests of the Griffin Insurance Company. “I suppose,” he added, “I shall be given the necessary facilities?”

“Certainly,” replied the officer, glancing at my colleague with an odd mixture of respect and suspicion “and if you can spot anything that we’ve overlooked, you are very welcome. It’s all for the public good. Is there anything in particular that you want to see?”

“I should like to see everything that has been recovered so far. The remains of the body have been removed, I suppose?”

“Yes, sir. To the mortuary. But I have got all the effects here.”

He led the way to the office—a wooden hut on low wheels—and unlocking the door, invited us to enter. “Here are the things that we have salved,” he said, indicating a table covered with white paper on which the various articles were neatly set out, “and I think it’s about the lot. We haven’t come on anything fresh for the last hour or so.”

Thorndyke looked over the collection thoughtfully; picked up and examined successively the two clay pipes—each with the initials “R. R.” neatly incised on the bowl—the absurd little mascot figure, so incongruous with its grim surroundings and the tragic circumstances, the distorted keys, the platinum chain-links to several of which shapeless blobs of gold adhered, and the crystal seal; and then, collecting the artificial teeth, arranged them in what appeared to be their correct order and compared them with the dental plate.

“I think,” said he, holding the latter in his fingers, “that as the body is not here, I should like to secure the means of comparison of these teeth with the skull. There will be no objection to that, I presume?”

“What did you wish to do?” the inspector asked.

“I should like to take a cast of the plate and a wax impression of the loose teeth. No damage will be done to the originals, of course.”

The inspector hesitated, his natural, official tendency to refuse permission apparently contending with a desire to see with his own eyes how the famous expert carried out his mysterious methods of research. In the end the latter prevailed and the official sanction was given, subject to a proviso. “You won’t mind my looking on while you do it?”

“Of course not,” replied Thorndyke. “Why should I?”

“I thought that perhaps your methods were a sort of trade secret.”

Thorndyke laughed softly as he opened the research case. “My dear inspector,” said he, “the people who have trade secrets are those who make a profound mystery of simple processes that any schoolboy could carry out with once showing. That is the necessity for the secrecy.”

As he was speaking he half-filled a tiny aluminium saucepan with water, and having dropped into it a couple of cakes of dentist’s moulding composition, put it to heat over a spirit-lamp. While it was heating he greased the dental plate and the loose teeth, and prepared the little rubber basin and the other appliances for mixing the plaster.

The inspector was deeply interested. With almost ravenous attention he followed these proceedings, and eagerly watched Thorndyke roll the softened composition into the semblance of a small sausage and press it firmly on the teeth of the plate; peered into the plaster tin, and when the liquid plaster was mixed and applied, first to the top and then to the lower surface of the plate, not only observed the process closely but put a number of very pertinent questions.

While the plaster and composition were setting Thorndyke renewed his inspection of the salvage from the rick, picking out a number of iron boot protectors which he placed apart in a little heap.

Then he proceeded to roll out two flat strips of softened composition, into one of which he pressed the loose teeth in what appeared to be their proper order, and into the other the boot protectors—eight in number—after first dusting the surface with powdered French chalk. By this time the plaster had set hard enough to allow of the mould being opened and the dental plate taken out. Then Thorndyke, having painted the surfaces of the plaster pieces with knotting, put the mould together again and tied it firmly with string, mixed a fresh bowl of plaster and poured it into the mould.

While this was setting Thorndyke made a careful inventory, with my assistance, of the articles found in the ashes and put a few discreet questions to the inspector. But the latter knew very little about the case. His duty was merely to examine and report on the rick for the information of the coroner. The investigation of the case was evidently being conducted from headquarters. There being no information to be gleaned from the officer, we went out and inspected the site of the rick. But here, also, there was nothing to be learned; the surface of the ground was now laid bare and the men who were working with the sieves reported no further discoveries. We accordingly returned to the hut, and as the plaster had now set hard Thorndyke proceeded with infinite care to open the mould. The operation was a complete success, and as my colleague extracted the cast—a perfect replica, in plaster, of the dental plate—the inspector’s admiration was unbounded. “Why,” he exclaimed, “excepting for the colour you couldn’t tell one from the other; but all the same, I don’t quite see what you want it for.”

“I want it to compare with the skull,” replied Thorndyke, “if I have time to call at the mortuary. As I can’t take the original plate with me, I shall need this copy to make the comparison. Obviously, it is important to make sure that this is Reed’s plate and not that of some other person. By the way, can you show us the spot where the plate was picked up?”

“Yes,” replied the inspector. “You can see the place from here. It was just by that gate at the crossing of the ditch.”

“Thank you, inspector,” said Thorndyke. “I think we will walk down and have a look at the place.” He wrapped the new cast in a soft cloth, and having repacked his research—case, shook hands with the officer and prepared to depart.

“You will notice, Jervis,” he remarked as we walked towards the gate, “that this denture was picked up at a spot beyond the rick—farther from the town, I mean. Consequently, if the plate is Reed’s, he must have dropped it while he was approaching the rick from the direction of the river. It will be worthwhile to see if we can find out whence he came.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “But the dropping of the plate is a rather mysterious affair. It must have happened when he took the poison—assuming that he really did poison himself; but one would have expected that he would wait until he got to the rick to take his dose.”

“We had better not make too many assumptions while we have so few facts,” said Thorndyke. He put down his case beside the gate, which guarded a bridge across a broad ditch, or drainage dyke, and opened his map.

“The question is,” said he, “did he come through this gate or was he only passing it? This dyke, you see, opens into the creek about three-quarters of a mile farther down. The probability is, therefore, that if he came up from the river across the marshes he would be on this side of the ditch and would pass the gate. But we had better try both sides. Let us leave our things by the gate and explore the ground for a few hundred yards, one on either side of the ditch. Which side will you take?”

I elected to take the side nearer the creek, and, having put my camera down by the research-case, climbed over the padlocked gate and began to walk slowly along by the side of the ditch, scanning the ground for foot prints showing the impression of boot-protectors. At first the surface was far from favourable for imprints of any kind, being, like that immediately around the gate, covered with thick turf. About a hundred and fifty yards down, however, I came upon a heap of worm-casts on which was plainly visible the print of a heel with a clear impression of a kidney-shaped protector such as I had seen in the hut. Thereupon I hailed Thorndyke and, having stuck my stick in the ground beside the heel-print, went back to meet him at the gate.

“This is rather interesting, Jervis,” he remarked, when I had described my find. “The inference seems to be that he came from the creek—unless there is another gate farther down. We had better have our compo impressions handy for comparison.” He opened his case and taking from it the strip of composition—now as hard as bone—on which were the impressions of the boot-protectors, slipped it into his outer pocket. We then took up the case and the camera and proceeded to the spot marked by my stick.

“Well,” said Thorndyke, “it is not very conclusive, seeing that so many people use boot-protectors, but it is probably Reed’s footprint. Let us hope that we shall find something more distinctive farther on.”

We resumed our march, keeping a few yards apart and examining the ground closely as we went. For a full quarter of a mile we went on without detecting any trace of a footprint on the thick turf. Suddenly we perceived ahead of us a stretch of yellow mud occupying a slight hollow, across which the creek had apparently overflowed at the last spring tide. When we reached it we found that the mud was nearly dry, but still soft enough to take an impression; and the surface was covered with a maze of footprints.

We halted at the edge of the patch and surveyed the complicated pattern; and then it became evident that the whole group of prints had been produced by two pairs of feet, with the addition of a row of sheep-tracks.

“This seems to raise an entirely new issue,” I re marked.

“It does,” Thorndyke agreed. “I think we now begin to see a definite light on the case. But we must go cautiously. Here are two sets of footprints of which one is apparently Reed’s—to judge by the boot-protectors—while the other prints have been made by a man, whom we will call X, who wore boots or shoes with rubber soles and heels. We had better begin by verifying Reed’s.” He produced the composition strip from his pocket, and, stooping over one pair of footprints, continued: “I think we may assume that these are Reed’s feet. We have on the compo strip impressions of eight protectors from the rick, and on each footprint there are four protectors. Moreover, the individual protectors are the same on the compo and on the footprints. Thus the compo shows two pairs of half-protectors, two single edge-pieces, and two kidney-shaped protectors; while each footprint shows a pair of half-protectors on the outside of the sole, a single one on the inside and a kidney-shaped piece on the heel. Furthermore, in both cases the protectors are nearly new and show no appreciable signs of wear. The agreement is complete.”

“Don’t you think,” said I, “that we ought to take plaster records of them?”

“I do,” he replied, “seeing that a heavy shower or a high tide would obliterate them. If you will make the casts I will, meanwhile, make a careful drawing of the whole group to show the order of imposition.”

We fell to work forthwith upon our respective tasks, and by the time I had filled four of the clearest of the footprints with plaster, Thorndyke had completed his drawing with the aid of a set of coloured pencils from the research-case. While the plaster was setting he exhibited and explained the drawing.

“You see, Jervis, that there are four lines of prints and a set of sheep-tracks. The first in order of time are these prints of X, drawn in blue. Then come the sheep, which trod on X’s footprints. Next comes Reed, alone and after some interval, for he has trodden both on the sheep-tracks and on the tracks of X. Both men were going towards the river. Then we have the tracks of the two men coming back. This time they were together, for their tracks are parallel and neither treads into the prints of the other. Both tracks are rather sinuous as if the men were walking unsteadily, and both have trodden on the sheep-tracks and on the preceding tracks. Next, we have the tracks of X going alone towards the river and treading on all the others excepting number four, which is the tracks of X coming from the river and turning off towards that gate, which opens on to the road. The sequence of events is therefore pretty clear.

“First, X came along here alone to some destination which we have yet to discover. Later—how much later we cannot judge—came Reed, alone. The two men seem to have met, and later returned together, apparently the worse for drink. That is the last we see of Reed. Next comes X, walking back—quite steadily, you notice—towards the river. Later, be returns; but this time, for some reason—perhaps to avoid the neighbourhood of the rick—he crosses the ditch at that gate, apparently to get on the road, though you see by the map that the road is much the longer route to the town. And now we had better get on and see if we can discover the rendezvous to and from which these two men went and came.”

As the plaster had now set quite hard I picked up the casts, and when I had carefully packed them in the case we resumed our progress riverwards. I had already noticed, some distance ahead, the mast of what looked like a small cutter yacht standing up above the marshes, and I now drew Thorndyke’s attention to it. But he had already observed it and, like me, had marked it as the probable rendezvous of the two men. In a few minutes the probability became a certainty, for a bend in the creek showed us the little vessel—with the name Moonbeam newly painted on the bow—made fast along side a small wooden staging; and when we reached this the bare earth opposite the gangway was seen to be covered with the footprints of both men.

“I wonder,” said I, “which of them was the owner of the yacht.”

“It is pretty obvious, I think,” said Thorndyke, “that X was the owner if either of them was. He came to the yacht alone, and he wore rubber-soled shoes such as yachtsmen favour; whereas Reed came when the other man was there, and he wore iron boot-protectors, which no yacht owner would do if he had any respect for his deck-planks. But they may have had a joint interest; appearances suggest that they were painting the woodwork when they were here together, as some of the paint is fresh and some of it old and shabby.” He gazed at the yacht reflectively for some time and then remarked: “It would be interesting—and perhaps instructive—to have a look at the inside.”

“It would be a flagrant trespass, to put it mildly,” said I.

“It would be more than trespass if that padlock is locked,” he replied. “But we need not take a pedantic view of the legal position. My learned friend has a serviceable pair of glasses and commands an unobstructed view of a mile or so; and if he maintains an observant attitude while I make an inspection of the premises any trifling irregularity will be of no consequence.” As he spoke he felt in his pocket and produced the instrument which our laboratory assistant, Polton, had made from a few pieces of stiff steel wire, and which was euphemistically known as a smoker’s companion. With this appliance in his hand he dropped down on to the yacht’s deck, and after a quick look round, tried the padlock. Finding it locked he proceeded to operate on it with the smoker’s companion, and in a few moments it fell open, when he pushed back the sliding hatch and stepped down into the little cabin.

His exploration did not take long. In a few minutes he reappeared and climbed the short ladder to the staging. “There isn’t much to see,” he reported, “but what there is is highly suggestive. If you slip down and have a look round, I think you will have no difficulty in forming a plausible reconstruction of the recent events. You had better take the camera. There is light enough for a time exposure.”

I handed him the glasses, and dropping on to the deck, stepped down through the open hatch into the cabin. It was an absurd little cave, barely four feet high from the floor to the coach-roof, open to the fore-peak and lighted by a little skylight and two portholes. Of the two sleeping berths, one had evidently been used as a seat, while the other appeared to have been slept in, to judge by the indented pillow arid the tumbled blankets, left just as the occupant had crawled out of them. But the whole interior was in a stale of squalid disorder. Paint-pots and unwashed brushes lay about the floor, in company with a couple of whisky-bottles—one empty and one half-full—two tumblers, a pair of empty siphons and a litter of playing cards scattered broadcast and evidently derived from two packs. It was, as Thorndyke had said, easy to reconstruct the scene of sordid debauchery that the light of the two candles—each in its congealed pool of grease—must have displayed on that night of horror whose dreadful secret had been disclosed by the ashes of the rick. But I could see nothing that would enable me to give a name to the dead man’s mysterious companion.

When I had completed my inspection and taken a photograph of the interior, I rejoined Thorndyke, who then descended and replaced the padlock on the closed hatch, relocking it with the invaluable smoker’s companion.

“Well, Jervis,” said he, as we turned our faces to wards the town, “it seems as if we had accomplished our task, so far as Stalker is concerned. It is still possible that this was a case of suicide, but it is no longer probable. All the appearances point to homicide. I think my learned friend will agree with me in that.”

“Undoubtedly,” I replied. “And to me there is a strong suggestion of premeditation. I take it that X, the owner of the yacht, enticed Reed out here, possibly to prepare for a cruise; that the two men worked at the repainting while the daylight lasted and then spent the evening drinking and gambling. The fact that they used several packs of cards suggests that they played for pretty heavy stakes. Then, I think, Reed became drunk and X offered to see him safely off the marshes. It is evident that X was not drunk, because, although both tracks appear unsteady when the men were walking together, the tracks of X returning to the yacht are quite steady and straight. I should say that the actual murder took place just after they had got over the gate; that Reed’s false teeth fell out while his body was being dragged to the rick, and that this was unnoticed by X owing to the darkness. Then X dragged the body up the ladder and laid it in the middle of the rick at the top, set fire to the rick—probably on the lee side-and at once made off back to the yacht. There he passed the night, and in the morning he returned to the town along the road, giving the neighbourhood of the rick a wide berth. That is my reading of the evidence.”

“Yes,” said Thorndyke, “that seems to be the interpretation of the facts. And now all that remains is to give a name to the mysterious X, and I should think that will present no difficulties.”

“Are you proposing to inspect the remains at the mortuary?” I asked.

No,” he replied. “It would be interesting, but it is not necessary. We have all the available data for identification, and our concern is now not with Reed but with X. We had better get back to London.”

On our arrival at the station, we found the bookstall keeper in the act of sticking up a placard of the evening paper on which was the legend: “Rick tragedy; Sensational development.”

We immediately provided ourselves each with a copy of the paper, and sitting down on a seat, proceeded to read the heavily-leaded report.

“A new and startling aspect has been given to the rick tragedy by some further inquiries that the police have made. It seems that the dead man, Reed, was a member of the firm of Reed and Jarman, outside brokers, and it now transpires that his partner, Walter Jarman, is also missing. There has been no one at the office this week, but the caretaker states that on Monday evening at about eight o’clock, he saw Mr. Jarman let himself into the office with his key (the rick was first seen to be on fire at two o’clock on Monday morning). It appears that three cheques, payable to the firm and endorsed by Jarman, were paid into the bank—Patmore’s—by the first post on Tuesday morning, and that, also on Tuesday morning, Jarman purchased a parcel of diamonds of just over a thousand pounds in value from a diamond merchant in Hatton Garden, who accepted a cheque in payment after telephoning to the bank. It further appears that on the previous Saturday morning, Reed and Jarman visited the bank together and drew out in cash practically their whole balance, leaving only thirty-two pounds. The diamond merchant’s cheque was met by the cheques that had just been paid in. It is premature to make any comments, but we may expect some strange disclosures at the inquest, which will be held at Dartford the day after tomorrow.”

“I assume,” said I, “that the identity of X is no longer a mystery. It looks as if these two men had agreed to realise their assets and abscond, and had then spent the night gambling for the swag, and, oddly enough, Reed appears to have been the winner, for otherwise there would have been no need to murder him.”

“That is so,” Thorndyke agreed, “assuming that X is Jarman, which is probable, though not certain. But we mustn’t go beyond our facts, and we mustn’t construct theories from newspaper reports. I think we had better call at Scotland Yard on our way home and verify those particulars.”

The report and our own observations occupied us during the journey to London, though our discussion produced no further conclusions. As soon as we arrived at Charing Cross, Thorndyke sprang out of the train, and emerging from the station, walked swiftly towards Whitehall.

Our visit was fortunately timed, for as we approached the entrance to the head-quarters, our old friend, Superintendent Miller, came out. He smiled as he saw us and halted to utter the laconic query “Rick Case?”

“Yes,” replied Thorndyke. “We have come to verify the particulars given in the evening paper. Have you seen the report?”

“Yes; and you may take it as correct. Anything else?”

“I should have liked to look over a series of the cheques drawn by the firm. The last two, I suppose, are inaccessible?”

“Yes. They will be at the bank, and we couldn’t inspect them without an order of the court. But, as to the others, if they are at the office, I think you could see them. I’ll come along with you now if you like, and have a look round myself. Our people are in possession.”

We at once closed with the superintendent’s offer and proceeded with him by the Underground Railway to the Mansion House, from whence we made our way to Queen Victoria Street, where Reed and Jarman had their offices. A sergeant was in charge at the moment, and to him the superintendent addressed himself.

“Have you found any returned cheques?”

Yes, sir,” replied the sergeant; “lots of ’em. We’ve been through them all.”

As he spoke he produced several bundles of cheques and laid them on a desk, the drawers of which all stood open.

“Well,” said Miller, “there they are, doctor. I don’t know what you want to find out, but I expect you do.” He placed a chair by the desk, and as Thorndyke sat down and proceeded to turn the cheques over, he watched him with politely-suppressed curiosity.

It appears,” said Thorndyke, “as if these two men had mixed up their private affairs with the business account. Here, for instance, is a cheque drawn by Reed for the Picardy Wine Company. But that company could hardly have been a client. And this one of Jarman’s for the Secretary of the St. John’s Nursing Home must be a private cheque, and so I should say are these two for F. Waller, Esq., F.R.C.S., and for Andrew Darton, Esq., L.D.S. They are drawn for professional men and both are—like the Nursing Home cheque—stated in even amounts of guineas, whereas the business cheques are in uneven amounts of pounds, shillings and pence.”

“I think you are right, sir,” said Miller. “The business seems to have been conducted in a very casual manner. And just look at those signatures! Never twice alike. The banks hate that sort of thing, naturally. When a customer signs in the signature book he has given a specimen for reference and he ought to keep to it strictly. A man who varies his signature is asking for trouble.”

He is,” Thorndyke agreed, as he rapidly entered a few particulars of the cheques in his notebook; “particularly in the case of a firm with a staff of clerks.”

He stood up, and having pocketed his notebook, held out his hand.

“I am very much obliged to you, superintendent,” he said.

Seen all that you wanted to see?” Miller asked.

“Thank you, yes,” Thorndyke replied.

“I should very much like to know what you have seen,” Miller rejoined; to which my colleague replied by waving his hand towards the cheques, as he turned to go.

I don’t quite see the bearing of those cheques on our inquiry,” I said, as we took our way homeward along Cheapside.

“It is not very direct,” Thorndyke replied;” but the cheques help us to understand the characters of these two men and their relations with one another; which may be very necessary when we come to the inquest.”

During the following day I saw very little of Thorndyke, for our excursion to Dartford had put our work somewhat in arrear and we had to secure a free day for the inquest on the morrow. We met at dinner after the day’s work, but, beyond settling the programme for the next day nothing of importance passed with reference to the “Rick Case.”

The opening phases of the inquest, though of thrilling interest to the numerous spectators and Press men, did not particularly concern us. The evidence of the rural constable, the farmer and the police inspector—with whom Thorndyke had a little confidential talk and apparently surprised the officer considerably—merely amplified what we knew already. Of more interest was that of a local dentist who testified to having examined the dental plate and to having compared it with the skull of the dead man. “The plate and the jaw of deceased,” he said, “agree completely. The jaw contains five natural teeth in two groups, and the plate has two spaces which exactly correspond to those two groups of teeth. I have tried the plate on the jaw and have no doubt whatever that it belonged to deceased.”

“That is a very important fact,” Thorndyke remarked to me as the witness retired. “It is the indispensable link in the chain.”

“But surely it was obvious?” said I.

“No doubt,” he replied. “But now it is proved and in evidence.”

I was somewhat puzzled by Thorndyke’s remark, but the appearance of a new witness forbade discussion. Mr. Arthur Gerrard was an alert-looking, rather tall man, with bushy, Mephistophelian eyebrows and a small, dark moustache, who wore a pair of large bifocal spectacles, and to whom a small mole at the corner of the mouth imparted the effect of a permanent one-sided smile.

It was on your information,” said the coroner,” that the identity of the deceased was established.”

“Yes,” replied the witness, who spoke with a slight, but perceptible, Irish accent. “I saw the description in the papers of the things that had been found in the rick and at once recognised them as Reed’s. I knew deceased intimately and had often noticed his peculiar watch-chain and the little china mascot and seen him smoking the clay pipe with his initials scratched on it; and I knew that he wore false teeth.”

“Did you meet him frequently?”

“Oh, yes. For more than a year he was my partner in business, and we remained friends after I had dissolved the partnership.”

“Why did you dissolve the partnership?”

“I had to. Reed was impossible in a business sense. He gambled incessantly in stocks and I had to pay his losses. I lent him, for this purpose, at one time and another, over two thousand pounds. He gave me bills for the loans, but he was never able to meet them, and in the end, when we dissolved, I got him to insure his life for three thousand pounds and to draw up a document making his debt to me the first charge on his estate in the event of his death.”

“Had you ever any reason to suppose that he contemplated suicide?

“None whatever. After he left me, he entered into partnership with a Mr. Walter Jarman, and whenever I met him, he seemed to be quite happy and contented, though I gathered that he was still gambling a good deal. I saw him a week ago today and he then told me that he proposed to take a short yachting holiday with his partner, who owned a small cutter. That was the last time that I saw him alive.”

As the witness was about to retire, Thorndyke rose, and having obtained the coroner’s permission to cross-examine, asked: “You have spoken of a yacht. Do you know what her name is and where she has been kept lately?”

“Her name is the Moonbeam, and I believe Jarman kept her somewhere in the Thames, but I don’t know where.”

“And as to Jarman himself: what do you know about him, as to his character, for instance?”

“I knew him very slightly. He appeared to be rather a dissipated man. Drank a good deal, I should say, and I think he was a bit of a gambler.”

“Do you know if he was a heavy smoker?”

“He didn’t smoke at all, but he was an inveterate snuff-taker.”

At this point the foreman of the jury interposed with the audible remark that “he didn’t see what this had to do with the inquiry,” and the coroner looked dubiously at Thorndyke; but as my colleague sat down, the objection was not pursued.

The next witness was the caretaker of the building in which Reed and Jarman’s office was situated. His evidence was to the effect that on the previous Monday evening at about eight o’clock, he saw Mr. Jarman let himself into the office with his key. “I don’t know how long he stayed there,” he continued, in reply to the coroner’s question. “I had finished my work and was going up to my rooms at the top of the building. I didn’t see him again.”

“Did you notice anything unusual in his appearance?” asked Thorndyke, rising to cross-examine. “Was his face at all flushed, for instance?”

“I couldn’t say. I was going up the stairs and I just looked back over my shoulder when I heard him. His face was turned away from me.”

“But you had no difficult in recognising him?”

“No: I should have known him a mile off. He had his overcoat on, and it is a very peculiar overcoat—light brown with a sort of greenish check. You couldn’t possibly mistake it.”

“What should you say was Mr. Jarman’s height?”

“About five feet nine or ten, I should say.”

Here the foreman of the jury again interposed. “Aren’t we wasting time, sir?” he inquired impatiently. “These details about Jarman may be very important to the police, but they don’t concern us. We are inquiring into the death of Mr. Reginald Reed.”

The coroner looked deprecatingly at Thorndyke and remarked “There is some truth in what the foreman says.”

“I submit, sir,” replied Thorndyke,” that there is no truth in it at all. We are not inquiring into the death of Reginald Reed, but into that of a man whose remains were found in a burned rick.”

“But the body has been identified as that of Reginald Reed.”

“Then,” said Thorndyke,” I submit that it has been wrongly identified. I suggest that the body is that of Walter Jarman and I am prepared to produce witnesses who will prove that it is.”

“But,” exclaimed the coroner, “we have just heard the evidence of a witness who states that he saw Jarman alive eighteen hours after the rick was fired.”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Thorndyke. “We have heard the witness say that he saw Jarman’s overcoat. He expressly stated that he did not see the man’s face.”

The coroner hastily conferred with the jury—who openly scoffed at Thorndyke’s suggestion—and then said: “I find what you say perfectly incredible and so do the jury. It is utterly irreconcilable with the facts. You had better call your witnesses and let us dispose of this extraordinary suggestion.”

Thorndyke bowed to the coroner and called Mr. Andrew Darton; whereupon a middle-aged man of markedly professional aspect came forward and, having been sworn, gave evidence as follows: “I am a dental surgeon. A little over two years ago, Mr. Walter Jarman was under my care. I extracted some loose teeth from both jaws and made him two plates—an upper and a lower.”

“Could you identify those plates?”

“Yes. I have with me the plaster model on which those plates were made.” He opened a bag and produced a plaster cast of a pair of jaws fitted with a brass hinge so that the jaws could be opened and shut. On the upper jaw were two groups of teeth separated by a space of bare gums, while the lower jaw bore a single group of four front teeth.

“This model,” the witness explained, “is an exact replica of the patient’s jaws, and the two plates were actually moulded on it.” He picked up the dental plate from the table and, amidst a hush of breathless expectancy, opened the mouth of the model and applied the plate to the upper jaw. At a glance, it was obvious that it fitted perfectly. The two groups of the plaster teeth slipped exactly into the spaces on the plate, making a complete row of teeth. Then the witness covered the lower gums with strips of plastic wax, and taking the loose teeth from the table, attached them to the wax; and again the correspondence was evident. The teeth thus applied exactly filled the vacant spaces.

“Can you now identify that plate?” Thorndyke asked.

“Yes,” was the reply. “I am quite certain that this is the plate I made for Mr. Jarman and that those loose teeth are from his lower plate.”

Thorndyke looked at the coroner, who nodded emphatically. “This evidence seems perfectly conclusive,” he admitted. “What do you say, gentlemen?” he added, turning to the jury.

There was no doubt as to their sentiments. With one voice they declared their complete conviction. Had they not seen the demonstration with their own eyes?

“And now, sir,” said the coroner,” as you appear to know more than anyone else about this case, and as it is perfectly incomprehensible to me, and probably also to the jury, I suggest that you give us an explanation. And you had better make it a sworn statement, so that it can go into the depositions.”

“Yes,” Thorndyke agreed,” especially as I have some evidence to give.” He was accordingly sworn and then proceeded to make the following statement:

The first thing that struck me on reading the report of this case was the very remarkable character of the objects found in the ashes of the rick. They included objects composed of platinum, of pipe-clay, of iron and of porcelain—all substances practically indestructible by fire. And these imperishable objects were all highly distinctive and easily identifiable, and two of them actually bore the initials of their owner. There was almost a suggestion of the body having been prepared for identification after burning. This mere suggestion, however, gave place to definite suspicion when I saw the dental plate. That plate presented a most striking discrepancy. Here it is, sir, and you see that it is a clean polished plate of red vulcanite, with not a trace of stain or discoloration. But associated with that plate were two clay pipes. Now, the man who smokes a clay pipe is not only—as a rule—a heavy smoker, but he smokes strong and dark-coloured tobacco. And if he wears a dental plate, that plate becomes encrusted with a black deposit which is very difficult to remove. There is, as you see, no trace of any such deposit, or of any tobacco stain in the interstices of the teeth. It appeared to be almost certainly the plate of a non-smoker. But if that were so, it could not be Reed’s. But it had been ascertained by the police surgeon that it fitted the jaw of the skull and undoubtedly belonged to the burned body. Consequently if the plate was not Reed’s plate, the skull was not Reed’s skull, and the body was not Reed’s body. But the watch-chain was Reed’s, the pipes were his and the mascot was his. That is to say that the very identifiable and fire-proof property of Reed was associated with the burned body of some other person; that, in other words, the body of some unknown person had been deliberately prepared to counterfeit the body of Reed. This offered a further suggestion and raised a question. The suggestion was that the unknown person had been murdered—presumably somewhere near the spot where the dental plate was found. The question was—What was the object of causing the body to counterfeit that of Reed?

“Now, I knew, from the insurance company, that Reed had insured his life for three thousand pounds. Therefore, somebody stood to gain three thousand pounds by his death. The question was—Who was that somebody? I proceeded to make certain investigations on the spot;”—and here Thorndyke gave a summary of our discoveries on the marsh and on the yacht. “It thus appeared,” he continued, “that there were two men on the marshes that night, going towards the rick. One of them was the person whose body was found in the ashes; the other, who went back alone to the yacht, was presumably the person who stood to gain three thousand pounds by Reed’s death.”

“Have you formed any opinion as to who that person was?” the coroner asked.

“Yes,” replied Thorndyke. “I have very little doubt that he was Reginald Reed.”

“But,” exclaimed the coroner, “we have heard in evidence that it was Mr. Arthur Gerrard who stood to gain the three thousand pounds!”

“Precisely,” said Thorndyke; and for a while he and the coroner looked at one another without speaking.

Suddenly the latter cast a searching look around the court. “Where is Mr. Gerrard?” he demanded.

“He left the court about ten minutes ago,” said Thorndyke; “and a police inspector left immediately afterwards. I had advised him not to lose sight of Mr. Gerrard.”

“Then I take it that you suspect Gerrard of being in collusion with Reed?”

“I suspect that Arthur Gerrard and Reginald Reed are one and the same person.”

As Thorndyke made this statement, a murmur of astonishment arose from the jurymen and the spectators. The coroner, after a few moments’ puzzled reflection, remarked: “You are not forgetting that Reed’s caretaker was present while Gerrard was giving his evidence?” Then, turning to the caretaker, he asked: “What do you say? Was that Mr. Reed who gave evidence under the name of Gerrard?”

The caretaker, who had evidently been thinking furiously, was by no means confident. “I should say not,” he replied, “unless he was made up a good deal. He was certainly about the same height and build and colour; but he had a moustache, whereas Mr. Reed was clean-shaved; he had a mole on his face, which Mr. Reed hadn’t; he had bushy eyebrows, whereas Mr. Reed had hardly any eyebrows to speak of; and he wore spectacles, which Mr. Reed didn’t, and he spoke like an Irishman, whereas Mr. Reed was English. Still it is possible—”

Before he could finish, the door rattled to a heavy concussion. Then it flew open, and Mr. Gerrard staggered into the room, thrust forward by the police inspector. His appearance was marvellously changed, for he had lost his spectacles, and one of his eyebrows had disappeared, as had also the mole and a portion of the built-up moustache. The caretaker started up with an exclamation, but at this moment Gerrard, with a violent effort, wrenched himself free. The inspector sprang forward to recapture him. But he was too late. The prisoner’s hand flew upwards; there was a ringing report; and Arthur Gerrard—or Reginald Reed—fell back across a bench with a trickle of blood on his temple and a pistol still clutched in his hand.

“And so,” said Stalker, when he called on us the next day for details, “it was a suicide after all. Very lucky, too, seeing that there was no provision in the policy for death by judicial hanging.”

THE CAT’S EYE (1923) [Part 1]

PREFACE

By one of those coincidences which are quite inadmissible in fiction, but of frequent occurrence in real life, an incident in the story of The Cat’s Eye has found an almost exact duplicate in an actual case which has been reported in the Press.

The real case was concerned with a most alarming misadventure which befell a distinguished police official of high rank. The fictitious incident occurs in Chapter Ten of this book; and the reading of that chapter will inevitably convey the impression that I have appropriated the real case and incorporated it in my story; a proceeding that the reader might properly consider to be in questionable taste.

It seems, therefore, desirable to explain that Chapter Ten was written some months before the real tragedy occurred. Indeed, by that time, the book was so nearly completed that it was impracticable to eliminate the incident, which was an integral part of the plot.

The coincidence is to be regretted; but worse things might easily have happened. But for the circumstance that I had to lay this book aside to complete some other work, The Cat’s Eye would have been in print when the crime was committed; and it might then have been difficult for any one—even for the author—to believe that the fictitious crime had not furnished the suggestion for the real one.

—R.A.F.

Gravesend,

19th June 1923.

CHAPTER ONE

In the Midst of Life

I am not a superstitious man. Indeed superstition, which is inseparably bound up with ignorance or disregard of evidence, would ill accord with the silken gown of a King’s Counsel. And still less am I tainted with that particular form of superstition in which the fetishism of barbarous and primitive man is incongruously revived in a population of, at least nominally, educated persons, by the use of charms, amulets, mascots and the like.

Had it been otherwise; had I been the subject of this curious atavistic tendency, I should surely have been led to believe that from the simple gem whose name I have used to give a title to this chronicle, some subtle influence exhaled whereby the whole course of my life was directed into new channels. But I do not believe anything of the kind; and therefore, though it did actually happen that the appearance of the Cat’s Eye was coincident with a radical change in the course and manner of my life, and even, as it seemed, with my very personality; and though with the Cat’s Eye the unfolding of the new life seemed constantly associated; still I would have it understood that I use the name merely as a label to docket together a succession of events that form a consistent and natural group.

The particular train of events with which this history deals began on a certain evening near the end of the long vacation. It was a cloudy evening, I remember, and very dark, for it was past eight o’clock and the days were drawing in rapidly. I was returning across Hampstead Heath towards my lodgings in the village, and was crossing the broken, gorse-covered and wooded hollow to the west of the Spaniards Road, when I heard the footsteps of someone running, and running swiftly, as I could judge by the rapid rhythm of the footfalls and the sound of scattering gravel. I halted to listen, noting that the rhythm of the footsteps was slightly irregular, like the ticking of an ill-adjusted clock; and even as I halted, I saw the runner. But only for a moment, and then but dimly. The vague shape of a man came out of the gloom, passed swiftly across my field of vision, and was gone. I could not see what he was like. The dim shape appeared and vanished into the darkness, leaving me standing motionless, listening with vague suspicion to the now faint footfalls and wondering what I ought to do.

Suddenly the silence was rent by a piercing cry, the cry of a woman calling for help. And, strangely enough, it came from the opposite direction to that towards which the fugitive was running. In an instant I turned and raced across the rugged hollow towards the spot from whence the sound seemed to come, and as I scrambled up a gravelly hillock I saw, faintly silhouetted on the murky skyline of some rising ground ahead, the figures of a man and a woman struggling together; and I had just noted that the man seemed to be trying to escape when I saw him deal the woman a blow, on which she uttered a shriek and fell, while the man, having wrenched himself free, darted down the farther slope and vanished into the encompassing darkness.

When I reached the woman she was sitting up with her right hand pressed to her side, and as I approached she called out sharply:

“Follow him! Follow that man! Never mind me!”

I stood for a moment irresolute, for on the hand that was pressed to her side I had noticed a smear of blood. But as I hesitated, she repeated: “Follow him! Don’t let him escape! He has just committed a dreadful murder!”

On this I ran down the slope in the direction that the man had taken and stumbled on over the rugged, gravelly hillocks and hollows, among the furze bushes and the birches and other small trees. But it was a hopeless pursuit. The man had vanished utterly, and from the dark heath not a sound came to give a hint as to the direction in which he had gone. There was no definite path, nor was it likely that he would have followed one; and as I ran forward, tripping over roots and sandy hummocks, the futility of the pursuit became every moment more obvious, while I felt a growing uneasiness as to the condition of the woman I had left sitting on the ground and apparently bleeding from a wound. At length I gave up the chase and began to retrace my steps, now full of anxiety lest I should be unable to find the spot where I had left her, and speculating on the possibility that the victim of the murder of which she had spoken might yet be alive and in urgent need of help.

I returned as quickly as I could, watching the direction anxiously and trying vainly to pick up landmarks. But the uneven, gorse-covered ground was a mere formless expanse intersected in all directions by indistinct tracks, confused by the numbers of birch-trees and stunted oaks, and shut in on all sides by a wall of darkness. Presently I halted with a despairing conviction that I had lost my way hopelessly, and at that moment I discerned dimly through the gloom the shape of a piece of rising ground lying away to the right. Instantly I hurried towards it, and as I climbed the slope, I thought I recognised it as the place from which I had started. A moment later, the identity of the place was confirmed beyond all doubt, for I perceived lying on the ground a shawl or scarf which I now remembered to have seen lying near the woman as she sat with her hand pressed to her side, urging me to follow her assailant.

But the woman herself had disappeared. I picked up the shawl, and throwing it over my arm, stood for a few moments, peering about me and listening intently. Not a sound could I distinguish, however, nor could I perceive any trace of the vanished woman. Then I noticed, a few yards away, a defined path leading towards a patch of deeper darkness that looked like a copse or plantation, and following this, I presently came upon her, standing by a fence and clinging to it for support.

“The man has got away,” said I. “There is no sign of him. But what about you? Are you hurt much?”

“I don’t think so,” she answered faintly. “The wretch tried to stab me, but I don’t think—” Here her voice faded away, as she fell forward against the fence and seemed about to collapse. I caught her, and lifting her bodily, carried her along the path, which appeared to lead to a house. Presently I came to an open gate, and entering the enclosed grounds, saw before me an old-fashioned house, the door of which stood ajar, showing a faint light from within. As I approached the door, a telephone bell rang and a woman’s voice, harsh and terrified, smote my ear:

“Are you there? This is Rowan Lodge. Send to the police immediately! Mr. Drayton has been robbed and murdered! Yes, Mr. Drayton. He is lying dead in his room. I am his housekeeper. Send the police and a doctor!”

At this moment I pushed open the door and entered; and at my appearance, with the insensible woman in my arms, the housekeeper shrieked aloud, and dropping the receiver, started back with a gesture of wild terror.

“My God!” she exclaimed, “What is this? Not another!”

“I hope not,” I replied, not, however, without misgivings. “This lady tried to hold the man as he was escaping and the villain stabbed her. Where can I lay her down?”

The whimpering housekeeper flung open a door, and snatching a matchbox from the hall table, struck a match and preceded me into a room where, by the light of the match that flickered in her shaking hand, I made out a sofa and laid my burden on it, rolling up the shawl and placing it under her head. Then the housekeeper lit the gas and came and stood by the sofa, wringing her hands and gazing down with horrified pity at the corpse-like figure.

“Poor dear!” she sobbed. “Such a pretty creature, too, and quite a lady! God help us! What can we do for her? She may be bleeding to death!”

The same thought was in my mind, and the same question, but as I answered that we could do nothing until the doctor arrived, the woman—or rather girl, for she was not more than twenty-six—opened her eyes and asked in a faint voice: “Is Mr. Drayton dead?”

The housekeeper sobbed an indistinct affirmative and then added:

“But try not to think about it, my dear. Just keep yourself quite quiet until the doctor comes.”

“Are you sure he is dead?” I asked in a low voice.

“I wish I were not,” she sobbed. Then, with an earnest look at the young lady—who seemed now to be reviving somewhat—she added:

“Come with me and see; and do you lie quite still until I come back, my dear.”

With this she led me out of the room, and turning from the hall into a short corridor, passed quickly along it and stopped at a door. “He is in there,” she said in a shaky voice that was half a sob. She opened the door softly, peered in, and then, with a shuddering cry, turned and ran back to the room that we had just left.

When she had gone I entered the room half-reluctantly, for the atmosphere of tragedy and horror was affecting me most profoundly. It was a smallish room, almost unfurnished save for a range of cabinets such as insect collectors use; and opposite one of these a man lay motionless on the floor, looking, with his set, marble-white face and fixed, staring eyes, like some horrible waxwork figure. I stooped over him to see if there were any sign of life. But even to a layman’s eye the fixity, the utter immobility was unmistakable. The man was dead beyond all doubt. I listened with my ear at his mouth and laid my finger on the chilly wrist. But the first glance had told me all. The man was dead.

As I stood up, still with my eyes riveted on the face, set in that ghastly stare, I became conscious of a certain dim sense of recognition. It was a strong, resolute face, and even in death, the fixed expression spoke rather of anger than of fear. Where had I seen that face? And then in a flash I recalled the name that the housekeeper had called through the telephone—Mr. Drayton. Of course. This was the brother of my neighbour in the Temple, Sir Lawrence Drayton, the famous Chancery lawyer. He had spoken to me of a brother who lived at Hampstead, and there could be no doubt that this was he. The likeness was unmistakable.

But, as I realised this, I realised also the certainty that this crime would become my professional concern. Sir Lawrence would undoubtedly put the case in the hands of my friend John Thorndyke—the highest medico-legal authority and the greatest criminal lawyer of our time—and my association with Thorndyke would make me a party to the investigation. And that being so, it behoved me to gather what data I could before the police arrived and took possession.

The mechanism of the crime was obvious enough, though there were one or two mysterious features. Of the cabinet opposite which the body lay, one drawer was pulled out, and its loose glass cover had been removed and lay shattered on the floor beside the corpse. The contents of this drawer explained the motive of the crime, for they consisted of specimens of jewellery, all more or less antique, and many of them quite simple and rustic in character, but still jewels. A number had evidently been taken, to judge by the empty trays, but the greater part of the contents of the drawer remained intact.

The rifled drawer was the second from the top. Having turned up the gas and lit a second burner, I drew out the top drawer. The contents of this were untouched, though the drawer appeared to have been opened, for the cover-glass was marked by a number of rather conspicuous fingerprints. Of course these were not necessarily the prints of the robber’s fingers, but they probably were, for their extreme distinctness suggested a dirty and sweaty hand such as would naturally appertain to a professional thief in a state of some bodily fear. Moreover the reason why this drawer should have been passed over was quite obvious. Its contents were of no intrinsic value, consisting chiefly of Buckinghamshire lace bobbins with carved inscriptions and similar simple objects.

I next drew out the third drawer, which I found quite untouched, and the absence of any fingerprints on the cover-glass confirmed the probable identity of those on the glass of the top drawer. By way of further settling this question, I picked up the fragments of the broken glass and looked them over carefully; and when I found several of them marked with similar distinct fingerprints, the probability that they were those of the murderer became so great as nearly to amount to certainty.

I did not suppose that these fingerprints would be of much interest to Thorndyke. They were rather the concern of the police and the Habitual Criminals Registry. But still I knew that if he had been in my place he would have secured specimens, on the chance of their being of use hereafter, and I could do no less than take the opportunity that offered. Looking over the broken fragments again, I selected two pieces, each about four inches square, both of which bore several fingerprints. I placed them carefully face to face in a large envelope from my pocket, having first wrapped their corners in paper to prevent the surfaces from touching.

I had just bestowed the envelope in my letter-case and slipped the latter into my pocket when I heard a man’s voice in the hall. I opened the door, and walking along the corridor, found a police inspector and a sergeant in earnest conversation with the housekeeper, while an elderly man, whom I judged to be the doctor, stood behind, listening attentively.

“Well,” said the inspector “we’d better see to the lady. Will you have a look at her, doctor, and when you’ve attended to her, perhaps you will let us know whether she is in a fit state to answer questions. But you might just take a look at the body first.” Here he observed me and inquired: “Let me see, who is this gentleman?”

I explained briefly my connection with the case as we walked down the corridor, and the inspector made no comment at the moment. We all entered the room, and the doctor stooped over the body and made a rapid inspection.

“Yes,” he said, rising and shaking his head, “there’s no doubt that he is dead, poor fellow. A shocking affair. But I had better go and see to this poor lady before I make any detailed examination.”

With this he bustled away, and the inspector and the sergeant knelt down beside the corpse but refrained from touching it.

“Knife wound, apparently,” said the inspector, nodding gloomily at a small pool of blood that appeared between the outstretched right arm and the side. “Seems to have been a left-handed man, too, unless he struck from behind, which he pretty evidently did not.” He stood up, and once more looking at me, somewhat inquisitively, said: “I had better have your name and address, sir.”

“My name is Anstey—Robert Anstey, KC, and my address is 8A Kings Bench Walk, Inner Temple.”

“Oh, I know you, sir,” said the inspector with a sudden change of manner. “You are Dr. Thorndyke’s leading counsel. Well, well. What an odd thing that you should happen to come upon this affair by mere chance. It’s quite in your own line.”

“I don’t know about that,” said I. “It looks to me rather more in yours. If they have got these fingerprints in the files at Scotland Yard you won’t have much trouble in finding your man or getting a conviction.”

As I spoke, I drew his attention to the fingerprints on the broken glass, saying nothing, however, about those on the upper drawer.

The two officers examined the incriminating marks with deep interest, and the inspector proceeded carefully and skilfully to pack several of the fragments for subsequent examination, remarking, as he laid them tenderly on the top of a cabinet: “This looks like a regular windfall, but it’s almost too good to be true. The professional crook, nowadays, knows too much to go dabbing his trade-marks about in this fashion. These prints and the knife rather suggest a casual or amateur of some kind. The fellow not only didn’t wear gloves, he didn’t even trouble to wipe his hands. And they wanted wiping pretty badly. Are all these cabinets full of jewellery?”

“I really don’t know what they contain, but they are pretty insecure if their contents are valuable.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “A single locked batten to each cabinet. One wrench of a jemmy and the whole cabinet is open. Well, we’d better have a few words with the housekeeper before we go over the room in detail. And she won’t want to talk to us in here.”

With this he led the way back to the hall, and I could not but admire the diplomatic way in which he managed to get me away from the scene of his intended investigation.

As we entered the hall, we met the doctor, who was repacking his emergency bag at the door of the room.

“I think,” said he, “my patient is well enough to give you a few necessary particulars. But don’t tire her with needless questions.”

“She is not seriously hurt, then?” said I, with considerable relief.

“No. But she has had a mighty narrow escape. The brute must have aimed badly, for he struck viciously enough, but the point of the knife glanced off a rib and came out farther back, just transfixing a fold of skin and muscle. It is a nasty wound, but quite superficial and not at all dangerous.”

“Well, I’m glad it’s no worse than that,” said the inspector, and with this he pushed open the door of the room and we all entered, though I noticed that the sergeant regarded me with a somewhat dubious eye. And now, for the first time, I observed the injured lady with some attention, which I was able to do at my leisure while the examination was proceeding. And a very remarkable-looking girl she was. Whether she would have been considered beautiful by the majority of persons I cannot say; she certainly appeared so to me. But I have always felt a great admiration of the pictures of Burne-Jones and of the peculiar type of womanhood that he loved to paint; and this girl, with her soft aureole of reddish-gold hair, her earnest grey eyes, her clear, blonde skin—now pale as marble—the characteristic mouth and cast of features, might have been the model whose presentment gave those pictures, to me, their peculiar charm. She seemed not of the common, everyday world, but like some visitor from the regions of legend and romance. And the distinction of her appearance was supported by her speech—by a singularly sweet voice, an accent of notable refinement, and a manner at once gentle, grave, and dignified.

“Do you feel able to tell us what you know of this terrible affair, Madam?” the inspector asked.

“Oh yes,” she replied. “I am quite recovered now.”

“Was Mr. Drayton a friend of yours?”

“No. I never met him until this evening. But perhaps I had better tell you how I came to be here and exactly what happened.”

“Yes,” the inspector agreed, “that will be the shortest way.”

“Mr. Drayton,” she began, “was, as you probably know, the owner of a collection of what he called ‘inscribed objects’—jewels, ornaments, and small personal effects bearing inscriptions connecting them with some person or event or period. I saw a description of the collection in the Connoisseur a short time ago, and as I am greatly interested in inscribed jewels, I wrote to Mr. Drayton asking if I could be allowed to see the collection; and I asked, since I am occupied all day, if he could make it convenient to show me the collection one evening. I also asked him some questions about the specimens of jewellery. In reply he wrote me a most kind letter—I have it in my pocket if you would like to see it—answering my questions and not only inviting me most cordially to come and look at his treasures, but offering to meet me at the station and show me the way to the house. Of course I accepted his very kind offer and gave him a few particulars of my appearance so that he should be able to identify me, and this evening he met me at the station and we walked up here together. There was no one in the house when we arrived—at least he thought there was not, for he mentioned to me that his housekeeper had gone out for an hour or so. He let himself in with a key and showed me into this room. Then he went away, leaving the door ajar. I heard him walk down the corridor and I heard a door open. Almost at the same moment, he called out loudly and angrily. Then I heard the report of a pistol, followed immediately by a heavy fall.”

“A pistol!” exclaimed the inspector “I thought it was a knife wound. But I mustn’t interrupt you.”

“When I heard the report I ran out into the hall and down the corridor. As I went, I heard a sound as of a scuffle, and when I reached the door of the museum, which was wide open, I saw Mr. Drayton lying on the floor, quite still, and a man climbing out of the window. I ran to the window to try to stop him, but before I could get there he was gone. I waited an instant to look at Mr. Drayton, and noticed that he seemed to be already dead and that the room was full of the reek from the pistol, then I ran back to the hall and out through the garden and along the fence to where I supposed the window to be. But for a few moments I could not see any one. Then, suddenly, a man sprang over the fence and dropped quite near me, and before he could recover his balance, I had run to him and seized him by both wrists. He struggled violently, though he did not seem very strong, but he dragged me quite a long way before he got free.”

“Did he say anything to you?” the inspector asked.

“Yes. He used most horrible language, and more than once he said: ‘Let go, you fool. The man who did it has got away.’”

“That might possibly be true,” I interposed, “for, just before I heard this lady call for help, a man passed me at a little distance, running so hard that I was half inclined to follow him.”

“Did you see what he was like?” the inspector demanded eagerly.

“No. I hardly saw him at all. He passed me at a distance of about thirty yards and was gone in an instant. Then I heard this lady call out and, of course, ran towards her.”

“Yes,” said the inspector, naturally. “But it’s a pity you didn’t see what the man was like.” Then, once more addressing the lady, he asked: “Did this man stab you without warning, Miss—”

“Blake is my name,” she replied. “No. He threatened several times to “knife” me if I didn’t let go. At last he managed to get his left hand free. I think he was holding something in it, but he must have dropped it, whatever it was, for the next moment I saw him draw a knife from under his coat. Then I got hold of his arm again, and that is probably the reason that he wounded me so slightly. But when he stabbed me I suddenly went quite faint and fell down, and then he escaped.”

“He held the knife in his left hand, then?” the inspector asked. “You are sure of that?”

“Quite sure. Of course it happened to be the free hand, but—”

“But if he had been a right-handed man he would probably have got his right hand free. Did you see which side he carried his knife?”

“Yes. He drew it from under his coat on the left side.”

“Can you give us any description of the man?”

“I am afraid I can’t. I am sure I should recognise him if I were to see him again, but I can’t describe him. It was all very confused, and, of course, it was very dark. I should say that he was a smallish man, rather slightly built. He wore a cloth cap and his hair seemed rather short but bushy. He had a thin face, with a very peculiar expression—but, of course, he was extremely excited and furious—and large, staring eyes, and a rather pronounced, curved nose.”

“Oh, come,” said the inspector approvingly, “that isn’t such a bad description. Can you say whether he was dark or fair, clean shaved or bearded?”

“He was clean shaved, and I should say decidedly dark.”

“And how was he dressed?”

“He wore a cloth cap, and, I think, a tweed suit. Oh, and he wore gloves—thin, smooth gloves—very thin kid, I should say—”

“Gloves!” exclaimed the inspector. “Then the fingerprints must be the other man’s. Are you sure he had gloves on both hands?”

“Yes, perfectly sure. I saw them and felt them.”

“Well,” said the inspector, “this is a facer. It looks as if the other man had really done the job while this fellow kept watch outside. It’s a mysterious affair altogether. There’s the extraordinary time they chose to break into the house. Eight o’clock in the evening. It would almost seem as if they had known about Mr. Drayton’s movements.”

“They must have done,” said the housekeeper. “Mr. Drayton went out regularly every evening a little after seven. He went down to the village to play chess at the club, and he usually came back between half-past nine and ten. And I generally sat and worked in the kitchen on the other side of the house from the museum.”

“And did he take no sort of precautions against robbery?”

“He used to lock the museum when he went out. That was all. He was not at all a nervous man, and he used to say that there was no danger of robbery because the things in the museum were not the kind of things that burglars go for. They wouldn’t be of any value to melt or sell.”

“We must just look over the museum presently and see what the collection consists of,” said the inspector. “And we must see how they got in and what they have taken. I suppose there is a catalogue?”

“No, there isn’t,” replied the housekeeper. “I did suggest to Mr. Drayton that he ought to draw up a list of the things, but he said it was not a public collection, and as he knew all the specimens himself, there was no need to number them or keep a catalogue.”

“That is unfortunate,” said the inspector. “We shan’t be able to find out what is missing or circulate any descriptions unless you can remember what was in the cabinets. By the way, did Mr. Drayton ever show his collection to visitors other than his personal friends?”

“Occasionally. After the Connoisseur article that Miss Blake was speaking of, two or three strangers wrote to Mr. Drayton asking to be allowed to see the jewellery, and he invited them to come and showed them everything.”

“Did Mr. Drayton keep a visitors’ book, or record of any kind?”

“No. I don’t remember any of the visitors, excepting a Mr. Halliburton, who wrote from the Baltic Hotel in the Marylebone Road. I remember him because Mr. Drayton was so annoyed about him. He put himself to great inconvenience to meet Mr. Halliburton and show him the jewellery that he had asked to see, and then, he told me, when he came, it was quite obvious that he didn’t know anything at all about jewellery, either ancient or modern. He must have come just from idle curiosity.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” said the inspector. “Looks a bit suspicious. We shall have to make some inquiries at the Baltic. And now we had better go and have a look at the museum, and perhaps, doctor, you would like to make a preliminary examination of the body before it is moved.”

On this we all rose, and the inspector was just moving towards the hall when there came a sharp sound of knocking at the outer door, followed by a loud peal of the bell.

CHAPTER TWO

Sir Lawrence Declares a Vendetta

At the first stroke of the knocker we all stood stock still, and so remained until the harsh jangling of the bell gradually died away. There was nothing abnormal in either sound, but I suppose we were all somewhat overstrung, for there seemed in the clamorous summons, which shattered the silence so abruptly, something ominous and threatening. Especially did this appear in the case of the housekeeper, who threw up her hands and whimpered audibly.

“Dear Lord!” she ejaculated. “It is Sir Lawrence—his brother! I know his knock. Who is to tell him?”

As no one answered, she crept reluctantly across the room, murmuring and shaking her head, and went out into the hall. I heard the door open and caught the sound of voices, though not very distinctly. Then the housekeeper re-entered the room quickly, and a man who was following her said in a brisk, somewhat bantering tone:

“You are very mysterious, Mrs. Benham.” The next moment the speaker came into view; and instantly he stopped dead and stood staring into the room with a frown of stern surprise.

“What the devil is this?” he demanded, glaring first at the two officers and then at me. “What is going on, Anstey?”

For a few moments I was tongue-tied. But an appealing glance from the housekeeper seemed to put the duty on me.

“A dreadful thing has happened, Drayton,” I replied. “The house has been broken into and your brother has been killed.”

Sir Lawrence turned deathly pale and his face set hard and rigid, until it seemed the very counterpart of that white, set face that I had looked on but a few minutes age. For a while he stared at me frowningly, neither moving nor uttering a word. Then he asked gruffly: “Where is he?”

“He is lying where he fell, in the museum,” I replied.

On this he turned abruptly and walked out of the room. I heard him pass quickly down the corridor and then I heard the museum door shut. We all looked at one another uncomfortably, but no one spoke. The housekeeper sobbed almost inaudibly and now and again uttered a low moan. Miss Blake wept silently, and the two officers and the doctor stood looking gloomily at the floor.

Presently Sir Lawrence came back. He was still very pale. But though his eyes were red, and indeed were still humid, there was no softness of grief in his face. With its clenched jaw and frowning brows, it was grim and stern and inexorable as Fate.

“Tell me,” he said, in a quiet voice, looking from me to the inspector, “exactly how this happened.”

“I don’t think any one knows yet,” I replied. “This lady, Miss Blake, is the only person who saw the murderer. She tried to detain him and held on to him until he stabbed her.”

“Stabbed her!” he exclaimed, casting a glance of intense apprehension at the recumbent figure on the sofa and stepping softly across the room.

“I am not really hurt,” Miss Blake hastened to assure him. “It is only quite a trifling wound.”

He bent over her with a strange softening of the grim face, touching her hand with his and tenderly adjusting the rug that the housekeeper had spread over her.

“I pray to God that it is as you say,” he replied. Then, turning to me, he asked: “Has this brave young lady been properly attended to?”

“Yes,” I answered. “The doctor here—Dr—”

“Nichols,” said the medicus. “I have examined the wound thoroughly and dressed it, and I think I can assure you that no danger is to be apprehended from it. But, having regard to the shock she has sustained, I think she ought to be got home as soon as possible.”

“Yes,” Sir Lawrence agreed, “and if she is fit to be moved, I will convey her to her home. My car is waiting in the road. And I will ask you. Anstey, to come with me, if you can.”

Of course I assented, and he continued, addressing the inspector:

“When I have taken this lady home I shall go straight to Dr Thorndyke and ask him to assist the police in investigating this crime. Probably he will return here with me at once, and I will ask you to see that nothing—not even the body—is disturbed until he has made his inspection.”

At this the officer looked a little dubious, but he answered courteously enough: “So far as I am concerned. Sir Lawrence, your wishes shall certainly be attended to. But I notified Scotland Yard before I came on here, and this case will probably be dealt with by the Criminal Investigation Department, and, of course, I can enter into no undertakings on their behalf.”

“No,” Sir Lawrence rejoined, “of course you can’t. I will deal with the Scotland Yard people myself. And now we had better start. Is Miss Blake able to walk to the car, Doctor? It is only a few yards to the road.”

“I am quite able to walk,” said Miss Blake; and as Dr Nichols assented, we assisted her to rise, and Sir Lawrence carefully wrapped her in the rug that Mrs. Benham had thrown over her. Then I picked up the shawl, and tucking it under my arm, followed her as she walked slowly out supported by Sir Lawrence.

At the garden gate we turned to the left, and passing along the path, came very shortly to a road on which two cars were standing, a large closed car, which I recognised as Sir Lawrence’s, and a smaller one, presumably Dr Nichols.’ Into the former Miss Blake was assisted, and when the carriage rug had been wrapped around her, I entered and took the opposite seat.

“What address shall I tell the driver, Miss Blake?” Sir Lawrence asked.

“Sixty-three Jacob Street, Hampstead Road,” she replied; and then, as neither the driver nor either of us could locate the street, she added: “It is two or three turnings past Mornington Crescent on the same side of the road.”

Having given this direction to the driver, Sir Lawrence entered and took the vacant seat and the car moved off smoothly, silently, and with unperceived swiftness.

During the journey hardly a word was spoken. The darkness of the heath gave place to the passing lights of the streets, the rural quiet to the clamour of traffic. In a few minutes, as it seemed, we were at the wide crossing by the Mother Red-Cap, and in a few more were turning into a narrow, dingy, and rather sordid by-street. Up this the car travelled slowly as the driver threw the light of a powerful lamp on the shabby doors, and at length drew up opposite a wide, wooden gate on which the number sixty-three was exhibited in large brass figures. I got out of the car and approached the gate in no little surprise, for its appearance and the paved truckway that led through it suggested the entrance to a factory or builders yard. However, there was no doubt that it was the right house, for the evidence of the number was confirmed by a small brass plate at the side, legibly inscribed “Miss Blake” and surmounted by a bell-pull. At the latter I gave a vigorous tug and was immediately aware of the far-away jangling of a large bell, which sounded as if it were ringing in an open yard.

In a few moments I detected quick footsteps which seemed to be approaching along a paved passage; then a wicket in the gate opened and a boy of about twelve looked out.

“Whom did you want, please?” he asked in a pleasant, refined voice and with a courteous, self-possessed manner which “placed” him instantly in a social sense. Before I had time to reply, he had looked past me and observed Miss Blake, who, having been helped out of the car, was now approaching the gate; on which he sprang through the wicket and ran to meet her.

“You needn’t be alarmed, Percy,” she said in a cheerful voice. “I have had a little accident and these gentlemen have very kindly brought me home. But it is nothing to worry about.”

“You look awfully white and tired, Winnie,” he replied; and then, addressing me, he asked: “Is my sister hurt much, sir?”

“No,” I answered. “The doctor who attended to her thought that she would soon be quite well again, and I hope she will. Is there anything that we can do for you, Miss Blake?”

“Thank you, no,” she replied. “My brother and a friend will look after me now, but I can’t thank you enough for all your kindness.”

“It is I,” said Sir Lawrence, “who am in your debt—deeply in your debt. And I do pray that you may suffer no ill consequences from your heroism. But we mustn’t keep you standing here. Goodbye, dear Miss Blake, and God bless you.”

He shook her hand warmly and her brother’s with old-fashioned courtesy. I handed the boy the folded shawl, and having shaken hands with both, followed my friend to the car.

“Do you think Thorndyke will be at home?” he asked as the car turned round and returned to the Hampstead Road.

“I expect so,” I replied. “But I don’t suppose there will be very much for him to do. There were plenty of fingerprints in evidence. I should think the police will be able to trace the man without difficulty.”

“Police be damned!” he retorted gruffly. “I want Thorndyke. And as to fingerprints, weren’t you the leading counsel in that Hornby case?”

“Yes, but that was exceptional. You can’t assume—”

“That case,” he interrupted, “knocked the bottom out of fingerprint evidence. And these fingerprints may not be on the files at the registry, and if they are not, the police have no clue to this man’s identity, and are not likely to get any.”

It seemed to me that he was hardly doing the police justice, but there was no use in discussing the matter, as we were, in fact, going to put the case in Thorndyke’s hands. I accordingly gave a colourless assent, and for the rest of the short journey we sat in silence, each busy with his own reflections.

At length the car drew up at the Inner Temple gate. Drayton sprang out, and signing to the driver to wait, passed through the wicket and strode swiftly down the narrow lane. As we came out at the end of Crown Office Row, he looked eagerly across at King’s Bench Walk.

“There’s a light in Thorndyke’s chambers,” he said, and quickening his pace almost to a run, he crossed the wide space, and plunging into the entry of number 5A, ascended the stairs two at a time. I followed, not without effort, and as I reached the landing the door opened in response to his peremptory knock and Thorndyke appeared in the opening.

“My dear Drayton!” he exclaimed, “you really ought not, at your age—” he stopped short, and looking anxiously at our friend, asked: “Is anything amiss?”

“Yes,” Drayton replied quietly, though breathlessly. “My brother Andrew—you remember him, I expect—has been murdered by some accursed housebreaker. He is lying on the floor of his room now. I told them to leave him there until you had seen him. Can you come?”

“I will come with you immediately,” was the reply; and as with grave face and quick but unhurried movements, he made the necessary preparations, I noticed that—characteristically—he asked no questions, but concentrated his attention on providing for all contingencies. He had laid a small, green, canvas-covered case upon the table, and opening it, was making a rapid inspection of the apparatus that it contained, when suddenly I bethought me of the pieces of glass in my pocket.

“Before we start,” said I, “I had better give you these. The fingerprints on them are almost certainly those of the murderer.” As I spoke, I carefully unwrapped the two pieces of glass and handed them to Thorndyke, who took them from me, holding them daintily by their edges, and scrutinising them closely.

“I am glad you brought these, Anstey,” he said. “They make us to some extent independent of the police. Do they know you have them?”

“No,” I replied. “I took possession of them before the police arrived.”

“Then, in that case,” said he “it will be as well to say nothing about them.” He held the pieces of glass up against the light, examining them closely and comparing them, first with the naked eye and then with the aid of a lens. Finally he lifted the microscope from its shelf, and placing it on the table, laid one of the pieces of glass on the stage and examined it through the instrument. His inspection occupied only a few seconds, then he rose, and turning to Drayton, who had been watching him eagerly, said: “It may be highly important for us to have these fingerprints with us. But we can’t produce the originals before the police, and besides, they are too valuable to carry about at the risk of spoiling them. But I could make rough, temporary photographs of them in five minutes if you will consent to the delay.”

“I am in your hands, Thorndyke,” replied Drayton. “Do whatever you think is necessary.”

“Then let us go to the laboratory at once,” said Thorndyke; and taking the two pieces of glass, he led the way across the landing and up the stairs to the upper floor on which the laboratory and workshop were situated. And as we went, I could not but appreciate Thorndyke’s tact and sympathy in taking Drayton up with him, so that the tedium of delay might be relieved by the sense of purposeful action.

The laboratory and its methods were characteristic of Thorndyke. Everything was ready and all procedure was prearranged. As we entered, the assistant, Polton, put down the work on which he was engaged, and at a word, took up the present task without either hesitation or hurry. While Thorndyke fixed the pieces of glass in the copying frame of the great standing camera, Polton arranged the light and the condensers and produced a dark-slide loaded with bromide paper. In less than a minute the exposure was made; in another three minutes the print had been developed, roughly fixed, rinsed, squeegeed, soaked in spirit, cut in two, and trimmed with scissors, and the damp but rapidly drying halves attached with drawing pins to a small hinged board specially designed for carrying wet prints in the pocket.

“Now,” said Thorndyke, slipping the folded board into his pocket and taking from a shelf a powerful electric inspection lamp, “I think we are ready to start. These few minutes have not been wasted.”

We returned to the lower room, where Thorndyke, having bestowed the lamp in the canvas-covered “research-case,” put on his hat and overcoat and took up the case, and we all set forth, walking quickly and in silence up Inner Temple Lane to the gate, and taking our seats in the waiting car when Drayton had given a few laconic instructions to the driver.

Up to this point Thorndyke had asked not a single question about the crime. Now, as the car started, he said to Drayton: “We had better be ready to begin the investigation as soon as we arrive. Could you give me a short account of what has happened?”

“Anstey knows more about it than I do,” was the reply. “He was there within a few minutes of the murder.”

The question being thus referred to me, I gave an account of all that I had seen and heard, to which Thorndyke listened with deep attention, interrupting me only once or twice to elucidate some point that was not quite clear.

“I understand,” said he when I had finished, “that there is no catalogue or record of the collection and no written description of the specimens?”

“No,” replied Drayton. “But I have looked over the cabinets a good many times, and taken the pieces out to examine them, so I think I shall be able to tell roughly what is missing, and give a working description of the pieces. And I could certainly identify most of them if they should be produced.”

“They are not very likely to be traced,” said Thorndyke. “It is highly improbable that the murderer will attempt to dispose of things stolen in such circumstances. Still, the possibility of identifying them may be of the greatest importance, for the folly of criminals is often beyond belief.”

CHAPTER THREE

Thorndyke Takes Up the Inquiry

The outer door of the house was shut, although the lower rooms were all lighted up, but at the first sound of the bell it was opened by a uniformed constable who regarded us stolidly and inquired as to our business. Before there was time to answer, however, a man whom I at once recognised as Inspector Badger of the Criminal Investigation Department came out into the hall and asked sharply: “Who is that, Martin?”

“It is Sir Lawrence Drayton, Dr Thorndyke, and Mr. Anstey,” I replied; and as the constable backed out of the way we all entered.

“This is a terrible catastrophe, Sir Lawrence,” said Badger “Dreadful, dreadful. If sincere sympathy would be any consolation—”

“It wouldn’t,” interrupted Drayton, “though I thank you all the same. The only thing that would console me—and that little enough—would be the sight of the ruffian who did it dangling at the end of a rope. The local officer told you, I suppose, that I was asking Dr Thorndyke to lend his valuable aid in investigating the crime?”

“Yes, Sir Lawrence,” replied Badger, “but I don’t know that I am in a position to authorise any unofficial—”

“Tut, tut, man!” Drayton broke in impatiently, “I am not asking you to authorise anything. I am the murdered man’s sole executor and his only brother. In the one capacity his entire estate is vested in me until it has been disposed of in accordance with the will; in the other capacity, the duty devolves on me of seeing that his murderer is brought to account. I give you every liberty and facility to examine these premises, but I am not going to surrender possession of them. Has any discovery been made?”

“No, sir.” Badger replied a little sulkily. “We have only been here a few minutes. I was taking some particulars from the housekeeper.”

“Possibly I can give you some information while Dr Thorndyke is making his inspection of my poor brother’s body,” said Drayton. “When he has finished and the body has been laid decently in his bedroom, I will come with you to the museum and we will see if anything is missing.”

Badger assented, with evident unwillingness, to this arrangement. He and Drayton entered the drawing-room, from which the inspector had just come, while I conducted Thorndyke to the museum.

The room was just as I had seen it last, excepting that the open drawer had been closed. The stark, rigid figure still lay on the floor, the set, white face still stared with stern fixity at the ceiling. As I looked, the events of the interval faded from my mind and all the horror of the sudden tragedy came back.

Just inside the door Thorndyke halted and slowly ran his eye round the room, taking in its arrangement, and no doubt fixing it in his memory. Presently he stepped over to where the body lay, and stood a while looking down on the dead man. Then he stopped and closely examined a spot on the right breast.

“Isn’t there more bleeding than is usual in the case of a bullet-wound?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied, “but that blood hasn’t come from the wound in front. There must be another at the back, possibly a wound of exit.” As he spoke, he stood up and again looked searchingly round the room, more especially at the side in which the door opened. Suddenly his glance became fixed and he strode quickly across to a cabinet that stood beside the door; and as I followed him, I perceived a ragged hole in the front of one of the drawers.

“Do you mean, Thorndyke,” I exclaimed, “that the bullet passed right through him?”

“That is what it looks like,” he replied. “But we shall be able to judge better when we get the drawer open—which we can’t do until Badger comes. But there is one thing that we had better do at once.” Stepping over to the table on which he had placed the research-case, he opened the latter, and taking from it a stick of blackboard chalk, went back to the body. “We must assume,” said he, “that he fell where he was standing when he was struck, and if that is so he would have been standing here.” He marked on the carpet two-rough outlines to indicate the position of the feet when the murdered man fell, and having put the chalk back in the case, continued: “The next thing is to verify the existence of the wound at the back. Will you help me to turn him over?”

We turned the body gently on to its right side, and immediately there came into view a large, blood-stained patch under the left shoulder, and at the centre of it a ragged burst in the fabric of the coat.

“That will do,” said Thorndyke. “It is an unmistakable exit wound. The bullet probably missed the ribs both in entering and emerging, and passed through the heart or the great vessels. The appearances suggest almost instantaneous death. The face is set, the eyes wide open, and both the hands tightly clenched in a cadaveric spasm. And the right hand seems to be grasping something, but we had better leave that until Badger has seen it.”

At this moment footsteps became audible coming along the corridor, and Badger entered the room accompanied by the local inspector. The two officers looked inquiringly at Thorndyke, who proceeded at once to give them a brief statement of the facts that he had observed.

“There can’t be much doubt,” said Badger when he had examined the hole in the drawer front, “that this was made by a spent bullet. But we may as well settle the question now. We shall want the keys in any case.”

He passed his hand over the dead man’s clothes, and having located the pocket which contained the keys, drew out a good-sized bunch, with which he went over to the cabinet. A few trials with likely-looking keys resulted in the discovery of the right one, and when this had been turned and the hinged batten swung back, all the drawers of the cabinet were released. The inspector pulled out the one with the damaged front and looked in inquisitively. Its contents consisted principally of latten and pewter spoons, now evidently disarranged and mingled with a litter of splinters of wood; and in the bowl of a spoon near the back of the drawer lay a distorted bullet, which Badger picked up and examined critically.

“Browning automatic, I should say,” was his comment, “and if so we ought to find the cartridge case somewhere on the floor. We must look for it presently, but we’d better get the body moved first, if you have finished your inspection, Doctor.”

“There is something grasped in the right hand,” said Thorndyke. “It looks like a wisp of hair. Perhaps we had better look at that before the body is moved, in case it should fall out.”

We returned to the body, and the two officers stooped and watched eagerly as Thorndyke, with some difficulty, opened the rigid hand sufficiently to draw from it a small tuft of hair.

“The spasm is very marked,” he observed as he scrutinised the hair and felt in his pocket for a lens; and when, with the aid of the latter, he had made a further examination, he continued: “The state of the root-bulbs shows that the hair was actually plucked out—which, of course, is what we should expect.”

“Can you form any opinion as to what sort of man he was?” Badger asked.

“No,” replied Thorndyke, “excepting that he was not a recently released convict. But the appearance of the hair agrees with Miss Blake’s description of the man who stabbed her. I understand that she described him as a having rather short but bushy hair. This hair is rather short, though we can’t say whether it was bushy or not. Perhaps more complete examination of it may tell us something further.”

“Possibly,” Badger agreed. “I will have it thoroughly examined, and get a report on it. Shall I take charge of it?” he added, holding out his hand.

“Yes, you had better,” replied Thorndyke, “but I will take a small sample for further examination, if you don’t mind.”

“There is no need for that,” protested Badger. “You can always have access to what we’ve got if you want to refer to it.”

“I know,” said Thorndyke, “and it is very good of you to offer. Still this will save time and trouble.” And without more ado he separated a third of the tuft and handed the remainder to the inspector, who wrapped it in a sheet of note-paper that he had taken from his pocket and sourly watched Thorndyke bestow his portion in a seed-envelope from his pocket-book, and after writing on it a brief description, return it to the latter receptacle.

“You were saying,” said Badger, “that this hair agrees with Miss Blake’s description. But it was suggested that it was the other man who really committed the murder. Isn’t that rather a contradiction?”

“I don’t think so,” replied Thorndyke. “The probabilities seem to me to point to the other man as the murderer.”

“But how can that be?” objected Badger. “You say that this hair agrees with Miss Blake’s description of the man. But this hair is obviously the hair of the murderer. And that man was left-handed and the wound is on the right breast, suggesting that the murderer held his pistol in his left hand.”

“Not at all,” said Thorndyke. “I submit that this hair is obviously not the hair of the murderer. Look at those chalk marks that I have made on the floor. They mark the spot on which the deceased was standing when the bullet struck him. Now go back to the cabinet and look at the chalk marks and see what is in a direct line with them.”

The inspector did so. “I see,” said he. “You mean the window.”

“Yes, it was open, since the robber evidently came in by it, and the sill is barely five feet from the ground. I suggest—but merely as a probability, since the bullet may have been deflected—that the other man was keeping guard outside, and that when he heard a noise from this room he looked in through the window and saw his confederate on the point of being captured by the deceased, that he then fired, and when he saw deceased fall, he made his escape. That would account for the man who was seen by Miss Blake making his appearance after the other man had gone. He may have had to extricate himself from the dead man’s grasp, and then he had to climb out of the window. But the position of the empty cartridge-case—if we find it—will settle the question. If the pistol was fired into the room through the window, the cartridge-case will be on the ground outside.”

He opened his research-case, and taking from it the electric lamp, walked slowly to the window, throwing the bright light on the floor as he went. The two officers followed, and all scrutinised the floor closely, but in vain. Then Thorndyke leaned out of the window and threw the light of his lamp on the ground outside, moving the bright beam slowly to and fro while the inspector craned forward eagerly. Suddenly Badger uttered an exclamation.

“There it is, Doctor! Don’t move the light. Keep it there while I go out and pick the case up.”

“One moment, Badger,” said Thorndyke. “We mustn’t be impetuous. There are some other things out there more important than the cartridge-case. I can see two distinct sets of footprints, and it is above all things necessary that they should not be confused by being trodden into. Let us get the body moved first. Then we can take some mats out and examine the footprints systematically and recover the cartridge-case at the same time. If we are careful we can leave the ground in such a condition that it will be possible to go over it again by daylight.”

The wisdom of this suggestion was obvious, and the inspector proceeded at once to act on it. The sergeant and the constable were sent for, and by them the body of the murdered man was carried, under the inspector’s supervision, to the bedroom above. Then a couple of large mats were procured from Mrs. Benham and we all issued from the front door into the garden. Here, however, a halt was called, and at Thorndyke’s suggestion, the party was separated into two, he and Badger to explore the grounds inside the fence, while the local inspector and the others endeavoured to follow the tracks outside.

I did not join either party, nor did Sir Lawrence. We both realised the futility of any attempt to trace the fugitives, and recognised that the suggestion was made by Thorndyke merely to get rid of the unwanted supernumeraries. Accordingly we took up a position outside the fence, which we could just look over, and watched the proceedings of Thorndyke and Inspector Badger, as they passed slowly along the side of the house, each with the light of his lantern thrown full on the ground.

They had gone but a few paces when they picked up on the soft, loamy path the fairly clear impressions of two pairs of feet going towards the back of the house. Both the investigators paused and stooped to examine them, and Badger remarked: “So they came in at the front gate-naturally, as it was the easiest way. But they must have been pretty sure that there was no one in the house to see them. And that suggests that they knew the ways of the household and that they had lurked about to watch Mr. Drayton and Mrs. Benham off the premises.”

“Is it possible to distinguish one man from the other?” Drayton asked.

“Yes, quite easily,” Badger replied. “One of them is a biggish man—close on six feet, I should say—while the other is quite a small man. That will be the one that Miss Blake saw.”

They followed the tracks to the back of the house, and as we followed on our side of the fence Thorndyke called out: “Be careful, Anstey, not to tread in the tracks where they came over the fence. We ought to get specially clear prints of their feet where they jumped down. Could you get a light?”

“I’ll go and get one of the acetylene lamps from the car,” said Drayton. “You stay where you are until I come back.”

He was but a short time absent, and when he returned he was provided with a powerful lamp and a couple of small mats. “I have brought these,” he explained “to lay on any particularly clear footprints to protect them from chance injury. We mustn’t lose the faintest shadow of a clue.”

With the aid of the brilliant light Drayton and I explored the ground at the foot of the fence. Suddenly Sir Lawrence exclaimed:

“Why, these look like a woman’s footprints!” and he pointed to a set of rather indistinct impressions running parallel to the fence.

“They will be Miss Blake’s,” said I. “She ran round this way. Yes, here is the place where the man came over. What extraordinarily clear impressions this ground takes. It shows the very brads in the heels.”

“Yes,” he agreed; “this is the Hampstead sand, you know; one of the finest foundry-sands in the country.”

He laid one of the mats carefully on the pair of footprints, and we continued our explorations towards the back of the house. Here we saw Thorndyke and the inspector, each kneeling on a mat, examining a confused mass of footprints on the ground between the museum window and the fence.

“Have you found the cartridge-case?” I asked.

“Yes,” replied Thorndyke. “Badger has it. It is a “Baby Browning.” And I think we have seen all there is to see here by this light. Can you see where the big man came down from the fence? He went over where I am throwing the light.”

We approached the spot cautiously, and at the place indicated perceived the very clear and deep impression of a large right foot with a much less distinct print of a left foot, both having the heels towards the fence; and a short distance in front of them the soft, loamy earth bore a clear impression of a left hand with the fingers spread out, and a fainter print of a right hand.

I reported these facts to Thorndyke, who at once decided to come over and examine the prints. Handing his lamp over a few paces farther along the fence, he climbed up and dropped lightly by my side, followed almost immediately by Inspector Badger.

“This,” said the inspector, gazing down at the foot and hand-prints, “bears out what we saw from the inside. He wasn’t any too active, this chappie. Probably fat—a big, heavy, awkward man. Had to pull the garden seat up to the fence to enable him to get over, though it was an easy fence to climb with those big cross-rails; and here, you see, he comes down all of a heap on his hands and knees. However, that doesn’t help us a great deal. He isn’t the only fat man in the world. We had better go indoors now and have a look at the room and see if we can find out what has been taken.”

We turned to retrace our steps towards the gate, pausing on our way to lift the mats and inspect the footprints of the smaller man; and as we went Drayton asked if anything of interest had been discovered.

“No,” replied Badger. “They got in without any difficulty by forcing back the catch of the window—unless the window was open already. It isn’t quite clear whether they both got in. The big man walked part of the way round the house and along the fence in both directions, and he pulled a garden seat up to the fence to help himself up. The small man came out of the window last, if they were both inside, and I expect it was he who dropped this—must have had it in his hand when he climbed out”—and here the inspector produced from his pocket a ring, set with a single round stone, which he handed to Sir Lawrence.

“Ah,” said the latter, “a posy-ring, one of the cat’s eye series. There were several of these and a set of moonstone rings in the same drawer.”

“You know the collection pretty well, then. Sir Lawrence?”

“Fairly well. I often used to look over the things with my poor brother. But, of course, I can’t remember all the specimens, though I think I can show you the drawer that this came from.”

By this time we had entered the house and were making our way to the museum. On entering the room, Drayton walked straight to the cabinet which I remembered to have seen open, and pulled out the second drawer from the top.

“This is the one,” said he. “They have taken out the glass top—I suppose those are the pieces of it on the floor.”

“Yes,” said Badger. “We found it open, and it seems to be the only drawer that has been tampered with.”

Drayton pulled out the top drawer, and having looked closely at the glass cover, remarked: “They have had this one open, too. There are distinct fingerprints on the glass; and they have had the cover off for there are finger-marks on the inside of the glass. I wonder why they did that.”

“I can’t imagine,” said Badger. “They don’t seem to have taken anything—there wasn’t anything worth taking, for that matter. But they could see that without lifting off the glass. However, it is all for the best. We’ll hand this glass cover to the Fingerprint Department and hope they will be able to spot the man that the fingers belong to.”

As he spoke, he made as if he would lift off the cover, but he was anticipated by Thorndyke, who carefully raised the glass by its leather tab, and taking it up by the edges, held it against the light and examined the fingerprints minutely both on the upper and under surfaces.

“The thumbs are on the upper surface,” he remarked, “and the fingers underneath; so the glass was lifted right out and held with both hands.”

He handed the glass to the inspector, who had been watching him uneasily, and now took the cover from him with evident relief; and as Badger proceeded to deposit it in a safe place, he pushed in the top drawer and returned to the consideration of the second.

“There are evidently several pieces missing from this drawer,” said he, “and it may be important to know what they are, though it is rather unlikely that the thieves will try to dispose of them. Can you tell us what they are, Drayton?”

“I can tell you roughly,” was the reply. “This drawer contained the collection of posy-rings, and most of them are there still, as you can see. The front row were rings set with moonstone and cat’s eye, and most of those are gone. Then there was a group of moonstone and cat’s eye ornaments, mostly brooches and earrings, and one pendant. Those have all disappeared. And there is another thing that was in this drawer that has apparently been taken; a locket. It was shaped like a book and had a Greek inscription on the front.”

“So far as you can see, Sir Lawrence,” said Badger, “has anything of value been taken—of real value, I mean?”

“Of negotiable value, you mean,” Drayton corrected. “No. Most of the things were of gold, though not all, but the stones were probably worth no more than a few shillings each. The value was principally in the associations and individual character of the pieces. All of them had inscriptions, and several of them had recorded histories. But that would be of no use to a thief.”

“Exactly,” said Badger. “That was what was in my mind. There is something rather amateurish about this robbery. It isn’t quite like the work of a regular hand. The time was foolish, and then all this shooting and stabbing is more like the work of some stray foreign crooks than of a regular tradesman; and as you say, the stuff wasn’t worth the risk—unless there’s something else of more value. Perhaps we had better go through the other cabinets.”

He produced the bunch of keys from his pocket and had just inserted one into the lock of the next cabinet when Drayton interposed.

“There is no need for that, Inspector. If the cabinets are locked and have not been broken open, their contents are intact; and I can tell you that those contents are of no considerable intrinsic value.”

With this he drew the key from the lock and dropped the bunch in his pocket, a proceeding whereat the inspector smiled sourly and remarked: “Then in that case, I think I have finished for the present. I’ll just pack up this glass cover and see if those others were able to follow the tracks of either of these men. And I’ll wish you gentlemen goodnight.”

Sir Lawrence accompanied him to the drawing-room, and as I learned later, provided the official party with refreshment, and when we were alone I turned to Thorndyke.

“I suppose we have finished, too?”

“Not quite,” he replied. “There are one or two little matters to be attended to, but we will wait until the police are clear of the premises. They will keep their own counsel and I propose to keep mine, unless I can give them a straight lead.” He opened his research-case and was thoughtfully looking over its contents when Drayton returned and announced that the police had departed.

“Is there anything more that you want to do, Thorndyke?” he asked.

“Yes,” was the reply. “For one thing, I should like to see if there are any more fingerprints.” As he spoke, he pulled out the drawers of the cabinet one after the other, and examined the glass covers. But apparently they had not been touched. At any rate, there were no marks on any of the glasses.

“They must have been disturbed soon after they got to work,” said Drayton “as they opened only two drawers.”

“Probably,” Thorndyke agreed, taking from his case a little glass-jar filled with a yellowish powder and fitted with two glass tubes and a rubber bulb. With this apparatus he blew a cloud of the fine powder over the woodwork of the rifled cabinet, and when a thin coating had settled on the polished surface, he tapped the wood gently with the handle of his pocket-knife. At each tap a portion of the coating of powder was jarred on the surface, and then there appeared several oval spots to which it still adhered. Then he gently blew away the rest of the powder, when the oval spots were revealed as fingerprints, standing out white and distinct against the dark wood. Thorndyke now produced from his pocket the hinged board, and opening it, compared the photographs with these new fingerprints, while Drayton and I looked over his shoulder.

“They are undoubtedly the same,” said I, a little surprised at the ease with which I identified these curious markings. “Absolutely the same—which is rather odd, seeing that there are the marks of only two digits of the left hand and four of the right. It almost looks as if those particular fingers had got soiled with some greasy material and that the other fingers were clean and had left no mark.”

“An admirable suggestion, Anstey,” said Thorndyke. “The same idea had occurred to me, for the prints of these particular fingers are certainly abnormally distinct. Let us see if we can get any confirmation.” He blew upon each of the fingerprints in turn until most of the powder was dislodged and the markings had become almost invisible. Then, taking my handkerchief, which was of soft silk, and rolling it into a ball, he began to wipe the woodwork with a circular motion, at first very lightly but gradually increasing the pressure until he was rubbing quite vigorously. The result seemed to justify my suggestion, for as the rubbing proceeded, I could see, by the light of Drayton’s lamp, thrown on at various angles, that the fingerprints seemed to have spread out into oval, glistening patches, having a lustre somewhat different from that of the polished wood.

Sir Lawrence looked on with keen interest, and as Thorndyke paused to examine the woodwork, he asked: “What is the exact purpose of this experiment?”

“The point is,” replied Thorndyke, “that whereas the fingerprint of the mathematical theorists is a mere abstraction of form devoid of any other properties, the actual or real fingerprint is a material thing which has physical and chemical properties, and these properties may have considerable evidential significance. These fingerprints, for instance, contain some substance other than the natural secretions of the skin. The questions then arise, What is that substance? How came it here? And is it usually associated with any particular kind of person or activity? The specimens that Anstey so judiciously captured may help us to answer the first question, and our native wits may enable us to answer the others. So we have some data for consideration. And that reminds me that there are some other data that we must secure.”

“What are they?” Drayton asked eagerly.

“There are those impressions in the sand outside the fence. I must have permanent records of them. Shall we go and do them now? I shall want a jug of water and a light.”

While Drayton went to fetch the water Thorndyke and I took our way out through the garden to the outside of the fence, he carrying his research-case, and I bearing Drayton’s lamp. At the spot where we had laid down the mat we halted, and Thorndyke, having set down his case, once more lifted the mat.

“They are small feet,” he remarked, glancing at the footprints before stooping to open the case. “A striking contrast to the other man’s.”

He took from his case a tin of plaster of Paris, and dipping up a small quantity in a spoon, proceeded very carefully to dust the footprints with the fine, white powder until they were covered with a thin, even coating. Then he produced a bottle of water fitted with a rubber ball-spray diffuser, and with this blew a copious spray of water over the footprints. As a result, the white powder gradually shrank until the footprints looked as if they had received a thin coat of whitewash.

“Why not fill the footprints up with liquid plaster?” asked Drayton, who came up at this moment carrying a large jug.

“It would probably disturb the sand,” was the reply, “and moreover, the water would soak in at once and leave the plaster a crumbling mass. But when this thin layer has set it will be possible to fill up and get a solid cast.”

He repeated the application of the spray once or twice, and then we went on to the place where the other man had come over. Here the same process was carried out, not only with the footprints but also with those of the hands. Then we went back to the first place, and when Thorndyke had gently touched the edge of the footprints and ascertained that the thin coating of plaster had set into a solid shell, he produced a small rubber basin, and having half filled it with water, added a quantity of plaster and stirred it until it assumed the consistency of cream; when he carefully poured it into the white-coated footprints until they were full and slightly overflowing.

“You see the advantage of this?” said Thorndyke as he cleaned out the basin and started to walk slowly back to the site of the second set of prints.

“I do, indeed,” replied Drayton, “and I am astonished that Badger did not take a permanent record. These casts will enable you to put the actual feet of the accused in evidence if need be.”

“Precisely; besides giving us the opportunity to study them at our leisure, and refer to them if any fresh evidence should become available.”

The second set of footprints and the impressions of the hands received similar treatment, and when they had been filled, Thorndyke proceeded to pack up his appliances.

“We ought to give the casts a good twenty minutes to set hard,” he said, “though it is the best plaster and quite fresh and has a little powdered alum mixed with it to accelerate setting and make the cast harder. But we mustn’t be impatient.”

“I am in no hurry,” said Drayton. “I shall stay here tonight—one couldn’t leave Mrs. Benham in the house all alone. The car can take you back to your chambers and drop Anstey at his lodgings. Tomorrow we must make some arrangements of a more permanent kind. But the great thing is to get on the track of these two villains. Nothing else seems to matter. There is my poor brother’s corpse, crying aloud to Heaven for justice, and I shall never rest until his murderers have paid their debt.”

“I sympathise with you most cordially, Drayton,” said Thorndyke, “and it is no mere verbal sympathy. I promise you that every resource at my disposal shall be called in to aid, that no stone shall be left unturned. It is not only the office of friendship; it is a public duty to ensure that an inexcusable crime of this kind shall be visited with the most complete retribution.”

“Thank you. Thorndyke,” Sir Lawrence said with gruff earnestness. And then after a short pause, he continued: “I suppose it is premature to ask you, but do you see any glimmer of hope? Is there anything to lay hold of? I can see for myself that it is a very difficult and obscure case.”

“It is,” Thorndyke agreed. “Of course the fingerprints may dispose of the whole difficulty, if they happen to be on the files at the Habitual Criminals Registry. Otherwise there is very little evidence. Still, there is some, and we may build up more by inference. I have seen more unpromising cases come to a successful issue.”

By this time the stipulated twenty minutes had expired, and we proceeded to the first set of footprints. The plaster, on being tested, was found to be quite firm and hard, and Thorndyke was able, with great care, to lift the two chalky-looking plates from their bed in the ground. And even in the rather unfavourable light of the lamp their appearance was somewhat startling, for, as Thorndyke turned them over, each cast presented the semblance of a white foot, surprisingly complete in detail so far as the sole was concerned.

But if the appearance of these casts was striking, much more so was that of the second set; for the latter included casts of the handprints, the aspect of which was positively uncanny, especially in the case of the deeper impression, the effect of which was that of a snowy hand with outspread, crooked, clutching fingers. And here again the fine loam had yielded an unexpected amount of detail. The creases and markings of the palm were all perfectly clear and distinct, and I even thought that I could perceive a trace of the ridges of the fingertips.

Before leaving the spot we carefully removed all traces of plaster, for it was certain that the footprints would be examined by daylight, and Thorndyke considered it better that the existence of these casts should be known only to ourselves. The footprints were left practically intact, and it was open to the police to make casts if they saw fit.

“I think,” said Thorndyke when we had re-entered the house and were inspecting the casts afresh as they lay on the table, “it would be a wise precaution to attach our signatures to each of them, in case it should be necessary at any time to put them in evidence. Their genuineness would then be attested beyond any possibility of dispute.”

To this Drayton and I agreed most emphatically, and accordingly each of us wrote his name, with the date, on the smooth back of each cast. Then the “records” were carefully packed and bestowed in the research-case, and Thorndyke and I shook our host’s hand and went forth to the car.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Lady of Shalott

The modern London suburb seems to have an inherent incapacity for attaining a decent old age. City streets and those of country towns contrive to gather from the passing years some quality of mellowness that does but add to their charm. But with suburbs it is otherwise. Whatever charm they have appertains to their garish youth and shares its ephemeral character. Cities and towns grow venerable with age, the suburb merely grows shabby.

The above profound reflections were occasioned by my approach to the vicinity of Jacob Street, Hampstead Road, and by a growing sense of the drab—not to say sordid—atmosphere that enveloped it, and its incongruity with the appearance and manner of the lady whose residence I was approaching. However, I consoled myself with the consideration that if “Honesty lives in a poor house, like your fair pearl in your foul oyster,” perhaps Beauty might make shift with no better lodging; and these cogitations having brought me to the factory-like gateway, I gave a brisk tug at the bell above the brass plate.

After a short interval the wicket was opened by my young acquaintance of the previous night, who greeted me with a sedate smile of recognition.

“Good afternoon,” I said, holding out my hand. “I have just called to learn how your sister is. I hope she is not much the worse for her rather terrifying experiences last night.”

“Thank you,” he replied with quaint politeness, “she seems to be all right today. But the doctor won’t let her do any work. He’s fixed her arm in a sling. But won’t you come in and see her, sir?”

I hesitated, dubious as to whether she would care to receive a stranger of her own class in these rather mean surroundings, but when he added: “She would like to see you, I am sure, sir,” my scruples gave way to my very definite inclination and I stepped through the wicket.

My young friend—who wore a blue linen smock—conducted me down a paved passage, the walls of which bore each a long shelf on which was a row of plaster busts and statuettes, into an open yard in which a small, elderly man was working with chisel and mallet on a somewhat ornate marble tombstone, amidst a sort of miniature Avebury of blocks and slabs of stone and marble. Across the yard rose a great barn-like building with one enormous window high up the wall, a great double door, and a small side door. Into the latter my conductor entered and held it open for me, and as I passed in, I found myself in total darkness. Only for a moment, however, for my young host, having shut the door, drew aside a heavy curtain and gave me a view of huge, bare hall with lofty, whitewashed walls, an open timber roof, and a plank floor relieved from absolute nakedness by one or two rugs. A couple of studio easels stood opposite the window, and in a corner I observed a spectral lay-figure shrouded in what looked like a sheet. At the farther end, by a large, open fireplace, Miss Blake sat in an easy-chair with a book in her hand. She looked up as I entered, and then rose and advanced to meet me, holding out her left hand.

“How kind of you, Mr. Anstey, to come and see me!” she exclaimed. “And how good it was of you to take such care of me last night!”

“Not at all,” I replied. “But I hope you are not very much the worse for your adventures. Are you suffering much pain?”

“I have no pain at all,” she replied with a smile, “and I don’t believe this sling is in the least necessary. But one must obey the doctor’s orders.”

“Yes,” interposed her brother, “and that is what the sling is for. To prevent you from getting into mischief, Winnie.”

“It prevents me from doing any work, if that is what you mean, Percy,” said she, “and I suppose the doctor is right in that.”

“I am sure he is,” said I. “Rest is most essential to enable the wound to heal quickly. What sort of night did you have?”

“I didn’t sleep much,” she replied. “It kept coming back to me, you know—that awful moment when I went into the museum and saw that poor man lying on the floor. It was a dreadful experience. So horribly sudden, too. One moment I saw him go away, full of life and energy, and the next I was looking on his corpse. Do you think those wretches will really escape?”

“It is difficult to say. The police have the fingerprints of one of them, and if that person is a regular criminal, they will be able to identify him.”

“Will they really?” she exclaimed. “It sounds very wonderful. How are they able to do it?”

“It is really quite simple. When a man is convicted of a crime, a complete set of his fingerprints is taken at the prison by pressing his fingers on an inked slab and putting them down on a sheet of paper—there is a special form for the purpose with a space for each finger. This form is deposited, with photographs of the prisoner, in one of the files of the Habitual Criminals Registry at Scotland Yard. Then, when a strange fingerprint turns up, it is compared with those in the files, and if one is found that is an exact facsimile, the name attached to it is the name of the man who is wanted.”

“But how are they ever able to find the facsimile in such a huge collection, for the numbers in the files must be enormous?”

“That also is more simple than it looks. The lines on fingertips form very definite patterns-spirals, or whorls, closed loops like the end grain of wood, open curves, or arches, and so on. Now each fingerprint is filed under its particular heading—whorl, loop, arch, etc.—and also in accordance with the particular finger that bears the pattern, so the inquiry is narrowed down to a comparatively small number from the start. Let us take an instance. Suppose we have found some fingerprints of which the left little finger has a spiral pattern and the ring finger adjoining has a closed loop. Then we look in the file which contains the spiral left little fingers and in the file of looped left ring fingers, and we glance through the lists of names. There will be certain names that will appear in both lists, and one of those will be the name of the man that we want. All that remains is to compare our prints with each of them in turn until we come to the one that is an exact facsimile. The name attached to that one is the name of our man. Of course, in practice, the process is more elaborate, but that is the principle.”

“It is wonderfully ingenious,” said Miss Blake, “and really simple, as you say, and it sounds as if it were perfectly infallible.”

“That is the claim that the police make. But, as you see, the utility of the system for the detection of crime is limited to the cases of those criminals whose fingerprints have been registered. That is what our chance depends on now. The man who murdered Mr. Drayton left prints of his fingers on the glass of the cabinet, and the police have taken the glass away to examine. If they find facsimiles of those fingerprints in the register, then they will know who murdered Mr. Drayton. But if those fingerprints are not in the register, they won’t help us at all. And as far as I know, there is no other clue to the identity of the murderer.”

Miss Blake appeared to reflect earnestly on what I had said, and in the ensuing silence I continued my somewhat furtive observation of the great studio and its occupants. Particularly did I notice a number of paintings, apparently executed in tempera on huge sheets of brown paper, pinned on the walls somewhat above the level of the eye; figure subjects of an allegorical character, strongly recalling the manner of Burne-Jones, and painted with something considerably beyond ordinary competence. And from the paintings my eye strayed to the painter—as I assumed and hoped her to be—and a very striking and picturesque figure she appeared, with her waxen complexion, delicately tinged with pink, her earnest grey eyes, a short, slightly retrousse nose, the soft mass of red-gold hair and the lissom form, actually full and plump though with the deceptive appearance of slimness that one notes in the figures of the artist whose style she followed. I noted with pleasure—not wholly aesthetic, I suspect—the graceful pose into which she seemed naturally to fall, and when my roving eye took in a “planchette” hanging on the wall and a crystal ball reposing on a black velvet cushion on a little altar-like table in a corner, I forbore to scoff inwardly as I should have done in other circumstances, for somehow the hint of occultism, even of superstition, seemed not out of character. She reminded me of the Lady of Shalott, and the whispered suggestion of Merlinesque magic gave a note of harmony that sounded pleasantly.

While we had been talking, her brother had been pursuing his own affairs with silent concentration, though I had noticed that he had paused to listen to my exposition on the subject of fingerprints. In the middle of the studio floor was a massive stone slab—a relic of some former sculptor tenant—and on this the boy was erecting, very methodically, a model of some sort of building with toy bricks of a kind that I had not seen before. I was watching him and noting the marked difference between him and his sister—for he was a somewhat dark lad with a strong, aquiline face—when Miss Blake spoke again.

“Did you find out what had been stolen?”

“Yes,” I answered, “approximately. There was nothing missing of any considerable value. Only a few pieces had been taken, and those were mostly simple jewels set with moonstones or cat’s eyes.”

“Cat’s eyes!” she exclaimed.

“Yes, a few posy-rings, some earrings, and. I think, one pendant.”

“Was the pendant stolen?”

“Yes, apparently. Sir Lawrence mentioned a cat’s-eye pendant as one of the things that he missed from the drawer. Does the pendant interest you specially?”

“Yes,” she answered thoughtfully, “it was this pendant that I went there to see. It was illustrated in the Connoisseur article, and I wrote to poor Mr. Drayton because I wanted to examine it. And so,” she added in a lower tone and with an expression of deep sadness, “the pendant became, through me, the cause of his death. But for it and me, he would not have gone to the house at that time.”

“It is impossible to say whether he would or not,” said I, and then, to change the subject, as this seemed to distress her, I continued: “there was another thing missing that was figured in the Connoisseur—a locket—”

“Of course!” she exclaimed. “How silly of me to forget it.” She rose hastily, and stepping over to an old walnut bureau that stood under the window, pulled out one of the little drawers and picked some small object out of it.

“There,” she said, holding out her hand, in which lay a small gold locket, “this is the one. I recognised it instantly. And now see if you can guess how it came into my possession.”

I was completely mystified, and said so, though I hazarded a guess that it had in some way caught in her clothing.

“Yes,” said she, “it was in my shawl. You remember I said that the man whom I was trying to hold had something in his hand and that he must have dropped it when he drew his knife. Now it happened that my shawl had just then slipped off in the struggle and that he was standing on it. The locket must have dropped on the shawl, and this little brass hook, which some one has fastened to the ring of the locket, must have hooked itself into the meshes of the shawl—which is of crocheted silk, you will remember. Then you picked the shawl up and rolled it into a bundle, and it was never unrolled until this morning. When I shook it out to hang it up, the locket fell out, and most unfortunately, as it fell it opened and the glass inside got broken. I am most vexed about it, for it is such an extremely charming little thing. Don’t you think so?”

I took the little bauble in my hand, and, to speak the literal truth, was not deeply smitten with its appearance. But policy, and the desire to make myself agreeable, bade me dissemble. “It is a quaint and curious little object,” I admitted.

“It is a perfectly fascinating little thing,” she exclaimed enthusiastically. “And so secret and mysterious, too. I am sure there is some hidden meaning in those references inside, and then there is something delightfully cabalistic and magical about that weird-looking inscription on the front.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “Greek capitals make picturesque inscriptions, especially this uncial form of lettering, but there is nothing very recondite in the matter; in fact it is rather hackneyed. ‘Life is short but Art is long.’”

“So that is what it means. Percy couldn’t quite make it out, and I don’t know any Greek at all. But it is a beautiful motto, though I am not sure that I don’t prefer the more usual form, ‘Art is long but Life is short.’”

“That is the Latin version, ‘Ars longa, vita brevis.’ Yes, I think I agree with you. The Latin form is rather more epigrammatic. But what other inscription were you referring to?”

“There are some references to passages of Scripture inside. I have looked them out, all but one. Shall I get my notes and let you see what the references are?” She looked at me so expectantly and with such charming animation that I assented eagerly. Not that I cared particularly what the references were, but the occupation of looking them out promised to put us on a delightfully companionable footing. And if I was not profoundly interested in the locket, I found myself very deeply interested in the Lady of Shalott.

While she was searching for her notes, I examined the little bauble more closely. It was a simple trinket, well made and neatly finished. The workmanship was plain, though very solid, and I judged it to be of some considerable age, though not what one would call antique. It was fashioned in the form of a tiny book with a hinge at the back and a strong loop of gold on each half, the two loops forming a double suspension ring. To one of the loops a small brass hook had been attached, probably to hang it in a show-case. On the front was engraved in bold Greek uncials “O BIOC BPAXYO H AE TEXNH MAKPH” without any other ornament, and on turning the locket over I found the back—or under-side as a bookbinder would say—quite plain save for the hallmark near the top. Then I opened the little volume. In the back half was a circular cell, framed with a border of small pearls and containing a tiny plait of black hair coiled into a close spiral. It had been enclosed by a glass cover, but this was broken and only a few fragments remained. The interior of the front half was covered with extremely minute engraved lettering which, on close inspection, appeared to be references to certain passages of Holy Scripture, the titles of the books being given in Latin.

I had just concluded these observations when Miss Blake returned with a manuscript book, a Bible, and a small reading-glass.

“This,” she said, handing me the latter, “will help you to make out the tiny lettering. If you will read out the references one at a time, I will read out the passages that they refer to. And if any of them suggest to you any meaning beyond what is apparent, do, please, tell me, for I can make nothing of them.”

I promised to do so, and focusing the glass on the microscopic writing, read out the first reference: “Leviticus 25. 41.”

“That verse,” she said, “reads: ‘And then shall he depart from thee, both he and his children with him, and shall return unto his own family, and unto the possession of his fathers shall he return.’”

“The next reference,” said I, “is ‘Psalms 121. 1.’”

“The reading is: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’ What do you make of that?”

“Nothing,” I replied, “unless one can regard it as a pious exhortation, and it is extraordinarily indefinite at that.”

“Yes, it does seem vague, but I feel convinced that it means more than it seems to, if we could only fathom its significance.”

“It might easily do that,” said I, and as I spoke I caught the eye of her brother, who had paused in his work and was watching us with an indulgent smile, and I wondered egotistically if he was writing me down a consummate ass.

“The next,” said I, “is ‘Acts 10. 5.’”

“The reading is: ‘And now send men to Joppa, and call for one Simon, whose surname is Peter.’”

“I begin to think you must be right,” said I, “for that passage is sheer nonsense unless it covers something in the nature of a code. Taken by itself, it has not the faintest bearing on either doctrine or morals. Let us try the next one, ‘Nehemiah 8. 4.’”

“That one is just as cryptic as the others,” said she. “It reads: ‘And Ezra the scribe stood upon a pulpit of wood, which they had made for the purpose; and beside him stood Mattithiah, and Shema, and Anaiah, and Urijali, and Hilkiah, and Maaseiah, on his right hand; and on his left hand, Pedaiah, and Mishad, and Malchiah, and Hashum, and Hashbadana, Zechariah, and Meshullam.’”

At this point an audible snigger proceeding from the direction of the builder revived my misgivings. There is something slightly alarming about a schoolboy with an acute perception of the ridiculous.

“What is the joke, Percy?” his sister asked.

“Those fellows’ names, Winnie. Do you suppose there really was a chap called Hashed Banana?”

“Hashbadana, Percy,” she corrected.

“Very well. Hashed Badada then. But that only makes it worse. Sounds as if you’d got a cold.”

“What an absurd boy you are, Percy,” exclaimed Miss Blake, regarding her brother with a fond smile. Then, reverting to her notes, she said: “The next reference appears to be a mistake, at least I don’t understand it. It says ‘3 Kings 7. 41.’ Isn’t that so?”

“Yes. ‘3 Lib. Regum 7. 41.’ But what is wrong with it?”

“Why, there are only two Books of Kings.”

“Oh, I see. But it isn’t a mistake. In the Authorised Version the two books of Samuel have the alternative title of the First and Second Books of Kings, and the First Book of Kings has the subtitle ‘Commonly called the Third Book of the Kings.’ But at the present day the books are invariably referred to as the First and Second Books of Samuel and the First and Second Books of Kings. Shall we look it up?”

She opened the Bible and turned over the leaves to the First Book of Kings.

“Yes,” she said, “it is as you say. How odd that I should never have noticed it, or at any rate, not have remembered it. Then this reference is really ‘1 Kings 7. 41.’ And yet it can’t be. What sense can you possibly make of this: ‘The two pillars, and the two bowls of the chapiters that were on the top of the two pillars; and the two networks, to cover the two bowls of the chapiters which were upon the top of the pillars.’ It seems quite meaningless, separated from its context.”

“It certainly is rather enigmatical,” I agreed. “This is an excerpt from what was virtually an inventory of Solomon’s Temple. If the purpose of this collection of Scripture texts was to inculcate some religious or moral truths, I don’t see the bearing of this quotation at all. But we may take it that these passages had some meaning to the original owner of the locket.”

“They must have had,” she replied earnestly. “Perhaps we may be able to find the key to the riddle if we consider the whole series together.”

“Possibly,” I agreed, not very enthusiastically. “The next reference is ‘Psalms 31. 7.’”

“The verse is: ‘I will be glad and rejoice in thy mercy: for thou hast considered my trouble; thou hast known my soul in adversities.’”

“That doesn’t throw much light on the subject,” said I. “The last reference is ‘2 Timothy 4. 13.’”

“It reads: ‘The cloak that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments.’” She laid down her notes, and looking at me with the most intense gravity, exclaimed: “Isn’t that extraordinary? It is the most astonishing of them all. You see, it is perfectly trivial, just a message from St Paul to Timothy on a purely personal matter of no importance to anybody but himself. But the whole collection of texts is very odd. They seem utterly unconnected with one another, and, as you say, without any significance in respect of either faith or morals. What is your opinion of them?”

“I don’t know what to think,” I replied. “They may have had some significance to the original owner of the locket only, something personal and reminiscent. Or they may have been addressed to some other person in terms previously agreed on. That is to say, they may have formed something in the nature of a code.”

“Exactly,” she agreed eagerly. “That is what I think. And I am just devoured by curiosity as to what the message was that they were meant to convey. I shan’t rest until I have solved the mystery.”

I smiled, and again my glance wandered to the planchette on the wall and the crystal ball on the table. Evidently my new and charming friend was an inveterate mystic, an enthusiastic explorer of the dubious regions of the occult and the supernormal. And though my own matter-of-fact temperament engendered little sympathy with such matters, I found in this very mysticism an additional charm. It seemed entirely congruous with her eminently picturesque personality.

But at this moment I became suddenly aware that I had made a most outrageously long visit and rose with profuse apologies for my disregard of time.

“There is no need to apologise,” she assured me cordially. “It is most kind of you to have given so much time to a mere counterfeit invalid. But won’t you stay and have tea with us? Can’t you really? Well, I hope you will come and see us again when you can spare an hour. Oh, and hadn’t I better give you this locket to hand to Sir Lawrence Drayton?”

“Certainly not,” I replied. “You had better keep it until you see him, and perhaps in the interval you may be able to extract its secret. But I will tell him that it is in safe hands.” I shook her hand warmly, and when I had made a brief inspection of Master Percy’s building, that promising architect piloted me across the yard and finally launched me, with a hearty farewell and a cordial invitation to “come again soon,” into the desert expanse of Jacob Street.

CHAPTER FIVE

Mr. Halliburton’s Mascot

Emerging into the grey and cheerless street I sauntered towards the Hampstead Road, and having reached that thoroughfare, halted at the corner and looked at my watch. It was barely four o’clock, and as I had arranged to meet Thorndyke at the Euston Road corner at half-past four, I had half an hour in which to cover something less than half a mile. I began to be regretful that I had refused the proffered tea, and when my leisurely progress brought me to the door of an establishment in which that beverage was dispensed, I entered and called for refreshment.

And as I sat by the shabby little marble-topped table, my thoughts strayed back to the great bare studio in Jacob Street and the strange, enigmatical but decidedly alluring personality of its tenant. To say that I had been favourably impressed by her would be to understate the case. I found myself considering her with a degree of interest and admiration that no other woman had ever aroused in me. She was—or, at least, she appeared to me—a strikingly beautiful girl, but that was not the whole, or even the main, attraction. Her courage and strength of character, as shown in the tragic circumstances of the previous night; her refinement of manner and easy, well-bred courtesy, her intelligence and evident amiability, and her frank friendliness, without any sacrifice of dignity, had all combined to make her personality gracious and pleasant. Then there were the paintings. If they were her work, she was an artist of some talent. I had meant cautiously to inquire into that, but the investigation of the locket had excluded everything else. And the thought of the locket and the almost childish eagerness that she had shown to extract its (assumed) secret, led naturally to the planchette and the crystal globe. In general I was disposed to scoff at such things, but on her the mysticism and occultism—I would not call it superstition—seemed to settle naturally and to add a certain piquancy to her mediaeval grace. And so reflecting, I suddenly bethought me of the cat’s eye pendant. What was the nature of her interest in that? At first I had assumed that she was a connoisseur in jewels, and possibly I was right. But her curious interest in the locket suggested other possibilities, and into these I determined to inquire on my next visit—for I had already decided that the friendly invitations should not find me unresponsive. In short, the Lady of Shalott had awakened in me a very lively curiosity.

My speculations and reflections very effectively filled out the spare half-hour and brought me on the stroke of half-past four to the corner of the Euston Road; and I had barely arrived when I perceived the tall, upright figure of my colleague swinging easily up Tottenham Court Road. In a few moments he joined me, and we both turned our faces westward.

“We needn’t hurry,” said he. “I said I would be there at five.”

“I don’t quite understand what you are going for,” said I. “This man, Halliburton, seems to have been no more than a chance stranger. What do you expect to get out of him?”

“I have nothing definite in my mind,” he replied. “The whole case is in the air at present. The position is this: a murder has been committed and the murderers have got away almost without leaving a trace. If the fingerprint people cannot identify the one man, we may say that we have no clue to the identity of either. But that murder had certain antecedents. Halliburton’s visit was one of them, though there was probably no causal relation.”

“You don’t suspect Halliburton?”

“My dear fellow, I suspect nobody. We haven’t got as far as that. But we have to investigate every thing, person, or circumstance that makes the smallest contact with the crime. But here is our destination, and I need not remark, Anstey, that our purpose is to acquire information, not to give it.”

The “Baltic” Hotel was a large private house not far from the Great Central Station, distinguished from other private houses only by an open street door and by the name inconspicuously inscribed on the fanlight. As we ascended the steps and entered the hall, a short, pleasant-faced man emerged from an office and looked inquiringly from one of us to the other. “Dr Thorndyke?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied my colleague, “and I assume that you are the manager, Mr. Simpson. I must thank you for making the appointment and hope I am not inconveniencing you.”

“Not at all,” rejoined the other. “I know your name very well, sir, and shall be delighted to give you any assistance that I can. I understand that you want Mr. Halliburton’s address.”

“If you have no objection, I should like to have it. I want to write to him.”

“I can give it to you off-hand,” said the manager. “It is ‘Oscar Halliburton, Esquire, Wimbledon.’”

“That doesn’t seem a very sufficient address,” remarked Thorndyke.

“It is not,” said the manager. “I had occasion to write to him myself and my letter was returned, marked ‘insufficiently addressed.’”

“Then, in effect, you have not got his address?”

“That is what it amounts to. Would you like to see the visitors’ book? If you will step into my private office I will bring it to you.”

He showed us into his office, and in a few moments entered with the book, which he laid on the table and opened at the page on which the signature appeared.

“This does not appear to have been written with the hotel pen,” Thorndyke remarked when he had glanced at the adjoining signatures.

“No,” the manager agreed. “Apparently he used his own fountain pen.”

“I see that this entry is dated the 13th of September. How long did he stay?”

“He left on the 16th of September—five days ago.”

“And he received at least one letter while he was here?”

“Yes, one only, I believe. It came on the morning of the 16th, I remember, and he left in the evening.”

“Do you know if he went out much while he was here?”

“No, he stayed indoors nearly all day, and he spent most of his time in the billiard-room practising fancy strokes.”

“What sort of man was he—in appearance, for instance?”

“Well,” said Simpson rather hesitatingly, “I didn’t see much of him, and I see a good many people. I should say he was a biggish man, medium colour and rather sunburnt.”

“Any beard or moustache?”

“No, clean shaved and a good deal of hair—rather long, wanted a crop.”

“Any distinctive accent or peculiarity of voice?”

“I didn’t have much talk with him—nor did anybody else, I think. He was a gruffish, taciturn man. Nothing peculiar about his voice, and as to his accent, well, it was just ordinary, very ordinary, with perhaps just a trace of the cockney, but only a trace. It wasn’t exactly the accent of an English gentleman.”

“And that is all that you remember about him?”

“That is all.”

“Would you have any objection to my taking a photograph of this signature?”

The manager looked rather dubious. “It would hardly do for it to be known—” he began, when Thorndyke interrupted:

“I suggest, Mr. Simpson, that whatever passes between us shall be regarded as strictly confidential on both sides. The least said, the soonest mended, you know.”

“There’s a good deal of truth in that,” said the manager with a smile, “especially in the hotel business. Well, if that is understood, I don’t know that I have any objection to your taking a photograph. But how are you going to manage it?”

“I have a camera;” replied Thorndyke, “and I see that your table lamp is a sixty Watt. It won’t take an unreasonably long exposure.”

He propped the book up in a suitable position, and having arranged the lamp so as to illuminate the page obliquely, produced from his pocket a small folding camera and a leather case of dark slides, at which Mr. Simpson gazed in astonishment. “You’ll never get a useful photograph with a toy like that,” said he.

“Not such a toy as you think,” replied Thorndyke as he opened the little instrument. “This lens is specially constructed for close range work, and will give me the signature the full size of the original.” He laid a measuring tape on the table, and having adjusted the camera by its engraved scale, inserted the dark slide, looked at his watch, and opened the shutter.

“You were saying just now, Mr. Simpson,” he resumed as we sat round the table watching the camera, “that you had occasion to write to Mr. Halliburton. Should I be indiscreet if I were to ask what the occasion was?”

“Not at all,” replied the manager. “It was a ridiculous affair. It seems that Mr. Halliburton had a sort of charm or mascot which he wore suspended by a gold ring from a cord under his waistcoat; a silly little bone thing, of no value whatever, though he appears to have set great store by it. Well, after he had left the hotel he missed it. The ring had broken and the thing had dropped off the cord—presumably, he supposed, when he was undressing. So a couple of days later—on the eighteenth—back he came in a rare twitter to know if it had been picked up. I asked the chambermaids if any of them had found the mascot in his room or elsewhere, but none of them had. Then he was frightfully upset and begged me to ask them again and to say that he would give ten pounds to any one who should have found it and would hand it to him. Ten pounds!” Mr. Simpson repeated with contemptuous emphasis. “Just think of it! The price of a gold watch for a thing that looked like a common rabbit bone! Why, a man like that oughtn’t to be at large.”

I could see that my colleague was deeply interested, though his impassive face suggested nothing but close attention. He put away his watch, closed the lens-shutter and the dark slide, and finally bestowed the little apparatus in his pocket. Then he asked the manager: “Can you give us anything like a detailed description of this mascot?”

“I can show you the thing itself,” replied Simpson. “That is the irony of the affair. Mr. Halliburton hadn’t been out of the house half an hour when the boy who looks after the billiard-room came bursting into my office in the devil’s own excitement. He had heard of the ten pounds reward and had proceeded at once to take up all the rugs and mats in the billiard-room, and there, under the edge of a strip of cocoa-nut matting, he had found the precious thing. No doubt the ring had broken when Halliburton was leaning over the table to make a long shot. So I took it from the boy and put it in the safe, and I wrote forthwith to the address given in the book to say that the mascot had come to light, but, as I told you just now, the letter was returned marked ‘insufficiently addressed.’ So there it is, and unless he calls again, or writes, he won’t get his mascot, and the boy won’t get his ten pounds. Would you like to see the treasure?”

“I should, very much,” replied Thorndyke; whereupon the manager stepped over to a safe in the corner of the room, and having unlocked it, came back to the table holding a small object in the palm of his hand.

“There it is,” said he, dropping it on the table before Thorndyke, “and I think you will agree with me that it is a mighty dear ten pounds’ worth.”

I looked curiously at the little object as my colleague turned it about in his hand. It was evidently a bone of some kind, roughly triangular in shape and perforated by three holes, one large and two smaller. In addition to these, a fourth hole had been drilled through near the apex to take a gold suspension ring, and this was still in position, though it was broken, having chafed quite thin with wear in one part and apparently given way under some sudden strain. The surface of the bone was covered with minute incised carving of a simple and rather barbaric type, and the whole bone had been stained a deep, yellowish brown, which had worn lighter in the parts most exposed to friction; and the entire surface had that unmistakable polish and patina that comes with years of handling and wear.

“What do you make of it, sir?” asked Mr. Simpson.

“It is the neck bone of some small animal,” Thorndyke replied “But not a rabbit. And, of course, the markings on it give it an individual character.”

“Would you give ten pounds for it?” the manager asked with a grin.

“I am not sure that I wouldn’t,” Thorndyke replied “though not for its intrinsic value. But yours is not a ‘firm offer.’ You are not a vendor. But I should like very much to borrow it for a few hours.”

“I don’t quite see how I could agree to that,” said Simpson. “You see, the thing isn’t mine. I’m just a trustee. And Mr. Halliburton might call and ask for it at any moment.”

“I would give you a receipt for it and undertake to let you have it back by ten o’clock tomorrow morning,” said Thorndyke.

“M’yes,” said Simpson reflectively and with evident signs of weakening. “Of course, I could say I had deposited it at my bank. But is it of any importance? Would you mind telling me why you want to borrow the thing?”

“I want to compare it carefully with some similar objects, the existence of which is known to me. I could do that tonight, and, if necessary, send the specimen back forthwith. As to the importance of the comparison, who can say? If Halliburton should turn up and give a practicable address there would be nothing in it. But if he should never reappear and it should become necessary to trace him, the information gathered from an exhaustive examination of this object might be of great value.”

“I see,” said Simpson. “In a sense it is a matter of public policy. Of course that puts a different complexion on the affair. And having regard to your position and character, I don’t see why I shouldn’t agree to your having a short loan of the thing. But I should like to have it back by nine o’clock tomorrow morning, if you could manage it.”

“I promise you that it shall be delivered into your hand by a responsible person not later than nine o’clock,” said Thorndyke. “I will now give you a receipt, which I will ask you to hand to my messenger in exchange for your property; and again, Mr. Simpson, I would suggest that we make no confidences to anyone concerning this transaction.”

To this the manager assented with decided emphasis, and our business being now concluded, we thanked Mr. Simpson warmly for his courtesy and his very helpful attitude and took our departure.

“You seem extraordinarily keen about that precious bone, Thorndyke,” I remarked as we walked back along the Marylebone Road, “but I’m hanged if I see why. It won’t tell you much about Halliburton. And if it would, I don’t quite see what you want to know. He is obviously a fool. You don’t need much investigation to ascertain that, and like most fools, he seems easily parted from his money. What more do you want to know?”

“My learned friend,” replied Thorndyke, “is not profiting sufficiently by his legal experience. One of the most vital principles that years of practice have impressed on me is that in the early stages of an inquiry, no fact, relevant or irrelevant, that is in any way connected with the subject of the inquiry should be neglected or ignored. Indeed, no such fact can be regarded as irrelevant, since, until all the data are assembled and collated, it is impossible to judge the bearing or value of any one of them. Take the present case. Who is Mr. Halliburton? We don’t know. Why did he want to examine Mr. Drayton’s collection? We don’t know. What passed between him and Mr. Drayton when he made his visit? Again we don’t know. Perhaps there is nothing of any significance to know. The probability is that Halliburton has no connection with this case at all. But there is no denying that he is in the picture.”

“Yes, as a background figure. His name has been mentioned as one of the visitors who had come to see the collection. There were other visitors, you remember.”

“Yes, and if we knew who they were we should want to know something about them, too. But Halliburton is the only one known to us. And your presentation of his position in relation to what has happened does not state the case fairly at all. The position is really this: Halliburton—a complete stranger to Drayton—took considerable trouble to obtain an opportunity to examine the collection. Why did he do this? You have quoted Mrs. Benham as saying that he apparently knew nothing about jewellery, either ancient or modern. He was not a connoisseur. Then, why did he want to see the collection? Again, he wrote for the appointment, not from his own residence but from an hotel; and when we come to that hotel we find that he has left no verifiable address, and the vague locality that he gave may quite possibly be a false address. And further, that this apparent concealment of his place of abode coincides with a very excellent reason for giving a correct address, the fact that he has lost—and lost in the hotel, as he believes—certain property on which he sets a high value. And if you add to this the facts that within four days of his visit to Drayton the collection was robbed; that the robbers clearly knew exactly where it was kept and had some knowledge of the inmates of the house and their habits, you must admit that Halliburton is something more than a background figure in the picture.”

I was secretly impressed by the way in which Thorndyke had “placed” Mr. Halliburton in respect of the inquiry, but, of course, it wouldn’t do to say so. It was necessary to assert my position.

“That,” I replied, “is the case for the prosecution, and very persuasively stated. On the other hand it might be said for the defence: ‘Here is a gentleman who lives in the country and who comes up to spend a few days in town—’”

“For the apparent purpose,” Thorndyke interrupted, “of practising the art of billiards, a sport peculiar to London.”

“Exactly. And while he is in London he takes the opportunity of inspecting a collection which has been described in the Press. A few days after his visit the collection is robbed by some persons who have probably also seen the published description. There is no positive fact of any kind that connects him with those persons, and I assert that the assumption that any such connection exists is entirely gratuitous.”

Thorndyke smiled indulgently. “It seems a pity,” he remarked, “that my learned friend should waste the sweetness of his jury flourishes on the desert air of Marylebone Road. But we needn’t fash ourselves, as I believe they say in the North. There was a lady named Mrs. Glasse whose advice to cooks seems to be applicable to the present case. We had better catch our hare before we proceed to jug him—the word ‘jug’ being used without any malicious intent to perpetrate a pun.”

“And do I understand that the capture is to be accomplished by the agency of the rabbit-bone that my learned senior carries in his reverend pocket?”

“If you do,” replied Thorndyke, “your understanding is a good deal in advance of mine. I am taking this little object to examine merely on the remote chance that it may yield some information as to this man’s antecedents, habits, and perhaps even his identity. The chance is not so remote as it looks. There are very few things which have been habitually carried on a man’s person which will not tell you something about the person who has carried them. And this object, as you probably noticed, is in many respects highly characteristic.”

“I can’t say that I found the thing itself particularly characteristic. The fact that the man should have carried it and have set such a ridiculous value on it is illuminating. That writes him down a superstitious ass. But superstitious asses form a fairly large class. In what respects do you find this thing so highly characteristic, and what kind of information do you expect to extract from it?”

“As to the latter question,” he replied, “an investigator doesn’t form expectations in advance; and as to the former, you will have an opportunity of examining the object for yourself and of forming your own conclusions.”

I determined to make a minute and exhaustive inspection of our treasure trove as soon as we arrived home. For obviously I had missed something. It was clear to me that Thorndyke attached more importance to this object than would have been warranted by anything that I had observed. There was some point that I had overlooked and I meant to find out what it was.

But the opportunity did not offer immediately, for, on our arrival at his chambers, Thorndyke proceeded straight up to the laboratory, where we found his assistant, Polton, seated at a jeweller’s bench, making some structural alterations in a somewhat elaborate form of pedometer.

“I’ve got a job for you, Polton,” said Thorndyke, laying the mascot on the bench. “Quite a nice, delicate little job, after your own heart. I want a replica of this thing—as perfect as you can make it. And I have to return the original before nine o’clock tomorrow morning. And,” he added, taking the camera and dark slides from his pocket, “there is a photograph to be developed, but there is no particular hurry for that.”

Polton picked the mascot up daintily, and laying it in the palm of his hand, stuck a watchmaker’s glass in his eye and inspected it minutely.

“It’s a queer little thing, sir,” he remarked. “Seems to have been made out of a small cervical vertebra. I suppose you want the copy of the same colour as this and as hard as possible?”

“I want as faithful a copy as you can make, similar in all respects, excepting that the reproduction can scarcely be as hard as the original. Will there be time to make a gelatine mould?”

“There’ll have to be, sir. It couldn’t be done any other way, with these undercuttings. But I shan’t lose any time on that. If I have to match the colour I shall have to make some experiments, and I can do those while the gelatine is setting.”

“Very well, Polton,” said Thorndyke. “Then I’ll leave the thing in your hands and consider it as good as done. Of course the original must not be damaged in any way.”

“Oh, certainly not, sir,” and forthwith the little man, having carefully deposited the mascot in a small, glass-topped box on the bench, fell to work on his preparations beaming with happiness. I have never seen a man who enjoyed his work so thoroughly as Polton did.

“I am going round to the College of Surgeons now,” said Thorndyke. “No callers are expected, I think, but if any one should come and want to see me, I shall be back in about an hour. Are you coming with me, Anstey?”

“Why not? I’ve nothing to do, and if I keep an eye on you I may pick up a crumb or two of information.”

Here I caught Polton’s eye, and a queer, crinkly smile overspread that artificer’s countenance. “A good many people try to do that, sir,” he remarked. “I hope you will have better luck than most of them have.”

“It occurs to me” Thorndyke observed as we descended the stairs, “that if the scribe who wrote the Book of Genesis had happened to look in on Polton he would have come to the conclusion that he had grossly overestimated the curse of labour.”

“He was not much different from most other scribes,” said I. “A bookish man-like myself, for instance—constantly fails to appreciate the joy of manual work. I find Polton an invaluable object lesson.”

“So do I,” said Thorndyke. “He is a shining example of the social virtues—industry, loyalty, integrity, and contentment—and as an artificer he is a positive genius.” With this warm appreciation of his faithful follower he swung round into Fleet Street and crossed towards the Law Courts.

CHAPTER SIX

Introduces an Ant-Eater and a Detective

As we entered the hall of the College of Surgeons Thorndyke glanced at the board on which the names of the staff were painted and gave a little grunt of satisfaction.

“I see,” he said, addressing the porter, “that Mr. Saltwood hasn’t gone yet.”

“No, sir,” was the reply. “He is working up at the top tonight. Shall I take you up to him?”

“If you please,” answered Thorndyke, and the porter accordingly took us in charge and led the way to the lift. From the latter we emerged into a region tenanted by great earthenware pans and jars and pervaded by a curious aroma, half spirituous, half cadaveric, on which I commented unfavourably.

“Yes,” said Thorndyke, sniffing appreciatively, “the good old museum bouquet. You smell it in all curators’ rooms, and though, I suppose, it is not physically agreeable, I find it by no means unpleasant. The effects of odours are largely a matter of association.”

“The present odour,” said I, “seems to suggest the association of a very overripe Duke of Clarence and a butt of shockingly bad malmsey.”

Thorndyke smiled tolerantly as we ascended a flight of stairs that led to a yet higher storey, and abandoned the discussion. At the top, we passed through several long galleries, past ranges of tables piled up with incredible numbers of bones, apparently awaiting disposal, until we were finally led by our conductor to a room in which two men were working at a long bench, on which were several partially articulated skeletons of animals. They both looked up as we entered, and one of them, a keen-faced, middle-aged man, exclaimed: “Well, this is an unexpected pleasure. I haven’t seen you for donkey’s years, Thorndyke. Thought you had deserted the old shop. And I wonder what brings you here now.”

“The usual thing, Saltwood. Self-interest. I have come to negotiate a loan. Have you got any loose bones of the Echidna?”

Saltwood stroked his chin and turned interrogatively to his assistant. “Do you know if there are any, Robson?” he asked.

“There is a set waiting to be articulated, sir. Shall I fetch them?”

“If you would, please, Robson,” replied Saltwood. Then turning to my colleague, he asked: “What bones do you want, Thorndyke?”

“The middle cervical vertebrae—about the third or fourth,” was the reply, at which I pricked up my ears.

In a few minutes Robson returned carrying a cardboard box on which was a label inscribed “Echidna hystrix.”

Saltwood lifted the lid, disclosing a collection of small bones, including a queer little elongated skull.

“Here you are,” said he, picking out a sort of necklace formed of the joints of the backbone; “here is the whole vertebral column, minus the tail, strung together. Will you take it as it is?”

“No,” replied Thorndyke, “I will just take the three vertebrae that I want—the third, fourth, and fifth cervical, and if I let you have them back in the course of the week, will that do?”

“Perfectly. I wouldn’t bother you to return them at all if it were not for spoiling the set.” He separated the three little bones from the string, and having wrapped them in tissue paper and handed them to Thorndyke, asked; “How is Jervis? I haven’t seen him very lately, either.”

“Jervis,” replied Thorndyke, “is at present enjoying a sort of professional holiday in New York. He is retained, in an advisory capacity, in the Rosenbaum case, of which you may have read in the papers. My friend Anstey here is very kindly filling his place during his absence.”

“I’m glad to hear that I’m filling it,” said I, as Saltwood bowed and shook hands. “I was afraid I was only half filling it, being but a mere lawyer destitute of medical knowledge.”

“Well,” said Saltwood, “medical knowledge is important, of course, but you’ve always got Thorndyke to help you out. Oh—and that reminds me, Thorndyke, that I’ve got some new preparations that I should like you to see, a series of tumours from wild animals. Will you come and have a look at them? They are in the next room.”

Thorndyke assented with enthusiasm, and the two men went out of the room, leaving me to the society of Robson and the box of bones. Into the latter I peered curiously, again noting the odd shape of the skull; then I proceeded to improve the occasion by a discreet question or two.

“What sort of beast in an Echidna?” I asked.

“Echidna hystrix,” replied Robson in a somewhat pompously didactic tone, “is the zoological name of the porcupine ant-eater.”

“Indeed,” said I, and then tempted by his owlish solemnity to ask foolish questions, I inquired: “Does that mean that he is an eater of porcupine ants?”

“No, sir,” he replied gravely (he was evidently a little slow in the uptake). “It is not the ants which are porcupines. It is the ant-eater.”

“But,” I objected, “how can an ant-eater be a porcupine? It is a contradiction in terms.”

This seemed to floor him for a moment, but he pulled himself together and explained: “The name signifies a porcupine which resembles an ant-eater, or perhaps one should say, an ant-eater, which resembles a porcupine. It is a very peculiar animal.”

“It must be,” I agreed. “And what is there peculiar about its cervical vertebrae?”

He pondered profoundly, and I judged that he did not know but was not going to give himself away, a suspicion that his rather ambiguous explanation tended to confirm.

“The cervical vertebrae,” he expounded, “are very much alike in most animals. There are exceptions, of course, as in the case of the porpoise, which has no neck, and the giraffe, which has a good deal of neck. But in general, cervical vertebrae seem to be turned out pretty much to one pattern, whereas the tail vertebrae present great differences. Now, if you look at this animal’s tail—” here he fished a second necklace out of the box and proceeded to expound the peculiarities of its constituent bones, to which exposition I am afraid I turned an inattentive ear. The Echidna’s tail had no bearing on the identity of Mr. Halliburton.

The rather windy discourse had just come to an end when my two friends reappeared and Saltwood conducted us down to the hall. As we stepped out of the lift he shook our hands heartily, and with a cheery adieu, pressed the button and soared aloft like a stage fairy.

From the great portico of the College we turned eastward and walked homewards across Lincoln’s Inn, each of us wrapped in his own reflections. Presently I asked:

“Supposing this mascot of Halliburton’s to be the neck bone of an Echidna, what is the significance of the fact?”

“Ah!” he replied. “There you have me, Anstey. At present I am concerning myself only with the fact, hoping that its significance may appear later. To us it may have no significance at all. Of course there is some reason why this particular bone should have been used rather than some other kind of bone, but that set of circumstances may have—probably has—no connection with our inquiry. It is quite probable that Halliburton himself has no such connection. On the other hand, the circumstances which determined the use of an Echidna’s vertebra as a mascot may have an important bearing on the case. So we can only secure the fact and wait for time and further knowledge to show whether it is or is not a relevant fact.”

“And do you mean to say that you are taking all this trouble on the mere chance that this apparently trivial and meaningless circumstance may possibly have some bearing?”

“That is so. But your question, Anstey, exhibits the difference between the legal and the scientific outlook. The lawyer’s investigations tend to proceed along the line of information wanted: the scientists tend to proceed along the line of information available. The business of the man of science is impartially to acquire all the knowledge that is obtainable; the lawyer tends to concern himself only with that which is material to the issue.”

“Then the scientist must accumulate a vast number of irrelevant facts.”

“Every fact,” replied Thorndyke, “is relevant to something, and if you accumulate a great mass of facts, inspection of the mass shows that the facts can be sorted out into related groups from which certain general truths can be inferred. The difference between the lawyer and the scientist is that one is seeking to establish some particular truth while the other seeks to establish any truth that emerges from the available facts.”

“But,” I objected, “surely even a scientist must select his facts to some extent. Every science has its own province. The chemist, for instance, is not concerned with the metamorphoses of insects.”

“That is true; he admitted. “But then, are we not keeping within our own province? We are not collecting facts indiscriminately, but are selecting those facts which make some sort of contact with the circumstances of this crime and which may therefore conceivably be relevant to our inquiry. But methinks I perceive another collector. Isn’t that our friend Superintendent Miller crossing to King’s Bench Walk and apparently bearing down on our chambers?”

I looked at the tall figure, indistinctly seen by the light of a lamp, and even as I looked, it ascended the steps and vanished into our entry; and when, a couple of minutes later, we arrived on our landing, we found Polton in the act of admitting the Superintendent.

“Well, gentlemen,” the officer said genially, as he subsided into an armchair and selected a cigar from the box which Thorndyke handed to him “I’ve just dropped in to give you the news—about this Drayton case, you know. I thought you’d be interested to hear what our people are doing. Well, I don’t think you need trouble yourselves about it any more. We’ve got one of the men, at any rate.”

“In custody?” asked Thorndyke.

“No, we haven’t actually made the arrest, but there will be no difficulty about that. We know who he is. I just passed those fingerprints in to Mr. Singleton and he gave me the name straight away. And who do you think it is? It is our old friend, Moakey—Joe Hedges, you know.”

“Is it really!” said Thorndyke.

“Yes, Moakey it is. You’re surprised. So was I. I really did think he had learned a little sense at last, especially as he seemed to be taking some reasonable precautions last time. But he always was a fool. Do you remember the asinine thing that he did on that last job?”

“No,” replied Thorndyke, “I don’t remember that case.”

“It was a small country house job, and Moakey did it all on his own. And it did look as if he had learned his lesson, for he undoubtedly wore gloves. We found them in his bag and there was not a trace at the house. But would you believe it, when he’d finished up, all neat and ship-shape, he must stop somewhere in the grounds to repack the swag—after he had taken his gloves off. Just then the alarm was raised and a dog let loose, and away went Moakey, like a hare, for the place in the fence where he had hidden his bicycle. He nipped over the fence, mounted his bike, and got clear away, and all trace of him seemed to be lost. But in the morning, when the local police came to search the grounds, they found a silver tray that Moakey had evidently had to drop when he heard the dog, with a most beautiful set of fingerprints on it. The police got a pair of photographs at once—there happened to be a dark room and a set of apparatus in the house—and sent a special messenger with them to Scotland Yard. And then the murder was out. They were Moakey’s prints, and Moakey was arrested the same day with all the stuff in his possession. He hadn’t had time to go to a fence with it. So the fingerprints didn’t have to be put in evidence.”

“Did Moakey ever hear about the fingerprints?” Thorndyke asked.

“Yes. Some fool of a warder told him. And that’s what makes this case so odd; to think that after coming a cropper twice he should have gone dabbing his trademarks over the furniture as he has, is perfectly incredible. And that isn’t the only queer feature in the case. There’s the stuff. I got Sir Lawrence to show it to me this morning, and I assure you that when I saw what it was, you could have knocked me down with a feather. To say nothing of the crockery and wineglasses and rubbish of that sort and the pewter spoons and brass spoons and bone bobbins, the jewellery was a fair knockout. There was only one cabinet of it, and you’ll hardly believe me. Doctor, when I tell you that the greater part of it was silver, and even pinchbeck and brass—or latten, as Sir Lawrence calls it—set with the sort of stones that you can buy in Poland Street for ten bob a dozen. You never saw such trash!”

“Oh come. Miller,” Thorndyke protested, “don’t call it trash. It is one of the most interesting and reasonable collections that I have ever seen.”

“So it may be,” said the Superintendent, “but I am looking at it from the trade point of view. Why, there isn’t a fence outside Bedlam who’d give a fiver for the whole boiling. It’s perfectly astonishing to me that an experienced tradesman like Moakey should have wasted his time on it. He might just as well have cracked an ironmonger’s.”

“I expect,” said I, “he embarked on the job under a mistake. Probably he saw, or heard of, that article in the Connoisseur and thought that this was a great collection of jewels.”

“That seems likely,” Miller agreed. “And that may account for his having worked with a chum this time instead of doing the job single-handed as he usually does. But it doesn’t account for his having used a pistol. That wasn’t his way at all. There has never been a charge of violence against him before. I always took him for the good old-fashioned, sporting crook who played the game with us and expected us to play the game with him.”

“Is it clear that it was Moakey who fired the shot?” asked Thorndyke.

“Well, no, I don’t know that it is. But he’ll have to stand the racket unless he can prove that somebody else did it. And that won’t be so very easy, for even if he gives us the name of the other man—the small man—and Miss Blake can identify him, still it will be difficult for Moakey to prove that the other man fired the shot, and the other chap isn’t likely to be boastful about it.”

“No,” said Thorndyke, “he will pretty certainly put it on to Moakey. But between the two we may get at the truth as to what happened.”

“We will hope so,” said Miller, rising and picking up his hat. “At any rate, that is how the matter stands. I understand that Sir Lawrence wants you to keep an eye on the case, but there’s really no need. It isn’t in your line at all. We shall arrest Moakey and he will be committed for trial. If he likes to make a statement we may get the other man, but in any case there is nothing for you to do.”

For some minutes after the Superintendent’s departure, Thorndyke sat looking into the fire with an air of deep reflection. Presently he looked up as if he had disposed of some question that he had been propounding to himself and remarked: “It’s a curious affair, isn’t it?”

“Very,” I agreed. “It seems as if this man, Moakey, had thrown all precaution to the winds. By the way, do you suppose those fingerprint people ever make mistakes? They seem pretty cocksure.”

“They would be more than human if they never made a mistake,” Thorndyke replied. “But, on the other hand, the identification of a whole set of fingerprints doesn’t leave much room for error. You might get two prints that were similar enough to admit of a mistake, but you would hardly get two sets that could be mistaken for one another.”

“No, I suppose not. So the mystery remains unexplained.”

“It remains unexplained in any case,” said Thorndyke.

“How do you mean?” I asked. “If they had made a mistake and these were really the fingerprints of some unknown person, that person might be a novice and there would be no mystery about his having taken no precautions.”

“Yes, but that is not the mystery. The real mystery is the presence of a third man who has left no other traces.”

“A third man!” I exclaimed. “What evidence is there of the presence of a third man?”

“It is very obvious,” replied Thorndyke. These fingerprints are not those of the small man, because he wore gloves. And they are not the fingerprints of the tall man.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

Thorndyke rose, and opening a cabinet, took out the plaster cast of the tall man’s left hand, which he had made on the previous night, and the pair of photographs.

“Now,” said he, “look at the print of the left forefinger in the photograph. You see that the pattern is quite clear and unbroken. Now look at the cast of the forefinger. Do you see what I mean?”

“You mean that pit or dent in the bulb of the finger. But isn’t that due to an irregularity of the ground on which the finger was pressed?”

“No, it is the puckered scar of an old whitlow or deep wound of some kind. It is quite characteristic. And the print of this finger would show a blank white space in the middle of the pattern. So it is certain that those fingerprints did not belong to either of these two men.”

“Then, really,” said I, “the fact that these are Moakey’s fingerprints serves to explain this other mystery.”

“To some extent. But you see, Anstey, that it introduces a further mystery. If there were three men in that room, or on the premises, how comes it that there were only two sets of footprints?”

“Yes, that is rather extraordinary. Can you suggest any explanation?”

“The only explanation that occurs to me is that one of these men may have let Moakey into the house by the front door, that he may have been in the room when Miss Blake entered—he might, for instance, have been behind the door—and have slipped out when she ran to the window. He could then have to run into the drawing-room and waited until she rushed out of the house, when it would be easy for him to slip out at the front door and escape.”

“Yes,” I said dubiously, “I suppose that is possible, but it doesn’t sound very probable.”

“It doesn’t,” he agreed. “But it is the only solution that I can think of at the moment. Of course there must be some explanation, for there are the facts. Inside the house are traces of three men. Outside are traces of only two. Have you any suggestion to offer?”

I shook my head. “It is beyond me, Thorndyke. Why didn’t you ask Miller?”

“Because I am not proposing to take the police into my confidence until I have evidence that they are prepared to do the same by me. They will probably assume that the tall man was Moakey—he is about the same height. The information that we obtain from the cast of that man’s hand is not, you must remember, in their possession.”

“No, I had forgotten that. And now I begin to appreciate my learned senior’s foresight in taking a permanent record of that handprint.”

“Yes,” said Thorndyke. “A permanent record is invaluable. It allows of reference at one’s leisure and in connection with fresh evidence, as in the present case. And, moreover, it allows of study under the most favourable conditions. That scar on the finger was not noticeable in the impression in the sand, especially by the imperfect light of the lamp. But on the cast, which we can examine at our ease, by daylight if necessary, it is plainly visible. And we have it here to compare with the finger, if ever that finger should be forthcoming. I now make a rule of securing a plaster cast of any object that I cannot retain in my possession.”

Here, as if in illustration of this last statement, Polton entered the room bearing a small tray lined with blotting paper, on which lay three objects—a diminutive glass negative and two mascots. He laid the tray on the table and invited us to inspect his works, tendering a watchmakers eyeglass to assist the inspection.

Thorndyke picked up the two mascots and examined them separately through the glass, then with a faint smile, but without remark, he passed the tray to me. I stuck the glass in my eye and scrutinised first one and then the other of the mascots, and finally looked up at Polton, who was watching me with a smile that covered his face with wrinkles of satisfaction.

“I suppose, Polton,” I said, “You have some means of telling which is which, but I’m hanged if I can see a particle of difference.”

“I can tell ’em by the feel, sir,” he replied “but I took the precaution to weigh the original in the chemical balance before I made the copy. I think the colour matches pretty well.”

“It is a perfect reproduction, Polton,” said Thorndyke. “If we were to show it to Superintendent Miller he would want to take your fingerprints right away. He would say that you were not a safe person to be at large.”

At this commendation Polton’s countenance crinkled until he looked like a species of human walnut, and when the photograph of the signature had been examined and pronounced fit for the making of an enlargement, he departed, chuckling audibly.

When he had gone, I picked up one of the mascots and again examined it closely while Thorndyke made a similar inspection of its twin.

“Had you any definite purpose in your mind,” I asked “when you instructed Polton to make this indistinguishable copy?”

“No,” he replied. “I thought it wise to preserve a record of the thing, but, for my own information, a plain plaster cast would have answered quite well. Still, as it would not take much more trouble to imitate the colour and texture, I decided that there might be some advantage in having a perfect replica. There are certain imaginable circumstances in which it might be useful. I shall get Polton to make a cast of the Echidna’s vertebra, so that we may have the means of demonstrating the nature of the object to others, if necessary; and by the way, we may as well make the comparison now and confirm my opinion that the animal really was an Echidna.”

He produced the little packet that Saltwood had given him, and laying the little bones on the table, compared them carefully with the mascot.

“Yes,” he said at length, “I was right. Mr. Halliburton’s treasure is the third cervical vertebra of a young but full-grown Echidna.”

“How did you recognise this as an Echidna’s vertebra?” I asked, recalling Mr. Robson’s rather obscure exposition on the subject. “Aren’t neck vertebrae a good deal alike in most animals?”

“In animals of the same class they are usually very much alike. But the Echidna is a transitional form. Although it is a mammal, it has many well-marked reptilian characters. This vertebra shows one of them. If you look at those corner-pieces—the transverse processes—you will see that they are separate from the rest of the bone, that they are joined to it by a seam or suture. But in all other mammals, with a single exception, the transverse processes are fused with the rest of the bone. There is no separating line. That suture was the distinguishing feature which attracted my attention.”

“And does the fact of its being an Echidna’s bone suggest any particular significance to your mind?”

“Well,” he replied, “the Echidna is far from a common animal. And this particular bone seems to have been worked on by some barbarian artist, which suggests that it may have been originally a barbaric ornament or charm or fetish, which again suggests personal connections and a traceable history. You will notice that the two letters seem to have been impressed on the ornament and have no connection with it, which suggests that the bone was already covered with these decorations when it came into the late owner’s possession.”

I took up the glass and once more examined the mascot. The whole surface of the little bone, on both sides, was covered with an intricate mass of ornament consisting principally of scrolls or spirals, crude and barbaric in design but very minutely and delicately executed. In the centre of the solid part of the bone an extremely small “o” had been indented on one side and on the same spot on the reverse side an equally minute “h.” And through the glass I could see that the letters cut into the pattern, whereas the hole for the suspension ring was part of the original work and was incorporated into the design.

“I wonder why he used small letters for his initials instead of capitals,” said I.

“For the reason, I imagine, that they were small letters. He wanted them merely for identification, and no doubt wished them to be as inconspicuous as possible. Any letters are a disfigurement when they are not part of the design, and capitals would have been much worse than small letters.”

“These seem to have been punched, on with printer’s types.” I remarked.

“They have been punched, not cut, but not, I should say, with printer’s types. Type metal—even the hard variety which would be used for casting these little ‘Pearl’ or ‘Diamond’ types—is comparatively soft, and the harder varieties are brittle. It would scarcely be strong enough to bear hammering into bone. I should say these letters were indented with steel punches.”

“Well,” I said “we have got a vast amount of entertainment out of Mr. Halliburton and his mascot. But it looks rather as if that were going to be the end of it, for if Moakey is one of the robbers, we may take it that the others are just professional crooks. And thereupon Mr. Halliburton recedes once more into the background. Isn’t that the position?”

“Apparently it is,” replied Thorndyke. “But we shall see what happens at the inquest. Possibly some further evidence may be forthcoming when the witnesses give their accounts in detail. And possibly Moakey himself may be able to throw some further light on the matter. They will probably have him in custody within a day or two.”

“By the way,” I said, “have you examined the hair that poor Drayton had grasped in his hand?”

“Yes. There is nothing very characteristic about it. It is dark in colour and the hairs are rather small in diameter. But there was one slightly odd circumstance. Among the tuft of dark hairs there was one light one—not white—a blonde hair. It had no root and no tip. It was just a broken fragment. What do you make of that?”

“I don’t know that I make anything of it. I understand that a man may sometimes find a woman’s hair sticking to his coat in the neighbourhood of the shoulder or chest, though I have no personal experience of such things. But if on the coat, why not on the head? My learned senior’s powerful constructive imagination might conceive circumstances in which such a transfer of hair might occur. Or has he some more recondite explanation?”

“There are other possible explanations,” Thorndyke replied. “And as the hour seems to preclude a return to Hampstead tonight, and seems to suggest a temporary tenancy of Jervis’s bedroom, I would recommend the problem for my learned friend’s consideration while awaiting the approach of Morpheus or Hypnos, whichever deity he elects to patronize.”

This gentle hint, enforced by a glance at my watch, brought our discussion to an end, and very shortly afterwards we betook ourselves to our respective sleeping apartments.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Vanished Heirloom

The tragic events at “The Rowans” had excited a considerable amount of public interest, and naturally that interest was manifested in a specially intense form by the residents in the locality. I realised this when, in obedience to the summons which had been left at my lodgings, I made my way to the premises adjoining the High Street in which the inquest was to be held. As I approached the building I observed that quite a considerable crowd had gathered round the doors awaiting their opening, and noticed with some surprise the proportion of well-dressed women composing it.

Observing that the crowd contained no one whom I knew, I began to suspect that there was some other entrance reserved for authorised visitors, and was just looking round in search of it when the doors were opened and the crowd began to surge in; and at that moment I saw Miss Blake approaching. I waited for her to arrive, and when we had exchanged greetings I proceeded to pilot her through the crowd, which passed in with increasing slowness, suggesting that the accommodation was already being somewhat taxed.

I was not the only person who observed the symptoms of a “full house.” A woman whom I had already noticed making her way through the throng with more skill and energy than politeness, came abreast of me just as I had struggled to the door and made a determined effort to squeeze past. Perhaps if she had been a different type of woman I might have accepted the customary masculine defeat, but her bad manners, combined with her unprepossessing appearance, banished any scruples of chivalry. She was a kind of woman that I dislike most cordially; loudly dressed, flashy, scented like a civet cat; with glaring golden hair—manifestly peroxided, as was evident by her dark eyebrows—pencilled eyelids, and a coat of powder that stared even through her spotted veil. My gorge rose at her, and as she stuck her elbow in my ribs and made a final burst to get in before me, I maintained a stolid resistance.

“You must excuse me,” I said, “but I am a witness, and so is this lady.”

She cast a quick glance at me, and from me to Miss Blake; then—with a bad enough grace and without replying—she withdrew to let us pass, and ostentatiously turned her back on us.

The room was already crowded, but that was no concern of ours. We were present, and when our names should be called, the coroner’s officer would do all that was necessary.

“I suppose,” said Miss Blake, “we ought to have come in by another door. I see Sir Lawrence and Mrs. Benham are sitting by the table; and isn’t that Dr Thorndyke next to Sir Lawrence?”

“Yes,” I replied. “I don’t think he has been summoned, but, of course, he would be here to watch the case. I see Inspector Badger, too. I wonder if he is going to give evidence. Ah! You were right. There is another door. Here come the coroner and the jury. They will probably call you first as you are the principal witness, unless they begin with the medical evidence or Sir Lawrence. I see Dr Nichols has just come in.”

As the coroner and the jury took their seats at the table, the loud hum of conversation died away and an air of silent expectancy settled on the closely-packed audience. The coroner looked over a sheaf of type-written papers, and then opened the proceedings with a short address to the jury in which he recited the general facts of the case.

“And now, gentlemen,” he said in conclusion, “we will proceed to take the evidence, and we had better begin with that of the medical witness.”

Hereupon Dr Nichols was called, and having been sworn, described the circumstances under which he was summoned to “The Rowans” on the night of the 20th of September, and the result of his subsequent examination of the body of the deceased. “The cause of death,” he stated, “was a bullet-wound of the chest. The bullet entered on the right side between the third and fourth ribs, and passed completely through the chest, emerging on the left side of the back between the fourth and fifth ribs. In its passage it perforated the aorta—the greater central artery—and this injury might have produced almost instantaneous death.”

“Could the wound have been self-inflicted?” the coroner asked.

“Under the circumstances, it could not, for although death was practically instantaneous, no weapon was discovered. If the injury had been self-inflicted, the weapon would have been found either grasped in the hand or lying by the body.”

“Was the weapon fired at close quarters?”

“Apparently not. At any rate there was no singeing of the clothes or any other sign indicating a very close range.”

That was the sum of Dr Nichols’ evidence, and on its conclusion the local inspector was called. His evidence, however, was of merely formal character, setting forth the time at which he received the alarm call from Mrs. Benham and the conditions existing when he arrived. When it was finished there was a short pause. Then the next witness was called. This was Sir Lawrence Drayton, who, after giving evidence as to the identity of the deceased, answered a few questions respecting the collection and his brother’s manner of life, and the articles which had been stolen.

“The report, then,” said the coroner, “that this was a collection of valuable jewellery was erroneous?”

“Quite erroneous. Deceased never desired, nor could he afford, to accumulate things of great intrinsic value.”

“Do you know if many strangers came to see the collection?”

“Very few. In fact I never heard of any excepting those who came after an article on the collection had appeared in the Connoisseur.”

“Do you know how many came then?”

“There was a small party of Americans who came by appointment and were introduced by one of the staff of the South Kensington Museum. And there was a Mr. Halliburton who wrote from some hotel for an appointment. All I know about him is that he was apparently not specially interested in anything in the collection excepting the pieces that were illustrated in the magazine. I believe he wanted to buy one of those, but I don’t remember which it was.”

That was the substance of Drayton’s evidence, and when he had returned to his seat, the next witness was called.

“Winifred Blake.”

Miss Blake rose, and having made her way to the table, took the oath and proceeded to give her evidence. After one or two preliminary questions, the coroner allowed her to make her statement without interruption, while the jury and the audience listened with absorbed interest to her clear and vivid account of the events connected with the crime. When she had finished her narration—which was substantially the same as that which I had heard from her on the night of the tragedy—the coroner thanked her for the very lucid manner in which she had given her evidence and then proceeded to enlarge upon one or two points relating to the possible antecedents of the tragedy.

“You have mentioned, Miss Blake, that you were led to communicate with deceased by a certain article which appeared in the Connoisseur. Did that article give you the impression that the collection described was an important collection of valuable jewellery?”

“No. The article explicitly stated that the chief value of the pieces was in their history and associations.”

“Are you an expert or connoisseur in jewellery?”

“No. As an artist I am, of course, interested in goldsmith’s and jewellers work, but I have no special knowledge of it. My interest in this collection was purely personal. I wished to examine one of the pieces that was illustrated.”

“Would you tell us exactly what you mean by a personal interest?”

“The Connoisseur article was illustrated with two photographs, one of a locket and the other of a pendant. The pendant appeared to me to resemble one which was an heirloom in my own family and which disappeared about a hundred and fifty years ago and has never been seen since. I wanted to examine that pendant and see if it really was the missing jewel.”

“Was the missing pendant of any considerable value?”

“No. It was a small, plain gold pendant set with a single cat’s eye, and the pendant shown in the photograph appeared to answer the description exactly so far as I could judge. Its actual value would be quite small.”

“You say that the actual, or intrinsic, value of this jewel would be trifling. Had it, so far as you know, any special value?”

“Yes. It appears to have been greatly prized in the family, and I believe a good many efforts have been made to trace it. There was a tradition, or superstition, connected with it which gave it its value to members of the family.”

“Can you tell us what was the nature of that tradition?”

“It connected the possession of the jewel with the succession to the estates. The custom had been for the head of the family to wear the jewel, usually under the clothing, and the belief was that so long as he wore the jewel, or at any rate had it in his possession, the estates would remain in the possession of the branch of the family to which he belonged; but if the jewel passed into the possession of a member of some other branch of the family, then the estates would also pass into the possession of that branch.”

The coroner smiled. “Your ancestors,” he remarked, “appear to have taken small account of property law. But you say that efforts have been made to trace this jewel and that a good deal of value was set on it. Now, do you suppose that this tradition was taken at all seriously by any of the members of your family?”

“I cannot say very positively, but I should suppose that any one who might have a claim in the event of the failure of the existing line, would be glad to have the jewel in his possession.”

“Is there, so far as you know, any probability of a change in the succession to this property?”

“I believe that the present tenant is unmarried and that if he should die there would be several claimants from other branches of the family.”

“And then,” said the coroner with a smile, “the one who possessed the cat’s eye pendant would be the successful claimant. Is that the position?”

“It is possible that some of them entertain that belief.”

“Have you any expectations yourself?”

“Personally I have not. But my brother Percival is, properly speaking, the direct heir to this estate.”

“Then why is he not in possession? And what do you mean exactly by the ‘direct heir’?”

“I mean that he is the direct descendant of the head of the senior branch of the family. Our ancestor disappeared at the same time as the jewel—he took it with him, in fact. The reason that my brother is not in possession is that we cannot prove the legality of our ancestor’s marriage. But it is always possible that the documents may be discovered—they are known to exist; and then, if a change in the succession should occur, my brother’s claim would certainly take precedence of the others.”

“This is very interesting,” said the coroner, “and not without importance to this inquiry. Now tell us, Miss Blake, would you yourself attach any significance to the possession of this jewel?”

Miss Blake coloured slightly as she replied: “I don’t suppose it would affect the succession to the property, but I should like to know that the jewel was in my brother’s possession.”

“In case there might be some truth in the belief, h’m? Well, it’s not unnatural. And now, to return for a moment to the man whom you tried so pluckily to detain. You have given us a very clear description of him. Do you think you would be able to recognise him?”

“I feel no doubt that I could. As an artist with some experience as a portrait painter I have been accustomed to study faces closely and quickly and to remember them. I can form quite a clear mental picture of this man’s face.”

“Do you think you could make. I drawing of it from memory?”

“I don’t think my drawing would be reliable for identification. It is principally the man’s expression that I remember so clearly. I might be wrong as to the details of the features, but if I were to see the man again I am sure I should know him.”

“I hope you will have an opportunity,” said the coroner. Then, turning to the jury, he asked: “Do you wish to ask this witness any questions, gentlemen?” and on receiving a negative reply, he thanked Miss Blake and dismissed her with a bow.

My own evidence was taken next, but I need not repeat it since it was concerned only with those experiences which I have already related in detail. I was followed by Mrs. Benham, who, like the preceding witnesses, was allowed to begin with a statement describing her experiences.

“How did it happen,” the coroner asked when she had finished her statement, “that there was no one in the house when the thieves broke in?”

“I had to take a message for Mr. Drayton to a gentleman who lives at North End. It is quite a short distance, but I was detained there more than a quarter of an hour.”

“Was the house often left?”

“No, very seldom. During the day I had a maid to help me. She went home at six, and after that I hardly ever went out.”

“Were you alone in the house in the evenings when Mr. Drayton was at the club?”

“Yes. From about seven to between half-past nine and ten. Mr. Drayton used to lock the museum and take the key with him.”

“Did many persons know that deceased was away from the house every evening?”

“A good many must have known, as he was a regular chess-player. And anybody who cared to know could have seen him go out and come back.”

“On the night of the murder did he go out at his usual time?”

“Yes, a little after seven. But, unfortunately, he came back nearly two hours earlier than usual. That was the cause of the disaster.”

“Exactly. And now, Mrs. Benham, I want you to tell us all you know about the visitors who came to see the collection after the article had appeared in the Connoisseur. There were some Americans, I believe?”

“Yes. A small party—four or five—who came together in a large car. They sent a letter of introduction, and I think Mr. Drayton knew pretty well who they were. Then about a week later Mr. Halliburton wrote from the Baltic Hotel to ask if he might look over the collection, and naming a particular day—the sixteenth of this month—and Mr. Drayton made the appointment, although it was very inconvenient.”

“Was Mr. Halliburton known to deceased?”

“No, he was a complete stranger.”

“And did he come and inspect the collection?”

“Yes; he came, and Mr. Drayton spent a long time with him showing him all the things and telling him all about them. I remember it very well because Mr. Drayton was so very vexed that he should have put himself to so much inconvenience for nothing.”

“Why ‘for nothing’?” asked the coroner.

“He said that Mr. Halliburton didn’t seem to know anything about jewellery nor to care about any of the things but the two that had been shown in the photographs. He seemed to have come from mere idle curiosity. And then he rather offended Mr. Drayton by offering to buy one of the pieces. He said that he wanted to give it for a wedding present.”

“Do you know which piece it was that he wanted to buy?”

“The pendant. The other piece—the locket—didn’t seem to interest him at all.”

“Did you see Mr. Halliburton?”

“I only saw his back as he went out. Mr. Drayton let him in and took him to the museum. I could see that he was rather a big man, but I couldn’t see what he was like.”

“And are these the only strangers that have been to the house lately?”

“Yes; the only ones for quite a long time.”

The coroner reflected for a few moments, then, as the jury had no questions to ask, he thanked the witness and dismissed her.

The next witness was Inspector Badger, and a very cautious witness he was, and like his namesake, very unwilling to be drawn. To me, who knew pretty well what information he held, his evasive manoeuvres and his portentous secrecy were decidedly amusing, and the foxy glances that he occasionally cast in Thorndyke’s direction made me suspect that he was unaware of Superintendent Miller’s visit to our chambers. He began by setting forth that, in consequence of a telephone message from the local police, he proceeded on the evening of the twentieth instant to “The Rowans” to examine the premises and obtain particulars of the crime. He had obtained a rough list of the stolen property from Sir Lawrence Drayton. It included the pendant and the locket which had been illustrated in the article referred to.

“Should you say there was any evidence of selection as to the articles stolen?” the coroner asked.

“No. Only two drawers had been opened, and they were the two upper ones. The top drawer contained nothing of any value, and I infer that the thieves had only just got the second drawer open when they were disturbed.”

“Did you ascertain how many men were on the premises?”

“There were two men. We found their footprints in the grounds, and moreover, both of them were seen. And certain other traces were found.”

“Dr Nichols has mentioned that some hair was found grasped in the hand of deceased. Has that been examined?”

“I believe it has, but hair isn’t much use until you have got the man to compare it with.”

“I suppose not. And with regard to the other traces. What were they?”

The inspector pursed up his lips and assumed a portentous expression.

“I hope, sir,” said he, “that you will not press that question. It is not desirable in the interests of justice that the information that is in our possession should become public property.”

“I quite agree with you,” said the coroner. “But may we take it that you have some clue to the identity of these two men?”

“We have several very promising clues,” the inspector replied with some disregard, I suspected, for the exact wording of the oath that he had just taken.

“Well,” said the coroner, “that is all that really concerns us,” and I could not but reflect that it was all that really concerned Mr. Joseph Hedges, alias Moakey, and that the inspector’s secrecy was somewhat pointless when the cat had been let out of the bag to this extent. “I suppose,” he continued, “it would be indiscreet to ask if any information is available about the Mr. Halliburton whose name has been mentioned.”

“I should rather not make any detailed statement on the subject,” replied Badger, “but I may say that our information is of a very definite kind and points very clearly in a particular direction.”

“That is very satisfactory,” said the coroner. “This is a peculiarly atrocious crime, and I am sure that all law-abiding persons will be glad to hear that there is a good prospect of the wrongdoers being brought to justice. And I think if you have nothing more to tell us, Inspector, that we need not trouble you any further.” He paused, and as Badger resumed his seat, he took a final glance over his notes; then, turning to the jury, he said: “You have now, gentlemen, heard all the evidence, excepting those details which the police have very properly reserved and which really do not concern us. For I may remind you that this is not a criminal court. It is not our object to fix the guilt on any particular persons but to ascertain how this poor gentlemen met with his most deplorable death; and I am sure that the evidence which you have heard will be sufficient to enable you, without difficulty, to arrive at a verdict.”

On the conclusion of the coroner’s address, the jury rapidly conferred for a few moments; then the foreman rose and announced that they had agreed unanimously on a verdict of wilful murder committed by some person or persons unknown, and they desired to express their deep sympathy with the brother of the deceased, Sir Lawrence Drayton; and when the latter had briefly thanked the jury, through the coroner, the proceedings terminated and the court rose.

As the audience were slowly filing out, Sir Lawrence approached Miss Blake, and having shaken hands cordially and inquired as to her convalescence, said: “That was a very remarkable story that you told in your evidence; I mean the simultaneous disappearance of your ancestor and this curious heirloom. As a Chancery barrister, unusual circumstances affecting the devolution of landed property naturally interest me. In the court in which I practise one sees, from time to time, some very odd turns of the wheel of Fortune. May I ask if any claim has ever been advanced by your branch of the family?”

“Yes. My father began some proceedings soon after my brother was born, but his counsel advised him not to go on with the case. He considered that without documentary evidence of my ancestor’s marriage, it was useless to take the case into court.”

“Probably he was right,” said Drayton. “Still, as a matter of professional interest—to say nothing of the interest that one naturally feels in the welfare of one’s friends—I should like to know more about this quaint piece of family history. What do you think, Anstey?”

“I think it would be interesting to know just at what point the evidence of the relationship breaks off, and how large the gap is.”

“Precisely,” said Drayton. “And one would like to know how the other parties are placed. What, for instance, would be the position if the present tenant were to die without issue, who are the heirs, and so on.”

“If it would interest you,” said Miss Blake, “I could give you fairly full particulars of all that is known. My grandfather, who was a lawyer, wrote out an abstract for the guidance of his descendants; quite a full and very clear narrative. I could let you have that or a copy of it, if I didn’t feel ashamed to take up your time with it.”

“Let me have the copy,” said Drayton. “I don’t suppose anything will come of it from your point of view, but it strikes me as an interesting case which is at least worth elucidating. Do you know Dr Thorndyke?”

“We know one another by repute,” said Thorndyke. “Miss Blake used to board with Polton’s sister. You were speaking of the curious circumstances that Miss Blake mentioned in reference to the cat’s eye pendant.”

“Yes,” said Drayton. “I was saying that it would be worth while to get the facts of the case sorted out.”

“I quite agree with you,” said Thorndyke. “The same idea had occurred to me when Miss Blake was giving her evidence. Do I understand that there are documents available?”

“I have a full resume of the facts relating to the change in the succession,” said Miss Blake, “and a copy which I am going to hand to Sir Lawrence.”

“Then,” said Thorndyke, “I shall crave your kind permission to look through that copy. I am not much of an authority on property law, but—”

“Nihil quod tetigit non ornavit,” I murmured, quoting Johnson’s famous epitaph on the versatile “Goldie.”

“Quite right, Anstey,” Drayton agreed warmly. “All knowledge is Thorndyke’s province. Then you will let me have that copy at your convenience, Miss Blake?”

“Thank you, yes, Sir Lawrence,” she replied. “You shall have it by tomorrow. Oh, and there is something else that I have to give you, and I may as well give it to you now. Did Mr. Anstey tell you that I had found the missing locket? I have brought it tied round my neck for safety. Has any one got a knife?” As she spoke she unfastened the top button of her dress and drew out the little gold volume which was attached to a silken cord.

“Don’t cut the cord,” said Drayton. “I want you to keep the locket as a souvenir of my poor brother. Now don’t raise objections. Anstey has told me that the little bauble has found favour in your eyes, and I very much wish you to have it. It was a great favourite of my brother’s. He used to call it ‘the little Sphinx’ because it always seemed to be propounding a riddle; and it will be a great satisfaction to me to feel that it has passed into friendly and sympathetic hands instead of going to a museum with the other things.”

“It is exceedingly kind of you, Sir Lawrence,” she began, but he interrupted: “It is nothing of the kind. I am doing myself a kindness in finding a good home for poor Andrew’s little favourite. Are you going by train or tram?”

“I shall wait for the tram,” she replied.

“Then we part here. Dr Thorndyke and I are taking the train to Broad Street. Goodbye! Don’t forget to send me that copy of the documents.”

The two men swung off down the road to the station, and as a tram appeared in the offing, a resolution which had been forming in my mind took definite shape.

“I don’t see,” said I, “why I should be left out in the cold in regard to this family romance of yours. Why shouldn’t I come and collect the copy to deliver to Sir Lawrence and have a surreptitious read at it myself?”

“It would be very nice of you if you could spare the time,” she replied. “I will even offer special inducements. I will give you some tea, which you must be wanting by this time, I should think, and I will show you not only the copy but the original documents. One of them is quite curious.”

“That settles it then,” said I. “Tea and documents, combined with your society and that of your ingenious brother, form what the theatrical people would call a galaxy of attractions. Here is our tram. Do we go inside or outside?”

“Oh, outside, please. There is quite a crowd waiting.”

I was relieved at this decision, for I was hankering for a smoke; and as soon as we had taken our places in a front seat on the roof, I began secretly to feel in the pocket where the friendly pipe reposed and to debate within myself whether I might crave permission to bring it forth. At length the tobacco-hunger conquered my scruples and I ventured to make the request.

“Oh, of course,” she replied. “Do smoke. I love the smell of tobacco, especially from a pipe.”

Thus encouraged, I joyfully produced the calumet and felt in my pocket for my pouch. And then came a dreadful disappointment. The pouch was there, sure enough, but its lean sides announced the hideous fact that it was empty. There were not even a few grains wherewith to stave off imminent starvation.

“How provoking!” my companion exclaimed tragically. “I am sorry. But you shan’t be deprived for long. You must get down at a tobacconist’s and restock your pouch, and then after tea you shall smoke your pipe while I show you the documents, as you call them.”

“Then I am comforted,” said I. “The galaxy of attractions has received a further addition.” Resignedly I put away the pipe and pouch, and reverting to a question that had occurred to me while she was giving her evidence, I said: “There was one statement of yours that I did not quite follow. It was with regard to the man whom you were trying to hold. You said that you were quite confident that you would recognise him and that you could call up quite a clear and vivid mental picture of his face, but yet you thought that, if you were to draw a memory portrait of him, that portrait might be misleading. How could that be? You would know whether your portrait was like your recollection of the man, and if it was, surely it would be like the man himself?”

“I suppose it would,” she replied thoughtfully. “But there might be some false details which wouldn’t matter to me but which might mislead others who might take those details for the essential characters.”

“But if the details were wrong, wouldn’t that destroy the likeness?”

“Not necessarily, I think. Of course, a likeness is ultimately dependent on the features, particularly on their proportion and the spaces between them. But you must have noticed that when children and beginners draw portraits, although they produce the most frightful caricatures—all wrong and all out of drawing—yet those portraits are often unmistakable likenesses.”

“Yes, I have noticed that. But don’t you think the likeness is probably due to the caricature? To the exaggeration of some one or two characteristic peculiarities?”

“Very likely But that rather bears out what I said. For those caricatures, though easily recognisable, are mostly false; and if one of them got into the hands of a stranger who had never seen the subject of the portrait, for purposes of identification, he would as probably as not look for some one having those characteristics which had been quite falsely represented.”

“Yes; and then he would be looking for the wrong kind of person altogether.”

“Exactly. And then my drawing would probably be far from a correct representation of my recollection of the face. It isn’t as if one could take a photograph of a mental image. So I am afraid that the idea of a memory drawing for the purpose of identification must be abandoned. Besides, it would be of no use unless we could get hold of the man.”

“No. But that is not impossible. The police have apparently identified one of the men and expect to have him in custody at any moment. He may give information as to the other, but even if he does not, the police may be able to find out who his associates were, and in that case a memory drawing which was far from accurate might help them to pick out the particular man.”

“That is possible,” she agreed. “But then if the police could get hold of this man’s associates and let me see them, I could pick out the particular man with certainty and without any drawing at all. Isn’t that a tobacconist’s shop that we are approaching?”

“It is. I think I will get off and make my purchase and then come along to the studio.”

“Do,” she said, “and I will run on ahead and see that the preparations for tea are started.”

I ran down the steps and dropped off the tram without stopping it, but by this time we had passed the shop by some little distance and I had to walk back. I secured the new supply, and having stuffed it into my pouch, came out of the shop just in time to see the tram stop nearly a quarter of a mile ahead and Miss Blake get off, followed by a couple of other passengers, and walk quickly into Jacob Street. I strode forward at a brisk pace in the same direction, but when I reached the corner of the street she had already disappeared. I was just about to cross to the side on which the studio was situated when my attention was attracted by a woman who was walking slowly up the street on my side. At the first glance I was struck by something familiar in her appearance and a second glance confirmed the impression. She was smartly—and something more than smartly—dressed, and in particular I noted a rather large, elaborate, and gaudy hat. In short, she was very singularly like the woman who had jostled me in the doorway of the hall in which the inquest was held.

I slowed down to avoid overtaking her, and as I did so she crossed the road and walked straight up to the gate of the studio. For an instant I thought she was going to ring the bell, for after a glance at the number on the gate she turned to the side and read the little nameplate, leaning forward and putting her face close to it as if she were near-sighted. At that moment the wicket opened and Master Percy stepped out on to the threshold; whereupon the woman, after one swift, intense glance at the boy, turned away and walked quickly up the street. I was half disposed to follow her and confirm my suspicion as to her identity; but Master Percy had already observed me, and it seemed, perhaps, more expedient to get out of sight myself than to reveal my presence in attempting to verify a suspicion of which I had practically no doubt, and which, even if confirmed, had no obvious significance. Accordingly I crossed the road, and having greeted my host, was by him conducted down the passage to the studio.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A Jacobite Romance

In the minds of many of us, including myself, there appears to be a natural association between the ideas of tea and tobacco. Whether it is that both substances are exotic products, adopted from alien races, or that each is connected with a confirmed and accepted drug habit, I am not quite clear. But there seems to be no doubt that the association exists and that the realisation of the one idea begets an imperative impulse to realise the other. In conformity with which natural law, when the tea-things had been, by the joint efforts of Miss Blake and her brother, removed to the curtained repository—where also dwelt a gas ring and a kettle—I proceeded complacently to bring forth my pipe and the bulging tobacco-pouch and to transfer some of the contents of the latter to the former.

“I am glad to see you smoking,” said Miss Blake as the first cloud of incense ascended. “It gives me the feeling that you are provided with an antidote to the documents. I shall have less compunction about the reading.”

“You think that the ‘tuneless pipe’ is similar to the tuneful one in its effects on the ‘savage breast.’ But I don’t want any antidote. I am all agog to hear your romance of a cat’s eye, that is, if you are going to read out the documents.”

“I thought I would read the copy aloud and get you to check it by the originals. Then you can assure Sir Lawrence that it is a true copy.”

“Yes. I think that is quite a good plan. It is always well to have a copy checked and certified correct.”

“Then I will get the books and we will begin at once. Do you want to hear the reading, Percy, or are you going on with your building?”

“I should like to come and listen, if you don’t mind, Winnie,” he replied; and as his sister unlocked the cabinet under the window, he seated himself on a chair by the now vacant table. Miss Blake took from the cabinet three books, one of which—an ordinary school exercise-book—she placed on the table by her chair.

“That,” she said, “is the copy of both originals. This”—handing to me a little leather-covered book, the pages of which were filled with small, clearly-written, though faded, handwriting—“is the abstract of which I spoke. This other little book is the fragmentary original which is referred to in the abstract. If you are ready I will begin. We will take the abstract first.”

I provided myself with a pencil with which to mark any errors, and having opened the little book announced that I was ready.

“The abstract,” said she, “was written in 1821, and reads as follows:

“A SHORT HISTORY OF THE BLAKES OF BEAUCHAMP BLAKE NEAR WENDOVER IN THE COUNTY OF BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, FROM THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1708.

“This history has been written by me for the purpose of preserving a record of certain events for the information of my descendants, to whom a knowledge of those events may prove of great importance; and its writing has become necessary by the circumstance that, whereas the only existing written record has been reduced by Time and ill-usage to a collection of disconnected fragments, the traditions passed on orally from generation to generation become year by year more indistinct and unreliable.

“I shall begin with the year 1708, at which time the estate of Beauchamp Blake was held by Harold Blake. In this year was born Percival Blake, the only son of Harold aforesaid. Seven years later occurred a rising in favour of the Royal House of the Stuarts, in which act of rebellion the said Harold Blake was suspected (but never accused) of having taken part. In the year 1743, Harold Blake died and his only son, Percival, succeeded to the property.

“In or about the year 1742, Percival Blake married a lady named Judith Weston (or Western). For some unknown reason this marriage took place secretly, and was, for a time at least, kept secret. Possibly the marriage would not have been acceptable to Percival’s father, or the lady may have been a Papist. This latter seems the more probable, inasmuch as the marriage was solemnised, not at the church of St Margaret at Beauchamp Blake, but at a little church in London near to Aldgate, called St Peter by the Shambles, the rector of which, the Reverend Stephen Rumbold, an intimate friend of Percival’s, became subsequently not only a Papist but a Jesuit. In the next year, 1743, a son was born and was christened James. No entry of this birth appears in the registers of St Margaret’s, so it is probable that it was registered at the London church. Unfortunately, this register is incomplete. Several pages have been torn out, and as these missing pages belong to the years 1742 and 1743, it is to be presumed that they contained the records of the marriage and the birth.

“About the year 1725 Percival came to London to study medicine; and about 1729 or 1730 he completed his studies and took his degree at Cambridge, of which University he was already a Bachelor of Arts. From this time onwards he appears to have practised in London as a physician, and it was probably at this period that he made the acquaintance of Judith Western and Stephen Rumbold. Even after the death of his father and his own succession to the property, he continued to practise his profession, making only occasional visits to his estate in Buckinghamshire.

“Like his father, Percival Blake was an ardent supporter of the Stuarts, and it is believed that he took an active part in the various Jacobite plots that were heard of about this time; and when, in 1745, the great rising took place, Percival was one of those who hastened to join the forces of the young Pretender, a disastrous act, to which all the subsequent misfortunes of the family are due.

“On the collapse of the Jacobite cause, Percival took immediate measures to avert the consequences of his ill-judged action from his own family; and in these he displayed a degree of foresight that might well have been exhibited earlier. From Scotland he made his way to Beauchamp Blake and there, in one of the numerous hiding-places of the old mansion, concealed certain important documents connected with the property. It is not quite clear what these documents were. Among them appear to have been some of the title-deeds, and there is no doubt that they included documents proving the validity of his marriage with Judith and the legitimacy of his son James. Meanwhile, he had sent his wife and child, with a servant named Jenifer Gray, to Hamburg, where they were to wait until he joined them. He himself made his way to a port on the East Coast, believed to have been King’s Lynn, where he embarked, under a false name, on a small vessel bound for Hamburg; but while he was waiting for the vessel to sail, he circulated a very circumstantial account of his own death by drowning while attempting to escape in an open boat.

“This was at once a fortunate and unfortunate act; fortunate inasmuch as it completely achieved his purpose of preventing the confiscation of the property; unfortunate inasmuch as it effectually shut out his own descendants from the succession. On the report of his death (unmarried, as was believed, and so without issue) a distant cousin, of unquestionable loyalty to the reigning house, took possession of the estate without opposition and without any suggestion of confiscation.

“One thing only, appertaining to the inheritance, Percival took with him. Among the family heirlooms was a jewel consisting of a small pendant set with a single cymophane (vulgarly known as a cat’s eye) and bearing an inscription, of which the actual words are unknown, but of which the purport was that whosoever should possess the jewel should also possess the Blake estate; a foolish statement that seems to have been generally believed in the family and to which Percival evidently attached incredible weight. For not only did he take the jewel with him but, as will presently appear, he made careful provision for its disposal.

“From this time onward the history becomes more and more vague. It seems that Percival joined his wife and child at Hamburg, and thereafter travelled about Germany, plying his profession as a physician. But soon he was overtaken by a terrible misfortune. It appears that a robbery had been committed by a woman who was said to be a foreigner, and suspicion fell upon Judith. She was arrested, and on false evidence, convicted and sent, as a punishment, to labour in the mines somewhere in the Harz Mountains. Percival made unceasing efforts to obtain her release, but it was three years before his efforts were crowned with success. But then, alas, it was too late. The poor lady came back to him aged by privation and broken by long-standing sickness, only to linger on a few months and then to die in his arms. On her release he carried her away to France, and there, at Paris, about the year 1751, she passed away and is believed to have been buried in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise.

“The death of his wife, to whom he seems to have been devotedly attached, left Percival a broken man; and about eighteen months later, he himself died, and is believed to have been buried beside Judith. But in these sad months he occupied himself in making provision for the recovery of the family inheritance by his posterity when circumstances should have become more favourable. To this end he wrote a summary of the events connected with and following the Jacobite rising and had it sewn into a little illustrated Book of Hours, which, together with the cymophane jewel, he gave into the keeping of Jenifer Gray, to be by her given to the child James when he should be old enough to be trusted with them. The exact contents of the little book we can only surmise from the fragments that remain, but they seem to have been a short account of his own actions and vicissitudes, and no doubt gave at least a clue to the place in which the documents were hidden. Nor can we tell what the exact form of the jewel was or the nature of the inscription, for Percival’s references to the latter as “a guide” to his descendants are not clearly understandable. At any rate, the jewel has disappeared and the written record is reduced to a few fragments. Jenifer Gray (who seems to have been an illiterate and foolish woman) apparently gave the little book to the child to play with, for the few leaves that remain are covered with childish scrawls; and she may have sold the jewel to buy the necessaries of life, for she and the boy were evidently but poorly provided for.

“On reaching the age of fourteen, James was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker in Paris and apparently became very skilful workman. When he was out of his time (Jenifer Gray having died in the meantime) he came to England and settled in London, where, in time, he established an excellent business.

“Into this his son William (my father), was taken, first as an apprentice, then as partner and finally as principal. By my father the prosperity of the house was so well maintained that he was able to article me to an attorney, to whom I am chief clerk at this time of writing.

“This record, together with what remains of Percival Blake’s manuscript, will, I trust, be preserved by my descendants in the hope that it may be the instrument by which Providence may hereafter reinstate them in the inheritance of their forefathers.

“JOHN BLAKE.

“16 SYMOND’S INN, LONDON,

“20th June 1821.”

As she finished reading, Miss Blake let the book fall into her lap and looked at me as if inviting criticism. I closed the little original, and laying it on the table, remarked: “A very singular and romantic history, and a very valuable record. The detailed narrative presents a much more convincing case than one would have expected from the bare statement that you gave in your evidence. Your great-grandfather was a wise man to commit the facts to writing while the memory of the events was comparatively recent. How much is there left of Percival’s manuscript?”

“Very little, I am sorry to say,” she replied, picking up the remaining volume and handing it to me; “but I have made a copy of these fragments, too. It follows the copy of John Blake’s abstract, and I will read it out to you if you will check it by the original.”

I turned the little book over in my hand and examined it curiously. It was a tiny volume, bound in gold-tooled calf, now rusty and worn and badly broken at the joints. The title-page showed it to be a Book of Hours—Horae Beatae Mariae Virginis—printed at Antwerp by Bakhasar Moretus and dated 1634, and on turning over the leaves I perceived that it was illustrated with a number of quaint but decorative woodcuts. The inside of the cover seemed to have been used as a sort of unofficial birth register. At the top, in very faded writing, was inscribed “Judith Weston,” and underneath a succession of names beginning with “James, son of Percival and Judith Blake, born 3 April 1743,” and ending with Winifred and Percival, the daughter and son of Peter and Agnes Blake. Between the cover and the title-page a number of fly-leaves of very thin paper had been stitched in, and those that remained were covered with minute writing of a pale, ghostly brown, largely defaced by spots, smears, scribblings and childish drawings. But most of them had disappeared, and the few that were left hung insecurely to the loosened stitches.

When I had completed my inspection, I opened the book at the first fly-leaf, and adjusting the reading-glass which Miss Blake had placed on the table, announced that I was ready; whereupon she resumed her reading.

“The first page reads: ‘…to my cousin Leonard, who, as the heir-at-law, would, I knew, be watching the course of events. Indeed, I doubt not that if he had known of my marriage, he would have used his influence at the Court to oust me. But the news of my death I felt sure would bring him forward at once, and his loyalty to the German King would make him secure to the succession. So he and his brood should keep the nest warm until the clouds had passed and the present troubles should be forgotten. Only to my own posterity, the true heirs, must be provided a key wherewith to re-enter on their inheritance, and to this end I searched the muniment chest and took therefrom all the—’”

This was the end of the page, and as she broke off. Miss Blake looked up.

“Isn’t it exasperating?” said she. “There seems to be only one page missing in this place, but it is the one that contains the vital information.”

“It is not very difficult to guess what he took,” said I. “Evidently he abstracted the title-deeds. But the question is, what did he do with them?”

“Yes,” said Miss Blake, “that is the important question, and unfortunately we cannot answer it. That he hid them in a secure hiding-place is evident from the next two pages. The first reads: ‘Will Bateman, the plumber, made me a tall leaden jar like a black-jack to hold the documents, with a close-fitting lid, which we luted on with wax when we had put the documents into it. And this jar I set in the hiding-place, and on top of it the great two-handled posset-pot that old Martin, the potter, made for my mother when I was born; which I prize dearly and would not have it fall into the hands of strangers. When all was ready, we sent for the carpenter, who is a safe man and loyal to the Prince, and bade him close the chamber, which he did so that no eye could detect the opening. So the writings shall be safe until such time—’

“The next page reads: ‘…and the other documents which I obtained from Mr. Halford, the attorney. I had feared that their absence might be a bar to the succession, but he assured me it was not so, but only that it would hinder the sale of the property. So I am satisfied; and I am confident that Leonard will never guess the hiding-place in which they are bestowed, nor will he ever dream what that hiding-place conceals.’

“‘When I had done this I began forthwith to spread the report of my death among strangers, both in the coffee-houses and at the inn whereat I lodged while I was waiting for the ship to sail from—’ There the page ends, and there seems to be quite a lot missing, for the next one speaks of the disaster as having already occurred.

“‘Nor, indeed, would they listen to her protestations (spoken, as they were, in a strange tongue), and still less to my entreaties. And so she was borne away from my sight, brave, cheerful, and dignified to the last, as befitted an English gentlewoman, though it seemed then as if we should never look on one another again. So I left with the child and Jenifer and must needs continue to live at Eisenach (that I might be near my darling, though I could never see her) and must minister for my daily bread to the wretches who people that accursed land—’

“There seems to be only one or two pages missing here, for the next page runs: ‘…this joyful day (as I had hoped it would be) and set forth from Eisenach with the child and Jenifer to meet my poor darling on the road. A few miles out we saw the cart approaching, filled with the prisoners released from the mines. I looked among them, but at first saw her not. Then a haggard old woman held out her arms to me and I looked again. The old woman was Judith, my wife! But, O God, what a wreck! She was wasted to a very skeleton, her skin was like old parchment, her hair, that had been like spun gold, was turned to a strange black and her whole aspect—’” Miss Blake paused and said in a low voice: “It is a dreadful picture. Poor Judith! And poor Percival! And the rest of the story is just as sad. The next page takes up the thread just after Judith’s death.

“‘And when it was over and I saw them shovel in the earth, I felt moved to beg them not to fill the grave but to leave room for me. I went away through the snow with Jenifer and the boy. But I was alone. Judith had been all to me, and my heart was under the new-turned sods. Yet I bethought me, if it should please God to take me, I must not go without leaving some chart to guide my son back to our home, should such return be possible in his lifetime, or to guide his children or his children’s children. Therefore, that same sad day I began to write this history on the fly-leaves that my dear wife had had sewn into her little book of—’

“There seems to be only one page missing before the next, but it was an important one, so far as we can judge. Indeed, it almost appears as if all the most significant pages were lost. The next page reads:

“…gave me a string from his bass viol, which he says will be the best of all. So that matter is as secure as care and judgement can make it. This book and the precious bauble I purpose to hold until I feel the hand of death upon me, and then I shall give both into the keeping of Jenifer, bidding her guard them jealously as treasures beyond price, until my son attains the age of fourteen. Then she shall give them to him, adjuring him to preserve the book in a safe place and never to lend or show it to any person whatsoever, and to wear the trinket hung around his neck under his clothing so that none shall know—”

“That is the last complete page. There remains a half-page, which seems to have been the concluding one. It reads: ‘…and that is all that I can do, since one cannot look into the future. When the time is ripe, my son, or his descendants, can go forward with open eyes. This history and the trinket shall guide them. Wherefore I pray that both may be treasured by them to whom I thus pass on the inheritance.’”

As Miss Blake finished her reading she closed the book and sat looking thoughtfully at her brother, who had listened with rapt attention to the pathetic story. Half-reluctantly I shut the little Book of Hours and laid it on the table.

“It is a tragic little history,” I said, “and these soiled and tattered leaves and the faded writing and the old-fashioned phraseology make it somehow very real and vivid. I wonder what became of the cat’s eye pendant. Is nothing at all known of the way in which it was lost?”

“Nothing,” she replied. “The boy James was only seven years old when his father died, so he would hardly have remembered, even if he knew of the existence of the jewel. It may have been lost or stolen, or, more probably, Jenifer sold it to buy the necessaries of life. She must have been pretty hard pressed at times.”

“She must have been a duffer,” said Percy, “if she sold it after what she had been told. Couldn’t she have popped it and kept up the interest?”

“You seem to know a good deal about these matters, Percy,” his sister remarked with a smile.

“Well,” said he, “I should think everybody knows how to raise the wind if they are hard up. There’s no need to sell things when you’ve got an uncle.”

“We don’t know that she did sell it,” said Miss Blake. “She may even have ‘popped’ it, to use your elegant expression. All that we know is that it disappeared. And now it has disappeared again, if this pendant that was stolen was really the Blake pendant.”

“Is there any reason to suppose that it was?” I asked.

“Only that it agreed with what little we know of the missing jewel, and cat’s eye pendants must be very rare. Unfortunately, the Connoisseur article doesn’t help us much. It gives a photograph, from which we could identify the pendant if we knew exactly what it was like, but the description fails just at the vital point. It doesn’t say anything about the inscription on the back. It was in order to find out what that inscription was that I asked poor Mr. Drayton to let me see the jewel. Would you like to see the photograph?”

“I should, very much, if you have a copy.”

She fetched from the cabinet a copy of the Connoisseur, and having found the article, handed the open magazine to me. There were two photographs on the page, one of the little book-locket and the other of a simple, lozenge-shaped pendant of somewhat plain design, set with a single, rather large stone, smooth-cut and nearly circular. The letterpress gave no particulars and did not even mention the inscription.

“I suppose,” said I, “there is no doubt that this pendant did bear an inscription of some kind. There is no reference to it here.”

“No particular reference, unfortunately. But this was a collection of inscribed objects. Every specimen bore an inscription if it was only a name and a date. The article, you will see, says so, and Mr. Drayton told me so himself.”

“You didn’t ask him what was written on this pendant?”

“No; I didn’t want to tell him about our family tradition unless I found that it really was the Blake pendant. Perhaps I might not have told him even then, for the inscription might have told us all we wanted to know; though I must confess to a certain superstitious hankering to possess the jewel, or, at least, to see it in Percy’s possession.”

“You were telling Sir Lawrence that proceedings to establish a claim were actually begun by your father.”

“Yes, but our solicitor was not at all hopeful, and the counsel whom he retained very strongly advised my father not to go on. He thought that, with the apparently well-founded belief in Percival’s death and the absence of any real evidence of his marriage and survival, we had no case. So the action was settled out of court and the tenant at the time agreed to pay most of the costs.”

“Do you remember who was the solicitor for the tenant?”

“Yes. His name was Brodribb, and my father thought he treated us very fairly.”

“He probably did. I know Mr. Brodribb very well, and I have the highest opinion of him as a lawyer and as a man. I have often been retained by him, and I have usually been very well satisfied to be associated with him. Do you know what the position was when your father began his action? I mean as to the possible heirs. Was the present tenant then in possession?”

“No; he was a Mr. Arnold Blake, a widower with no surviving children. But he knew the present tenant, Arthur Blake, although they were not very near relatives, and was prepared to contest the claim on his behalf. Arthur Blake was then, I think, in Australia.”

“And I gather that you don’t know much about him?”

“No, excepting that I understand that he is unmarried, which is all that really matters to us.”

“And did Brodribb know about this little book and John Blake’s abstract?”

“I think my father must have told him that we had some authentic details of the family history, but I don’t know whether he actually showed him the originals.”

“And with regard to the pedigree since Percival. Have the marriages and births all been proved?”

“Yes. My father had them investigated, and obtained certificates of all of them, and I have those certificates, though I am afraid they are never likely to be called for.”

“Well,” I said, “as a lawyer, I shouldn’t like to hold out any hopes even if the death of the present tenant without issue should seem to create a favourable situation. But, of course, if it should ever become possible to prove the marriage of Percival and Judith and the birth of James, that would alter the position very materially. And now I must tear myself away. I have been most keenly interested in hearing your romance, and I have no doubt that Sir Lawrence will be equally so. If you will give me the copy, I will leave it at his chambers tonight or tomorrow morning.”

She gave me the manuscript book, which I slipped into my pocket, and then she and Percy escorted me across the yard and let me out at the wicket.

CHAPTER NINE

Exit Moakey

From Jacob Street I made my way to the Temple with the intention of letting Thorndyke look through Miss Blake’s manuscript—since he had expressed a wish to see it—before delivering it to Drayton. And as I sat on the omnibus roof I reflected on the events of the afternoon. In spite of my legal training and experience the romance of the lost inheritance had taken a strong hold on me. The two narratives, and especially the older one, diffused an atmosphere of reality that was very convincing. It was practically certain that the two manuscripts were genuine, and if they were, there could be no doubt that my young friend Percy was the direct descendant of the Jacobite fugitive, Percival Blake. Nor could there be much reasonable doubt that the descent was legitimate. Percival plainly referred to Judith as his wife and there seemed to be no reason for supposing that the marriage had not taken place at the time stated in John Blake’s abstract. In short, I found myself wondering whether Mr. Peter Blake’s counsel had not been a little over-cautious, or whether he might not have been influenced by a possible financial straitness on the part of the said Peter unfavourable to a warmly-contested action at law.

If he had been over-cautious, it was unfortunate, for he had missed an opportunity. The death of Arnold Blake without a direct successor would have made things comparatively easy for a new claimant with a good case, whereas now, with Arthur Blake in possession, the difficulties would be much greater. It is one thing to maintain a claim against other claimants, but quite another to oust a tenant who has established a title by actual possession. And, to judge by their surroundings and mode of life, my friends were but poorly equipped for any action at all.

From the manuscripts and their story my thoughts strayed to the woman whom I had seen examining Miss Blake’s nameplate. I did not like that incident at all. It might mean nothing. The woman might happen to live in the neighbourhood and have made her inspection from mere idle curiosity. But that was not what the appearances suggested. The woman had been at the inquest, and from Hampstead she must have travelled in the same tramcar that had conveyed Miss Blake and me. Then she had seemed to have followed Miss Blake, at some distance, on the opposite side of the road. There was a suggestion of purpose in the whole proceeding that I found disquieting and rather sinister, and it was not made less so by the very unprepossessing appearance of the woman herself.

When I let myself into our chambers with my key—or rather Jervis’—I found the sitting-room vacant; but as an inspection of the hat-rack in the lobby suggested that Thorndyke was somewhere on the premises, I went up to the laboratory, and there I found him in company with Polton and an uncanny-looking apparatus consisting of a microscope with an attachment of miniature hot-water pipes.

“This is a new form of magic,” said I, “at least it is new to me. What is going on?”

“This is just a microscope with a warm stage,” Thorndyke explained. “We are making it a hot stage for the purposes of the present experiment.”

“And what is the experiment?” I asked with sudden curiosity, for I had just observed that the object on the microscope stage was an irregular-shaped piece of glass on which I could distinguish a very clear fingerprint.

“The experiment is connected with the fingerprints on the piece of glass that you so very fortunately secured at ‘The Rowans.’ This is a portion of it which I have cut off with a glazier’s diamond and which bears a duplicate print. You remember my pointing out to you that a real fingerprint-as distinguished from a statistical or mathematical fingerprint—has chemical and physical properties. Well, we are endeavouring to determine the chemical nature of the substance of which this fingerprint is composed by inference from its physical properties. We are now ascertaining its melting-point; in fact I may say that we have ascertained it. It is fifty-three degrees centigrade. And this fact, in conjunction with its other observed physical properties, tells us that it is Japanese wax.”

“Indeed,” said I. “Then that goes to show that the man who made these fingerprints had been handling Japanese wax.”

“That is the obvious inference.”

“Does that throw any light on the man’s personality or occupation? What is Japanese wax used for?”

“For a variety of purposes. Very largely for the manufacture of wax polishes for boots and furniture, for the preparation of foundry wax and the various waxes used by jewellers, engravers, and lapidaries. It is also used in pharmacy in the making of certain plasters and cerates.”

“Do you think,” I asked, “that this man could have got it on his fingers by touching the furniture?”

“No,” replied Thorndyke. “The cabinets were French-polished, and I saw no trace of wax polish on them. Besides, there is more wax than would have been taken up in that way.”

“Does the presence of this wax suggest anything to you?”

“Well,” replied Thorndyke, “of course there are possibilities. But one mustn’t expect to apply a fact as soon as it is discovered. We have ascertained what this substance is. Let us put this item of knowledge in its proper mental pigeon-hole and hope that we shall find a use for it presently.”

“I have a strong suspicion, Thorndyke,” said I, “that you have found a use for it already. However, I won’t press you. I know my place. The mantle of Jervis is on me—and trailing a few yards along the ground. I am not permitted to cross-examine my reverend senior.”

“There really isn’t any need for you to do so,” said he. “I have no exclusive information. You are in possession of all the facts that are known to me.”

“That is not strictly true, you know, Thorndyke,” I objected. “We share the mere observed facts of this case, I admit; but you have a body of general knowledge which I have not, and which gives many of these observed facts a significance that is hidden from me. However, we will let that pass. You are the investigating wizard, I am only a sort of familiar demon. Which reminds me that I have been devilling for you this afternoon. I think you said that you would like to look over the documents relating to Miss Blake’s claim.”

“Yes, I should be interested to see them.”

“Well, I’ve got a copy, which I have compared with the originals, and which I am to hand over Drayton. Would you like to have it now?”

“Yes; I have finished up here. Let us go downstairs and look over the documents together.”

“You had better take the copy down with you and run through it while I am having a wash. Then I will come down and hear your reverend pronouncements on the case.” I produced the manuscript book from my pocket and having handed it to him, retired to the bedroom of which I was tenant ex officio, while he descended to the sitting-room with the manuscript in his hand.

When I came down after a leisurely wash and brush up, I found Thorndyke sitting with the open book before him and a slip of paper and a pencil in his hand. Apparently he had finished the reading and was jotting down a few dates and other particulars.

“This is a singularly interesting story, Anstey,” said he, “and extraordinarily picturesque in its setting. It enables us to understand Miss Blake’s view as to her brother’s claim, which sounded a little extravagant when baldly stated in her evidence. And, in fact, it looks as if that claim were a perfectly sound one. If it were only possible to produce satisfactory evidence of the marriage of Percival and Judith Blake and of the legitimacy of James, I should take the case into Court with perfect confidence—under suitable conditions, of course.”

“You mean, if there were any question as to the succession.”

“Yes. And such a question may arise at any moment if the present tenant is unmarried. It seems to me a matter of vital importance to find out as much as possible about this present tenant, Arthur Blake; I mean as to his heir, his relatives and connections generally, and the chances of his marrying. Miss Blake’s brother is but a child, and many things may happen before he is a middle-aged man.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “It would be a good deal more to the point than fussing about this ridiculous cat’s eye. Miss Blake’s keenness about that is a mystery to me.”

“Don’t forget,” said Thorndyke, “that the pendant is believed to bear an inscription that might be helpful to the possessor, though it is difficult to imagine in what way it could be.”

“Very difficult,” said I. “But it isn’t the inscription that she is so keen on, it is the thing itself. She has a sort of half-belief in some occult quality inherent in this jewel, in fact she is infected by the family superstition. It is incomprehensible to me.”

“It is always difficult for one temperament to understand another,” said he. “But this state of mind is quite a common one. That absurd little bone of Halliburton’s is a case in point, and quite a representative instance. It was obviously a mascot—that is to say, an object credited with occult properties and the power to influence events; and how many people are there who, openly or secretly, cherish similar charms or fetishes. The Stock Exchange, the Stage, and the Sporting Clubs are full of them.”

“Yes, that is true,” I agreed; and then, suddenly remembering the mysterious woman, I said: “By the way, a rather queer thing happened this afternoon. I accompanied Miss Blake home from Hampstead, but I got off the tram to get some tobacco and let her go on ahead. She had gone indoors before I arrived at the studio, and as I was approaching her house, I saw a woman cross the road and go deliberately up to the door and read the name on the plate.”

“Yes,” said Thorndyke, looking at me interrogatively.

“Well, the point is that that woman had followed us from Hampstead.”

“Indeed!” he exclaimed with sudden gravity. “You are sure of that?”

“Yes. I recognised her before she crossed. You may have noticed her at the inquest, a brassy-haired baggage with a spotted veil and a face powdered like a clown’s.”

“Yes, I noticed her. She was sitting near to you, by the door. I took particular note of her because she stood up while Miss Blake was giving her evidence, and seemed deeply interested in her and in you.”

“Well, that is the woman.”

“But this is very serious, Anstey. What a pity you didn’t follow her and find out where she went to!”

“I had half a mind to, but Master Percy—Miss Blake’s brother—came to the door at that moment and saw me, so it was hardly possible.”

“It is very unfortunate,” said Thorndyke. “You see the importance of the matter? Miss Blake stood up in open Court and swore that she was confident she could identify the man who stabbed her. Now that man is not only a robber. He is, at least, an accessory to the murder of Andrew Drayton, and his apprehension would probably reveal the identity of the actual murderer—if he is not the murderer himself—to say nothing of the charge against him of wounding with intent. Of course, if the police are right about those fingerprints, there is not so much in it. They will arrest Moakey and probably get the other man as well. But if the police clue should fail—and I should not be surprised if it does—Miss Blake represents the whole of the evidence against these two men. Apart from her, a conviction would be impossible unless the men were taken with the stolen property in their possession, which they are not likely to be. Even if the men were arrested they could not be identified, excepting by her, and would have to be released. I consider that her position is one of extreme danger. Did you tell her of this incident?”

“No; I thought there was no use in making her uneasy.”

“She ought to be warned, Anstey. And she ought to be most cautious about exposing herself to the possibility of an attack of any kind. I am expecting a visit from Superintendent Miller—he sent me a note asking for an interview at seven o’clock, so he will be here in a few minutes. When we have seen him, we shall know how the case stands, but the fact of his wanting an interview suggests that the police bark has got into shoal water.”

Punctually at seven o’clock the Superintendent’s characteristic official rat-tat announced his arrival, and as I let him in, a subtle something in his manner seemed to confirm Thorndyke’s surmises.

“I suppose,” said he as he took the armchair and lighted the customary cigar, “you’ve guessed what I wanted to talk to you about? It’s this Drayton case, you know.”

Thorndyke nodded. “Any new developments?” he asked.

“Well, yes, there are. We’ve got a bit of a setback. It seems that the fingerprint people made a mistake. Never known them to do such a thing before, but I suppose nobody is infallible. It turns out that those fingerprints are not Moakey’s after all.”

As the Superintendent made this statement, he fixed a stony gaze on the opposite wall. Glancing at Thorndyke, I noted that my colleague’s countenance had taken on that peculiar woodenness that I had learned to associate with intense attention not unmingled with suspicion.

“I can’t think how they came to make such a stupid mistake,” the Superintendent continued, still staring fixedly at the wall. “Might have got us into a horrid mess.”

“I should have thought,” said Thorndyke, “that mistakes might easily be made with such multitudes of records. Whose fingerprints are they?”

“Ah!” said Miller, “there you are. We don’t know. They don’t seem to hav ’em at the registry. So our only clue is gone.”

“Haven’t you opened up in any other direction?” Thorndyke asked.

“We’ve notified all the likely fences, of course, but that’s no good. These coveys are not likely to try to plant the stuff with a murder charge hanging over them. Then we made some inquiries about that man Halliburton. But they turned out a frost. The chap has disappeared and left no address. We’ve got his signature, and we’ve got a dam silly rabbit bone that some fool has taken the trouble to cut a pattern on, that he left behind at the hotel; and as he seemed to value the thing, we put an advertisement in the papers saying that it had been found. But there are no answers up to the present, and not likely to be. And then Halliburton probably had nothing to do with the affair. So we’re rather up a tree. And it’s annoying, after thinking it was all plain sailing, and letting the papers give out that we were in full cry. Of course, they are all agog for the next act—and, by the way, one of them has got a portrait of you—I think I’ve got it. Yes, here it is.”

He produced from his pocket a copy of the Evening Courier and opened it out. On the front page was an excellent portrait of my colleague, with the descriptive title: “Dr John Thorndyke, the famous criminal expert, whose services are being retained in the case.”

“That ought to help you, sir,” said the Superintendent with a grin. “You won’t be a stranger to our friends if you should happen to meet them. It is a pity their photographs can’t be given, too.”

“Yes, it would be more to the point. But now, Miller, what is it that you want me to do? I assume that you have come to suggest some sort of co-operation?”

“Well,” said Miller, “you are retained in the case, and I rather suspect that Sir Lawrence would like you to carry on independently. But there is no sense in our getting at cross-purposes.”

“Not the least,” Thorndyke agreed. “It is a criminal case, and our objects are identical—to secure the offenders and recover the property. Do I understand that you are prepared to offer me facilities?”

“What facilities do you want?”

“At this moment I am not wanting any, excepting that I should like to look at the fingerprints. There would be no objection to that. I suppose?”

The Superintendent looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know why there should be,” said he, “but you know what Singleton and his crowd are. They don’t like unofficial investigators in their department. And,” Miller added with a grin, “they aren’t very fond of you, and no wonder; they haven’t forgotten that Hornby case. But it wouldn’t help you a bit if you did look at the prints. You can take it from me that Moakey is not the man. There’s no mistake this time. They have checked the fingerprints quite carefully, and you can rely on what they say. So it would be no use your examining them—unless,” he added with a shrewd look at Thorndyke, “you’ve got a fingerprint registry of your own.”

As a matter of fact it was known to me that Thorndyke had a collection in a card-index file, but it was a mere appendix to the reports of cases dealt with, which had no bearing on the present case.

“I daresay you are right,” Thorndyke agreed “One doesn’t learn much from stray fingerprints. And you’ve nothing more to tell us?”

“Nothing,” was the reply. “And you, sir? I suppose you haven’t struck anything that would give us a lead?”

“I have not begun to work at the case,” said Thorndyke. “I have been waiting for your report, to see if the case was as simple as it appeared.”

“Yes,” said Miller, “it did look simple. Seemed as if there was nothing to do but make the arrest. And now we have nothing to go on at all. Well,” here he rose and began to move towards the door, “if we can help you in anyway I hope you will let us know, and, of course, if you can put us on to anything we shall thank you kindly.”

As our visitor’s footsteps died away on the stairs, Thorndyke softly closed the door and moved to the window, where he stood meditatively regarding the retreating officer as the latter crossed to Crown Office Row.

“That was a queer interview,” said he.

“Yes,” I agreed “I don’t see why he made the appointment. He hadn’t much to tell us.”

“I am not quite sure of that,” said Thorndyke. “I have a sort of feeling that he came here to tell us something and didn’t tell it—at least he thinks he didn’t.”

“It seemed to me that he told us nothing,” said I.

“It probably seemed so to him,” replied Thorndyke. “Whereas, if I am not mistaken, he has made us a free gift of a really valuable piece of information.”

“Well, it may be so,” said I, “but for my part, I can’t see that he gave us a particle of information excepting that the case against Moakey has fallen through. Perhaps it is a technical point that is outside my range.”

“Not at all,” he replied. “It is just a matter of observation and comparison. You were present when Miller called last time and you have been present today. You have heard all that passed and have had the privilege of observing the Superintendent’s by no means unexpressive countenance. Just recall the conversation and consider it by the light of all the known circumstances and see if it does not yield a very interesting suggestion.”

I recalled without difficulty the brief conversation and reflected on it in connection with the Superintendent’s rather aggressively nonchalant air. But from that reflection nothing emerged but wonder at my colleague’s amazing power of rapid inference. Finally I resolved to write down the conversation and think it over at my leisure.

“I take it,” said I, “that you don’t believe Miller is in such a fog as he professes to be?”

“On the contrary,” Thorndyke replied, “I think that he is not only in a fog but hard aground. The fact that he meant to conceal and in effect disclosed (as I believe) is a leading fact. But I don’t think he realises whither it leads. And, of course, it may not be a fact, after all. I may have drawn an erroneous inference. Obviously, the first thing to do is to test my hypothesis rigorously. In twenty-four hours I shall know whether it is true or false, since the means of verification are quite simple.”

“I am glad of that,” I said sourly, “for the fog in which you assume that Miller is enveloped is clear daylight compared to that which surrounds me.”

“I think you will find that the fog will clear up under the influence of a little reflection,” said Thorndyke. “But we are forgetting Miss Blake. You see the bearing of Miller’s tidings on her position. Moakey is out of the case. The fingerprints are unknown, and therefore practically valueless. The police evidently have no clue at all. Miss Blake represents the only danger that threatens these men, and we may be pretty sure that they know it. If she could be eliminated their position would be absolutely secure. And, remember, these are desperate men to whom a human life is of no account when set against their own safety. It is an unseemly hour at which to call on a lady, but I think she ought to be warned without delay.”

“I entirely agree with you,” said I. “We can’t stand on ceremony; and after all, it is barely eight o’clock. A taxi will cake us there in quarter of an hour.”

“Then let us start at once,” said he, stepping into the lobby for his hat and stick. Leaving a slip of paper on the table for Polton’s information, we set forth together and walked rapidly up Inner Temple Lane to the gate. As we emerged, a taxi-cab drew up to deposit a passenger and we hurried forward to secure the reversion when the present tenant should give up possession. A few moments later we had taken our seats and were bowling up Chancery Lane to the soft hum of the taxi’s engine.

CHAPTER TEN

A Timely Warning

As the cab rolled swiftly through the quietening streets I turned over once more the two statements that had been made by Superintendent Miller and compared them. Together they had yielded to the amazingly quick intelligence of my friend Thorndyke something that the speaker had not intended to convey. What was the something? The first statement had set forth that the fingerprints were those of Joseph Hedges—or Moakey, as his associates had nicknamed him; the second had set forth that the fingerprints were not his but those of some person who had yet to be identified. The two statements contradicted one another, of course, but the first was admittedly based upon a mistake. What was the fact that emerged from the contradiction?

I revolved the question again and again without seeing any glimmer of light. And then, suddenly, the simple explanation burst upon me. Of course! The prints were those of fingers smeared with Japanese wax. But Japanese wax is used for making furniture polish. There was the solution of this profound mystery. They were Mrs. Benham’s fingerprints—or perhaps those of the murdered man—made in the process of applying furniture polish to the cabinet. This, the only clue, evaporated into a myth and left Miss Blake’s identification the only link with the vanished murderer.

“I think I have found the solution to the fingerprint problem, Thorndyke,” said I.

“Ah!” said he, “I thought you would if you reflected on it. What is it?”

“They are Mrs. Benham’s fingerprints, or else Drayton’s. They were made in the course of polishing the furniture.”

“An excellent suggestion, Anstey,” he replied, “which doesn’t seem to have occurred to the police. I suspected it as soon as I saw the waxy material of the fingerprints. It doesn’t happen to be the correct explanation, I am glad to say, for it would be a singularly unilluminating one. I took the fingerprints both of Mrs. Benham and the deceased this morning before the inquest, but I didn’t think it necessary to mention the matter to the police. It is quite clear to me that they are not laying their cards on the table. In point of fact, they have only one card, and my impression is that they are mistaking the back of that for the face. But here we are at our destination.”

We sprang out of the cab, and having dismissed it, gave a pull at the studio bell. The wicket was opened by Miss Blake herself, and I hastened to make the necessary apologies.

“I have come back again, you see, Miss Blake, and with reinforcements. It is an unholy time for making a call, but we have come on a matter of business. Dr. Thorndyke thought it advisable that you should be told something and given certain advice without delay.”

“Well,” she said graciously, “you are both very welcome, business or no business. Won’t you come in?”

“Is Percy in the studio?”

“Yes. He has finished his home lessons and is doing a little building before going to bed.”

“Then we had better say what we have to say here, or perhaps in the passage”

We stepped through the wicket and closed it, and as we stood in the dark entry, Miss Blake remarked: “This is very secret and portentous. You are filling me with curiosity.”

“Then we will proceed to satisfy it. To begin with, do you remember a woman who jostled us rather rudely at the door when we were going in to the inquest?”

“Yes, I remember the incident, but I didn’t notice the woman particularly, except that she gave me a rather impertinent stare and that she was a horrid-looking woman.”

“Well, she either lives about here or she followed us deliberately from Hampstead. She must have come on the same car as we did; for when I turned into Jacob Street I saw her prowling up the opposite side of the road, and when she came opposite this house, she crossed and looked at the number on the door—and the name on your plate.”

“That was very inquisitive of her,” said Miss Blake. “But does it matter?”

“It may be of no significance at all,” said Thorndyke. “But under the special circumstances it would be unwise to ignore the warning that it may convey.”

“What are the special circumstances?” she asked.

“They are these,” he replied. “You heard Inspector Badger say in his evidence this morning that the police have a very promising clue? Well, that clue has broken off short. I believe the police have now no clue at all, and the murderers pretty certainly know it. But you stated publicly that you are confident that you could identify the man whom you saw. That statement is certain to be known, or to become known, to these men; and they will consequently know that you are a serious menace to their safety, and the only one; that your ability to recognise one of them is the only circumstance that stands between them and absolute, perfect security. But for this one fact they could walk abroad, safe from any possible recognition. They could stand outside Scotland Yard and snap their fingers at the police. Now, I don’t want to be an alarmist. But it is necessary to recognise a danger and take the necessary means to guard against it. You see what I mean?”

“I think so. You mean that if I were out of the way these men would be safe from any possibility of discovery, and that it is consequently to their interest to put me out of the way.”

“Yes, stated bluntly, that is the position. And you know what the characters of these men are.”

“They are certainly not persons who would stick at trifles. Yes, I must admit that your view of the position seems a reasonable one, though I hope things are not as bad as you fear. But what precautions could I take?”

“I suggest that, for the present, you don’t go out after dark—at any rate, not alone; that you avoid going about alone as far as is possible, that you especially shun all unfrequented places where you might be suddenly attacked, and that, on all occasions, you bear this danger in mind in considering any unusual circumstances.”

“All this sounds rather alarming,” she said uneasily.

“It is alarming,” Thorndyke agreed, “and I am extremely sorry to have to impress it on you. But I would further impress on you that you have friends—two of them are now present—who are deeply concerned as to your safety and who would consider it a privilege to be called upon at any time for help or advice. I am always at your service, and I am sure Mr. Anstey is too, as well as Sir Lawrence Drayton.”

“Then,” said Miss Blake, “the compensations are greater than the evil for which they compensate. I welcome the danger if it brings me such kind friends. And now you really must come in for a little while, or Percy will accuse me of gossiping with ‘followers’ at the gate.”

She led the way down the paved passage and I steered Thorndyke with an expert hand past the scattered monoliths and the unfinished tombstone until we reached the door, where Miss Blake stopped to hold aside the curtain. As we entered Percy looked up from his work and then, in his quaint, self-possessed way came forward to welcome us.

“How do you like my tower now it’s finished, Mr. Anstey?” he asked, regarding his work complacently, with his head on one side.

We stood by him looking at the building—a model of a church tower some three feet in height-and I observed with a sort of proprietary pride that Thorndyke was deeply impressed.

“This is really a remarkable piece of work,” said he. “Where do you get your bricks?”

“I make them of clay,” replied Percy, “and let them dry hard. I make one as a model and make a plaster mould of it. Then all the rest are just squeezes from the mould. So I can get any shaped bricks that I like, and as many of them as I want. It’s much cheaper than buying them, and besides, the bought bricks are no use for serious work.”

“No,” Thorndyke agreed, “you couldn’t build a tower like that with ready-made bricks, at least with none that I have ever seen. Are you going to be an architect?”

“Yes,” the boy replied gravely, “if we can afford it. If not I shall be a mason. Mr. Wingrave—out in the yard, you know—lets me do a bit of stone-cutting sometimes. I shouldn’t mind being a mason, but I should like to work on buildings, not on tombstones. I love buildings.”

Thorndyke looked at the boy with keen and sympathetic interest. “It is a good thing,” said he, “to know what you want and to have a definite bent and purpose in life. I should think you ought to be a happy man and a useful one if you keep up your enthusiasm. Don’t you think so, Miss Blake?”

“I do indeed,” she replied. “Percy has a real passion for buildings and he knows quite a lot about them. His copy of Parker is nearly worn out. And I don’t see why he shouldn’t be an architect and make his hobby his living.”

As she was speaking, I looked at her and noticed that she was wearing the locket suspended from a bead necklace.

“I see you have taken your new acquisition into wear,” I remarked.

“Yes,” she replied. “I have just hooked it to this necklace, but I must get some more secure attachment. Have you seen this locket, Dr Thorndyke?”

“No,” he answered, and as she unhooked it and gave it to him to inspect, he continued: “This is what poor Mr. Drayton used to call his ‘little Sphinx,’ isn’t it?”

“Yes, because it seemed always to be propounding riddles. But the riddles are inside.”

“One of them is outside,” said Thorndyke, “though it is not a very difficult one. I mean the peculiar construction and workmanship.”

“What is there unusual about that?” she asked eagerly.

“Well,” he replied, “it is not ordinary jeweller’s construction. The normal way to make a locket is to build it up of sheet metal. The sides would be made first by bending a stout strip into a hoop of the proper shape—nearly square, in this case—and joining the ends with solder. Then the back and front would be soldered on to the hoop and the latter cut through vertically with a fine saw, dividing the locket into two exactly similar halves. Then the hinge and the suspension ring would be soldered on, and the flange fastened in with solder. But in this case the method has been quite different. Each half of the locket was a single casting, which included half a hinge and one suspension ring. Probably both halves were cast from a single half-model and the superfluous part of the hinge filed off. Then each half was worked on the stake and pitch-block to harden the metal and the final finishing and fitting done with the file and stone. The engraving must have been done after everything but the hinge was finished.”

“It must have been very awkward to engrave that small writing inside, with the edges projecting,” said Miss Blake.

Thorndyke opened the locket, and taking his Coddington lens from his pocket, examined the writing closely. “If you look at it through the lens,” said he, “you will see that it is not engraved. It is etched, which would have disposed of the difficulty to a great extent.”

Miss Blake and I examined the minute writing, and through the lens it was easy to see that the delicate lines were bitten, not engraved.

“You were saying,” said Miss Blake, as the locket and lens were passed to Percy (who, having examined the inscription, extended his investigations to his fingertips and various other objects before reluctantly surrendering the lens) “that the riddle of the construction is not a difficult one. What is the answer to it?”

“I think,” he replied, “the inscription inside supplies the answer. That inscription was clearly put there for some purpose to which the original owner attached some importance. It apparently conveyed some kind of admonition or instruction which was hardly likely to be addressed to himself. But if the message was of importance it was worth while to take measures to ensure its permanence. And that is what has been done. There are no loose or separable parts, no soldered joints to break away. Each half of the locket is a single piece of solid metal, including the hinge and suspension ring. And you notice that the hinge is unusually massive, and that each half of the locket has its own suspension ring, so that if the hinge should break, both halves would still be securely suspended. And there was no loose ring to chafe through and break.”

“Don’t you think,” she asked, “that there was originally a loose ring passing through both of the eyes?”

“No,” he answered. “If you look carefully at the two eyes you will see that the holes through them have been most carefully smoothed and rounded. Evidently the locket was meant to be suspended by a cord or thong, and the position of the eyes with a hole through from back to front shows that the cord was intended to be tied in a single knot where it passed through—a much more secure arrangement than a chain, any one link of which may, unnoticed, wear thin and break at any unusual strain.”

“And you think that the message or whatever it was that the inscription conveyed was really something of importance?” As she asked the question, Miss Blake looked at Thorndyke with a suppressed eagerness at which I inwardly smiled. The Lady of Shallot evidently had hopes of Merlin.

“That is what the precautions suggest,” was his reply. “It appeared important to the person who took the precautions,”

“And do you suppose that it would be possible to guess what the nature of the message was?”

“One could judge better,” he replied “if one knew what passages the reader is referred to.”

“I can show you the passages,” she said. “I have looked them up, and Mr. Anstey and I went over them together and could make nothing of them.”

“That doesn’t sound very encouraging,” said Thorndyke as she ran to the cabinet and brought out her book of notes. ‘However, we shall see if a further opinion is of any help.” He took the notebook from her and read through the entries slowly and with close attention. Then he handed the book back to her.

“One thing is fairly evident,” said he. “The purpose of the writer was not pious instruction. Whatever was intended to be conveyed did not lie on the surface, for the individual passages are singularly barren of meaning, while the collection as a whole is a mere jumble of quotations without any apparent sequence or connection. The passages must have had some meaning previously agreed on, or, more probably, they formed the key of a code or cipher used for secret correspondence.”

“If they form the key of a cipher,” said Miss Blake, “do you think it would be possible to work out the cipher by studying them?”

“I suppose it would be possible,” he replied, “since a cipher must work by some sort of rule. But people who make ciphers do not take great pains to make them easily decipherable to the uninitiated. And then we are only guessing that they are the key to a cipher. They may be something quite different; some form of cryptogram that would be utterly unintelligible without some key or counterpart that we haven’t got. Do you think of trying to decipher them or extract the hidden meaning?”

“I am rather curious about them,” she admitted, “and rather interested in ciphers and cryptograms.”

“Well,” said Thorndyke, “you may succeed. More probably you will draw a blank—but in any case I think you will get a run for your money.”

Once more with his lens he examined the locket inside and out, not omitting the hallmark on the back, on which he dwelt for some time. Then, still holding the locket in his hand, he said: “You ought to have this cover-glass replaced. The hair is part of the relic and ought not to be exposed to loss or injury.”

“Yes,” said she, “I ought to get it done, but I don’t much like trusting it to an unknown jeweller.”

“Would you like Polton to do it for you?” Thorndyke asked. “He is not a stranger, and you know he is a first-class workman.”

“Oh, if Mr. Polton would do it I should be delighted and most grateful. Do you think he would?”

“I think he would be highly flattered at being asked,” said Thorndyke. “I will take it back with me if you like, and get him to put in the fresh glass at once.”

Miss Blake accepted this offer joyfully, and taking the locket from Thorndyke, she proceeded, with great care and a quantity of tissue paper, to make it into a little packet. While she was thus engaged, the bell in the yard rang loudly and Percy ran out to open the gate. In less than a minute he re-entered the studio carrying a brown-paper parcel.

“Miss Winifred Blake,” he announced. “Shall I see what’s in it, Winnie?”

“I suppose you won’t be happy till you do,” she replied, whereupon he gleefully cut the string and removed the paper, exposing a cardboard box, of which he lifted the lid.

“My eye, Winnie!” he exclaimed. “It’s tuck. I wonder who it’s from. And it’s for us both. ‘To Winifred and Percival Blake, with love.’ Whose love, I wonder. Can you spot the handwriting?” He passed a slip of paper to his sister and exhibited a shallow box filled with large chocolate sweets on which he gazed gloatingly.

Thorndyke, who had just received the little packet from Miss Blake and was putting it into his pocket, watched the boy attentively, interested, as I supposed, by the sudden descent from the heights of architectural design to frank, boyish gluttony.

“I don’t recognise the writing at all,” said Miss Blake, “and I can’t imagine who can have sent this.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” said Percy. “Let’s sample them.” He passed the box to his sister—still closely watched by Thorndyke, I noticed—and as she put out her hand to pick up one of the sweets, my colleague asked in a significant tone: “Are you sure that you don’t know the handwriting?”

The tone in which the question was asked was so emphatic that she looked at him in surprise. “No,” she answered, “the writing is quite strange to me.”

“Then,” said he, “the writer is possibly a stranger.”

She looked at him with a puzzled expression, and I noticed that he was gazing at her with a strange fixity. After a pause he continued:

“We were speaking just now of unusual circumstances. Would not a gift of food from a stranger be an unusual circumstance?”

In an instant his meaning flashed upon me, and upon her too, for she took the box quickly from her brother and her face became deathly pale.

“I think, Percy dear,” she said, “if you don’t mind very much, we won’t touch these tonight. Do you mind?”

“Of course I don’t,” he replied, “if you would rather keep ’em till tomorrow.”

Nevertheless the boy looked curiously at his sister, and it was clear to me that he saw that there was “something in the wind.” But he asked no questions and made no comment, sauntering back to his tower and looking it over critically.

“It’s really time you went to bed, Percy,” Miss Blake said after a pause.

“Is it?” he asked. “What’s the time?”

“It is getting on for ten, and you have to be up at half-past six.”

“It’s always ‘getting on’ for ten, you know,” said he. “The question is, how far has it got? But there! It’s no good arguing. I suppose I shall get chucked out if I don’t go peaceably.” He offered a friendly hand to me and Thorndyke in succession, and having given his sister a hug and a kiss, took his departure. And again I thought I detected in his manner a perception of something below the surface that accounted for his sudden dismissal.

“I suspect Master Percy smells a fox,” said I, “but is too polite to mention it.”

“It is very likely,” said Miss Blake. “He is wonderfully quick and observant, and he is extraordinarily discreet. In most respects he is quite a normal boy, but in others he is more like a man.”

“And a very well-bred man, too,” said I.

“Yes, he is nice boy and the best of brothers. But now, Dr Thorndyke, about these sweets. Do you really think there is anything wrong with them?”

“I don’t say that,” replied Thorndyke, “but, of course, when you have swallowed one, it is too late to inquire. May I look at that paper?”

Miss Blake took the slip of paper from the box and handed it to him, and once more the lens came into requisition.

“Yes,” he said, after somewhat prolonged examination of the writing, “this is not reassuring. It is quite clear that this writing was traced over a previous writing in lead pencil. A hard rubber has been used to take out the pencil marks, but the ink has fixed them in several places. If you look at the writing carefully through the lens you can see the fine, dark pencil line forming a sort of core to the broader ink line. And you can also distinguish several minute crumbs of blackened rubber—little black rolls with pointed ends.”

“But why should it have been written first in pencil?” Miss Blake asked.

“For the purpose of disguising the handwriting,” replied Thorndyke. “It is a common practice. Of course, in the case of a forger copying a signature, its purpose is obvious. He takes a pencil tracing of the original signature, goes over it in ink and rubs out the pencil—if he can. But it is used in producing feigned handwriting as well. It is difficult to write direct with a pen in a hand which is quite different from one’s own. But if a preliminary trial sketch is done in pencil, and touched up if necessary, and then traced over deliberately with the pen, the result may be quite unlike one’s own handwriting. But, in any case, this underlying pencil writing is manifestly abnormal and therefore suspicious. Shall we see if there is anything unusual in the appearance of the sweets?”

She passed him the box, which he placed on the table under the gaslight and looked over systematically. Then he turned the sweets, one after the other, on their sides, and when they were all in this position, he again looked them over.

“It seems hardly possible,” said I, “that the woman—if it is she whom you suspect—could have prepared a set of poisoned sweets in such a short time. It was past four o’clock when she came and looked at the plate, and it is not ten yet. There doesn’t seem to have been time.”

“There has been about five hours,” said Thorndyke, “and I see by the postmark on the wrapper that the parcel was posted in this neighbourhood barely two hours ago. That leaves three hours, which would have been sufficient. But she might have had the things prepared in advance, and merely waited for the inquest to get the name and particulars. And the sender may not be this woman at all. And again, there may be no poison in the sweets. We are only taking precautions against a possibility. But looking at these things all together, there seems to me to be a suggestion of their having been patched with liquid chocolate round the sides. If that is so, they will have been cut open horizontally and the halves fitted together again, and the purpose of the patching will have been to hide the join. Here is a very well-marked specimen. I think we will take it as a test case.”

He picked out the sweet, and with his pocket-knife, began very delicately to scrape away the outer coat of chocolate all round the sides, while we drew up our chairs and watched him anxiously. Presently he paused and silently held the sweet towards us, indicating a spot with the point of his knife; and looking at that spot where the outer coating had been scraped away, I could clearly make out an indented line. He then resumed his scraping, following the line, until he had worked round the whole circumference. And now it was quite obvious that the sweet had been divided into an upper and a lower half and the two parts rejoined.

“I am afraid it is a true bill, Thorndyke,” said I.

“I think so,” he agreed, “but we shall soon see.” He inserted his knife into the encircling crevice, and giving it a gentle turn, raised the top half, which he then lifted off. At once I could see that the exposed surfaces of the white interior of the sweet were coated with a glistening white powder, worked into the soft material of the filling. Thorndyke produced his lens, and through it examined the cut surface for a few moments. Then he passed the half sweet and the lens to me.

“What do you suppose this stuff is, Thorndyke?” I asked, when I had inspected the sweet, and then passed it and the lens to Miss Blake. “It looks like finely powdered china or white enamel.”

“It looks like—and I have no doubt is—arsenious acid, or white arsenic, as it is commonly called; and I should say there is rather more than two grains in this sweet. It is a heavy substance.”

“Is that a fatal dose?” I asked.

“Yes. And it is extremely unlikely that only one sweet would have been eaten. Two or three would contain a does that would produce death very rapidly.”

We were silent for a few moments. Suddenly Miss Blake burst into tears and buried her face in her hands, sobbing almost hysterically. Thorndyke looked at her with a curious expression, stern and even wrathful, and yet with a certain softness of compassion, but he said nothing. As to me, I was filled with fury against the wretch who had done this unspeakable thing, but, like Thorndyke, I could find no words that were adequate.

Presently Miss Blake recovered her self-possession somewhat, and as she wiped her eyes, she apologised for her outburst.

“Pray forgive me!” she exclaimed. “But it is horrible—horrible! Just think! But for the infinitely unlikely chance of your coming in tonight Percy would have eaten at least two or three of those sweets. By now he would have been dead, or dying in agony, and I unable to help him! It is a frightful thought. Nobody would have known anything until Mrs. Wingrave came in the morning and found our bodies! And the wretch may try again.”

“That won’t matter much,” said Thorndyke. “You are now on your guard. It will be best to think as little of this episode as you can. It has been a narrow escape, but it is past. You must fix your attention on the future.”

“But what can we do?” she asked despairingly.

“You must walk warily and never for one moment forget this implacable, ruthless enemy. No opportunity must be given. Do not go out after dark without efficient protection, and avoid going abroad alone at any time. You had better not to go to the gate after nightfall, neither you nor Percy. Can you not arrange for some one to answer the bell for you?”

“I could ask Mrs. Wingrave, the sculptor’s wife. Their rooms open on the yard. But what could I tell her?”

“You will have to tell her as much as is necessary. And, of course, Percy must be told. It is very unfortunate, but we can take no risks. You must impress upon him that under no circumstances whatever must he eat or drink anything that is given or sent to him by strangers or of which he does not know the antecedents. Does he go to school?”

“Yes. He goes to the Elizabeth Woodville Grammar School, near Regents Park. He usually gets home about five o’clock. Sometimes I go and meet him, but he has some school-fellows who live near here and who generally walk home with him.”

“Then let him come home with them. There is no reason to suppose that he is in any danger apart from you. And let me impress upon you again that Mr. Anstey and I are always at your service. While this danger lasts—I hope it will soon pass—don’t scruple to make any use of us that circumstances may require. If you have to go anywhere at night, we can always arrange for you to have an escort. At a pinch, we could secure the help of the police, but we don’t want to do that unless we are compelled. And—it seems contradictory advice to give you—but having taken all precautions, try not to think about this incident of tonight, or to dwell on the danger more than is necessary to keep your attention on the alert. And now we must wish you good night, Miss Blake. I will take these sweets with me for more complete examination.”

“I can never thank you enough for all your kindness,” she said, as he wrapped the box in its original paper, “and I shall have no hesitation in treating you as the good and generous friends that you have proved tonight. I feel that Percy and I are in your hands, and we shouldn’t wish to be in better.” She walked out with us to the gate, and at the wicket shook our hands warmly, and indeed with no little emotion. And when we had seen the wicket safely closed on her, and taken a look up and down the street, we turned westward and started on our way home.

THE CAT’S EYE (1923) [Part 2]

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Blue Hair

“What are you going to do, Anstey?” Thorndyke asked as we reached the corner of Jacob Street. “Are you going to Hampstead or are you coming home with me?”

“What are you going to do tonight?” I asked in return.

“I shall make a rough qualitative test of the substance in that sweet,” he replied, “just to settle definitely whether it is or is not arsenic.”

“Have you any doubt on the subject?” I asked.

“No,” he answered. “But still it is not a matter of fact until it has been verified by analysis. My own conviction on the subject is only a state of mind, which is not transferable as evidence. A chemical demonstration is a fact which can be deposed to in sworn testimony.”

“Then,” said I, “I shall come home with you and hear the result of your analysis, although your certainty would be good enough for me.”

We walked down to the bottom of Hampstead Road where we boarded an omnibus bound for Charing Cross. For some time nothing more was said, each of us being immersed in reflection on the events of the evening.

“It is a horrible affair,” I said at length, assuming that we were still thinking on the same subject, “and a terrible thing to reflect that the world we live in should contain such wretches.”

“It is,” he agreed. “But the mitigating circumstance is that these wretches are nearly always fools. That is the reassuring element in the present case.”

“In what way reassuring?” I asked.

“I mean,” said he, “the palpable folly of the whole proceeding. We have here no subtle, wary criminal who works with considered strategy under secure cover, but just the common arsenic fool who delivers himself into your hands by his own stupidity.”

“But what is the evidence of the stupidity?”

“My dear Anstey!” he exclaimed. “Look at the crudity of method. The discharge, broadcast, of a boxful of poisoned food under manifestly suspicious circumstances, with the poison barely concealed; the faked writing, which a common policeman would have detected, the absence of any plausible origin of the gift, and the nature of the poison itself. That alone is diagnostic. Arsenic is typically a fool’s poison. No competent poisoner would dream of using such a material.”

Why not?” I asked.

“Because its properties are exactly the reverse of those which would make a poison safe to use. The fatal dose is relatively large—not less than two grains and for security, considerably more. The effects are extremely variable and uncertain, making necessary the use of really large doses. The material is rather conspicuous, it is only slightly soluble in water and still less so in tea or coffee; it is easily recognised by simple chemical tests, even in the minutest quantities. It is practically indestructible, and its strong preservative effects on the dead body make it easy to demonstrate its presence years after death. A man who poisons a person with arsenic creates a record of the fact which will last, at least, for the term of his own lifetime.”

“That isn’t much benefit to the person who has been poisoned,” I remarked.

“No,” he admitted. “But we are considering the poisoner’s point of view. It is not enough for him to succeed in killing his victim. He has to avoid killing himself at the same time. A poisoner sets out to commit a secret murder, and the secrecy is the test of his efficiency. If his methods are easily detectable, and if he leaves a record which stands against him in perpetuity, he is an inefficient poisoner. And that is the case of the arsenic practitioner. He runs a great present risk, since the symptoms of arsenic poisoning are conspicuous and fairly characteristic; and he leaves traces of his crime which nothing but cremation will destroy.”

Our discussion had brought us to our chambers, where Thorndyke proceeded straight up to the laboratory, breaking in upon Polton, who was seated at his bench, putting the finishing touches to the large and elaborate pedometer.

“We need not disturb you, Polton,” said Thorndyke. “I am just going to make a rough qualitative test for arsenic.”

Polton instantly laid down his watchmaker’s glass and unlocked a cupboard on the chemical side of the laboratory. “You will want a Marsh’s apparatus and the materials for Reinsch’s test, I suppose, sir?” said he.

“Yes. But we will begin with the liquid tests. I shall want a glass mortar and some hydrochloric acid.”

Polton put the necessary appliances on the bench and added a large bottle labelled “Distilled Water,” while I seated myself on a stool and watched the analysis with a slightly vague though highly interested recognition of the processes that I had so often expounded to juries. I saw Thorndyke open the box, take from it the two halves of the divided sweet, and drop them into the little glass mortar, and having poured on them some distilled water and a little acid, rub them with the glass pestle until they were reduced to a muddy-looking liquid. This liquid he carefully filtered into a beaker, when it became clear and practically colourless, like water, and this watery-looking fluid formed the material for the succeeding tests.

Of these the first three were performed in test-tubes into each of which a small quantity of the clear solution was poured, and then to each was added a few drops of certain other clear liquids. The result was very striking. In two of the tubes the clear liquid instantly turned to a dense, opaque yellow, somewhat like yolk of egg, while in the third it changed to a bright, opaque emerald green.

“What are those precipitates?” I asked.

“The two yellow ones,” he replied, “are arsenite of silver and arsenic sulphide. The green one is arsenite of copper. As there is sugar and some other organic matter in this solution, I shall not carry these tests any farther, but they are pretty conclusive. How are you getting on, Polton?”

“I think we are ready, sir,” was the reply; on which I crossed to the bench on which he had been at work. Here on a tripod over a Bunsen gas-burner, was a beaker containing a number of little pieces of copper foil and a clear, watery liquid which was boiling briskly.

“This is Reinsch’s test,” Thorndyke explained. “You see that this copper-foil remains bright in the dilute acid, showing that both the metal and the acid are free from arsenic. I shall now introduce a few drops of the suspected liquid, and if it contains arsenic the copper-foil will become grey or black according to the amount of arsenic present.” As he spoke, he took the beaker containing the filtered liquid from the mortar and poured about a tablespoonful into that containing the copper-foil. I watched eagerly for the result, and very soon a change began to appear. The ruddy lustre of the copper gradually turned to a steely grey and from that to a glistening black.

“You see,” said Thorndyke, “that the reaction is very distinct. The quantity of arsenic present is, in an analytical sense, quite large. And now we will try the most definite and conclusive test of all—Marsh’s.” He turned to the other apparatus which Polton had made ready, which consisted of a squat bottle with two short necks, through one of which passed a tall glass funnel, and through the other a glass tube fitted with a tap and terminating in a fine jet. The contents of the bottle—lumps of zinc immersed in sulphuric acid—were effervescing briskly, and the tap was turned on to allow the gas to escape through the jet. To the latter Polton now applied a lighted match, and immediately there appeared a little pale violet flame. Picking up a white tile which had been placed in readiness, Thorndyke held it for a moment in the flame and then looked at it.

“You see,” said he, “that the tile is quite unsoiled. If there had been the smallest trace of arsenic in the bottle, a dark spot would have appeared on the tile. So we may take it that our chemicals are free from arsenic. Now let us try the solution of the sweet.”

He took up the beaker containing the solution of the disintegrated chocolate, and poured very slowly, drop by drop, about a teaspoonful into the funnel of the bottle. Then, after having given it time to mix thoroughly with the other contents, he once more picked up the tile and held it for an instant in the flame. The result was, to me, most striking. In the very moment when the tile touched the flame, there appeared on the white surface a circular spot, black, lustrous, and metallic.

“That,” said Thorndyke, “might be either antimony or arsenic. By its appearance it is obviously metallic arsenic, but still we will make the differential test. If it is arsenic it will dissolve in a solution of chlorinated lime; if it is antimony it will not.” He removed the stopper from a bottle labelled “Chlorinated Lime,” and poured a little pool of the solution on the tile. Almost immediately the black spot began to fade at the edges, and to grow smaller and fainter until at length it disappeared altogether.

“That completes our inquiry,” said Thorndyke as he laid down the tile. “For the purposes of evidence in a court of law, a more searching and detailed analysis would be necessary. To produce conviction in the minds of a jury we should have to be able to say exactly how much arsenic was in each of the sweets. That, however, is no concern of ours. The criminal intention is all that matters to us. And now, Anstey, I must leave you for a while to entertain yourself with a book. I have to do some work in the office on another case. But we will take this ill-omened box down and put it in a safe place.”

He took the box of sweets, with its original wrapper, and when we descended to the sitting-room, he closed it up, sealed it, and signed and dated it; and having made a note of the particulars of the postmark, deposited it in the safe. Then he retired to the office, where I assumed that he had in hand some work of compilation or reference, for the “office” was in fact rather a miniature law library, in which was stored a singularly complete collection of works bearing upon our special branch of legal practice.

When he had gone, I ran my eye vaguely along the book-shelves in search of a likely volume with which to pass the time. But the box of poisoned sweets haunted me and refused to be ejected from my thoughts. Eventually I brought out Miss Blake’s manuscript from the drawer in which I had put it when Miller had arrived, and drawing an easy-chair up to the fire, sat listlessly glancing over the well-remembered pages, but actually thinking of the writer; of the brave, sweet-faced girl and the fine, manly boy to whom she was at once sister and mother. What, I wondered uncomfortably, was to be the end of this? Only by the merest hairbreadth had she and the boy, this very night, escaped a dreadful death. Soon the wretches who had contrived this diabolical crime would discover that their plot had miscarried in some way. What would they do next? It was hardly likely that they would try poison again, but there are plenty of other ways of committing murder. It was all very well to say that they were fools. So they might be. But they were unknown fools. That was the trouble. They could make their preparations unwatched, and approach unsuspected within striking distance. If your enemy is unknown it is almost impossible to be on your guard against him. In one direction only safety lay—in detection. In the moment when the identity of the criminals should become known, the danger would be at an end.

But when would that moment arrive? So far as the position was known to me, it was not even in sight. The police admitted that their clue had broken off short and apparently they had no other; at least that was Thorndyke’s opinion. But what of Thorndyke himself? Had he any clue? My feeling was that he had not. It seemed impossible that he could have, for these two men had, as it were, dropped down out of the sky and then vanished into space. No one knew who they were, whence they had come, or whither they had gone. And they seemed to have left not a trace for the imagination to work on.

On the other hand, Thorndyke was Thorndyke; an inscrutable man; silent, self-contained, and even secretive, in spite of his genial exterior. I thought of him, at this very moment, sitting calmly in the office with all his faculties quietly transferred to a fresh case, unmoved by the thrilling events of the evening, though it was he who had instantly seen the danger, he who had immediately suspected the “Greek Gift.” And as I thought of him poring over his reports, and marvelled at his detachment, I recalled the many instances of his wonderful power of inference from almost invisible data, and found myself hoping that even now, when to me all seemed dark, some glimmer of light was visible to him.

It had turned half-past eleven when I heard a light but deliberate step ascending the stair. Instantly I stole on tiptoe to the office, and had just opened the door when a tapping-apparently with the handle of a stick or umbrella—on our “oak” announced the arrival of a visitor.

“Shall I open the door, Thorndyke?” I whispered.

“Yes,” he answered. “It is Brodribb. I know his knock. Tell him I shall have finished in a few minutes. And you might run up and tell Polton that he is here. He will know what to do.”

I accordingly went out and threw open the “oak,” and there, sure enough, was Mr. Brodribb, looking with his fine, rich complexion, his silky white hair, and his sumptuous, old-fashioned raiment, as if he had stepped out of the frame of some Georgian portrait.

“Good evening, Anstey,” said he, “might even say ‘good night.’ It’s a devil of a time to come stirring you up, but I saw a light in your windows, and I rather particularly wanted to have a word or two with Thorndyke. Is he in?”

“Yes. He is in the office surrounded by a sort of landslide of reports—assizes, Central Criminal, and various assorted. He will have finished in a few minutes. Meanwhile I will run up and let Polton know you are here.”

At the mention of Polton’s name methought his bright blue eye grew brighter, and by the way in which he murmured “Ha!” and smiled as he subsided into an armchair, I judged that—as our American cousins would say—he “had been there before;” and this impression was confirmed when I made my announcement in the laboratory, where I found Polton dancing his pedometer up and down and listening ecstatically to its measured tick.

“Mr. Brodribb,” said he. “Let me see, it is the sixty-three that he likes. Yes; and Lord, he does like it! It’s a pleasure to see him drink it!”

“Well, Polton,” said I, “it is an altruistic pleasure, and if it would add to your enjoyment to see me drink some, too, I am prepared to make an effort.”

“You couldn’t do it as Mr. Brodribb does,” said Polton, “and you haven’t got the complexion. Still—I’ll bring it down in a minute or two, when I’ve got it filtered into the decanter.”

On this I descended and rejoined Mr. Brodribb, and having offered him a cigar, which he declined—no doubt with a view to preserving his gustatory sense unimpaired—sat down and filled my pipe.

“I looked in,” said Mr. Brodribb, “on my way home to ask Thorndyke a question. I met Drayton today—only saw him for a few moments—and he said something about wanting some information respecting Arthur Blake of Beauchamp Blake. I understood him to say that the matter arose out of the inquest on his brother; can’t see how the devil it could, but that is what I gathered. Now, before I tell him anything, I should like to know what’s in the wind. What’s he after? Do you happen to know?”

“I think I do, to some extent,” said I, and I gave him a brief account of the circumstances and a summary of Miss Blake’s evidence.

“I see,” said he. “Then this young lady will be Peter Blake’s daughter. But what does Drayton want to know? And why does he want to know it? He said something about Thorndyke, too. Now, where does Thorndyke come in?”

As if in answer to the question, my colleague emerged at this moment from the office, slipping a large notebook into his pocket. As he greeted our visitor, I found myself speculating on the contents of that notebook and wondering what kind of information he had been disinterring from those piles of arid-looking reports of assizes, quarter-sessions, and the Central Criminal Court. The greetings were hardly finished when Polton entered with a tray on which were a decanter, three glasses, and a biscuit jar; and having placed a small table adjacent to Mr. Brodribb’s chair, deposited the tray thereon with a crinkly smile of satisfaction, and departed after an instantaneous glance of profound significance in my direction.

Thorndyke filled the three glasses, and drawing a chair nearer to the fire, sat down and began to fill his pipe; while Brodribb lifted his glass, looked at it reflectively, took an experimental sip, savoured it with grave attention, and again looked at the glass.

“A noble wine, Thorndyke,” he pronounced solemnly. “I don’t deserve this after coming and routing you out at close upon midnight. But I haven’t come for mere gossip. I’ve just been putting my case to Anstey,” and here he repeated what he had told me of his interview with Sir Lawrence. “Now, what I want to know,” he concluded, “is, what is Drayton after? He seems disposed to interest himself in Peter Blake’s daughter—and his son, too, I suppose.”

“Yes,” said Thorndyke, “and for that matter, I may say that I feel a benevolent interest in the young people myself, and so, I think, does Anstey.”

“Then,” said Brodribb, “I’m going to ask you a plain question. Is there any idea of contesting the title of the present tenant of the Blake property—Arthur Blake?”

“I should say certainly not,” replied Thorndyke. “Drayton’s object is, I think, to ascertain whether there is any prospect of circumstances becoming favourable in the future for the revival of Peter Blake’s claim—or rather Percival Blake’s, as it would now be. He wants to know who the present heir is, what is his relation to the present tenant, and he would like to know as much as possible about Arthur Blake himself, particularly in regard to the probability of his marrying. And, as I said, Anstey and I are not uninterested in the matter.”

“Well, if that is all,” said Brodribb, “I can answer you without any breach of confidence to my client. As to the heir, his name is Charles Templeton, but what his relationship to Arthur Blake is, I can’t say at the moment. He is a pretty distant relative, I know. With regard to Arthur Blake, I can tell you all about him, for I have made some inquiries on my own account. And I can tell you something that will interest you more than the probability of his marrying—he is trying to sell the property.”

“The deuce he is!” exclaimed Thorndyke. “I suppose I mustn’t ask why he wants to sell?”

“I don’t know that there is any secret about it. His own explanation is that he doesn’t care for England and would like to get back to Australia, where he has lived nearly all his life; and I daresay there is some truth in that, for he is like a fish out of water—doesn’t understand the ways of an English landowner at all. But I don’t think that’s the whole of it. He knows about this claim of Peter Blake’s, and he knows that Peter Blake’s son is living; and then—you know about the title-deeds, I suppose?”

“Yes,” said Thorndyke. “Miss Blake has told us the whole story.”

“Well, I suspect that, with this claim in the air and the mystery of the whereabouts of the title-deeds, he feels that his tenure of the property is a little insecure. So he would like to sell it and clear off with the money. And, mind you, he is not entirely wrong. Peter Blake’s claim was a bona fide claim. It broke down from the lack of documentary evidence. But it is always possible for documents to reappear, and if these documents ever should, the position would be very different. And, to tell the honest truth, I shouldn’t be particularly afflicted if they did reappear.”

“Why wouldn’t you?” I asked.

“Well,” Brodribb replied, “you know, one gets a sort of sentimental interest in a historic estate which one has known all one’s life. I am Arthur Blake’s solicitor, it is true. But I feel that I have responsibilities towards the whole family and the estate itself. I have much more sentiment about the old house and its lands than Blake himself has. I hate the idea of selling an old place like that, which has been in one family since the time of Henry the Eighth, as if it were a mere speculative builder’s estate. Besides, it isn’t playing the game. An inherited estate belongs to the family, and a man who has received it from his ancestors has no right to dispossess his posterity. I told him so, and he didn’t like it a bit.”

“What sort of man is he?” I asked.

“He’s a colonial, and not a good type of colonial. Gruff and short and none too well-mannered, and, of course, he doesn’t know anybody in the county. And I should think he is a confirmed bachelor, for he lives—when he is at home—in the new part of the house, with three servants and his man, as if he were in a bachelor flat.”

“How did you manage to dig him up?” Thorndyke asked.

“I began to make inquiries as soon as it was certain that he would be Arnold Blake’s successor. That was years ago. I ascertained his whereabouts and got into touch with him pretty easily, but I really never knew much about him until a few weeks back, when I came across a man who had just retired from the Australian Police. He knew all about Blake, so I took the opportunity to get a pretty full history of him and make out a little dossier to keep by me. You never know when a trifle of information may come in useful.”

“No,” Thorndyke agreed as he refilled our visitor’s glass. “Knowledge is power.”

“Quite so,” said Brodribb, “and it is well to know whom you are dealing with. But, in fact, this fellow Blake is quite an interesting character.”

“So the police seem to have thought,” I remarked.

“Oh, I don’t think there was anything against Blake,” said he, “excepting that he kept rather queer company at times. My friend first heard of him at a mining camp, where the society was not exactly select, and where he ran a saloon or liquor bar. But he gave that up and took to digging, and he seems to have had quite good luck for a time. Then his claim petered out and he moved off to a new district and started a sawmill with some of his mining pals. There, I think, some of his partners had trouble with the police—I don’t know exactly what it was, but he moved off again and rambled about doing all sorts of odd jobs—boat-building, farming, working as deck hand on a coaster, carpentering—he seems to have been able to turn his hand to anything—and finally he came across his last partner, a man named Owen, a fellow of his own type, who seemed to be able to do anything but stick to one kind of job. Owen was a colonial—he was born at Hobart—and by trade he was a photo-engraver, but he had worked a small type-foundry, run a local newspaper, and done some other jobs that weren’t quite so respectable. Blake ran across him at a new town in a mining district, and the circumstances were characteristic of the two men. Owen had started a pottery, but he had just met with an accident and broken his knee-cap. Thereupon Blake took him in hand and fixed his knee-cap up in splints, and as it happened to be the left knee, so that Owen would not be able to work the potter’s wheel for a long time, Blake took over the job, worked the wheel, and turned out the pots and pans, while a woman who was associated with Owen—I don’t know what their relations were—helped with the kiln and sold the stuff in the town.”

“Why can’t you work a potter’s wheel with your right foot?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” replied Brodribb, “but I understand that you can’t.”

“In an ordinary ‘kick-wheel,’” said Thorndyke, “the ‘kick-bar,’ or treadle, is on the left side, and has to be if the potter is right-handed, to enable him to steady himself with the right foot.”

“I see,” said I. “And how long did the pottery last?”

“Not long,” replied Brodribb. “When Owen got about again, as he couldn’t work the wheel, it seems that he got restless and began to hanker for something fresh. Then Blake got a tip from some prospector about some traces of gold in the hills in an outlying district, so they sold the pottery and the three of them went off prospecting; and I think they were engaged in some tentative digging when Blake got my letter telling him that Arnold Blake was dead and that he had come into the property. A deuce of a time he was, too, in getting that letter, for, of course, there was no post out there and they only rode into the town at long intervals.”

“And now,” said Thorndyke, “he wants to sell the property and get back to his cronies. I should think they would be very glad to see him.”

“I don’t know that he wants to join his pals again,” said Brodribb. “As a man of property, I should think he would keep clear of people of that sort. But in any case, he couldn’t. Owen is dead. He must have died soon after Blake left; must have met with an accident when he was alone, for his body was found only a few months ago at the foot of a cliff-just a heap of more or less damaged bones that must have been lying there for several years. The skeleton was found by the merest chance by another prospector.”

“How did he know it was Owen’s body?” I asked.

“Well, he knew that Owen had been there and had not been seen for a long time, and he found a signet-ring—a rough affair that Owen had made himself and engraved with a representation of a yew-tree. That was recognised as his.”

“Why a yew-tree?” I asked.

“That was his private mark, a sort of rebus or pun on his Christian name, Hugh.”

“But how was it,” Thorndyke asked, “that the woman hadn’t reported his death?”

“Oh, she had left him quite soon after Blake’s departure. The police had an idea that she had gone off with Owen to the South Sea Islands on one of the schooners. At any rate, she disappeared, and they weren’t sorry to see the last of her. She was a shady character—and so, apparently, was Owen, for that matter.”

“What was there against her?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t know that there was anything very definite, though there may have been. But she turned up rather mysteriously at Melbourne on a Russian tramp steamer, and the police surmised that she had left her country for her country’s good and her own. So they entered her name—Laura Levinsky—on their books and kept an eye on her until she went. But, God bless me, what a damned old chatterbox I am! Here am I babbling away at past midnight, and giving you a lot of gossip that is no more your business than it is mine.”

“I think,” said Thorndyke, “we have all enjoyed the gossip, and as to its irrelevancy, who can tell? At any rate, we gather that there is no immediate prospect of Blake’s marrying, which really does concern us.”

“No,” said Brodribb, “nor of his selling the property, though he has put it into the hands of Lee and Robey, the estate agents. But he won’t sell it. Of course there’s no magic in title-deeds, and his title is good enough, but no one would buy an important property like that with the title-deeds missing and liable to turn up in the wrong hands. And now I must really be off. You’ve squeezed me dry if you were out for information, and I’ve squeezed you dry,” he added with a complacent glance at the decanter, “and a devilish good bottle of port it was. You can pass on what I’ve told you to Drayton, and I’ll see if I can let you know what relation the heir, Charles Templeton, is to Arthur Blake. So goodnight and good luck, and my best respects to your wine merchant.”

When Brodribb had gone, I stretched myself and yawned slightly.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t feel sleepy, but I think I will turn in. One must go to bed some time.”

“I don’t feel sleepy either,” said Thorndyke, “and I shall not turn in. I think I will just jot down a few notes of what Brodribb has told us and then have another look at Miss Blake’s manuscript before handing it over to Drayton.”

“Old Brodribb enjoyed the wine, didn’t he?” I remarked. “And, by Jove, it did set his old chin wagging. But he didn’t tell us much, after all. Excepting the proposed sale, it was just mere personal gossip.”

“Yes. But the sale question is really important. We shall have to think over that. He mustn’t be allowed to sell the property.”

“Can we prevent him?” I asked.

“I think,” replied Thorndyke, “from what Brodribb said, that a threat to apply for an injunction pending an investigation of the title would make him draw in his horns. But we shall see. Goodnight, if you are off.”

By the time I had undressed, washed, and turned into bed, I began to suspect that Thorndyke had taken the wiser course. And as I lay in the dark, at first quietly but then with increasing restlessness, the suspicion deepened. The disturbing—indeed, alarming—events of the evening came crowding back into my mind and grew, minute by minute, more vivid. The scene in the studio arose before me with fearful reality, and worse still, the horrible catastrophe, barely averted by Thorndyke’s watchfulness and wonderful prevision, actually seemed to befall before my eyes. The dreadful picture that Miss Blake had drawn in a few words, painted itself in my consciousness with the most frightful realism. I saw the sculptor’s wife peering into the dim and silent studio in the early morning, and heard her shriek of horror as her glance fell on the brother and sister, lying there stark and dead, and Thorndyke’s analysis in the laboratory took on a new and fearful significance. At last, after tossing in bed for over an hour, I could bear it no longer, and rose to go down to the sitting-room for a book.

As I entered the room, Thorndyke looked up from the notebook in which he was writing. “You had better have stayed up a little longer,” he remarked. “Now you are going to read yourself to sleep, I suppose.”

“Yes, I hope so,” I replied, and turned to the book-shelves to search for a work of a calm and cheerful tendency. The Compleat Angler appearing to fulfil these requirements most perfectly, I picked it out and was just about to move away when my glance lighted on the rather curious collection of objects on the table. They had made their appearance since I retired, and were presumably connected with some kind of investigation which my colleague had been pursuing while I was wooing Hypnos in vain. I looked at them curiously, and speculated on the nature of the inquiry. There was a microscope, and beside it lay the locket, opened and showing the broken glass, and a little, fat, greasy volume which examination showed to be a Latin Vulgate Bible.

I laid down the volume and glanced at Thorndyke, whom I found watching me with a faint smile. Then I peered through the microscope and perceived what looked like a thread of blue glass.

“Is this a thread of silk, Thorndyke?” I asked.

“No,” he replied, “it is a hair. Apparently a woman’s hair.”

“But,” I expostulated, “it is blue—bright blue! Where on earth did you get it?”

“Out of the locket,” he replied.

I stared at him in amazement. “What an extraordinary thing!” I exclaimed. “A blue hair! I never heard of blue hair before.”

“Then,” said Thorndyke, “my learned friend has made an addition to his already vast store of knowledge.”

“I suppose it was dyed?” said I.

“I think,” he replied, “we may assume that the blue colour is adventitious.”

“But why, in the name of Fortune, should a woman dye her hair blue?” I demanded.

He shook his head. “A curious question that, Anstey, a very curious question. I suggest that when my learned friend has satisfied himself as to the correct method of ‘daping’ or doping with a grasshopper for the chavender or chub,’ he might with advantage bring his colossal intellect to bear on it.”

“You are an aggravating old devil, Thorndyke,” I said with conviction. “You know perfectly well what this thing means, and yet, when you are asked a civil question, you sit there wagging your exasperating old head like some confounded secretive effigy. I’d like to paint your cranium with Stephen’s blue-black ink and then put it under the microscope.”

He shook the threatened head conclusively. “It would be futile, Anstey,” he replied “As a method of producing blue hair it would be a complete failure. The effect of the tannate of iron—on exposure to oxygen—would entirely mask that of the indigo-carmine. No, my friend. Physical experiment is outside the range of a King’s Counsel. Reflection is your proper province. And now take your book and go to bed. Consider the chavender or chub and also the possible connection between a blue hair and a gold locket; shun needless and inky strenuosities, and ‘be quiet and go a-angling.’”

With this he returned to his notebook, and there being evidently nothing more to be got out of him, I picked up my book, and having shaken my fist at the impassive figure by the table, once more betook myself to bed, there to meditate fruitlessly upon this new and curious problem.

CHAPTER TWELVE

From the Jaws of Death

On the following morning it seemed natural that my steps should stray in the direction of Jacob Street, not only that I might relieve my anxiety as to my friend whom I had left overnight in so distressed a state, but also to ascertain whether any services that I could render were at the moment in request. As to the former, my mind was completely set at rest as soon as I entered the studio (to which I was conducted by Mrs. Wingrave, who opened the wicket), for I found Miss Blake hard at work and looking as cheerful and interested as if poisoned sweets and brazen-haired Jezebels were things unheard of.

I explained, half-apologetically, the purpose of my visit, and was preparing a strategic retreat when she interrupted me.

“Now, Mr. Anstey, I will not have these formalities. We aren’t strangers. You have been, and are, the best and kindest of friends to me and Percy, and we are not only grateful but we value your friendship very much indeed. As to Percy, he loves you.”

“Does he?” said I, with an inward glow of satisfaction. “I am proud to know that. And Percy’s sister—?”

She coloured very prettily and smilingly avoided the pitfall. “Percy’s sister,” she replied, “takes an indulgent view of her brother’s infatuation. But I am going to treat you as a friend. I am going on with my work, because it has to be done, even if I didn’t like doing it; but it would be very nice and companionable if you would sit down and smoke a pipe and talk to me, that is, of course, if you can spare the time.”

“If I could spare the time!” Why, the whole Appeal Court, with the House of Lords thrown in, might have sat and twiddled their thumbs for all I cared. But, in fact, I had nothing to do at all.

“You are sure I shan’t hinder you?” I said, feeling for my pipe.

“Perfectly,” she answered. “I have done all the troublesome part, you see—posing and draping the model,” and she pointed with her pencil to a lay figure (it was an elaborate, “stuffed” figure with real hair and a wax face and hands), dressed in the very height of fashion, which stood, posed in what Lewis Carroll would have called an “Anglo-Saxon attitude,” simpering at us idiotically.

“That is a very magnificent costume,” I remarked. “I suppose it is one of your own? Or do you keep a wardrobe for the models?”

“It isn’t costume at all,” she replied with a laugh. “It is just dress material draped on and tacked or pinned in position. You will see if you go round to the other side.”

I went round to the “off-side,” and having thus discovered the fraud, asked: “Is this a figure for a subject picture?”

She laughed softly. “Bless your innocent heart, Mr. Anstey, I don’t paint pictures. I draw fashion-plates. I have to earn a living, you know, and give Percy a start.”

“What a horrid waste of talent!” I exclaimed. “But I had no idea that fashion-plate artists took all this trouble,” and I pointed to the smooth card on her easel which bore a masterly, though rather attenuated, nude figure—in the Anglo-Saxon attitude—lightly drawn in pencil, and looking almost like a silver point.

“Most of them don’t,” she replied, “and perhaps it isn’t really necessary. But I like to make a finished pencil drawing, though it has all to be rubbed out when the pen work has been done over it.”

“And the preliminary nude figure,” said I; “you do that from a model, I suppose?”

“No,” she answered. “I can draw a nude figure well enough for this purpose out of my head. You see, I worked from the model for a long time at the Slade School, and I never threw away a drawing. I have them all bound in books, and I have copied them and drawn them from memory over and over again. In practice, one must be able to rough out a figure out of one’s head.”

As she talked, her pencil travelled easily and lightly over the smooth fashion-plate board, gradually clothing the nude figure in transparent habiliments, and I sat smoking with infinite contentment and watching her. And a very dainty, picturesque figure she made in her long blue pinafore, with her red-gold hair and waxen skin, as she stood gracefully poised before her easel, hand on hip and the drawing arm flung out straight and swinging easily from the shoulder. I contrasted her lithe form, in which every curve was full of life and grace, with the absurd rigidity of the lay-figure, her simple, dignified garments with the fussy exuberance of the fashionable costume (though, to be sure, that costume was her own creation), and was moved to comments on the effigy that might have lacerated its feelings if it had had any.

“How long will this drawing take you?” I asked presently.

“I shall have it done by this evening,” she replied, “and tomorrow morning I shall take it to the office and deliver it to the Art editor.”

“Couldn’t I take it for you?” said I.

“I am afraid not,” she answered. “I must go myself to see that it is all right and to get instructions for the next drawings. Besides, why should you?”

“Didn’t we agree that you were to keep indoors out of harm’s way? Or at least not to go abroad without an escort? If you must take the drawing yourself, you had better let me come with you to see you safely there and back. Do you mind?”

“Of course I should like your company, Mr. Anstey,” she replied, “but it seems such a tax on you.”

“I wish all taxes were as acceptable,” said I. “But I understand that you agree; so, if you will fix a time, the escort will assemble at the gate and the bugles will sound ‘fall in’ with military punctuality.”

After a few more half-hearted protests she fixed the hour of half-past ten for the following morning, and I then took my leave, very well satisfied with the progress of this friendship that was becoming so dear to me, and even sensible of a dawning hope that a yet closer intimacy might some day become possible.

Punctually at the appointed time the Hampstead tram set me down at the end of Jacob Street, when I proceeded to collect the convoy and make sail for Bedford Street, Covent Garden, which was the abiding-place of the Art editor to whom the drawing was consigned. But if the outward voyage was characterised by business-like directness, it was quite otherwise with the homeward; which was marked by so many circumnavigations and interrupted by so many ports of call—including the National Gallery—that it was well on in the afternoon when the convoy shortened sail at sixty-three Jacob Street, and it became necessary for the escort to put into port and take in stores in the form of tea and biscuits. And even then, so satisfactory had the voyage turned out that (to pursue the metaphor to a finish) the charter-party was renewed and further voyages projected.

Expeditions abroad, however, could only be occasional, and even then on a plausible business pretext, for my fair friend was a steady worker and spent long days at her easel and drawing-desk; nor was I entirely without occupation, though Thorndyke made but the smallest demands upon my vacation leisure. In effect, not a day passed without a visit to Jacob Street, and whether my time was spent placidly watching the growth of a new drawing, in executing shopping commissions, or in escort duties, it was all equally pleasant to me, and day by day more firmly established my position as the indispensable friend of the little household.

Affairs had been on this footing for about a week when early on a certain afternoon I set forth from the Temple for my daily call, but with a more definite purpose than usual, for I bore with me the locket, in which Polton had fixed a new glass. I rang the studio bell with the customary pleasurable anticipation of the warm and evidently sincere welcome, and listened complacently to Mrs. Wingrave’s footsteps as she came along the paved passage, and as the wicket opened I prepared to step jauntily through. But the first words that the worthy lady spoke scattered in an instant all my pleasant thoughts and filled me with alarm.

“Miss Blake has just gone out,” she said. “A most sad thing has happened. Poor Master Percy has had an accident. He has broken his leg.”

“Where did this happen, and when?” I asked.

“It must have happened about an hour ago,” she replied. “I don’t know where, but they have taken him into a house near Chalk Farm.”

“Who brought the news?” I demanded breathlessly; for, seeing that Percy would be at school at the time mentioned, the story was, on the face of it, highly suspicious.

“It was a lady who brought the message,” said Mrs. Wingrave. “She wouldn’t come in, but she handed me a note, written in pencil and marked ‘urgent.’ Miss Blake showed it to me. It didn’t give any particulars beyond what I have told you, and the address of the house.”

“What was the lady like?” I asked.

“Well,” Mrs. Wingrave replied, “I call her a lady, but she was really rather a common-looking woman; painted and powdered and very vulgarly dressed.”

“Did you notice her hair?”

“Yes; you couldn’t help noticing it. Brassy-looking, golden stuff, frizzed out like a mop—and her eyebrows were as black as mine are.”

“Do you know where the note is?” I asked.

“I expect Miss Blake took it with her, but she may have left it in the studio. Shall we go and see?”

We hurried together across the yard and into the studio, where for a minute or so we searched the tables and the unfastened bureau. But there was no sign of the note.

“She must have taken it with her,” said Mrs. Wingrave. “But I think I can give you the address, if that is what you want. You don’t think there’s anything wrong, do you?”

“I am extremely uneasy, Mrs. Wingrave,” said I, producing my notebook and a pencil, “and I shall go straight to the house, if I can find it. What is the address? For Heaven’s sake don’t give me a wrong one!”

“I remember it quite clearly,” she replied, “and I think I know the place. It is number twenty-nine Scoresby Terrace, a corner house; and the terrace turns out of Sackett’s Road on the left side going up from here.”

I wrote this down in my notebook and then asked: “How long has Miss Blake been gone?”

“She started less than ten minutes before you came,” was the reply. “If you hurry you may possibly over-take her.”

We came out of the studio, and as we crossed the yard she gave me very full and clear directions as to how to find the place, some of which I jotted down. Passing a marble tombstone on which her husband had been working, I noticed a number of his tools lying on a sack, and among them a long chisel, almost like a small crowbar. “May I borrow this, Mrs. Wingrave?” I said, picking it up. “Certainly, if you want to,” she replied with a look of surprise.

“Thank you,” I said, slipping it up my sleeve. “I may have to force a door, you know,” and with this I let myself out at the wicket and strode away swiftly up the street.

I am habitually a rapid walker, and now I covered the ground at a pace that made other pedestrians stare. For Winifred, I felt sure, would have flown to her brother on the wings of terror, and hurry as I might, I should be hard put to it to overtake her. But her terror could have been nothing compared with mine. As I raced along the shabby streets, swinging the chisel openly in my hand—for its presence in my sleeve was a sensible hindrance—the sinister possibilities—nay, probabilities—that, unsought, suggested themselves one after another, kept me in a state of sickening dread. Supposing I failed to find the place after all! It was quite possible, for the neighbourhood was strange and rather intricate. Or suppose I should lose time in searching for the house and arrive at last, only to find—Here I set my teeth and fairly broke into a run, regardless of the inquisitive stares of idlers at doors and street corners. But, for all my terror and horrible forebodings, I kept my wits and held my attention firmly to Mrs. Wingrave’s directions, and I derived a faint encouragement from the fact that I had never lost touch of the landmarks and that every hurried step was bringing me nearer to my goal. At length, want of breath compelled me to drop into a walk, but a couple of minutes later, with a gasp of relief, I reached the corner of Sackett’s Road; and even as I swung round into the long, straight, dreary street, I caught a glimpse of a woman, at the far end, hurrying forward in the same direction. It was only a momentary glimpse, for in the instant when I saw her she turned swiftly into a by-street to the left. But brief as was the vision, and far away as she was, no doubt was possible to me. It was Winifred.

I drew a deep breath. Surely I should be in time. And perhaps my fears might be groundless after all. The plot might be but the creation of my own uneasy suspicion. At any rate, I was nearly there, and it was hardly possible that in a few short minutes anything could happen—but here all my terrors came crowding on me again, and, breathless as I was, I again broke into a run.

As I reached the corner of Scoresby Terrace and looked at the corner house, my heart seemed to stand still. A single glance showed that it was an empty house, and the horrible desolation of its aspect was made more dreadful by the silence and the total absence of any sign of life. I flew across the road, and barely glancing at the number-twenty-nine-raced up the garden path and tugged furiously at the bell.

Instantly the hollow shell reverberated with a hideous jangling that sounded more ominous and dreadful from the vacancy that the discordant echoes bespoke. But it slowly died away and was succeeded by no answering sound. A deadly silence enveloped the ill-omened place. Not a creak upon the stair, not a sign of life or movement could I detect, though I held my breath to listen. Yet this was the house, and she was in it—and that other! Again I wrenched at the bell, and again the horrible jangling filled the place with echoes, like some infernal peal rung by a company of ghouls. And still there was no answer.

In a frenzy of terror I rushed down the side passage, and bursting open the flimsy gate, ran into the back garden and tried the back door. But it was locked and bolted. Then I darted to the back parlour window, and springing on the sill, shattered, with a stroke of the chisel, the pane above the catch. Passing my hand in through the hole, I drew back the catch and slid up the lower sash. I had noticed that the wooden shutters were not quite closed, but at the moment that I slid up the window-sash, the shutters closed and I heard the cross-bar snap into its socket.

For a moment I had a thought of running round to the front and breaking in the street door. But only for a moment. Rescue, not capture, was my purpose. A glance at the flimsy, decrepit shutters showed me the way in. Thrusting the edge of the long, powerful chisel into the crack close to the lower hinge, I gave a violent wrench, and forthwith the hinge came away from the jamb, the screws drawing easily from the rotten woodwork. Another thrust and another wrench at the upper hinge brought that away too; at a push the whole shutter swung inward and I sprang down into the room. And at that moment I heard the street door shut.

I ran across the room to the door. Of course it was locked and the key was outside. But I was not a criminal lawyer for nothing. In a moment I had the chisel driven in beside the lock, and pressing on the long handle, drove the door back on its hinges, when the lock-bolt and latch disengaged from the striking-plate and the door came open at once.

I ran out into the hall, unlocked the front room, and looked in, but it was empty. Then I flew up the stairs and was about to unlock the door of the first room that I came to, when I became aware of a soft, shuffling sound proceeding apparently from the next room. Instantly I ran to that door, and turning the key, flung it open.

The sight that met my eyes as I darted into the room was but the vision of a moment, but in that moment it imprinted itself upon my memory for ever. Even now, as I write, it rises before me, vivid and horrible, with such dreadful remembrance that my hand falters as it guides the pen. In a corner near the wall she lay—my sweet, gracious Winifred-lay huddled, writhing feebly and fumbling with her hands at her throat. Her face was of the colour of slate, her lips black, her eyes wide and protruding.

It was, I say, but the vision of a moment, a frightful, unforgettable moment. The next, I was on my knees beside her, my open knife was in my hand, its keen edge eating through the knot at the back of her neck that secured the band that was strangling her. A moment of agonised impatience and then the knot was divided and the band hastily unwound—it was a narrow silken scarf—revealing a livid groove in the plump neck.

As I took away the scarf she drew a deep, gasping breath with a hoarse, distressful sound like the breathing of a croup-stricken child. Again and again it was repeated, growing quicker and more irregular, and with each succeeding gasp the horrible purple of face and lips faded away, leaving a pallor as of marble; the dreadfully protruding eyes sank back until they looked almost normal, though wild and frightened.

I watched these changes with a sense of utter helplessness, though not without relief—for they were clearly changes for the better. But I longed to help her, to do something active to advance her recovery. If only I had had Thorndyke’s knowledge I might have been of some use. He would have known what to do. But perhaps there was nothing to be done but wait for her natural recovery. At any rate, that was all that I could do. And so I remained kneeling by her side with her head resting on my arm, holding her hand, and looking with infinite pity and affection into the frightened, trustful eyes that sought my own with such pathetic appeal.

Presently, as her breathing grew easier, the gasps began to be mingled with sobs; and then, suddenly, she burst into tears and wept passionately, almost hysterically, with her face buried against my shoulder. I was profoundly moved, indeed I was almost ready to weep myself, so intense was the revulsion now that the danger was past. In the tumult of my emotions I forgot everything but that she was saved, and that I loved her. As I sought to comfort her, to coax away her terrors, to soothe and reassure her, I cannot tell what words of tenderness I murmured into her ear, by what endearing names I addressed her. Stirred as I was to the very depths of my soul, I was aware of nothing but the great realities. In the stress of terror but now barely past and the joy and relief of the hardly hoped for recovery, the world of everyday was forgotten. All I knew was that she was here, safe in my arms, and that she was all in all to me.

By degrees her emotion expended its force and she grew calmer. Presently she sat up, and having wiped her eyes, looked nervously about the empty room.

“Let us go away from this dreadful place,” she said in a low, frightened voice, laying her hand entreatingly on my arm.

“We will,” said I, “if you are well enough yet to walk. Let us see.”

I stood up and lifted her to her feet, but she was very unsteady and weak. I doubt if she could have stood without support, for I could feel her trembling as she leaned on me heavily. Still, with my help, she tottered to the door and crossed the landing, and then, very slowly, we descended the stairs. At the open door of the room which I had entered, we paused to adjust her hat and remove any traces of the struggle before we should emerge into the street. I was still holding the silken scarf, and now put it into my pocket to free my hands that I might assist her in settling her hat and the crumpled collar of her dress. As I looked her over to see that all was in order, I noticed three or four conspicuous golden hairs sticking to her right sleeve. I picked them off and was in the act of dropping them when it occurred to me that Thorndyke might be able to extract some information from them, whereupon I brought out my pocket-book and slipped them between the leaves.

“That is how I got into the house,” I said, pointing to the shattered window and the hanging shutter.

She peered fearfully into the empty room and said: “I heard the crash of the glass. It was that which saved me, I think, for that brute heard it too, and rushed away downstairs instantly. How did you break open the shutter?”

“I did it with a chisel of Mr. Wingrave’s-and that reminds me that I have left the chisel upstairs. I must take it back to him.”

I bounded up the stairs, and running into the room, snatched up the chisel from the floor and ran out again. As I turned the corner of the staircase, I met her beginning to ascend the stair, clinging to the handrail and sobbing hysterically. I cursed myself for having left her, even for a few moments, and putting my arm around her, led her back into the hall.

“Oh, pray forgive me!” she sobbed. “I am all unstrung. I couldn’t bear to be alone.”

“Of course you couldn’t,” said I, drawing her head to my shoulder and stroking her pale cheek. “I oughtn’t to have left you. But try, Winnie dear, to realise that it is now over and gone. And let us get out of this house.”

She wiped her eyes again, and as her sobs died away into an occasional moan, I opened the street door. The sight of the open street and the sunlight seemed to calm her at once. She put away her handkerchief, and clinging to my arm, walked slowly and a little unsteadily by my side down the garden path and out at the gate.

“I wonder where we can get a cab,” said I.

“There is a station not very far away, I believe,” said she. “Perhaps some one can direct us.”

We walked slowly down Sackett’s Road, looking about that curiously deserted thoroughfare for some likely person from whom to make inquiries, when I saw a taxi-cab draw up at a house and discharge its passengers. I managed to attract the notice of the driver, and a minute later we were seated in the vehicle travelling swiftly homeward.

During the short journey hardly a word was exchanged. She was quite composed now, but she was still deathly pale and lay back in her seat with an air of intense fatigue and exhaustion. When we reached the studio I helped her out of the cab, and having dismissed it, led her to the gate and rang the bell.

Instantly I heard hurried steps in the passage, the wicket was flung open, and Mrs. Wingrave looked out eagerly. When she saw us, she burst into tears.

“Thank God!” she exclaimed. “I’ve been in an agony of suspense. Directly Percy came home, I knew that Mr. Anstey must be right—that the message about him was a trap of some sort. What has happened?”

“I’ll tell you later, Mrs. Wingrave,” Winifred replied. “I don’t want to talk about it now. Is Percy at home?”

“No. The two Wallingford boys were with him. He has gone home to tea with them. I thought it best to say nothing, and let him go. They live quite near here.”

“I am glad you did,” said Winifred, as we crossed the yard-where I replaced the invaluable chisel. “Perhaps we needn’t tell him anything about this.”

“It might be better not to,” said Mrs. Wingrave. “And now go and sit down quietly in the studio and I will bring you some tea. You both look as if you wanted some rest and refreshment.” She bustled away towards her own residence and Winifred and I entered the studio.

As I held the curtain aside to let her pass, my companion halted and looked round the great, bare hall with an air of deep reflection—almost of curiosity. “I never thought to look upon this place again,” she said gravely; “and I never should but for you. My life is your gift, Mr. Anstey.”

“It is a very precious life to me, Winifred,” said I. And then I added: “I can’t call you Miss Blake.”

“I am glad of that,” she said, looking at me with a smile. “It would sound very cool and formal now when you have held my life in your hands, and my heart is bursting with gratitude to you.” She laid her hand on my arm for a moment, and then, as if afraid of saying too much, returned abruptly to the subject of her brother. “It is fortunate Percy was not at home. I don’t think we need tell him, at least not just now. Do you think so?”

“I don’t see any necessity,” I replied. “He knows the general position and the precautions that have to be taken. Perhaps he can be told later. And now you must just sit on the settee and rest quietly, for you are as pale as a ghost still. I wonder you have not collapsed altogether.”

In a few minutes Mrs. Wingrave brought in the tea and placed it on a table by Winifred’s settee. I drew up a chair and performed the presidential functions in respect of the teapot, and under the influence of the homely ceremony and the reviving stimulant my patient began to recover something like her normal appearance and manner. I kept up a flow of more or less commonplace talk, avoiding, for the present, any reference to the terrible events of the afternoon, the details of which I decided to elucidate later when the effect of the shock had passed off.

The postponement, however, was shorter than I had intended, for when we had finished tea and I had carried the tray across the yard and restored it to Mrs. Wingrave, Winifred opened the subject herself.

“You haven’t asked me how this thing happened,” she said, as I re-entered the studio and sat down beside her in the vacant place on the settee.

“No. I thought you wouldn’t want to talk about it just now.”

“I don’t want to talk about it to Mrs. Wingrave,” said she. “But you are my deliverer. I don’t mind telling you—besides you ought to know. And I want to know, too, by what extraordinary chance you came to be in that place at that critical moment. When I saw you come into the room, it seemed as if a miracle had happened.”

“There was nothing very miraculous about it,” said I, “except that I happened to arrive at the studio a little earlier than usual.” And here I gave her an account of my arrival and my interview with Mrs. Wingrave and my efforts to overtake her.

“It was very clever of Mrs. Wingrave to remember the address so clearly,” said Winifred.

“It is a mercy that she did,” said I. “If she had not—but there, we won’t think of that. What happened when you got to the house?”

“I rang the bell and a woman opened the door. I hardly saw her until I had entered the hall and she had shut the door, and then—you know how dark the hall was—I couldn’t see her very distinctly. But I noticed that she was a good deal powdered and that she had bright, unreal-looking golden hair, though that didn’t show much as she had a handkerchief tied over her head and under her chin. And I also noticed that her face seemed in some way familiar to me.

“As soon as she had shut the door the woman said in a rather peculiar voice: ‘You must excuse the state of the house, we haven’t properly moved in yet. The little man is with the nurse on the first floor, the second room you come to. Will you go up?’

“I ran up the stairs and she followed close behind me. When I came to the second room, I asked: ‘Is this the one?’ and when she answered ‘Yes,’ I opened the door and stepped in. Then, of course, I saw it was an empty room, and instantly I suspected that it was a trap. But at that moment the woman threw the scarf over my head and pulled it tight. I turned round quickly, but she dodged behind me and pulled me into the room, and there we struggled and kept turning round and round for hours, as it seemed to me, she trying to get behind me to tie the scarf, and I struggling to keep her in front of me. She still held both ends of the scarf, and though she was not able to pull it quite tight, it was tight enough to make my breathing difficult and to prevent me from calling out. At last I managed to turn quickly and seize her by the hair and the handkerchief that was tied over her head. But the handkerchief came away in my hand and the hair with it. It was a wig. And then, to my horror, I saw that this was not a woman at all. It was a man! The man who stabbed me that night at Hampstead! I recognised him instantly, and the shock was so awful that I nearly fainted. For a moment I felt perfectly helpless, and in that moment he got behind me and tied the scarf and pulled it tight.

“Then there came a tremendous pealing of the bell. The man started violently, and I could feel his hands trembling as he tried to finish tying the knot while I struggled to get hold of his wrists. But, of course, I could not struggle long, for the scarf was so tight that it almost completely stopped my breathing, and the horror of the thing took away all my strength. When the bell rang the second time, he broke into a torrent of curses mixed with a curious sort of whimpering, and flung me violently on the floor. He was just finishing the knot when I heard a crash of glass down below, and at that he sprang to his feet, snatched up the wig and handkerchief, and flew down the stairs.

“After this there seemed a long, long interval. Of course it was only a matter of seconds, I suppose, but it was agonising—that horrible feeling of suffocation. At last I heard a bursting sound down below. Then the street door shut, and then—just as I seemed to be losing consciousness—you came into the room, and I knew that I was saved.” She paused, and then, laying her hand on mine, she continued: “I haven’t thanked you for saving me from that horrible death. I can’t. No words are enough. Any talk of gratitude would be mere anticlimax.”

“There is no question of gratitude, Winnie,” said I. “Your life is more to me than my own, so there is no virtue in my cherishing it. But I needn’t tell you that, for I suspect that my secret has slipped out unawares already.”

“Your secret?” she repeated.

“That I love you, Winnie dearest. You must know it by now. I suppose I ought not to speak of it just at this time. And yet—well, perhaps I might ask you if you would take time to consider whether we might not, some day, be more to one another than we are now.”

She looked down gravely though a little shyly, but she answered without hesitation: “I don’t need to take time to consider. I can tell you at once that I am proud to be loved by such a man as you. And it is not a case of gratitude. I should have said the same if you had asked me yesterday—or even longer ago than that.”

“Thank you for telling me that, Winnie,” said I. “It would have been an unworthy thing if I had seemed to presume on any small service—”

“It would have been an absurd thing to have any such idea, Mr. Anstey.”

“Mr. Anstey?” I repeated. “May I humbly mention that I also have a Christian name?”

“I always suspected that you had,” she retorted with a smile, “and I must confess to having speculated as to what it might be.”

“It takes the prosaic form of Robert, commonly perverted by my own family to Robin.”

“And a very pretty name, too,” said she. “But you are a foolish Robin to speak in that way about yourself. The mistake you are making,” she continued, holding up an admonitory forefinger, “is that you don’t realise what an exceedingly nice person you are. But we realise it. Mrs. Wingrave is quite fond of you; Percy loves you; and as for Percy’s sister, well, she lost her heart longer ago than she is prepared to admit. So let us hear no more ridiculous self-deprecations.”

“There shall be no more, sweetheart,” said I. “You have taken away the occasion and the excuse. A man who has won the heart of the sweetest and loveliest girl in the whole world would be a fool to undervalue himself. But it is a wonderful thing, Winnie. I can hardly believe in my good fortune. When I saw you that night at Hampstead, I thought you were the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. And now I know I was right. But how little did I dream that that lovely girl would one day be my own!”

“I say again that you are a foolish Robin,” said she, resting her cheek against my shoulder. “You think your goose is a swan. But go on thinking it, and she will be as near a swan as she can manage, or failing that, a very faithful, affectionate goose.”

She looked up at me with a smile, half-shy but wholly endearing, and noting how her marble-white cheeks had grown pink and rosy, I kissed her; whereupon they grew pinker still.

It was all for our good that Percy lingered with his friends and left us to the undisturbed possession of our new happiness. For me the golden minutes supped away unnumbered—sullenly and relentlessly checked, however, by my unconsulted watch—as we sat, side by side and hand clasped in hand. We talked little; not that we were, as Rosalind would say, “Gravelled for lack of matter” (and even if we had been, Rosalind’s admirable expedient was always available). But perfect companionship is independent of mere verbal converse. There is no need for speech when two hearts are singing in unison.

At last there came the expected peal of the bell. I might, I suppose, have gone out to open the wicket, but, in fact, I left that office to Mrs. Wingrave.

“I don’t think Percy will notice anything unusual,” said I. “You look perfectly recovered now.”

“I suppose I do,” she answered with a smile. “There have been restoratives, you see.”

“So there have,” I agreed, and ex abundantia cautelae, as we lawyers say, I added a sort of restorative codicil even as the quick footsteps pattered across the yard.

Whether Percy observed anything unusual I cannot say with certainty. He was a born diplomatist and a very model of discretion. But I have a strong suspicion that he detected some new note in the harmony of our little society. Particularly when I addressed his sister as Winnie did he seem to cock an attentive ear; and when she addressed me as Robin he cocked both ears. But he made no sign. He was a jewel of a boy. No lover could have asked for anything more perfect in the way of a prospective brother-in-law.

But my suspicion of that juvenile diplomat was confirmed—and my admiration of his judgment reached a climax—when the time arrived for me to go, and Winifred rose to accompany me to the gate. This had always been Percy’s office. But now he shook hands with me without turning a hair and without even a glance at the studio door. It was a marvellous instance of precocious intelligence.

We had left the studio and were just crossing the yard when suddenly I bethought me of the locket which Thorndyke had entrusted to me for delivery, and which I had, up to this moment, completely forgotten.

“Here is another narrow escape,” said I. “The special errand which, to the uninitiated, appeared to be the occasion of my visit here today, has never been discharged. I was to give you your locket, which the ingenious Polton has made as good as new, and had forgotten all about it. However, it is not too late,” and here I took the little bauble from my pocket and handed it to her.

“I am glad it came today, of all days,” she said as she took it from me. “Now I can wear it as a sort of memento. If we had only known, Robin, we could have got Mr. Polton to engrave the date on the back.”

“He can do that later,” said I. “It is engraved on my heart already. I can never forget a single moment of this day. And what a wonderful day it has been! What a day of wild extremes! Within a few hours I have suffered the most intense misery and dread that I have ever experienced, and been blessed with the greatest happiness that I have ever known. And as to you, my poor darling—”

“Not a poor darling at all,” she interrupted, “but a very rich and proud and happy one. A day of storm and sunshine it has indeed been, but the storm came first, and ‘in the evening there was light.’ And after all, Robin dear, you can’t have a rainbow without rain.”

By this tune we had reached the gate; and when I had taken her in my arms and kissed her, I opened the wicket and passed out. As it closed behind me I looked up and down the dreary street, but it was dreary to me no longer. I don’t know who Jacob was—I mean this particular Jacob—but as I stopped to look back fondly at the factory-like gate, I felt that I was in some sort under an obligation to him as the (presumptive) creator of the sacred thoroughfare.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Thorndyke States His Position

Recalling the events of the evening after leaving the studio, I am sensible of a somewhat hazy interval between the moment when I turned the corner of Jacob Street and my arrival at the familiar precincts of the Temple. After the fashion of the aboriginal Londoner, I had simply set my face in the desired direction and walked, unconscious of particular streets, instinctively or subconsciously heading for my destination by the shortest route. And meanwhile my mind was busy with the stirring incidents of this most eventful day, with its swift alternations of storm and sunshine, its terror, its despair, and its golden reward. So my thoughts now alternated between joy at the attainment of a happiness scarcely hoped for and apprehension of the dangers that lurked unseen, ready to spring forth and wreck the life that was more to me than my own.

Thus meditating, I sped through by-streets innumerable and unnoted, crossing quiet squares and traversing narrow courts and obscure passages, but always shunning the main thoroughfares with their disturbing glare and noise, until I came, as it were, to the surface at the end of Chichester Rents, and turned into Chancery Lane. There the familiar surroundings brought me back to my everyday world, and my thoughts took a new direction. What would Thorndyke have to say to my news? Had he any resources unknown to me for staving off this very imminent danger? And would the terrible episode of the empty house convey any enlightenment to him that I had missed?

Still revolving these questions, I dived down Middle Temple Lane and presently became aware of a tall figure some little distance ahead, walking in the same direction as my own. I had nearly overtaken him when he turned at the entrance to Pump Court and looked back, whereupon a mutual recognition brought us both to a halt.

“I expect we are bound for the same port, Anstey,” said he as we shook hands. “I am going to call on Thorndyke. You are still helping him, aren’t you?”

“He says I am, and I hope it is true. At any rate, Jervis has not come back yet, if that is what you mean. I suppose, Drayton, you haven’t any fresh information for us?”

Sir Lawrence shook his head gloomily. “No,” he answered, “I have learned nothing new, nor, I fear, are any of us likely to. Those brutes seem to have got away without leaving a trace that it is possible to make anything of. We can’t expect impossibilities even of Thorndyke. But I am not calling on him with reference to the murder case. I want him to come down with me to Aylesbury to help me with an interview. A question of survivorship has arisen, and he knows more about that subject than I do, so I should like him to elicit the facts, if possible.”

As we walked through Pump Court and the Cloisters, I debated with myself whether I should tell Drayton of the horror that this day had witnessed. He was an interested party in more than one sense, for he had the warmest regard for Winifred. But I knew that he would be profoundly shocked, and as he continued to talk of the case on which he wanted Thorndyke’s advice, I said nothing for the present.

When I let myself and Drayton in with my latch-key, we found Thorndyke seated at the table with a microscope and a tray of reagents and mounting materials, preparing slides of animal hairs to add to his already extensive collection.

“I am ashamed to disturb you at this hour,” Drayton began.

But Thorndyke interrupted him. “You are not disturbing me at all. This kind of work can be taken up and put down at any moment.”

“It is very good of you to say so,” said Drayton, “and I will take you at your word.” And thereupon he opened the matter of which he had spoken to me.

“When do you want me to come down to Aylesbury?” Thorndyke asked.

“The day after tomorrow, if you can manage it.”

Thorndyke reflected for a few moments as he picked up with his forceps a newly-cleaned cover-glass, and delicately dropped it on the specimen that floated in its little pool of balsam.

“Yes,” he said at length, “I think we can arrange that. There isn’t very much doing just now.”

“Very well,” said Sir Lawrence. “Then I will call for you at ten o’clock, and I needn’t trouble you with any details now. We can talk the case over on the way down.” He rose as if to depart, but as he turned towards the door, he stopped and looked back at Thorndyke.

“I am afraid,” said he, “that I have rather neglected our friend Miss Blake. Has either of you seen her lately?”

Thorndyke gave me a quick look, and in the short interval before replying, I could see that he was rapidly debating how much he should tell Sir Lawrence. Apparently he reached the same conclusion as I had, that we could hardly conceal material facts from him, for he replied:

“Yes, we have both seen her quite lately; in fact, I think Anstey has just come from her studio. And I am sorry to say, we are both rather anxious about her.”

“Indeed,” said Drayton, laying down his hat and seating himself. “What is amiss with her?”

“The trouble is,” replied Thorndyke, “that she is the sole witness to the identity of the murderers, and they realise it, and they have determined, accordingly, to get rid of her.” And here he gave Sir Lawrence an account of the incident of the poisoned chocolates and the circumstances that had led up to it.

Drayton was thunderstruck. As he listened to Thorndyke’s vivid and precise narration, he sat motionless, with parted lips and his hands on his knees, the very picture of amazement and horror.

“But, good God!” he exclaimed, when Thorndyke had finished “this is perfectly frightful! It is a horrible state of things. Something must be done, you know. It is practically certain that they will make some further attempt.”

“They have already,” said I. And as the two men turned to me with looks of startled inquiry, I recounted—not without discomfort in recalling them—the terrible events of that afternoon.

My two friends listened with rapt attention as I told the hideous story, and on each it produced characteristic effects. Sir Lawrence glared at me with a scowl of suppressed fury, while Thorndyke’s face settled into a rigid immobility like that of a stone mask.

When I had concluded, Drayton sprang to his feet and began to pace the room in uncontrollable agitation, muttering and cursing under his breath. Suddenly he halted opposite Thorndyke, and gazing frowningly into his set face, demanded: “Is it not possible to do something? Something radical and effective, I mean? I don’t know what cards you hold, Thorndyke, and I am not going to embarrass you by asking for details, but are you in a position to make any kind of move?”

Thorndyke, who had also risen, and now stood with his back to the fire, looked down reflectively for a few moments. At length he replied:

“The difficulty is, Drayton, that if we move prematurely, we run a serious risk of failing, and we can’t afford to fail.”

“Do I understand, then, that you are in a position to take action?”

“Yes. But it would be extremely unsafe, for if we fail once we fail finally. It would be a gamble, and we should quite probably lose. Whereas, if we can wait, we shall have these men to a certainty. We have taken their measure and we know now exactly what kind of persons we are dealing with. You see, Drayton,” he continued after a brief pause, “secret crime most commonly comes to light through the efforts of the criminal to cover his tracks. That is so in the present case. All that I know as to the identity of these men I have learned from their struggles to conceal it. But for their multitudinous precautions I should have known nothing about them. And you see for yourself that they are criminals of the usual kind who will not let well alone. They keep making fresh efforts to secure their safety, and each time they make a move we learn something more about them. If only we can wait, they will surely deliver themselves into our hands.”

There was a brief silence. Then Sir Lawrence gave utterance to the thought that was in my own mind.

“That is all very well, Thorndyke, and as a lawyer I fully understand your desire to get a conclusive case before making a move. But can we afford to wait? Are we justified in using this poor young lady as a bait to enable us to catch these villains?”

“If that were the position,” replied Thorndyke, “there could be but one answer. But we must remember that the capture of these men is the condition on which her safety depends. If we fail, we fail for her as well as for ourselves.”

“Then,” asked Drayton, “what do you suggest? You don’t propose to stand by passively until they make some fresh attempt to murder her?”

“No. I suggest that more complete precautions be taken to secure Miss Blake’s safety, and meanwhile I hope to fill in one or two blanks in my collection of evidential facts and perhaps induce these men to make a move in a new direction. I think I can promise to bring the affair to a climax in one way or another, and that pretty soon.”

“Very well,” said Drayton, once more taking up his hat. “But who is going to look after Miss Blake?”

“Anstey has taken that duty on himself,” replied Thorndyke, “and I don’t think any one could do it better. If he wants assistance or advice, he has only to call upon us.”

With this arrangement Drayton appeared to be satisfied, though he still appeared uneasy—as, indeed, we all were. But he made no further suggestion, and very shortly took his leave.

For some time after his departure not a word was spoken. The conversation that had just taken place had given me abundant food for reflection, while Thorndyke, who still stood with his back to the fire, maintained a grim silence. Evidently he was thinking hard, and a glance at his face—stern, rigid, inexorable—assured me that his cogitations boded ill for those who had aroused his righteous anger. At length he looked up and asked:

“What measures can you suggest for Miss Blake’s protection?”

“I have told her that, for the present, she must not go out of doors on any occasion whatever unless accompanied by me—or, of course, by you or Drayton. She has promised to abide absolutely by that rule and to make no exception to it. She has also promised to keep the studio door locked and to inspect any visitors from the window of the bedroom adjoining before unlocking it.”

“If she keeps to those rules she should be quite safe,” said Thorndyke. “They are not likely to try to break in. There is a man living on the premises, I think?”

“Yes. Mr. Wingrave is about the place at his work most of the day, and, of course, he is always there at night.”

“Then, I think we may feel reasonably secure for the present; and I am glad you have made such complete arrangements, for I was going to suggest that you come down with us to Aylesbury.”

“With what object?” I asked. “Drayton won’t want me at the conference.”

“No. But it just occurred to me that, as we shall be within a mile or two of Beauchamp Blake and can easily take it on our way back, we might go and have a look at the place and see if we can pick up any information on the spot. I believe the question of the sale of the property is more or less in abeyance, but it would be just as well to make a few inquiries locally.”

I received the suggestion with some surprise but no enthusiasm.

“Doesn’t it seem rather inopportune,” I said, “with these imminent dangers impending, to be occupying ourselves in prosecuting this shadowy claim? Surely this is no time for building castles in the air. The chance of young Percival’s ever coming into this property is infinitely remote, and we can attend to it when we have done with more urgent matters.”

“If we attend to it at all,” he replied “we must do so when we have the opportunity. Should the property be sold, Percy’s chance will be gone for good. And the conflict between our two purposes is only in your mind. The fact of our keeping an eye on Percy’s interests will not hinder our pursuit of the wretches who murdered poor Drayton and would now murder Percy’s sister. You can trust me for that.”

“No, I suppose it won’t,” I admitted. “And you seem to take Percy’s claim to this estate quite seriously.”

“It is impossible to do otherwise,” said he. “It may be impossible to prove it, even if an opportunity should arise. But it is a real claim, and what little chance he has ought to be preserved. It mustn’t be lost by our negligence.”

I was not keen on the expedition, but I knew what Winifred’s sentiments would have been, and loyalty to her bade me assent, though in my own mind, I felt it to be a fruitless and somewhat foolish errand. Accordingly I agreed to form one of the party on the day after the morrow, a decision which Thorndyke received with more satisfaction than the occasion seemed to warrant.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Beauchamp Blake

“Can there be any more pleasant place of human habitation than an English country town?” I asked myself the question as I strolled round the market square of the little town of Aylesbury, gazing about me with a Londoner’s pleasure in the restful, old-world aspect of the place I had still more than half an hour to wait, but I had no feeling of impatience. I could spend that time agreeably enough, sauntering around, wrapped in pleasurable idleness provocative of reflection, looking at the handsome market-place with its clock-tower and its statues immortalising in bronze the worthies of more stirring times, or at the carriers’ carts that rested unhorsed in the square and told of villages and hamlets nestling amidst their trees but a few miles away down the leafy lanes.

Presently my leisurely perambulations brought me opposite a shop of more than common smartness, and here—perhaps because the crowd of market folk was a little more dense—I paused and gazed somewhat absently into the window. I have no idea why I looked into that particular shop window. The wares exposed in it—ladies’ hats—have no special attraction to the masculine eye—at least in the state in which they are presented by the milliner, bereft of the principal ornament which should be found underneath them. Nevertheless, I was not the only male observer. Another man had stopped and stood, nearer to the window than I, inspecting the gaily-flowered and feathered headgear with undeniable interest.

The incongruity of this eager scrutiny of things so characteristically feminine struck me with amused curiosity, and I watched the man with a half-suppressed smile. He was a small, slight man, neatly dressed in a suit of tweeds and a tweed hat, and the trouser-clips at his ankles suggested that he had cycled in from the country. I could not see his face, as I was standing nearly behind him, but apparently he became aware, after a time, of my presence—perhaps he saw my reflection in the window—and of the fact that I was observing him somewhat curiously, for he turned away with some suddenness, glancing up at me as he passed and then half pausing to look at me again before he bustled away and disappeared up an alley.

There was something very odd in that second look. The first had been a mere casual glance, but the second—quick, searching, even startled—suggested recognition, and something more than recognition. What could it have been? And who could he be? The face—a clean-shaved, thin, sallow face, not very young, seen only for a moment, left a clear mental image that still remained. And as I visualised it afresh I was conscious of a faint sense of familiarity. I had seen this man before. Where had I seen him; and who was he? And why did he look at me with that singular expression?

I stood where he had left me, cudgelling my brains for an answer to these questions. And even as I stood there, a cyclist passed swiftly across the end of the square and disappeared in the direction of the London Road. He was too far off for his face to be clearly recognisable: but he was a small man, he wore a tweed suit and hat, and trouser-clips, and I had no doubt that he was the same man.

Now who was he? The more I recalled the face, the more convinced I was that I had seen it before. But the identity of its owner eluded me completely. I couldn’t place the fellow at all. Probably it didn’t matter in the least who he was. But still it was exasperating to be baffled in this way. Unconsciously, I turned and stared into the milliner’s window. And then, in a flash it came. The middle of the window was occupied by an enormous hat—a huge, bloated, fungous structure overrun with counterfeit vegetation and bristling with feathers; such a hat as might have adorned the cranium of a Hottentot queen. A glance at that grisly head-dress supplied the missing link in the chain of association. The face that had looked into mine was the face of the woman who had shadowed Winifred and me from Hampstead; who had lured her to the empty house, and had there revealed herself as a man in disguise. In short, this was the murderer of poor Drayton, and the would-be murderer of Winifred!

And I had held this wretch in the hollow of my hand and I had let him go! It was an infuriating thought. If my quickness of observation had only been equal to his, I should have had him by now safely under lock and key. No wonder he had looked startled. But he must have a remarkably good memory for faces to have recognised me in that instantaneous glance. For he had seen me only once—at the inquest at Hampstead—and then but for a moment. Unless he had got a glimpse of me at the empty house, or—which seemed more probable—had shadowed and watched me when I had been acting as Winifred’s escort. At any rate he knew me, better than I knew him, and had managed very adroitly to slip through my fingers.

But what on earth was he doing at Aylesbury? Was it possible that he lived in this neighbourhood? If so, a description given to the police might even yet secure his arrest. I was turning over this possibility when the chiming of a clock recalled my appointment. I glanced up at the dial on the clock-tower and had just noted that the appointed hour had struck when I observed Thorndyke ascending the steps to the platform at the base. This was our rendezvous, and I forthwith hurried across the cobbled square and presented myself, bursting with my news and discharging them in a volley as soon as I arrived.

Thorndyke was deeply interested, but yet I found in his manner something slightly disappointing. He was an impassive man, difficult to surprise or move to any outward manifestation of emotion. Still, knowing this, I was a little chilled by the almost academic view that he took of the incident, and especially by his firm rejection of my plan for invoking the aid of the police.

“It sounds tempting,” he admitted, “to swoop down on this man and put an end forthwith to all our dangers and complications, but it would be a bad move. Quite probably the police would decline to take any action. And then what sort of description could you give them? For the purposes of a search it is far too general, and a change of clothing would make it entirely inapplicable. And we must admit the possibility of your being mistaken. And finally, if we gave this information, we should almost certainly lose one man—whom none of us has ever seen, but who is probably the principal. We should have let the cat out of the bag, and all our carefully-laid plans would come to nought.”

“I didn’t know that we had any carefully-laid plans,” said I.

“You know that we are engaged in investigating a murder; that our aim is to secure the two or more murderers and to elucidate the causes and circumstances of the crime, and that we have accumulated a certain number of data to that end.”

“You have,” I objected. “I have practically no data at all. May I ask if you know who this sallow-faced little devil is?”

“I have a strong suspicion,” he replied. “But suspicion isn’t quite what one wants to take into a court of law. I want to verify my suspicions and turn them into conclusive evidence. So that when I play my card it shall be a trump card.”

To this I had no reply to make. I knew Thorndyke’s methods. For years I had acted as his leading counsel, and always when I had gone into court I had taken with me a case complete to the last detail. Now, for the first time, I was realising the amount of patience and self-restraint that went to the making of a case of unassailable conclusiveness, and I found myself with difficulty overcoming the temptation to make a premature move.

While we had been talking, we had been making our way at an easy pace out of the town on to the London Road, and now Thorndyke, with the one-inch ordnance map in his hand, indicated our route.

“Beauchamp Blake,” said he, “lies just off the Lower Icknield Way, on the left of the London Road. But there is no need for us to take the shortest way. The by-road through Stoke Mandeville looks more entertaining than the main road, and we can pick up the Lower Icknield Way at the crossroads below the village.”

Our route being thus settled, we set forth, turning off presently into the quiet, shady by-road. And as we swung along between the thinning hedgerows, with the majestic elms—now sprinkled with yellow—towering above us and casting athwart the road streaks of cool shadow, we chatted sporadically with long intervals of silence, for we were Londoners on holiday to whom the beauty of this fair countryside was reinforced by a certain pleasant strangeness.

“I have wondered from time to time,” I said, after one of the long pauses, “what can be the significance—if it has any—of that blue-dyed hair that you extracted from Winifred’s locket” (I had confided to Thorndyke the new relations that had grown up between our fair client and me).

“Ah,” he replied. “A very interesting problem, Anstey.”

“I have also wondered what made you take the hair out of the locket to examine it under the microscope.”

“The answer to that question is perfectly simple,” said he. “I took it out to see if it was blue. In the mass the hair looked black.”

“But do I understand that you thought it might be blue?”

“I expected to find it blue. The examination was a measure of verification.”

“But why, in the name of Fortune, should you expect to find blue hair in a locket? I had no idea that hair ever was dyed blue—except,” I added with a sudden flash of recollection, “in the case of ancient Egyptian wigs, and I had an idea that they were not hair at all.”

“Some of them, I believe, were not. However, this was not ancient Egyptian hair. It was modern.”

“Then, will you tell me what it was that made you expect to find the hair in the locket dyed blue?”

“The expectation,” he replied, “arose out of an inspection of the locket itself.”

“Do you mean those mysterious and obscure Biblical references engraved inside?”

“No; I mean the external characters, the peculiar construction, the motto engraved on the front, and the hallmark on the back.”

“But what,” I asked, “was the connection between those external characters and this most extraordinary peculiarity of the hair inside?”

He looked at me with the exasperating smile that I knew so well (and was, in fact, expecting).

“Now, you know, Anstey,” said he, “you are trying to pump me; to suck my brains instead of using your own. I am not going to encourage you in any such mental indolence. The proper satisfaction of a discovery is in having made it yourself. You have seen and handled the locket, you have heard my comments on it, and you have access to it for further examination. Try to recall what it is like, and if necessary, examine it afresh. Consider its peculiarities one by one and then in relation to one another. If you do this attentively and thoughtfully you will find that those peculiarities will yield some most curious and interesting suggestions, including the suggestion that the hair inside is probably blue.”

“I shan’t find anything of the kind, you old devil,” I exclaimed wrathfully, “and you know perfectly well that I shan’t. Still, I will take an early opportunity to put the ‘little Sphinx’ under cross-examination.”

While we had been talking we had passed through the village of Stoke Mandeville, and we now arrived at the crossroads, where we turned to the left into the ancient Icknield Way.

“A mile and a half farther on,” said Thorndyke, again consulting the map, “we cross the London Road. Then we turn out of the Icknield Way into this lane, leaving Weston Turville on our left. I note there is an inn opposite the gates of Beauchamp Blake. Does that topographical feature interest you?”

“I think,” said I, “that after another couple of miles, we shall be ready for what the British workman calls a ‘breaver.’ But it is probably only a wayside beerhouse.”

Another half-hour’s walking brought us to the London Road, crossing which we followed a side road—apparently part of the Icknield Way—which skirted the lake-like reservoir and presently gave off as a branch a pleasant, elm-bordered lane on the right-hand side of which was a tall oak paling.

“This,” said Thorndyke, whose stature enabled him easily to look over the fence, “is the little park of Beauchamp Blake. I don’t see the house, but I see the roof of a gatekeeper’s lodge. And here is the inn.”

A turn of the lane had brought into view a gatekeeper’s lodge by the main gates of the park, and nearly opposite, the looked-for hostelry. And a very remarkable-looking hostelry it was, considering its secluded position; an antique, half-timbered house with a high, crinkly roof in which was a row of dormer windows, and a larger, overhanging gabled bay supported below by an immense carved corner-post. But the most singular feature of the house was the sign, which swung at the top of a tall post by a horse-trough in the little forecourt, on which was the head of a gentleman wearing a crown and a full-bottomed wig, apparently suspended in mid-air over a brown stone pitcher.

“It seems to me,” said I, as we approached the inn, “that the sign needs an explanatory inscription. The association of a king and a brown jug may be natural enough, but it is unusual as an inn-sign.”

“Now, Anstey,” Thorndyke exclaimed protestingly, “don’t tell me that that ancient joke has missed its mark on your superlative intellect. The inscription on the parlour window tells us that the sign is the King’s Head, and the pitcher under that portrait explains that the king is James the Second or Third—His Majesty over the water. This is evidently a Jacobite house. Does the sedition shock you? Or shall we enter and refresh? If the landlord’s ale is as old as his politics we ought to find quite exceptional entertainment within, and perhaps pick up a trifle of local gossip that may interest us.”

I assented readily, secretly denouncing my slowness in the “uptake.” Thorndyke’s explanations were always so ridiculously simple—when you had heard them.

The landlord, who looked like a retired butler, received us with old-fashioned deference and inducted us into the parlour, drawing a couple of Wycombe armchairs up to the table.

“What can I do for you, gentlemen?” he inquired.

“Well, what can you do for us?” asked Thorndyke. “Is it to be bread and cheese and beer?”

“I can let you have a cold fowl and a cut of boiled bacon,” said the landlord with the air of one who lays down the ace of trumps.

“Can you really!” exclaimed Thorndyke. “That is a repast fit for a king—even for the king over the water.”

The landlord smiled slyly. “Ah, you’re alluding to my old sign, sir,” said he. “’Twouldn’t have done to have had him swingin’ up there time back. Some others would have been swingin’ too. In those days he used to hang in this room over the fireplace, only there was a portrait of King George fixed over him with concealed hinges. When strangers came to the house there was King George—God bless him!—the same as the sign that used to hang outside; but when the villagers or the people from the Hall opposite sat in the room, then George was swung back on his hinges to bring James into view and a pitcher of water was put on the table to drink the toasts over. This was a thriving house in those days. They say that Percival Blake—he was the last of the old family and a rare plotter by all accounts—used to meet some of his political cronies in this very room, and I’ve no doubt a lot of business was plotted here that never came to anything.”

“Who has the place now?” asked Thorndyke.

“The present squire is Mr. Arthur Blake, and a queerish sort of squire he is.”

“In what way queer?” I asked.

“Well, you see, sir, he’s a Colonial—lived in Australia all his life, I understand. And he looks it—a big, roughish-looking man, and very short spoken. But he can ride, I’ll say that for him. There isn’t a better horseman in the county. Mounts from the off-side, too. I suppose that’s their way out there, though it don’t suit our rule of the road.”

As the landlord gave these particulars, he proceeded, with swift dexterity, to lay the table and furnish it with the materials for the feast, aided and abetted by an unseen female who lurked in the background. When he had put the final touch with a “foam-crowned jug of nut-brown,” he showed a tendency to withdraw and leave us to our meal; but Thorndyke was in a conversational mood and induced him, without difficulty, to fetch another tumbler and proceed with his output of local lore.

“Is it true that the place is going to be sold?” Thorndyke inquired.

“So they say,” replied the landlord. “And the best thing the squire could do if the lawyers will let him. The place is no good to him.”

“Why not?”

“Well, sir, he’s a bachelor, and like to remain one it seems. Then he’s a stranger to the place and don’t appear to take to English ways. He keeps no company and he makes no visits; he don’t know any of his neighbours and doesn’t seem to want to. He has only kept on one or two of the servants, and he lives with his man—foreign-looking chap named Meyer—in a corner of the house and never uses the rest. He’d be more comfortable in a little farm house.”

“And how does he spend his time?” asked Thorndyke.

“I don’t know, sir,” was the answer. “Mostly loafing about, I should say. He takes photographs, I hear; quite clever at it, too, it seems. And he goes out for a ride every afternoon—you’ll see him come out of the gate at three o’clock almost to the minute—and sometimes he goes out in the morning, too.”

“And as to visitors? Are strangers allowed to look over the house?”

“No, sir. The squire won’t have any strangers about the place at all. I fancy what made him so particular was a burglary that occurred there about a couple of years ago. Not that there was much in it, for they got all the things back and they caught the burglar the very next day.”

“That was smart work,” I remarked.

“Yes,” our friend agreed, “they did the thief very neatly. It was a one-man job and the burglar seems to have been a downy bird, for he worked in gloves so that he shouldn’t leave any marks behind. But he took those gloves off a bit too soon, for, when they heard him making off and let the dogs loose, he had to do a bolt, and he dropped one of the things in the park—a silver salver it was, I think—and the police found it the next morning and found some finger-marks on it. They wanted to take the salver up to Scotland Yard to have it examined, but the squire wouldn’t have that. He took a photograph of the fingermarks and gave it to the police, and they took it up to Scotland Yard, and the people there were able to tell them at once whose fingermarks they were, and they got the burglar that very evening with all the stolen goods in his possession. Wonderful smart, I call it.”

“Do you think,” Thorndyke asked, “that we should be able to get a look at the house? Just the outside, I mean?”

“I’ll see what can be done, sir,” the landlord replied “I’ll have a few words with the lodge-keeper. I was butler to the last squire but one, so they know me pretty well. I’ll just run across while you are finishing your lunch. But you’d better wait until the squire has gone out, because, if he sees you on the drive, like as not he’ll order you out, and that wouldn’t be pleasant for gentlemen like you.”

“I think we’ll take the risk,” said Thorndyke. “If he tells us to go, we can go, but I don’t like sneaking in behind his back.”

“No, sir, perhaps you are right,” the landlord agreed, a little dubiously, and departed on his errand, leaving us to finish our lunch—which, in fact, we had practically done already.

In this long conversation I had taken no part. But I had been an interested listener. Not that I cared two straws for the small beer that our host had been retailing. What had interested, and a good deal puzzled me was Thorndyke’s amazing inquisitiveness respecting the private and domestic affairs of a man whom neither of us knew and with whom we really had no concern. For the question of the succession to the property was a purely legal one—and pretty shadowy at that—on which the personal qualities and habits of the present tenant had no bearing whatever. And yet my experience of Thorndyke told me that he certainly had not been asking these trivial and impertinent questions without some reasonable motive. No man was less inquisitive about things that did not concern him.

But the discrepancy between his character and his conduct did not end here. As soon as the landlord had gone and we had filled and lit our pipes, he began to explore his waistcoat pockets and presently produced therefrom Polton’s reproduction of Mr. Halliburton’s ridiculous mascot, which he laid on the table and regarded fondly.

“Do you usually carry that thing in your pocket, Thorndyke?” I asked.

“Not usually,” he replied, “but this is a special occasion. We are on holiday, and moreover, we are seeking our fortune, or at least, hoping that something may turn up,”

“Are we?” I said. “I am not conscious of any such hope, and I don’t know what you expect.”

“Neither do I,” he replied. “But I feel in an optimistic mood. Perhaps it is the beer,” and with this he picked up the mascot, and opening the split gold ring with a knife-blade, attached it to his watch-chain, closing the ring with a squeeze of his finger and thumb.

It was a singular proceeding. What made it especially so was Thorndyke’s openly-expressed contempt of the superstition which finds expression in the use of charms, mascots and other fetishistic objects and practices. However, we were on holiday, as he had said, and perhaps it was admissible to mark the occasion by playing the fool a little.

In a few minutes the landlord returned and announced that he had secured the consent of the lodge-keeper to our making an inspection of the house, with the proviso that we were not to go more than a couple of hundred yards down the drive. “I’ll just step across with you,” he added, “so that he can see that you are the right parties.”

Accordingly, when we had paid the modest reckoning, we picked up our hats and sticks and as our host held open the parlour door, we passed out into the courtyard, glancing up with renewed interest at the historic sign which creaked in the breeze. Crossing the road, we passed through the wicket of the closed gate, under the detached observation of the lodge-keeper; and here our host wished us adieu and returned to the inn.

A short walk down the drive brought us to a turn of the road where we came in sight of the house across a stretch of meadows in which a small herd of cows made spots of vivid colour. It was not a large mansion, but what it lacked in size it made up for in character and interest. The two parts were clearly distinct, the newer portion being a Jacobean brick building with stone dressings and quaint corbie-step gables, while the older part—not later than the sixteenth century—was a comparatively low structure showing massive timbers with pargetted plaster fillings, a high roof with wide-spreading eaves and a long row of picturesque dormer windows and large, clustered chimneys.

“It is a grand old house,” I said. “What a pity it is that Blake is such a curmudgeon. The inside ought to be even more interesting than the outside.”

“Yes,” Thorndyke agreed, “it is a splendid specimen of domestic architecture, and absolutely thrown away, if our host was not exaggerating. One could wish for a more appreciative tenant—such as our young friend Percy, for instance.”

I glanced at Thorndyke, surprised, not for the first time, at the way in which he tended to harp on this very unresonant string. To me, Percy’s claim to this estate was simply a romantic instance of the might-have-been, and none too clear at that. His chance of ever inheriting Beauchamp Blake was a wild dream that I found myself unable to take seriously. But this was apparently not Thorndyke’s view, for it was evident that he had considered the matter worth inquiring into, and his last words showed that it still hovered in his mind. I was on the point of reopening the discussion when two men appeared round the corner of the house, each leading a saddled horse. Opposite the main doorway they halted and one of them proceeded to mount—from the off-side, as I noticed. Then they apparently became aware of our presence, for they both looked in our direction; indeed they continued to stare at us with extraordinary attention, and by their movements appeared to be discussing us anxiously.

Thorndyke chuckled softly. “There must be something uncommonly suspicious in your appearance, Anstey,” he remarked. “They seem to be in a deuce of a twitter about you.”

“Why my appearance?” I demanded. “They are looking at us both. In fact I think it is you who are the real object of suspicion. I expect they think you have come back for that silver plate.”

As we spoke, the discussion came to an end. The one man remained, holding his horse and still looking at us, while the other turned and advanced up the drive at a brisk trot, sitting his mount with that unconscious ease that distinguishes the lifelong, habitual equestrian. As he approached, he looked at us inquisitively and with undissembled disapproval, but seemed as if he were going to pass without further notice. Suddenly, however, his attention became more intense. He slowed down to a walk, and as he drew near to us he pulled up and dismounted. And again I noticed that he dismounted from the off-side.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Squire and the Sleuth-Hound

As Mr. Blake approached with the evident intention of addressing us, it was not unnatural that I should look at him with some interest. Not that such interest was in any way justified by his appearance, which was quite commonplace. He was a tall man, strongly built, and apparently active and muscular. His features were somewhat coarse, but his expression was resolute and energetic, though not suggestive of more than average intelligence. But at the moment, as he bore down on us, leading his horse by the bridle-rein, with his eyes fixed on Thorndyke’s face, suspicion and a certain dim suggestion of surprise were what I principally gathered from his countenance.

“May I ask what your business is?” he demanded somewhat brusquely, but not rudely, addressing Thorndyke and looking at him with something more than common attention.

“We really haven’t any business at all,” my colleague replied. “We were walking through the district and thought we should like to have a glance at your very picturesque and interesting house. That is all.”

“Is there anything in particular that you want to know about the house?” Mr. Blake asked, still addressing Thorndyke.

“No,” the latter replied. “Our interest in the place is merely antiquarian, and not very profound at that.”

“I see,” said Mr. Blake. He appeared to reflect for a few moments and seemed to be on the point of moving away when he stopped suddenly and a quick change passed over his face. At the same moment I noticed that his eyes were fixed intently on Thorndyke’s ridiculous mascot.

“I take it,” said he, “that you had the lodge-keeper’s permission to come inside the gates?”

“Yes,” Thorndyke replied. “He gave us permission—through the inn-keeper, who asked him—to come in far enough to see the house. As far as we have come, in fact.”

Mr. Blake nodded, and again his eyes wandered to the object attached to Thorndyke’s watch-chain.

“You are looking at my mascot,” the latter said genially. “It is a curious thing, isn’t it?”

“Very,” Blake agreed gruffly. “What is it?”

Thorndyke pulled the soft wire ring open, and detaching it from his chain, handed the little object to the other, who examined it curiously and remarked:

“It seems to be made out of a bone.”

“Yes; the bone of a porcupine ant-eater.”

“Ha. You got it somewhere abroad. I suppose?”

“No,” replied Thorndyke. “I found it in London, and, of course, it isn’t really mine. It belongs to a man named Halliburton. But I don’t happen to have his address at the moment, so I can’t return it.”

Mr. Blake listened to this explanation with a sort of puzzled frown, wondering, perhaps, at my colleague’s uncalled-for expansiveness to an utter stranger. But his wonder was nothing to mine, as I heard the usually secretive Thorndyke babbling in this garrulously confidential fashion.

When he had examined the mascot, Mr. Blake handed it back to Thorndyke with an inarticulate grunt, and as my colleague hooked the ring on his watch-chain, he turned away, walked round his horse to the off-side, mounted lightly to the saddle and started the horse forward at a trot. As he disappeared round a bend of the tree-bordered road, I glanced at Thorndyke, who was once more gazing calmly at the house.

“Mine host was right,” I observed. “Squire Blake is a pretty considerable boor.”

“His manners are certainly not engaging,” Thorndyke agreed.

“I didn’t notice that he had any manners,” said I, “and it seemed to me that you were most unnecessarily civil, not to say confidential.”

“Well, you know,” he replied, “we are on his premises, and not only uninvited, but contrary to his expressed wishes. We could hardly be otherwise than civil. And after all, he didn’t eject us. But I suppose we may as well retire now.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “he is probably waiting to see us off his confounded land, and possibly speaking his mind to the lodge-keeper.”

Both these surmises appeared to be correct, for when we came round the clump of trees at the turn of the road, I saw the squire in earnest conversation with the keeper, who was standing at attention, holding the gate open, and, I thought, looking somewhat abashed. We passed out through the wicket, which was still unfastened, but though the lodge-keeper looked at us attentively, and even a little curiously, Blake gave no sign of being aware of our existence.

“Well,” said I, “he is an unmannerly hog. But he has one redeeming feature. He is a man of taste. He did admire you, Thorndyke. While you were talking he couldn’t keep his eyes off you.”

“Possibly he was trying to memorise my features in case I should turn out to be a swell cracksman.”

I laughed at the idea of even such a barbarian as this mistaking my distinguished-looking colleague for a member of the swell mob. But it was not impossible. And certainly the squire had scrutinised my friend’s features with an intensity that nothing but suspicion could justify.

“Perhaps,” said I, “he suffers from an obsession on the subject of burglars. Our host’s remarks seemed to suggest something of the kind. I wonder what he was saying to the lodge-keeper. It looked to me as if the custodian was receiving a slight dressing-down on our account.”

“Probably he was,” replied Thorndyke. “But I think that, if my learned friend had happened to be furnished with eyes in the back of his head—”

“As my learned senior appears to be,” I interjected.

“—he would already have formed a more definite opinion as to what took place. In the absence of the retrocephalic arrangement, I suggest that we slip through this opening in the hedge and sit down under the bank.”

Stooping to avoid the thick upper foliage, he dived through the opening and I followed, with no small curiosity as to what it was that my extraordinarily observant colleague had seen. Presumably some one was following us, and if so, as the opening occurred at a sharp bend of the road, our disappearance would have been unobserved.

“It is my belief, Thorndyke,” I said, as we sat down under the bank, “that your optical arrangements are like those of the giraffe. I believe you can see all round the horizon at once.”

Thorndyke laughed softly. “The human field of vision, Anstey,” said he, “as measured by the perimeter, is well over a hundred and eighty degrees. It doesn’t take much lateral movement of the head to convert it into three hundred and sixty. The really important factor is not optical but mental. That earnest conversation with the gatekeeper suggested a possibility, though a rather remote one. Ordinary human eyesight, used with the necessary attention, was quite sufficient to show that the improbable had happened, as it often does. Hush! Look through that chink in the hedge.”

As he concluded in a whisper, rapid footfalls became audible. Nearer and nearer they approached, and then, through my spy-hole, I saw a man in cord breeches and leggings and a velveteen coat walk swiftly past. The gatekeeper had been dressed thus, and presumably the man was he, though I had not observed him closely enough to be able to recognise him with certainty.

“Now, why is he following us?” I asked, taking the identity for granted.

“We mustn’t assume that he is following us at all with a definite intent, though I suspect he is. But he may be merely going the same way. He may have business in Wendover.”

“It would be rather amusing to dodge him once or twice and see what his game is,” I said with the schoolboy instinct that lingers on, if atavistically, in the adult male.

“It would be highly amusing,” Thorndyke agreed, “but it wouldn’t serve our purpose, which is to ascertain his purpose and keep our knowledge to ourselves. We had better move on now if he is out of sight.”

He was out of sight, having reached and turned down the Tring Road. We followed at a sharp walk, and as we came out into the Tring Road, behold him standing in the footway a couple of hundred yards towards Wendover, looking about him with a rather foolish air of bewilderment. As soon as he saw us, he lifted his foot to the bank and proceeded to attend to his bootlace.

“We won’t notice him,” said Thorndyke. “He is evidently an artless soul and probably believes that he has not been recognised. Let us encourage that eminently desirable belief.”

We passed him with an almost aggressive appearance of unconsciousness on both sides, and pursued our way along the undulating road.

“I don’t think there is much doubt now that he is following us,” said I, “and the question is, why is he doing it?”

“Yes,” said Thorndyke, “that is the question. He may have had instructions to see us safely out of the district, or he may have had further instructions. We shall see when we get to the station. Meanwhile I am tempted to try a new invention of Polton’s. It is slightly fantastic, but he made me promise to carry it in my pocket and try it when I had a chance. Now, here is the chance, and here is the instrument.”

He took from his pocket a leather case from which he extracted a rather solidly-made pair of spectacles. “You see,” he said, “Polton has long had the idea that I ought to be provided with some means of observing what is going on behind me, and he has devised this apparatus for the purpose. Like all Polton’s inventions, it is quite simple and practicable. As you see, it consists of a rigid spectacle-frame fitted with dummy glasses—clear, plain glass—at the outer edge of which is fixed a little disc of speculum-metal worked to an optically true plane surface and set at a minute angle to the glass. As the disc is quite close to the eye, it enables the wearer, by the very slightest turn of the head, to get a clear view directly behind him. Would you like to try it?”

I took the spectacles from him and put them on, and was amazed at their efficiency. Although the discs were hardly bigger than split peas, they gave me a perfectly clear view along the road behind us—as if I had been looking through a small, round hole—and this with a scarcely appreciable turn of the head. Viewed from behind, I must have appeared to be looking straight before me.

“But,” I exclaimed, “it seems a most practical device, and I shall insist on Polton making me a pair.”

“That will please him,” said Thorndyke, and he added, reflectively “if only there were a few thousand more Poltons—men who found their satisfaction in being useful and giving pleasure to their fellows—what a delightful place this world would be!”

I continued to wear the magic spectacles all the way to Wendover, finding a childish pleasure in watching the unconscious gatekeeper who was dogging our footsteps and taking ludicrous precautions to keep—as he thought—out of sight. Only as we descended the long hill into the beautiful little town did I take them off, the better to enjoy the charm of the picturesque approach with its row of thatched cottages and the modest clock-turret, standing up against the background of the wooded heights that soared above Ellesborough. At the station we had the good fortune to find a train due and already signalled, but we delayed taking our tickets until our follower arrived, which he did, in evident haste, a couple of minutes later, being, no doubt, acquainted with the times of the trains. As soon as he appeared, Thorndyke sauntered to the booking-office wicket and gave him time to approach before demanding in clear, audible tones, two firsts to Marylebone. The gatekeeper followed, and thrusting his head and shoulders deep into the opening, as if he were about to crawl through, made his demand in a muffled undertone.

“We need not trouble ourselves about him any more,” said Thorndyke, “until we get to London. Then we shall know whether he is or is not trying to shadow us.”

When we had settled ourselves in an empty compartment and began to charge our pipes as the train moved off, I returned to the question of our tactics.

“What do you propose to do, Thorndyke, if this fellow tries to follow us home? Shall we let him run us to earth, or shall we lose him?”

“I see no reason why we should make a secret of who we are and where we live. That is apparently what Blake wants to know—that is, if this man is really shadowing us.”

“But,” I urged, “isn’t it generally wiser to withhold information until you know what use is going to be made of it?”

“As a rule, it is,” he admitted. “But it may happen that the use made of information by one party may be highly illuminating to the other. We may assume that Blake wants to know who we are simply because he suffers from an obsession of suspicion and thinks that we were in his grounds for some unlawful purpose. But he may have some other object, and if he has, I should like to know what it is; and the best way to find out is to let him have our names and address.”

To this I assented, though I was a little mystified. The man Blake was no concern of ours, and it did not seem to matter in the least what suspicions of us had got into his thick head. However Thorndyke probably knew his own business—and meanwhile the presence of this sleuth-hound provided an element of comedy of which I was far from unappreciative, and which my sedate colleague enjoyed without disguise.

When we alighted at Marylebone, we walked quickly to the barrier, but having passed through, we sauntered slowly to the main exit.

“Do you think Polton’s spectacles would be very conspicuous?” I asked.

My colleague smiled indulgently. “The new toy has caught on,” said he, “and it would be undeniably useful at the present moment. No, put the spectacles on. The discs are hardly noticeable to a casual observer.”

Accordingly I slipped the appliance on as we strolled out into the Marylebone Road and was able, almost immediately, to report progress.

“He is watching us from the exit. Which way are we going?”

“I think,” replied Thorndyke, “as he is a country cousin, we will make things easy for him and give him a little exercise after the confinement of the train. The Euston Road route is less crowded than Oxford Street.”

We turned eastward and started at an easy pace along the Marylebone Road and Euston Road, keeping on the less-frequented side of the street. I was a little self-conscious in regard to the spectacles, but apparently no one noticed them; and by their aid I was able to watch with astonishing ease our artless follower and to amuse myself by noting his conflicting anxieties to keep us in view and himself out of sight. We turned down Woburn Place, crossed Queen Square to Great Ormond Street and proceeding by Lamb’s-Conduit Street, Red lion Street, Great Turnstile, Lincoln’s Inn, and Chancery Lane, crossed Fleet Street to Middle Temple Lane. Here we slowed down, lest the sleuth-hound should lose us, and as we were now in our own neighbourhood, I removed the spectacles and restored them to their owner.

At the entrance to Pump Court we separated, Thorndyke proceeding at a leisurely pace towards Crown Office Row while I hurried through the court; and having halted in the Cloisters to make sure that the sleuth was not pursuing me, I darted through Fig-Tree Court and across King’s Bench Walk to our chambers, where I found Polton laying a sort of hybrid tea and supper.

To our trusty assistant I rapidly communicated the state of affairs (including the triumphant success of the magic spectacles, at which his face became a positive labyrinth of ecstatic wrinkles); and having provided ourselves with field-glasses, we stationed ourselves at the laboratory window, from whence we had the gratification of watching Thorndyke emerge majestically from Crown Office Row, followed shortly by the man in the velveteen coat, whose efforts to make himself invisible brought Polton to the verge of apoplexy.

“Hadn’t I better follow him and see where he goes to, sir?” the latter suggested.

The suggestion was put to Thorndyke when he entered, but was rejected.

“I don’t think we want to know where he goes from here,” said he. “But still, seeing that he has come so far, it might be kind of you, Polton, to go down and give him a chance of obtaining any information that he wants.”

Polton needed no second bidding. Clapping on his hat, he set forth gleefully down the stairs. But in a minute or two he was back again, somewhat crestfallen.

“It’s no go, sir,” he reported. “I found him copying the names on the door-post in the entry, and I think he must have got them all down, for when he saw me, he was off like a lamplighter.”

Thorndyke chuckled. “And to think,” said he, “that our friend, the squire, could have got all the information he wanted by the simple expedient of asking for our cards. Verily, suspicious folk give themselves a deal of unnecessary trouble.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Mr. Brodribb’s Embassy

There is a certain psychological phenomenon known to those financial navigators who have business on the deep and perilous waters of the Stock Exchange as “jobbing backwards.” It is not their monopoly, however. To ordinary mortals—who describe it as “prophesying after the event”—it has been familiar from time immemorial, and has always been associated with a degree of wisdom and certainty strangely lacking in prophecy of a more hasty and premature kind.

Reviewing the curious case of which this narrative is the record, I am tempted to embark on this eminently satisfying form of mental exercise. But when I do so, I am disposed to look with some surprise at the very conspicuous deficiency in the power of “jobbing forward” which I displayed while the events which I am chronicling were in progress. Now, I can see that all the striking and significant facts (only they then appeared neither striking nor significant) which enabled Thorndyke, from the very first, to pursue a steady advance along a visible trail, were in my possession as much as they were in his. But, whereas in his hands they became connected so as to form a continuous clue, in mine they remained separate, and apparently unrelated fragments. At the time, I thought that Thorndyke was hiding from me what material evidence he had. Now it is obvious to me (as also to the acute reader, who has, no doubt, already pieced the evidence together) that he not only concealed nothing, but actually gave me several of the very broadest hints.

So, despite the knowledge that I really possessed, if I had only realised it, I remained utterly in the dark. All that I knew for certain was that Winifred was encompassed by dangers; that human wolves prowled about her habitation and dogged her footsteps when she went abroad.

But even these perils had their compensations, for they gave an appearance of necessity to the constant companionship that my inclinations prompted. It was not a mere pilgrim of love that wended his way daily to Jacob Street, but an appointed guardian with duties to discharge. In the personally-conducted tours through the town, on business connected with the drawings that Winifred continued to produce with unabated industry, I was carrying out an indispensable function, since she was not permitted to go abroad without an efficient escort; and thus duty marched with pleasure.

Intimate, however, as my relations with Winifred had become, and recognised now even by Percy, I abstained from any confidences on the subject of our investigation of the murder. That was Thorndyke’s affair, and although he had made no stipulation on the subject, I had the feeling that he expected me to keep my own counsel, as he certainly did himself. Accordingly, in describing our visit to Beauchamp Blake—in which both she and Percy were intensely interested—I said nothing about the man whom I had seen in Aylesbury.

One exception I had nearly made, but thought better of it. The occasion arose one afternoon when we were examining and criticising her latest drawing. As we stood before the easel, a shaft of sunlight, coming in through the great window, struck a part of the drawing and totally altered the character of the colouring. I remarked on the change of colour produced by the more intense illumination.

“Yes,” said she, “and that reminds me of a very odd discovery that I made the other day and that I meant to tell you about.” She unfastened the silken cord by which she wore the mysterious locket suspended from her neck, and opening the little gold volume, held it in the sunbeam so that the light fell upon the coil of hair that it enclosed.

“Do you see?” she asked, looking at me expectantly.

“Yes,” I answered. “In the sunlight the hair seems to have quite a distinct blue tint.”

“Exactly!” she exclaimed. “Now isn’t that very remarkable? I have often heard of blue-black hair, but I thought it was just a phrase expressing intense blackness without any tinge of brown. But this is really blue, quite a clear, rich blue, like the colour of deeply-toned stained glass. Do you suppose it is natural? It can hardly be a dye.”

It was then that I had nearly told her of Thorndyke’s discovery and his strange and cryptic utterances on the subject. But a principle is a principle. The fact had been communicated to me by him, and I did not feel at liberty to disclose it without his sanction, though, to be sure, there was nothing confidential about it. His examination of the locket had been, apparently, a matter of mere curiosity. For Thorndyke was so constituted that he could not bring himself willingly to leave a problem unsolved, even though its solution promised no useful result. To him the solution was an end in itself, undertaken for the pleasure of the mental exercise. And this locket evidently held a secret. To what extent he had mastered that secret, I could not guess. Nor did I particularly care. It was not my secret, and I had no taste for working out irrelevant puzzles.

“I should hardly think the blue colour can be natural,” said I, and then, by way of compromise, I added: “but I expect Thorndyke could tell you. When you come to see us again you had better show it to him and hear what he says about it.”

I took the locket from her hand and looked it over with half-impatient curiosity, remembering Thorndyke’s exasperating advice, and recalling his reference to the hallmark on the back, I turned it over and scrutinised the minute device.

“You are looking at the hallmark, or the goldsmith’s ‘touch,’ or whatever it is,” said Winifred. “It is rather curious. I have never seen one like it before. It certainly is not an ordinary English hallmark. Let me get you a magnifying-glass.”

She fetched a strong reading-glass, and through this I examined the mark more minutely. But I could make nothing of it. It consisted of four punch-marks, of which the first was a capital A surmounted by a small crown and bearing two palm-leaves, the second a kind of escutcheon bearing the initials A.H. surmounted by a crown, and over that a fleur-de-lis; the third bore simply a capital L, and the fourth the head of some animal which looked like a horse.

“It is a curious and unusual mark,” said I, handing back to her the locket and the glass, “but it conveys no information to me beyond the suggestion that the locket is apparently of foreign workmanship, probably French or Italian. But,” I added, with a malicious hope of seeing my reverend senior cornered, “you had better ask Thorndyke about it when you come. He is sure to be able to tell you all about it.”

“He seems to be a sort of human encyclopaedia,” Winifred remarked as she refastened the locket. “I shall adopt your advice and consult him about that hair, but I shan’t be able to come this week. There is quite a big batch of drawings to be done, and that means some long working days. Perhaps you can arrange an afternoon in the latter part of next week for the oracular tea-party.”

I promised to ascertain my colleague’s arrangements and to fix a day, but the promise was left unredeemed and the “oracular tea-party” was thrust into the background by new and more stirring events, which began to cast their shadows before them that very evening. For, when I entered our chambers, behold Mr. Brodribb and Sir Lawrence Drayton settled in armchairs by the fire, in company with the small table and the inevitable decanter. Evidently some kind of conference was in progress.

“Ha!” said Brodribb. “Here is the fourth conspirator. Now we are complete. I have been devilling for your respected senior, Anstey, and I have called to report progress. Also, as you see, I have captured Sir Lawrence and brought him along as he seemed to be an interested party.”

“He is a somewhat mystified party at present,” said Drayton, “but probably some explanations are contemplated.”

“They are going to begin as soon as Anstey has filled his glass,” said Brodribb, bearing in mind, no doubt, the laws of conviviality as expounded by Mrs. Gamp; and as the stipulated condition was complied with, he proceeded: “It was suggested to me by Thorndyke a short time ago that the tenure of the Beauchamp Blake property would be put on a more satisfactory footing if the missing title-deeds could be recovered.”

“More satisfactory to the present tenant, you mean,” said Drayton.

“More satisfactory to everybody,” said Brodribb.

“That would depend on the nature of the documents recovered,” Sir Lawrence remarked. “But let us hear the rest of the suggestion.”

“The suggestion of our learned and Machiavellian friend was that, since the documents are believed to be hidden somewhere in the house, it would be a good plan to have a systematic survey of the premises carried out by some person who has an expert knowledge of secret chambers and hiding-places.”

“Do you know of any such person?” Drayton asked.

Brodribb smiled a fat smile and replenished his glass. “I do,” he replied “and so do you. Thorndyke himself is quite an authority on the subject; and, of course, the suggestion was that the survey should be made and the search conducted by him. Naturally. You can guess why, I suppose?”

“I can’t,” said Drayton, “if you are suggesting any reason other than the one you have given.”

“My dear Drayton,” chuckled Brodribb, “can you imagine Thorndyke embarking on a search of this kind without some definite leading facts? No, no. Our friend has got something up his sleeve. I’ve no doubt that he knows exactly where to put his hand on those documents before he begins.”

“Do you, Thorndyke?” Sir Lawrence asked, with an inquisitive glance at my colleague.

“Now,” the latter replied, “I put it to you, Drayton, whether it is likely that I, who have never been in this house in my life, have never seen a plan of it, and have no knowledge whatever of its internal construction or arrangement, can possibly know where these documents are hidden.”

“It certainly doesn’t seem very probable,” Drayton admitted, and it certainly did not. But still I noted that Thorndyke’s answer contained no specific denial, a circumstance that apparently did not escape Brodribb’s observation, for that astute practitioner received the reply with an unabashed wink and wagged his head knowingly as he savoured his wine.

“You can think what you like,” said he, “and so can I. However, to proceed: the suggestion was that I should put the proposal to the present tenant, Arthur Blake, and expound its advantages, but, of course, say nothing as to the source of the inspiration. Well, I did so. I wrote to him, pointing out the desirability of getting possession of the deeds, and suggesting that he should call at my office and talk the matter over.”

“And how did he take it?” asked Drayton.

“Very calmly—at first. He called at my office yesterday and opened the subject. But he didn’t seem at all keen on it; thought it sounded rather like a wild-goose chase—until I mentioned Thorndyke. Then his interest woke up at once. The mention of a real, tangible expert put the matter on a different plane; gave it an air of reality. And he had heard of Thorndyke—read about him in the papers, I suppose—and, of course, I cracked him up. So in the end he became as keen as mustard and anxious to get a start made as soon as possible. And not only keen on his own account. To my surprise, he raised the question of the other claimant, Peter Blake’s son. Of course he knew about Peter Blake’s claim, although it was before his time, and it seems that he read the newspaper report of the curious statement that Miss Blake—Peter’s daughter—made at the inquest on Sir Lawrence’s brother. Well, in effect, he suggested—very properly, as I thought—that Miss Blake might like to be present when the search was made.”

“I certainly think,” said Drayton, “she should be, if not actually present, at least represented. There might be some documents affecting her brother directly.”

“That was his point, and he authorised me to invite her to be present and to make all necessary arrangements. So the question is, Thorndyke, when can you go down and find the documents?”

“I am prepared to begin the search the day after tomorrow.”

“And with regard to Miss Blake? You are acquainted with her, I think?”

“Yes,” replied Thorndyke. “We can communicate with her. But my feeling is that it would hardly be desirable for her to be present while the actual survey is being made. It may be a tedious affair, and we shall get on with it better without spectators. Of course I shall know if anything is found and shall probably ascertain its nature; and in that case she can be informed.”

Drayton nodded, but he did not seem quite satisfied. “I suppose that will do,” said he, “though I would rather that she were directly represented. You see, Thorndyke, you are acting for Blake, and if Anstey goes with you, he is your coadjutor. I wonder if Blake would object to my looking in later in the day. I could, as I have to go down to Aylesbury the day after tomorrow. What do you say, Brodribb?”

“I see no objection,” was the reply, “in fact, I will take the responsibility of inviting you to call and see what progress has been made.”

“Very well, then,” said Drayton, “I will come about four. I shall go down by car, and when I have finished with my client, I can easily take Beauchamp Blake on my way home. And for that matter,” he added, “I don’t see why Miss Blake shouldn’t come with me. My client’s wife could entertain her while I am transacting the business, and then she could come on with me to the house. How does that strike you, Thorndyke?”

“It seems quite an admirable arrangement,” my colleague replied. “She will be saved the tedium of waiting about and she will have the advantage of your advice if any delicate inquiries have to be made.”

Drayton’s suggestion was accordingly adopted, subject to Winifred’s consent—which I did not doubt she would give readily, notwithstanding the pressure of her work—and shortly afterwards our two friends took their departure, leaving me a little puzzled as to the origin and purpose of the conference and the projected expedition.

It had been a rather curious transaction. There were several points that I failed to understand. In the first place, what interest had Thorndyke in these title-deeds? Assuming him to take Percy’s rather indefinite claim seriously—which he apparently did—was the establishment of the title desirable from his point of view? I should have thought not. It had appeared that Blake was anxious to sell the property and had been restrained only by the insecurity of the title. But if the title were made secure, he would almost certainly sell the estate, which was the last thing that Percy’s advisers could wish. Then could it be that our shrewd old friend Brodribb was right? That Thorndyke had actually ascertained or inferred the whereabouts of the missing deeds? In the case of any other person the supposition would have seemed ridiculous. But Thorndyke’s power of reasoning from apparently unilluminating facts was so extraordinary that the possibility had to be admitted, and his evasive reply to Drayton’s direct question seemed to make it even probable.

“I don’t see,” said I, with a faint hope of extracting some trifle of information from Thorndyke, “why you are so keen on these title-deeds.”

“That,” he replied, “is because you persist in thinking in sections. If you would take a larger view of the subject this proposed search would appear to you in a rather different light.”

“I wonder if there is really going to be a search,” I said craftily, “or whether old Brodribb was right. I am inclined to suspect that he was.”

“I commend your respect for Brodribb’s opinions,” he replied. “Our friend is an uncommonly wide-awake old gentleman. But he was only guessing. Whatever we find at Beauchamp Blake—if we find anything—will be discovered by bonafide research and experiment. And that raises another question. Are you going down with Drayton or did you propose to come with me?”

“I don’t want to be in your way,” I replied, a little piqued at the question. “Otherwise I should, of course, have liked to come with you.”

“Your help would be very valuable,” said he, “if you are willing to sacrifice the other attractions. But if you are going to help me, we had better take a little preliminary practice together. There is a set of empty chambers next door. Tomorrow I will get the keys from the treasurer’s office, and we can put in some spare time making careful measured plans. The whole art of discovering secret chambers is in the making of plans so exact as to account for every inch of space, and showing accurately the precise thickness of every wall and floor. And a little practice in the art of opening locked doors without the aid of keys will not be amiss.”

This programme was duly carried out. On the morrow we conveyed into the empty chambers a plane table covered with drawing-paper, a surveyor’s tape, and a measuring-rod; and with these appliances, I proceeded, under Thorndyke’s direction, to make a scaled plan of the set of rooms, showing the exact thickness of all the walls and the spaces occupied by chimneys, cupboards, and all kinds of projections and irregularities. It was a longer business than I had expected; indeed I did not get it completed until the evening was closing in, and when at last I had filled in the final details and took the completed plan to our chambers for Thorndyke’s inspection, I found my colleague busily engaged in preparations for the morrow’s adventure.

“Well!” I exclaimed, when my plan had been examined and replaced by a fresh sheet of paper, “this is an extraordinary outfit! I hope we shan’t have to carry this case home after dark.”

It was certainly a most sinister collection of appliances that Thorndyke had assembled in the suitcase. There was a brace and bits, and auger, a bunch of skeleton keys, an electric lantern, a pair of telescopic jemmies, and two automatic pistols.

“What on earth are the pistols for?” I demanded.

“Those,” he replied, “are just an extra precaution. Many of these hiding-holes are fitted with snap locks, and it is quite possible to find oneself caught in a trap. Then, if there should be no room to use a jemmy, it might be necessary to blow the lock to pieces.”

“Well,” I remarked, “it is as well to take all necessary precautions, but if Blake sees those pistols they will need a good deal of explaining, especially as he will certainly recognise us as the two suspicious visitors.”

“We need not exhibit them ostentatiously,” said Thorndyke. “We can carry them in our pockets, and the jemmies as well. Then if the necessity to use them arises, they will explain themselves.”

The rest of the evening we spent in a course of instruction in the arrangement and design of the various kinds of secret chambers, hiding-holes, aumbries, and receptacles for documents, sacred vessels, and other objects that, in times of political upheaval, might need to be concealed. On this subject Thorndyke was a mine of information, and he produced a notebook filled with descriptions, plans, sections, and photographs of most of the examples that had been examined, which we went over together and studied in the minutest detail. By the end of the evening, I had not only acquired an immense amount of knowledge on an obscure out-of-the-way subject, but I had become in so far infected with Thorndyke’s enthusiasm that I found myself looking forward almost eagerly to the romantic quest on which the following day was to see us launched.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Secret Chamber

It was close on half-past eleven when our train drew up in Wendover Station. We had just finished our rather premature lunch and had packed up the luncheon baskets and placed them on the seats; and now, lifting down the suitcase and the plane table with its folding tripod, stepped out on to the platform.

“I wonder,” said I, “if Blake has sent any kind of conveyance for us. I don’t suppose he has.”

My surmise turned out to be correct. When we went out into the station approach, the only vehicle in sight was a closed fly, which we decided to charter; and having stowed our impedimenta on the front seat and given the driver the necessary directions, we entered and took possession of the back seat. The coachman climbed to the box and started the horse at a quiet jog-trot, turning into the Aylesbury, or London Road to avoid the steep hill down which we had come to the station on the last occasion. As we passed the fine, brick-towered windmill and came out on the country road, Thorndyke leaned forward and opened the suitcase.

“We had better put the more suspicious-looking objects in our pockets,” said he. “We may not want them at all, and then they won’t have been seen, whereas if they are wanted, the necessity will explain our having provided ourselves with them.”

He took out the bunch of skeleton keys and slipped them into his coat pocket, and then picked out the two telescopic jemmies, one of which he handed to me while he bestowed the other in some kind of interior pocket—into which, I noticed, it disappeared with singular completeness, suggesting a suspicious suitability of the receptacle. Finally he took out the two automatic pistols, and having pocketed one, handed me the other after a careful and detailed explanation of its mechanism and the proper way to hold and fire it. I took the weapon from him and stowed it in my hip-pocket, very gingerly and with some reluctance, for I detest firearms; and as I placed it carefully with the muzzle pointed as far as possible away from my own person, I reflected once more with dim surprise on the circumstance that Thorndyke, whose dislike of these weapons was as great as my own, should have adopted this clumsy and dangerous means of dealing with a somewhat remote contingency. It seemed an excessive precaution, and I found creeping into my mind a faint suspicion that my colleague might possibly have had something more in his mind than he had disclosed, though that was even more incomprehensible, considering the very peaceful nature of our quest.

I was still turning these matters over in my mind when the fly reached the crossroads and entered the lane. Here the appearance of the inn just ahead recalled me to our immediate business, and old Brodribb’s observation recurred to me.

“How are you going to start, Thorndyke?” I asked. “I presume you have got some definite programme?”

“I shall be guided by what Blake has to tell us,” he replied. “He may have a good plan of the house, and it is possible that he has made some explorations of his own which will give us a start. There is our old friend, the lodge-keeper, mightily surprised to see us.”

I caught a passing glimpse of the sleuth, staring at us in undisguised astonishment; then we swung round into the drive, and the old house came into view. We were evidently expected, for as we approached the house a man came out of the main entrance and stood on the wide threshold awaiting our arrival. Just as the fly was about to draw up opposite the portico, Thorndyke said in a low voice:

“If we are offered any refreshments, Anstey, we had better decline them. We have had lunch, you know.”

I glanced at him in amazement. It was a most astonishing remark. But there was no time to ask for any explanation, for at that moment the fly drew up, the driver jumped down from his seat, and the squire came forward to receive us.

“We have met before, I think,” said the latter as we shook hands. “If I had known who you were I should have invited you to look at the house then. However, it isn’t too late. I see you have brought your traps with you,” he added, with a glance at the plane table and its tripod.

“Yes,” said Thorndyke, “we are prepared to make a regular survey, if necessary. But perhaps you have a plan of the house?”

“There is a plan,” replied Blake, “though I fancy it is not very exact. I will show it to you. Probably it will give you a hint where to begin.”

As I had now settled with the fly-man, we entered the house, and Blake conducted us into a large room, furnished as a library and containing a considerable collection of books. On a table by one of the windows was a plan spread out and held open by paperweights.

“You see,” said Blake, “this is an architect’s plan, made, I think, when some repairs were contemplated. It is little more than a sketch, and doesn’t give much detail. But it will help you to take a preliminary look round before lunch.”

“We have had lunch,” said Thorndyke. “We got that over in the train so that we should have a clear day before us. Time is precious, and we ought to get to work at once. I suppose you have not made any sort of investigation on your own account?”

As Thorndyke mentioned our premature meal, the squire gave him a quick glance and seemed to look a little resentful. But he made no comment beyond answering the question.

“I have not made any regular examination of the house, but I have poked about a little in the old part and I have found one secret chamber, which I have utilised as a photographic dark-room. Perhaps you would like to see that first. There may be some other hiding-places connected with it which I have overlooked. There is a tall cupboard in it which I have used to store my chemicals.”

“We may have to empty that cupboard to see if there is anything behind it,” said Thorndyke. “At any rate, we had better begin by overhauling it.”

He opened the suitcase and took from it the surveyor’s tape, which he put in his pocket.

“Hadn’t we better take the lamp?” said I.

“You won’t want that,” said Blake. “There is a portable lamp in the room.”

I was half-inclined to take it, nevertheless, but as Thorndyke shut the suitcase and prepared to follow our host, I let the matter rest.

From the library we passed out into a long gallery, one side of which was hung with portraits, presumably of members of the family, and some of them of considerable antiquity, to judge by the style of the painting and the ancient costumes. Then we crossed several rooms—fine, stately apartments with florid, moulded ceilings and walls of oaken panelling, on which I noticed a very respectable display of pictures. The rooms were fully furnished—very largely, I noticed, with the oak and walnut furniture that must have been put in when the new wing was built. But they were all pervaded by a sense of desolation and neglect; they were dusty and looked faded, unused, and forgotten. Nowhere was there a sign of human occupation, nor, I noticed, did we meet, in the whole course of our journey across this part of the house, a single servant or retainer, or, indeed, any living creature whatever.

A door at the end of a short passage, on being unlocked and opened, revealed a short flight of wooden stairs, and when we had descended these we found ourselves in a totally different atmosphere. This was the old timber house, and as we crossed its deserted rooms and trod its uncarpeted oaken floors, our footsteps resounded with dismal echoes among the empty chambers and corridors, conveying a singular sense of remoteness and desolation. The gloomy old rooms with their dirt-encrusted casements, the massive beams in their ceilings, the blackened wainscoting, rich with carved ornament but shrouded with the dust and grime of years of neglect, the gouty-legged Elizabethan tables and ponderous oaken chairs and settles; all these dusty and forgotten appurtenances of a vanished generation of men seemed to have died with their long-departed human associates and to be silently awaiting their final decay and dissolution. It was an eerie place, dead and desolate as an Egyptian tomb.

And yet, strangely enough, it was here that I saw the one solitary sign of human life. We were passing along a narrow gallery or corridor when I noticed, high up in the panelled wall, one of those small interior windows which one sees in old houses, placed opposite an exterior window to light an inner chamber. Looking up at this little window, I saw the face of some person looking down on us. It was the merest glimpse that I caught, for the window was coated with dust and the room behind it in darkness. But there was the face of some human creature, man, woman, or child, and its appearance in this remote, sepulchral place, so far from the domain of the living household, smote upon me strangely and seemed to make even more intense the uncanny solitude of the empty mansion.

I was still speculating curiously on who this watcher might be, when our host halted by the wall of a smallish room.

“This is the place,” said he, pointing to the wall. “I wonder if you can find the door.”

The wainscoting in this room was nearly plain, the only ornament being a range of very flat pilasters and a dado moulding, enriched by a row of hemispherical bosses. Thorndyke ran his eye over the wainscoting, noting more particularly the way in which the pilasters were joined to the intervening panels.

“I suppose,” said he, “we had better try the most obvious probabilities first. The natural thing would be to use one of these bosses to cover the release of the lock.”

Blake assented (or dissented) with an inarticulate grunt, and Thorndyke then proceeded to pass along the row of bosses, pressing each one firmly in turn. After about a dozen trials, he came to one in the middle of a pilaster which yielded to the pressure of his thumb, sinking in some two inches, in the fashion of a large electric-bell push. Holding the “push” in with his thumb, he pressed vigorously against the adjoining panel, first on one side of the pilaster and then on the other, but in neither case was there any sign of the panel moving, though I added my weight to his.

“You haven’t quite hit it off yet,” Blake informed us.

Thorndyke reflected for a few seconds. Then, keeping the boss pressed in, he put his other thumb on the next one of the series, which was at the edge of the panel, and gave a sharp push, whereupon this boss also sank in with an audible click and then the whole panel swung inward, disclosing a narrow and wonderfully well-concealed doorway.

“Good,” said Blake. “You’ve solved the problem more quickly than I did. Just hold the door open a moment. It has rather a strong spring, and I generally prop it open with this block.” As he spoke he fetched a small block of wood from under an adjacent table and set it against the foot of the door.

“I had better go first,” said he, “as I know where to find the lamp.” With this he entered before us, striking a wax match and shading it with his hand. The dim illumination showed a narrow, passage-like room, apparently a good deal more lofty than the low-ceiled room from which we had entered it, and dimly revealed a very high cupboard near the farther end. We had groped our way after him a few paces when he turned suddenly. “How stupid of me!” he exclaimed. “I had forgotten that I had left the lamp in the next room. Excuse me one moment.”

He slipped past us, and kicking the block away, ran out, pulling the door sharply after him, when it slammed to with a loud click of the latch.

“What the deuce did he kick that block away for,” I exclaimed, “and leave us all in the dark?”

“We shall probably find out presently,” replied Thorndyke. “Meanwhile, stand perfectly still. Don’t move hand or foot.”

“Why do you say that?” I demanded with something like a thrill of alarm, for there was something rather disturbing in the tone of Thorndyke’s sharply-spoken command. And standing there in the pitchy darkness, locked in a secret chamber in the very heart of this great, empty mansion, there came to me a flash of sudden suspicion. I recalled Thorndyke’s mysterious warning to take no food in this house; I remembered the loaded pistol that he had put into my hand, and I saw again that unaccountable face at the window, watching us as Blake led us—whither? “You don’t think Blake is up to any mischief, do you?” I asked.

“I can’t say,” he replied. “Perhaps he will come with the lamp presently. But we may as well see where we are while we are waiting.”

I heard a rustling as if he were searching his pockets. Then, suddenly, there broke out a bright light that flooded the little room and rendered all the objects in it plainly visible.

It was a queer-looking room, almost more like a rather irregularly-shaped passage, for none of the walls were straight, and the ceiling sloped up from a height of about eight feet at one end to nearly twelve at the other. Near the farther end was a very high wall-cupboard, and at the extreme end, facing us, was a small door, about three feet above the floor level and approached by a flight of five wooden stairs.

The appearance of the light was reassuring, and still more so was the evidence that it afforded of Thorndyke’s foresight in having provided himself with this supplementary lamp. But much less reassuring was his next observation after having flashed his light all over the room.

“I suspect we have seen the last of our host—for the present, at any rate. Look at the top of the cupboard, Anstey.”

I looked at the cupboard. It was between eight and nine feet high, and was fitted with folding doors, of which the leaf nearest to us was half open; and on the top of the half-open door, near the free corner, a little board had been placed with one end resting on the door and the other insecurely supported by the moulding at the top of the cupboard; and on the board, delicately balanced over the door, was a large chemical flask, filled with what looked like water and fitted with a cork.

“What do you make of it?” Thorndyke asked, keeping his powerful inspection-lamp focused on the flask as I gazed at it.

“It looks like some sort of booby-trap,” said I. “It is a wonder that flask wasn’t shaken down when Blake slammed the door.”

“He probably expected that it would be, and it very nearly was, for you can see that it has jarred to the extreme edge. But failing the slam of the door, he no doubt assumes that we, being as he imagines in total darkness, shall grope our way along the wall until we come to the cupboard. Then, the instant we touch the door, down will come the flask. It is quite an ingenious plan.”

“But what is the purpose of it?” I demanded. “It can’t be a practical joke.”

“It isn’t,” said he. “Far from it. I should say it is very deadly earnest. Unless I am mistaken, that flask is filled with some volatile poison. The instant that it falls and breaks, this room will become a lethal chamber.”

At these words, uttered by Thorndyke in tones as calm and emotionless as if he were giving a demonstration to his students, a chill of horror crept over me. My very hair seemed to stir. It was an appalling situation. I stared in dismay and terror at the flask, poised aloft and ready, as it seemed, at the slightest movement, or even a loudly-spoken word, to come crashing down and stifle us with its deadly fumes.

“Great God!” I gasped. “Then we are in a trap! But is there nothing that we can do? The flask is too high up for us to reach it.”

“It would be sheer insanity to go near it,” said Thorndyke. “But I don’t think we need be very disturbed. There must be some way of getting out of this chamber. Let us go and reconnoitre the door, though I daresay our friend has attended to that.”

We tiptoed cautiously back to the door and examined its construction. The mechanism was very simple, but like most old locksmith’s work, extremely massive. The two bosses outside evidently were the ends of two sliding bars and bolts of wood. The one which Thorndyke had pressed first apparently had a slot which, when it was brought opposite the massive latch, allowed the latter to rise. That at least was what Thorndyke inferred, for, as the latch was in the thickness of the great oaken doorpost (which had a slot to let it escape, when raised) the actual mechanism could not be seen. The second sliding bar, when pushed in, raised the latch itself by means of an inclined plane. Both the sliding bars had been provided with knobs on their inner ends, so that they could be pulled in from inside as well as pushed in from without; but whereas the knob still remained on the bar which raised the latch, that of the bar which released the latch and allowed it to rise had been removed. The end of the bar could be seen, nearly flush with the surface of the doorpost, and in it a small hole in which the knob had evidently been screwed.

“Would it be possible to hook anything, such as a skeleton key, into that hole?” I asked when we had examined it thoroughly.

“I think we can do better than that,” said he, hooking the bulls-eye of his inspection-lamp in a button-hole of his coat and feeling in his pocket. “This is a more workmanlike appliance.”

He exhibited an appliance that looked like a kind of clasp-knife, but was actually a pocket set of screw-taps, such as are carried by engineers and plumbers. Drawing out the smallest tap, he tried it in the hole, but the latter was too small to admit it. Then, from the same appliance, he drew out a taper reamer, and on trying this in the hole he found that the point entered easily. He accordingly drove it in lightly, rotating it as he pressed, and continued to turn it until the sharp-cutting tool had broached out the hole to a size that would admit the nose of the tap, when he withdrew the reamer, and inserting the tap, gave it a few vigorous turns. Now, on pulling gently at the handle of the tap, it was seen to be fast in the hole, and the sliding bar began to move forward.

“I wonder if our host is hanging about outside,” said he.

“What does it matter whether he is or not?” I asked.

“Because I want to try whether we can open the door, and I don’t want him to hear.”

“But, confound it,” said I, “he will see us when we come out.”

“We are not going to come out that way if we can find any other.”

“Why not?” I demanded. “We want to get clear of that infernal flask, and the sooner we are out the better.”

“Not at all,” said Thorndyke. “If we come out and show ourselves, the game is up, and there will probably be trouble. Whereas if we can get out another way, we shall put him in a very pretty dilemma. Hearing no sound from us, he will probably assume that his plan has succeeded. And if Drayton should arrive before he has taken the risk of verifying our decease, his explanations should be rather interesting. At any rate, I should like to see what his next move will be, but we must make our retreat secure in case of accidents. I think we can raise the latch without making any noticeable sound. You observe that the pivot has been oiled—and also that the door-spring is new and has apparently been fixed on quite recently.”

In my heart I cursed his inquiring spirit, for I wanted to get out of this horrible trap. But I offered no objection, standing by sullenly while he proceeded with calm interest to complete his experiment. Grasping the tap-handle with one hand and the knob with the other, he pulled steadily at the former until the sliding bar was drawn inwards to its full extent, and then at the knob, which came in with similar ease and silence. But when I saw the latch rise and the door begin to swing inwards, I could hardly restrain myself from dragging it open and making a burst for freedom.

The next moment the opportunity was gone. With the same silent care Thorndyke reclosed the door, let the latch down, and slid back the release bar.

“Now,” said he, turning away but leaving the tap jammed in the hole, “we can pursue our investigations at our ease. If there is no other exit, we can come out this way, and we have got a clear retreat in case of accidents. What does the appearance of this place suggest to you? I mean as to an exit.”

“Well,” I answered, “there is a door at the top of those steps. Presumably its function is the ordinary function of a door.”

“I doubt it,” said he. “It is too blatantly innocent. More probably its function was to occupy pursuers while the fugitive was gaining a start. Still, we will have a thorough look at it, as I expect our host has already done. We had better go one at time, and for Heaven’s sake step lightly, and remember that if that flask should come down, you make a bee-line for the door and get outside instantly.”

Lighted by Thorndyke’s lamp, I crept cautiously along the room with my eyes riveted on the flask and my heart in my mouth. Then Thorndyke followed, and together we ascended the steps to the door, and proceeded to examine it minutely. It was provided with plainly visible hinges but had no ostensible latch or lock. Around it were a number of projecting ends of tree-nails, but pressure on them, one after the other, produced no result, nor did the door itself show any sign of yielding; indeed, the form of the hinges suggested that it opened inwards—towards the room—if it would open at all.

“We are wasting time, Anstey,” Thorndyke said at length. “The thing is a dummy, as we might have expected. Let us try something more likely. Now, from what I know of these secret chambers, I should say that the most probable exits are the cupboard and the stairs. Both, you notice, seem to be functionless. There is no reason for that great cupboard having been built in here, and these stairs simply lead to a dummy door. And cupboards with sliding shelves and concealed doors in the back, and stairs with movable treads were very favourite devices. The cupboard is unfortunately not practicable while that flask is balanced overhead, so we had better give our attention to the stairs. I suspect that there are two exits, in different directions, but either will do for us.”

We stole softly down the stairs, and stooping on hands and knees, brought the light to bear on the joints of the treads and risers; but the dirt of ages had settled on them and filled up any tell-tale cracks that might have been visible. To my eye, the steps looked all alike, and all seemed to be solid oak planks immovably fixed in their positions.

Suddenly Thorndyke dived into his inner pocket and brought forth the telescopic jemmy, which he pulled out to its full length. Then, laying the chisel end on the tread of the bottom stair, he drove its edge forcibly against the angle where the tread and the riser met. To my surprise, the edge entered fully half an inch into the joint, which the dirt had filled and concealed.

“Get your jemmy, Anstey, and push it in by the side of mine,” said he.

I produced the tool from my breast pocket, where it had been reposing to my great discomfort, and opening it out, I inserted its edge close to that of Thorndyke’s.

“Now,” said he, “both together. Push!”

We both bore heavily on the ends of the jemmies, and the sharp chisel ends entered fully an inch; and simultaneously a visible crack appeared along the foot of the riser. We now withdrew the jemmies and reinserted them at the two ends of the tread. Again we drove in together, and the crack widened perceptibly. On this, Thorndyke rose and closely examined the angle of the step above and then that of the third, and here, as he brought the bulls-eye close to the surface of the step, I could see that a narrow crack had opened between the step and the riser.

“It looks,” said I, “as if the two steps had shifted.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “and apparently the pivot, if there is one, is above. Let us get to work again.”

We reinserted the jemmies several times in different places, thrusting together and as forcibly as we dared with that horrible flask insecurely balanced above our heads; and at each thrust there was an appreciable widening of the crack, which had now opened fully a quarter of an inch, making it evident that the stairs were really movable.

“Now,” said Thorndyke, “I think we might venture to prise.”

He reversed his jemmy and inserted the “crow” end into the crack near one extremity, while I inserted mine near the opposite end. Then, at a word from him, we bore on the ends of the levers, and with a protesting groan, the step rose another inch. Thorndyke now laid aside his jemmy, and standing on the bottom step, thrust his fingers into the gaping crack; I did the same, and when we had got a fair grasp, he gave the word.

“Now, both together. Up she comes!”

We both heaved steadily but not too violently. There was a grinding creak as the long-disused joint moved; then suddenly the two steps swung up and stood nearly upright on their pivot, disclosing a yawning hole in which the light showed a narrow flight of brick steps.

Thorndyke immediately stepped in through the opening, and descending a few steps, turned and held the light for me, when I followed.

The steps fell away steeply down a kind of well with walls of brickwork, which was thickly encrusted with slimy growths of algae and fungi, and the steps themselves were slippery with a similar coating and were almost hidden, in places, by great fungous masses which sprouted from the joints of the brickwork. After descending about eight feet, we reached a level floor and proceeded along a narrow brick tunnel, stooping to clear the slime-covered roof. This extended some fifteen yards and ended in what at first looked like a blank wall. On coming close, however, and throwing on it the light of the lantern, I perceived an oblong space of planking about five feet long by three high and three feet above the floor, forming a rude door, very massive and clumsy and furnished with a simple, roughly-fashioned iron latch.

“I don’t see any hinges,” observed Thorndyke, “so there is probably an internal pivot. Let us prise up the latch first and then see how the door moves.”

He slipped the end of his jemmy under the latch, taking a bearing on the brickwork, and levered the great latch up without much difficulty in spite of the rust that had locked it in position. Then, inserting the chisel end into the crack between the door and the jamb, he gave a tentative wrench, when the door moved perceptibly, inwards at one end and outwards at the other.

“It is evidently pivoted in the middle,” said he. “If you will prise the other end while I work at this, we shall get it open easily.”

We accordingly inserted our jemmies at the respective ends and gave a steady thrust; on which the door, with a deep groan and a loud screech from the rusty pivots, swung round on its centre, letting in a flood of cheerful daylight and fresh air, which I inhaled with profound relief. A vigorous pull on the edge brought the door fully open and disclosed a mass of foliage which blocked the view from within and no doubt concealed the door from outside. But in any case it would have been very inconspicuous, for we could now see that the solid planking was covered externally with counterfeit brickwork, very convincingly executed with slices of brick.

Thorndyke reached out and pulled aside a branch of the tree that obscured the view “This door,” said he, “seems to open on the edge of the moat, so it was probably made at a time when the moat was full of water. However, we have found our way out, and it is a better one than the cupboard would have given us, for, if that has an exit in the back, it probably leads up to the garrets or the chimneys. Now all we have to do is to remove our traces from the chamber above and make our way out. But there is no need for you to come up.”

“I am coming up all the same,” said I, and as he turned to re-enter the tunnel, I followed, though I admit, with infinite reluctance. But I did not actually re-enter the chamber. I stood with my head out of the opening and a terrified eye on the accursed flask, while Thorndyke tiptoed across the room to the door. Here he withdrew the tap from the hole, and folding it, dropped it into his pocket. Then he stooped and blew away the wood-dust that had fallen from the reamer on to the floor, and having thus removed every trace (excepting the broached-out hole in the sliding bar), he stepped lightly back and re-entered the opening.

“The problem now,” said he, “is to get these stairs back in their place without shaking down the flask.”

“Does it matter,” I asked, “now that we have a means of escape?”

“Not very much,” he answered, “but I would rather leave it there in evidence.”

The movable stairs were furnished with a rough wooden handle on the underside to enable a fugitive to replace them from below. This Thorndyke grasped, and with a steady pull, drew the stairs down into their original position, giving a final tug to bring the joints close together. Then once more we began to descend the slippery steps.

We were about half-way down when Thorndyke stopped.

“Listen, Anstey,” said he, switching off the light. And as he spoke, I caught the sound of footsteps somewhere overhead. Then I heard the door of the secret chamber open slowly—I could recognise it by the sound of the door-spring—and after a little interval, Blake’s voice called out:

“Dr Thorndyke! Mr. Anstey! Where are you?”

Again there was a short pause. The door slowly opened a little farther, the floor above creaked under a stealthy tread, and then I seemed to catch faintly another voice, apparently more distant.

“They are not here,” said Blake. “They seem to have got out somehow. Here, catch hold of the lamp. Mind the door! Mind the—”

The door-spring creaked. There was a heavy thud, and an instant later the sound of shattering glass, followed by a startled shout and a hurried trampling of feet.

“The knob! The knob! Quick!” a high-pitched voice shrieked; and at that the very marrow in my bones seemed to creep. For the knob was useless now. Thorndyke’s reamer had destroyed the screw-hole.

With the sweat streaming down my face and my heart thumping with sickening violence, I listened to the torrent of curses, rising to yells of terror and anguish and mingled with strange, whimpering cries. I could see it all with horrible distinctness: the two trapped wretches above, frantically turning the knob in the broached-out hole while the poisonous fumes rose remorselessly and encompassed them.

The cries grew thicker and more muffled, and mingled with dreadful coughs and gasps. Then there was a sound of a heavy body falling on the floor and a horrible husky screech broke out, whereat I felt the hair of my scalp stir like the fur of a frightened cat. Three times that appalling screech came through the floor to our pitch-dark lurking-place, the last time dying away into a hideous, quavering wail. Then, once more, there was the thud of a heavy body falling on the floor, and after that an awful silence.

“God Almighty!” I gasped. “Can’t we do anything, Thorndyke?”

“Yes,” he replied, “we can get out of this. It is time we did.”

Even as he spoke I became aware of a faint odour of bitter almonds which seemed every moment to grow more distinct. It was undoubtedly time for us to be gone; and when, once more, the light of his lamp flashed down the stairway, I responded readily to a gentle push and began to descend the steps as rapidly as my trembling knees would let me.

The faint, sinister odour pursued us even to the tunnel and it was with a sigh of relief that I reached the open doorway and looked again on the sky-lit foliage and breathed the wholesome air. We crept out together through the long, low doorway, and grasping the branches of the trees and bushes outside, scrambled down the sloping bank to the dry floor of the moat.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Cat’s Eye

When we stood up at the bottom of the bank, I turned to Thorndyke and asked:

“What are we going to do now? We must make some effort to let those poor devils out.”

“That,” he replied, “is an impossibility. In the first place they are certainly dead by now, and in the second it would be certain death to attempt to open that door. The chamber is full of the vapour of hydrocyanic acid.”

“But,” I expostulated, “we ought to do something. Humanity demands that we should, at least, make a show of trying to save them.”

“I don’t see why,” he replied coldly. “They are certainly dead, and if they were not, I would not risk a single hair of my head to save their lives. Still, if you have any feeling on the matter, we can go and reconnoitre. But we must look to our own safety.”

He struck out along the floor of the moat at a brisk pace, and I kept up with him as well as my trembling knees would let me, for I was horribly shaken by the shocking experiences of the last few minutes, and still felt sick and faint. Thorndyke, on the other hand, was perfectly unmoved, and as he strode along at my side, I glanced at his calm face and found in his quiet, unconcerned manner something inhuman and repelling. It is true that those two wretches who now lay stark and dead on the floor of that dreadful chamber deserved no sympathy. They had digged a pit for us and fallen into it themselves. But still, they were human beings, and their lives were human lives, but Thorndyke seemed to value them no more than if they had been a couple of rats.

About a hundred yards farther along the moat, we came to a cross path, at each end of which was a flight of rough steps up the bank. We ascended the steps on the house side, and these brought us to a small door with a Tudor arch in the head. A modern night-latch had been added to the ancient lock, but it was a simple affair which Thorndyke’s picklock opened in a few moments, and the door then yielded to a push. It opened into a corridor which I recognised as the one which we had passed through and where I had seen the face at the window—a dead face it was now, I suspected. We turned and walked along it in the direction in which Blake had led us, and as we neared the end I began to be sensible of a faint odour in the musty air; an attenuated scent of bitter almonds.

“We must go warily,” said Thorndyke. “The next room, I think, is the one out of which the secret chamber opens.”

He paused and stood looking dubiously at the door; and as he stood hesitating, I pushed past him, and seizing the handle, flung the door open and looked into the room. But it was only an instantaneous glance, showing me the uninterrupted wall, the wooden block lying where Blake had kicked it, and close by, a dead rat. The sight of that little corpse and the sickening smell of bitter almonds that suddenly grew strong in the air as the door opened, produced an instant revulsion. My concern for our would-be murderers was extinguished by a thrill of alarm for my own safety. I drew the door to hurriedly and followed Thorndyke, who was walking quickly away.

“It is no use, Anstey,” he said, a little impatiently. “It is mere sentiment, and a silly one at that. All we can do is to open these windows and clear off until the gas has diffused out. It won’t take so very long with all the gaping joints in this old woodwork.”

“And what are we going to do meanwhile?”

“We must find the housekeeper, if there is one, and let her know the state of affairs. Then we must send information to the police at Aylesbury, and before they arrive, I think it would be well to prepare a written statement, which we can sign in their presence and which should contain all that we are prepared to say about the matter before the inquest.”

“Yes,” I agreed “that seems to be the best course,” and with this we proceeded to open the rusty casements of the corridor and then made our way back to the new wing of the house.

The inn-keeper had certainly been right. Squire Blake had been very far from lavish in the matter of retainers. One after another of the great, dusty rooms we crossed or peered into without encountering a single serving-man or maid. The house seemed to be utterly deserted. At last we came to the entrance hall, and here, as we stood commenting on this extraordinary solitude, a door opened and a faded and shabby elderly woman, looking like a rather superior charwoman, emerged. She looked at us curiously and then asked:

“Can you tell me, sir, if Mr. Blake is ready for lunch?”

“I am sorry to say,” replied Thorndyke, “that Mr. Blake has met with a mishap. He has locked himself in his dark room and has poisoned himself accidentally with some chemicals.”

“Oh dear!” exclaimed the woman, looking at Thorndyke with a sort of stupefied dismay. “Hadn’t some one better go and fetch him out?”

“That is not possible at present,” said Thorndyke. “The room is full of poison gas.”

“But,” the woman protested, “he may die if no one goes to his assistance.”

“He is dead already,” said Thorndyke, “and there is another person in the room with him, who is also dead.”

“That will be Mr. Meyer, his valet,” said the woman, staring at Thorndyke with a sort of bewildered horror, puzzled, no doubt, by the incongruity between his tragic tidings and his calm, matter-of-fact demeanour. “And you say they have both killed themselves! Lord! Lord! What a dreadful thing!” She clasped her hands, and gazing helplessly from one of us to the other, asked: “What are we to do? Oh! what are we to do?”

“Is there any one whom we could send into Aylesbury?” asked Thorndyke, “We ought to let the police know of the accident, and we ought to get a doctor.”

“There is only the lodge-keeper,” she whimpered shakily “He could go on Mr. Meyer’s bicycle. Dear, dear! what an awful thing it is!”

“If you will have the bicycle brought to the door,” said Thorndyke, “I will write a note and take it up to the lodge-keeper myself. There are writing materials in the library I suppose?”

She supposed there were, and showed us into the room, where we found some notepaper and envelopes. Then she departed, wringing her hands and muttering, to fetch the bicycle.

“I shall not give any details in this note,” Thorndyke said as he sat down at the table and uncapped his fountain pen, “I shall just tell them that Mr. Blake and his valet have met their deaths—presumably—by poisoning, that it is a police case, and that the Divisional Surgeon had better accompany the police officer.”

With this he wrote the note, addressing it to the Superintendent or Chief Constable, and he had just closed and sealed it when the woman reappeared to announce the arrival of the bicycle, which had been brought to the door by a young woman, apparently a housemaid. Thorndyke mounted the machine and rode away swiftly up the drive, and I turned back into the house, followed by the two women, who, now that the first shock had spent itself, were devoured by curiosity and eager to extract information.

Their efforts in this direction, however, were not very successful, for, although the facts must very soon become public property, it seemed desirable at present to say as little as possible, while, as for any explanation of this extraordinary affair, I was as much in the dark as they were. So I maintained a discreet, though difficult, reticence until Thorndyke reappeared, when the two women retired and left us in possession of the room.

“I sent our friend off with the note,” said my colleague “and I told him enough to make sure that he will put on the pace. It is only about four miles, and as the police probably have a car, we may expect them pretty soon. I will just draft out a statement of the actual occurrences, and you had better write, on the same paper, a confirmatory declaration. We can read them to the officer and sign them in his presence.”

He proceeded to write out a concise, but fairly full, narrative of what had befallen us in this house, with a brief statement of the nature of our business here, and when I had read it through, I wrote at the foot a paragraph confirming the statement and accepting it as my own. This occupied some considerable time, and we had not long finished when there was a somewhat peremptory ring at the bell, and a minute later, the elderly woman—whom I assumed to be the housekeeper—entered, accompanied by a police officer and a gentleman in civilian clothes. The former introduced himself briefly and got to business without preamble.

“Concerning this note, sir,” said he, “you have given no particulars. I suppose there is no doubt that Mr. Blake and his valet are really dead?”

“I should say there is no doubt at all,” replied Thorndyke. “But I have written out a statement of the particulars, from which you will be able to judge. Shall I read it to you?”

“I think the doctor had better see the bodies first,” was the reply.

“Certainly,” agreed the doctor. “We don’t want to waste precious time on statements. Where are they?”

“I will take you to them,” said Thorndyke, “but I must tell you that they are shut in a room which is filled with the vapour of hydrocyanic acid.”

The two men gave a startled look at Thorndyke, and as he led the way out into the hall and across the new wing, they followed, talking together earnestly but in low tones. Presently they overtook us, and the officer remarked:

“This is a very extraordinary affair, sir. Has no attempt been made to get these men out of that room?”

“No,” replied Thorndyke.

“But why not?”

“I think you will see when you get there.”

“But,” exclaimed the doctor, “surely some effort ought to have been made to save them! You don’t mean to say that you have left them in that poisoned air and made no attempt even to open the doors and windows?”

“We have opened some of the neighbouring windows,” said Thorndyke; and he proceeded to give a description of the secret chamber and its surroundings, to which the doctor listened with pursed-up lips.

“Well,” he remarked dryly, “you seem to have been very careful. Is it much farther?”

“It opens out of the next room but one,” replied Thorndyke, and as he spoke I detected in the air a very faint odour of bitter almonds. I fancy the doctor noticed it, too, but he made no remark, and when we reached the end of the corridor and Thorndyke indicated the door that gave access to the room, both men hurried forward. The doctor turned the handle and flung the door open, and he and the officer stepped briskly across the threshold. And then they both stopped short, and I guessed that they had seen the dead rat. The next moment they both backed out hastily and the doctor slammed the door behind him and followed us to the discreet distance at which we had halted.

“The vapour is as you say,” said the latter, visibly crestfallen, “in an extreme state of concentration.”

“Yes,” agreed Thorndyke, “but it is much less than it was. If you will go a little farther away, I will throw the door open and we can then retire and let the vapour diffuse out.”

“Do you think it safe, sir?” queried the officer. “There’s a fearful reek in there;” then, as Thorndyke approached the door, he and the doctor (and I) walked away quickly up the corridor; and looking back, I saw my colleague, pinching his nostrils together, fling the door wide open and hurry after us.

When we had retired to a safe distance, the officer halted and said:

“You were saying something about a statement, sir. Shall we have it now? I don’t understand this affair in the least.”

Thorndyke produced the statement from his pocket and proceeded to read it aloud; and as he read, the two men listened with growing astonishment and not very completely concealed incredulity. When he had finished, I read out my statement, and then we both signed the document, the officer adding his signature as the witness.

“Well,” he said, as he put the paper in his pocket-book, “this is a most extraordinary story. Can you give any kind of explanation?”

“At the moment,” replied Thorndyke, “I am not proposing to go beyond the actual occurrence—certainly not until I have seen the bodies.”

The officer looked dissatisfied, and naturally enough. On the facts presented, he would have been quite justified in arresting us both on a suspicion of murder; and indeed, but for Thorndyke’s eminent position and my own status as a Kings Counsel, he would probably have done so. As it was, he contented himself with the expression of a hope that we should presently be able to throw some light on the mystery, on which remark my colleague offered no comment.

When about half an hour had passed, Thorndyke suggested that the vapour had probably cleared off from the room out of which the secret chamber opened and that it might now be possible to open the door of the chamber itself. Our friends were somewhat dubious, however. The sight of the dead rat had effectually dissipated the doctor’s enthusiasm and engendered a very wholesome caution.

“Perhaps,” said Thorndyke, “as my friend and I know where to find the concealed fastenings of the door, we could open it more safely. What do you say, Anstey?”

I was not much more eager than the doctor, but as Thorndyke would certainly have gone alone if I had refused, I assented with assumed readiness, and we started down the corridor, followed at a little distance by the other two. On entering the room, in which the odour of the poison had now become quite faint, Thorndyke opened both the casements wide and then slid the block of wood close up to the foot of the door.

“Now,” said he, “when I say ‘ready,’ take a deep breath, close your mouth, pinch your nostrils, and then push in the right-hand boss. I will press the other one and open and fix the door. Ready!”

I pushed in the boss, and immediately afterwards Thorndyke pressed in the other one. The door yielded, and as we pushed it wide open, he thrust the block in after it. Glancing in, I had a momentary glimpse of the dark chamber with the two dead men lying huddled on the floor and an extinguished lantern by the side of the nearer one. It was but the vision of an instant, for almost as the door opened, I turned with Thorndyke and ran out of the room; but in that instant it was imprinted on my memory for ever. Even as I write, I can see with horrible vividness that dark, gloomy hold and the two sprawling corpses stretched towards the door that had cut them off in the moment of their crime from the land of the living.

The first breath that I took, as I came out of the room, made me aware that the poisonous vapour was pouring out of the chamber of death. Our two friends had also noticed it and were already in full retreat, and we all made our way out of the old wing back to the library, there to wait until the poison should have become dissipated. The officer made one or two ineffectual efforts to extract from Thorndyke some explanation of the amazing events set forth in his statement, and then we settled down to a somewhat desultory conversation on subjects criminal and medical.

We had been in the library rather more than half an hour and were beginning to discuss the possibility of removing the bodies, when the doorbell rang, and a few moments later the housekeeper entered, followed by Sir Lawrence Drayton, Winifred, and Mr. Brodribb. The latter came in with a genial and knowing smile, which faded with remarkable suddenness as his eye lighted on the police officer.

“Why, what the deuce is the matter?” exclaimed Sir Lawrence as he also observed the officer.

“The matter is,” replied Thorndyke, “that there has been a tragedy. Mr. Blake is dead.”

“Dead!” exclaimed Drayton and Brodribb in unison.

“And what,” asked the former, “do you mean by a tragedy?”

“Perhaps,” said Thorndyke, “the officer would allow me to read you the written statement that I have given him. I may say,” he added, addressing the officer “that this lady and these gentlemen are interested parties and that they will all be called as witnesses at the inquest.”

This latter statement, utterly incomprehensible to me, seemed to be equally so to every one else present. Sir Lawrence and Brodribb stared in astonishment at Thorndyke, while the officer, with a frown of perplexity, slowly took the statement from his pocket-book and handed it to my colleague without a word. Thereupon the latter, having waited for the housekeeper to withdraw, read the statement aloud, and I watched the amazement growing on the faces of the listeners as he read.

“But, my dear Thorndyke!” Sir Lawrence exclaimed, when he had finished, “this is a most astounding affair. It looks as if this search had been a mere pretext to get you here and murder you!”

“That, I have no doubt, is the case,” said Thorndyke, “and that I suspected to be the object when Brodribb conveyed the invitation to me.”

“The devil you did!” said Brodribb. “But why should you suspect that Blake wanted to murder you?”

“I think,” replied Thorndyke, “that when we have seen the bodies you will be able to answer that question yourself. And I should say,” he added, turning to the doctor, “that it would now be possible to get the bodies out. Most of the fumes will have blown away by this time.”

“Yes,” the doctor agreed, evidently all agog to see and hear the explanation of this mystery. “We had better get a sheet from the housekeeper and then go and see if we can get those poor wretches out.”

He set forth in company with the officer, and as soon as the two strangers had left the room, Brodribb attacked my colleague.

“You are a most inscrutable fellow, Thorndyke. Do you mean to tell me that when you proposed this search, you were just planning to give this man, Blake, an opportunity to murder you?”

“To try to murder me,” Thorndyke corrected.

“And me,” I added. “It begins to dawn on me that the post of junior to Thorndyke is no sinecure.”

Brodribb smiled appreciatively, and Sir Lawrence remarked:

“We seem to be navigating in deep waters. I must confess that I am completely out of my depth, but I suppose it is useless to make any appeal.”

“I should rather say nothing more at present,” Thorndyke replied. “In a few minutes I shall be able to make the crucial test which I expect will render explanations unnecessary.”

I speculated on the meaning of this statement, but could make nothing of it, and I gathered from the perplexed expressions of the two lawyers that they were in a similar condition. But there was not much time to turn the matter over, for, very shortly, the police officer reappeared to announce that the bodies had been removed from the chamber and were ready for inspection and identification.

“It will not be necessary, I suppose,” said Drayton, as we rose to accompany the officer, “for Miss Blake to come with us?”

“I think,” answered Thorndyke, “that it is desirable and, in fact, necessary, that Miss Blake should see the bodies. I am sorry,” he added, “that she should be subjected to the unpleasantness, but the matter is really important.”

“I can’t imagine in what respect,” said Drayton, “but if you say that it is, that settles the matter.”

On this we set forth, Thorndyke and the officer leading the way, and as we crossed the great, desolate rooms I talked to Winifred about the old house and the secret chamber to divert her attention from our rather gruesome errand. At the end of the long corridor, as we entered the large room, we saw the doctor standing by two shrouded figures that lay on the floor near a window, with their feet towards us. We halted beside them in solemn silence, and the doctor stooped, and taking the two corners of the sheet, drew it away, with his eyes fixed on Thorndyke.

For a moment we all stood looking down on the two still and ghastly figures without speaking a word; but suddenly Winifred uttered a cry of horror and started back, clutching my arm.

“What is it?” demanded Drayton.

The man!” she exclaimed breathlessly, pointing to the body of the valet, which I had already recognised. “The man who tried to murder me in the empty house!”

“And who stabbed you that night at Hampstead?” said Thorndyke.

“Yes, yes,” she gasped. “It is he, I am certain of it.”

Sir Lawrence turned a look of eager inquiry on my colleague.

“This is an amazing thing,” he exclaimed. “How on earth did this fellow come to be associated with Mr. Blake?”

Thorndyke stooped over the dead squire, and unfastening the collar and neckband, drew the shirt open at the throat. There came into sight a stout, silken cord encircling the neck, which Thorndyke gently pulled up, when I saw that there was suspended from it a small gold pendant with a single large stone. As the little jewel was drawn out from its hiding-place, Winifred stooped forward eagerly.

“It is the Cat’s Eye!” she exclaimed.

“Impossible!” Sir Lawrence ejaculated. “Let me look at it.”

Thorndyke cut the cord and handed the pendant to Drayton, who turned it over in his hand, gazing at it with an expression of amazement and incredulity.

“It is,” he said at length. “This is certainly the pendant that was stolen from my poor brother’s house. I recognise it without doubt by the shape and colour of the stone, and there is the inscription on the back, ‘Dulce Domum,’ which I remember now. It is unquestionably the stolen pendant. But what does it mean, Thorndyke? You seemed to know that this man was wearing it.”

“The meaning of it is, Sir Lawrence,” replied Thorndyke, “that this man”—he pointed down at the dead squire—“is the man who murdered your brother. It was he who fired the pistol.”

Sir Lawrence looked down at the dead man with a frown of disgust.

“Do you mean to tell me, Thorndyke,” said he, “that this man murdered poor Andrew just to get possession of this trumpery toy?”

“I do,” replied Thorndyke, “though, of course, the murder was not a part of the original plan. But he carried the pistol with him to use if necessary.”

“He has got a pistol in his pocket now,” said the officer. “I felt it as I was dragging him out of the secret room.”

He plunged his hand into the dead man’s coat pocket and drew out a small automatic pistol, which he handed to Thorndyke.

This seems to be the very weapon,” said the latter; “a Baby Browning. You remember that we identified the pattern from the empty cartridge-case.”

I had noticed a peculiar expression of perplexity gathering on Mr. Brodribb’s face. Now the old solicitor turned to Thorndyke and said:

“This is a very unaccountable affair, Thorndyke. We didn’t know a great deal about Arthur Blake, but it always appeared that he was quite a decent sort of man, whereas this robbery and murder that he actually did commit, and the murder that he was attempting when he met his death, are cases of sheer ruffianism. I don’t understand it.”

Thorndyke turned to the doctor. “Would you mind telling us,” said he, “if there is anything abnormal in the condition of this man’s left knee-cap?”

The doctor stared at Thorndyke in astonishment. “Have you any reason to suppose that there is?” he asked.

“I have an impression,” was the reply, “that there is an old fracture with imperfect ligamentous union.”

The doctor stooped, and drawing up the trouser on the left side, placed his hand on the knee.

“You are quite right,” he said, looking up at Thorndyke with an expression of surprise. “There is a transverse fracture with a gap of fully two inches between the fragments.”

Suddenly Mr. Brodribb broke out eagerly with a look of intense curiosity at my colleague: “It can’t be! What is it that you are suggesting, Thorndyke?”

“I am suggesting that this man was not Arthur Blake. I suggest that he was an Australian adventurer named Hugh Owen.”

“But,” objected Brodribb, “Owen was reported to have died some years ago. His body was found and identified.”

“A mutilated skeleton was found,” retorted Thorndyke, “and was identified as that of Hugh Owen by means of a ring which was known to have belonged to Owen. I suggest that the remains were those of Arthur Blake; that he had been murdered by Owen, and that the ring had been put on the body for the purpose of ensuring a false identification.”

“That is perfectly possible,” Brodribb admitted. “Then who do you suggest that this other man is?”

“I suggest that this other person is a woman named Laura Levinsky.”

“Well,” said Brodribb, “that need not be left a matter of guesswork. I don’t think I mentioned it to you, but that Australian police official told me that Levinsky had a tattoo-mark on the right forearm—the letters H and L with a heart between. Let us see if this person has such a mark.”

The police officer bent down over the dead valet, and unfastening the right wristband, drew the sleeve up above the elbow.

“Ha!” exclaimed Brodribb as there were revealed, standing out on the greenish-white skin as if painted in blue ink, the letters H and L with a small, misshapen heart between them, “you are right, Thorndyke, as you always are. And I suppose she was a party to the murder?”

“I take it,” said Thorndyke, “that these two wretches murdered Arthur Blake, removed all identifiable objects from the corpse, put Owen’s ring on its finger, and tumbled it over the cliff, shooting down a mass of rocks and stones on top of it. Then they took possession of all Blake’s papers and money and separated, coming to England on different ships. I assume that no measures were ever taken to verify Blake’s identity?”

“No,” replied Brodribb. “There was no one who could identify him. He sent a letter, in answer to mine, saying when he would arrive. He arrived about the date mentioned, and presented all the necessary credentials. The question of identity was never raised.”

For some moments we all stood looking down on the bodies of the two adventures in silence. Presently Drayton asked, holding out the pendant:

“What is to be done with this? It was stolen from my brother, but it seems that, as it is an heirloom, it should be handed to Miss Blake.”

“For the present,” said Thorndyke “it must remain in the custody of the police, as it will have to be put in evidence at the inquest. We will take a receipt for it. But as to its being the missing heirloom, I doubt that very much. It does not agree with the description, and I should suppose that the original jewel will have been hidden with the title-deeds.”

“That could hardly be,” said Winifred, “though I agree with you that the inscription ‘Dulce domum’ doesn’t seem to be the right one. But you will remember that Percival’s manuscript distinctly says that the jewel was taken away and given to Jenifer to keep for the child James.”

“That is not my reading of the manuscript,” said Thorndyke. “But we can discuss that on another occasion. If we give our respective names and addresses to the officer, we shall have concluded our business here.”

At this hint, the officer produced a large, official notebook in which he entered the names and addresses of all the witnesses in the case, and when the doctor had once more covered the corpses with the sheet, we turned to retrace our steps to the library. As I walked along the corridor at Winifred’s side, I glanced at her a little anxiously, for it had been a rather terrible experience. She met my glance, and resting her hand on my arm for a moment, she said in a low voice:

“It was a gruesome sight, Robin, that poor little wretch lying there with that awful, fixed stare of horror on her face. But I couldn’t feel sorry for her, nor even for the man, though there was something very dreadful—almost pitiful—in the way in which his dead hand clutched that little brass knob. It must have been a frightful moment when he found that the knob was useless and that he and his companion were caught in their own hideous trap. But I can’t be sorry for them. I can only think of the relief to know that you are safe and that I am free.”

“Yes,” said I, “it is an unspeakable relief to feel that you can now go abroad in safety—that that continual menace is a thing of the past, thanks to Thorndyke’s uncanny power of seeing through a stone wall.”

“I am not sure “said she “that I am not disposed to quarrel with Dr Thorndyke for calmly walking you into this murderer’s den.”

“I don’t think there was ever any real danger,” I replied. “They couldn’t have murdered us by overt methods, and as to the other methods, I have no doubt that Thorndyke had got them all calculated out in advance and provided for. He seems to foresee everything.”

When we reached the library, and Thorndyke and I had replaced our pistols and jemmies in the suitcase (a proceeding which the police officer watched with bulging eyes and open mouth), Drayton asked:

“Have you two got any sort of conveyance? Because, if you haven’t, and you don’t mind a pretty tight squeeze, I can give you a lift to the station.”

We accepted the offer gladly; and having made our adieux to the officer and the doctor, we went out and packed ourselves and our impedimenta into the car as soon as the lawful occupants had taken their seats. As we moved off, I observed the housekeeper and two other women watching us with concentrated interest; and at the gate, as we swept past the lodge, I had an instantaneous glimpse of the keeper’s face at the window, with another countenance that seemed reminiscent of the “Kings Head.”

The swiftly-gliding car devoured the mile or two of road to the station in a few minutes. We drew up in the station yard, and while the chauffeur was handing out our luggage, Drayton stood up, and laying his hand on Thorndyke’s shoulder, said earnestly:

“I have spoken no word of thanks to you, Thorndyke, for what you have done, but I hope you understand that I am your debtor for life. Your management of this case is beyond my wildest expectations, and how you did it, I cannot imagine. Some day you must give me the intellectual satisfaction of hearing how the investigation was carried out. Now I can only congratulate you on your brilliant success.”

“I should like to second that,” said Brodribb; “and talking of success, I suppose you didn’t find those deeds after all?”

“No,” replied Thorndyke. “They are not there.”

“Oh, aren’t they?” Brodribb. “Then, if you are so certain where they are not, you probably know where they are?”

“That seems a sound inference,” replied Thorndyke. “But we can’t discuss the matter here. If you care to come to my chambers tomorrow, at two o’clock, we might go into it further, and, in fact, conduct an exploration.”

“Does that invitation include me?” Winifred asked.

“Most undoubtedly,” he replied. “You are the principal party to the transaction. And perhaps you might bring the Book of Hours with you.”

“I believe he has got the deeds stowed away in his chambers,” said Brodribb; and although my colleague shook his head, I felt no certainty that the old lawyer was not right.

When the car had moved off, we carried our cases into the station and were relieved to find that we had but a few minutes to wait for a train. I postponed my attack on my secretive colleague until we were snugly established in a compartment by ourselves. Not that I had any expectations. Thorndyke’s reticence had conveyed to me the impression that the time for explanations had not yet come; and so it turned out when I proceeded to put my questions.

“Wait till we have finished the case, Anstey,” said he. “Then, if you have not worked out the scheme of the investigation in the interval, we can review and discuss it.”

“But surely,” said I, “we have finished with the case of the murder of Andrew Drayton?”

“Not entirely,” he replied. “What you have never realised, I think, is the connection between the problem of the murder and the problem of the missing documents. This is a very curious and interesting case, and those two problems have a very strange connection. But for Owen’s determination to possess the cat’s eye pendant at all costs, those documents might have lain in their hiding-place, unsuspected, for centuries.”

This statement, while it explained Thorndyke’s hitherto unaccountable interest in Percy Blake’s claim, only plunged the other problem into deeper obscurity. During the remainder of the journey I tried to reconstitute the train of events to see if I could trace the alleged connection between the two problems. But not a glimmer of light could I see in any direction; and in the end I gave it up, consoling myself with the reflection that the morrow would probably see the last act played out and that then I might hope for a final elucidation.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

A Relic of the ’45

At two o’clock punctually, on the following afternoon, our visitors made their appearance; and at the very moment when the last of them—Mr. Brodribb—emerged from Crown Office Row, I observed from the window two taxi-cabs, which had entered successively by the Tudor Street gate, draw up before our door. I hailed their arrival with deep satisfaction, for the strange events of the previous day, together with Thorndyke’s rather mysterious observations thereon, had made me impatient to see the end of this intricate case and intensely curious to hear how my inscrutable colleague had managed to fit together the apparently unrelated fragments of this extraordinarily complex puzzle. Throughout the morning—while Thorndyke was absent, and, as I suspected, arranging details of the afternoon’s adventure—I had turned over the facts again and again, but always with the same result. There were the pieces of the puzzle, and no doubt a complete set; but separate pieces they remained, and obstinately refused to join up into anything resembling an intelligible whole.

“I see, Thorndyke,” said Mr. Brodribb as he entered, smiling, rosy, and looking as if he had just come out of a bandbox, “that I did you an injustice. You have not been sitting on the deeds. The chariots are at the door waiting, I suppose, for the band or the stavebearers. We shall be quite an imposing procession.”

“We won’t wait for the band,” said Thorndyke. “As we are all here, we may as well start. Will you conduct Miss Blake down, Anstey?”

“Do I give any directions to the driver?” I asked.

“Yes. You can tell him to put you down at the north-east corner of the Minories.”

Accordingly I led the way with Winifred, and having given the destination to the driver, bestowed my charge and myself in the cab. The driver started the engine, and as the cab made a sweep round to the Tudor Street gate, I heard the door of the other cab slam.

“Have you any idea where we are going, Robin?” Winifred asked as the cab whirled round into New Bridge Street.

“None beyond what I have communicated to the driver,” I replied. “Apparently we are going to explore the Minories or Aldgate or Whitechapel. It is an ancient neighbourhood, and in the days of Percival Blake it was somewhat more aristocratic than it is now. There are good many old houses still standing about there. You may have seen that picturesque group of timber houses looking on Whitechapel High Street. They are nearly all butchers’ shops, and have been, at least, since the days of Charles the Second; in fact, the group is known as Butcher Row, though I think there is an old tavern among them.”

“Perhaps we are going to the tavern,” said Winifred. “It is quite likely. Many of the old inns had secret hiding-places and must have been the favourite rendezvous of the conspirators of those times.”

She continued to speculate on the possibilities of the ancient tavern, which had evidently captured her romantic fancy, and as I looked at her-pink-cheeked, bright-eyed, and full of pleasurable excitement over our adventurous quest—I once more breathed a sigh of thankfulness that the dark days of ever-impending peril were over.

It seemed but a few minutes before the cab drew up at the corner of the Minories; and we had hardly alighted when the other vehicle arrived and disgorged its occupants at our side. The drivers having been paid (and having thereafter compared notes and settled themselves to watch our further proceedings), Thorndyke turned his face eastward and we started together along Whitechapel High Street. I noticed that, now, no one asked any questions. Probably each of us was busy with his own speculations; and in any case, Thorndyke maintained a sphinx-like reticence.

“Are those delightful old houses the ones you were speaking of?” Winifred asked as the ancient, plaster-fronted buildings came in sight.

“Yes,” I answered. “That is Butcher Row.”

“Or,” said Thorndyke, “to give it what is, I believe, its official title, ‘The Shambles,’ though the shambles proper are at the back.”

“The Shambles!” exclaimed Winifred, looking at Thorndyke with a startled expression. She appeared to be about to ask him some question, but at this moment he turned sharply into a narrow alley, into which we followed him. I glanced up at the name as we entered and read it aloud—“Harrow Alley.”

“Yes,” said Thorndyke, “quite a historic little thoroughfare. Defoe gives a very vivid description of its appearance during the Plague, with the dead-cart waiting at the entrance and the procession of bearers carrying the corpses down the narrow court. Here is the old ‘Star and Still’ tavern, and round the corner there are the shambles, very little changed since the seventeenth century.”

He turned the corner towards the shambles, and then, crossing the narrow road, dived through an archway into a narrow paved court, along which we had to go in single file. This court presently opened into a squalid-looking little square, surrounded on three sides by tall, ancient, timber and plaster houses, the fourth side being occupied by a rather mean, but quaint little church with a low brick tower. Thorndyke made his way directly to the west door of the church, and taking from his pocket a key of portentous size, inserted it into the lock. As he did so I glanced at the board that was fixed beside the doorway, from which I learned that this was the church of St Peter by the Minories.

As the door swung open Thorndyke motioned to us to enter. We filed in, and then he drew the door to after us and locked it from the inside. We stood for a few moments in the dim porch under the tower, looking in through the half-opened inner door; and as we stood there, Winifred grasped my arm nervously, and I could feel that her hand was trembling. But there was no time for speech, for as Thorndyke locked the door and withdrew the key, the inner door opened wide and two men—one tall and one short—appeared silhouetted against the east window.

“These are my friends, of whom I spoke to you,” said Thorndyke. “Miss Blake, Sir Lawrence Drayton, Mr. Brodribb, Mr. Anstey—the Reverend James Yersbury. I think you have met this other gentleman.”

We came out into the body of the church, and having made my bow to the clergyman, I turned to the smaller man.

“Why, it’s Mr. Polton!” exclaimed Winifred, shaking hands heartily with my colleague’s familiar; who greeted us with a smile of such ecstatic crinkliness, that I instantly suspected him of preparing some necromantic surprise for us.

“This is quite a remarkable building,” said Sir Lawrence, looking about him with lively interest, “and it appears the more striking by contrast with the shabby, commonplace exterior.”

“Yes,” agreed the clergyman, “that is rather characteristic of old London churches. But this is rather an ancient structure; it was only partially destroyed by the Great Fire and was almost immediately rebuilt, at the personal cost, it is said, of the Duke of York, afterwards James the Second. Perhaps that accounts for the strong Jacobite leanings of some of the later clergy, such as this good gentleman, for instance.”

He led us to a space between two of the windows where a good-sized tablet of alabaster had been let into the wall.

“That tablet,” said he, “encloses a cavity which is filled with bones piously collected from the field of Culloden, and the inscription leaves one in no doubt as to the sentiments of the collector. But I believe it was covered with plaster soon after it was put up, to preserve it from destruction, by the authorities, and it was only discovered about fifty years ago.”

I read the brief inscription with growing curiosity:

PRO PATRIA-PRO REGE 1745

“This Tablet was raised to the Memory of the Faithful by Stephen Rumbold, sometime Rector of this Church.”

“But,” said Winifred, “I thought Stephen Rumbold was rector of St Peter by the Shambles.”

“This is St Peter by the Shambles,” replied Mr. Yersbury. “The name has only been changed within the last forty years.”

Winifred faced me and looked with eager delight into my eyes, and I knew that the same thought was in both our minds. Here, during all the slowly-passing years, the missing deeds had rested, securely hidden with the bones of those patriots at whose side Percival Blake had fought on the fatal field of Culloden. I looked round at Thorndyke, expecting to see some preparations to open this curious little burial-place. But he had already turned away and was moving towards the east end of the church. We followed him slowly until he halted before the pulpit, where he stood for a few moments looking at it reflectively. It was a very remarkable pulpit. I have never seen another at all resembling it. In shape it was an elongated octagon, the panels and mouldings of deep brown oak enriched with magnificent carving. But the most singular feature was the manner in which it was supported. The oblong super-structure rested on twin pillars of oak, each pillar being furnished with a handsome, floridly-ornamented bronze capital and a bronze base of somewhat similar character. But fine as the workmanship was, the design was more unusual than pleasing. The oblong body and the twin pillars had, in fact, a rather ungainly appearance.

“Here,” said Thorndyke, pointing to the pulpit, “is another relic of the Reverend Stephen Rumbold, and one of more personal interest to us than the other. You notice these twin pillars. Aesthetically, they are not all that might be desired, but they serve a useful purpose besides supporting the upper structure, for each of them forms an aumbry, originally designed, no doubt, to conceal the sacred vessels and other objects used in celebrating Mass or Vespers or in administering Communion in accordance with the rites of the Church of Rome. One of them is still discharging this function. This pillar”—here he tapped the northern one of the pair—“contains a chalice and paten, a thurible and a small pyx. This other pillar contains—well, Polton will show us what it contains, so I need not go into particulars.”

“Do I understand,” Drayton asked, “that you have opened the aumbries already and verified the existence and nature of the contents?”

“We have not yet opened the aumbries,” Thorndyke replied, “but we have ascertained that the things are there untouched. Polton and I made an examination some days ago with an X-ray apparatus and a fluorescent screen. It was then that we discovered the plate in the second pillar. I wished Miss Blake to be present at the actual opening.”

At these words, like an actor taking up a cue, Polton appeared from somewhere behind the pulpit bearing a good-sized leather handbag. This he deposited on the floor, and as we gathered round, he took from it a small, rounded mallet, apparently of lead, covered with leather, and a tool of hard wood, somewhat, in shape, like a caulking chisel.

“Which pillar shall I begin on, sir?” he inquired, looking round with a sly smile. “The one with church plate or—”

“Oh, hang the church plate!” interposed Brodribb, adding hastily: “I beg your pardon, Mr. Yersbury, but you know—”

“Exactly,” interrupted the clergyman, “I quite agree with you. The church plate will keep for another half hour.”

Thereupon Polton fell to work, and we crowded up close to watch. The capitals of the pillars presented each two parts, a lower member, covered with ornament, and above this a plain, cylindrical space extending up to the abacus. It was to the lower part that Polton directed his attention. Having mounted on a chair, he placed the edge of the hardwood chisel against the lower edge of the ornamented member and struck it gently with the leaden mallet. Then he shifted the chisel half an inch to the right and struck another blow, and in this way he continued, moving the chisel half an inch after each stroke, until he had travelled a third of the way round the pillar, when Thorndyke placed another chair for him to step on.

“Have you oiled the surface?” my colleague asked.

“Yes, sir,” replied Polton, tapping away like Old Mortality; “I flooded it with a mixture of paraffin and clock oil, and it is moving all right.”

We were soon able to verify this statement, for when Polton had made a complete circuit of the pillar, the plain space above had grown perceptibly narrower and a ring of lighter-coloured wood began to appear below. Still, the leaden mallet continued to deliver its dull sounding taps, and still Polton continued to creep round the pillar.

By the time the second circuit was completed, the sliding part of the capital had risen half-way to the top of the plain space, as was shown by the width of paler, newly-uncovered wood below. And now the sliding member was evidently moving more freely, for there was a perceptible upward movement at each stroke, so that, by the end of the third circuit, the upper, plain space had disappeared altogether and a narrow ring of metal appeared below; and in this ring I perceived a notch about half an inch wide.

“I think she’s all clear now, sir,” said Polton.

“Very well,” said Thorndyke. “We are all ready.”

He relieved Polton of the mallet and chisel and handed him a tool which looked somewhat like a rather slender jemmy with a long, narrow beak. This beak Polton inserted carefully into the notch, when it evidently entered a cavity in the top of the woodwork. Then he began cautiously to prise at the end of the lever.

For a moment or two nothing happened. Suddenly there was a grating sound; the end of the lever rose, and at the same instant about a quarter of the pillar began to separate from the rest and come forward, showing a joint which had been cunningly hidden by the deep fluting. Polton grasped the top of the loose panel, and with a sharp pull, drew it right out and lifted it clear, but as he was in front of the opening, none of us could see what was within. Then he stepped down from the chair, and Winifred uttered a little cry and clasped her hands.

It was certainly a dramatic moment, especially to those of us who had read the manuscript in the little Book of Hours. The pillar was a great shell enclosing a considerable cavity, and in this cavity, standing on the floor, was a tall leaden jar with a close-fitting, flat lid; and on the lid stood a great, two-handled posset-pot. It was all exactly as Percival Blake had described it, and to us, who had formed a mental picture from that description, there was something very moving in being thus confronted with those strangely familiar objects, which had been waiting in their hiding-place for more than a century and a half-waiting for the visit of Percival’s dispossessed posterity.

For some time we stood looking at them in silence. At length Thorndyke said: “You notice, Miss Blake, that there is an inscription on the jar.”

I had not observed it, nor had Winifred; but we now advanced, and looking closely at the jar, made out with some difficulty on the whitened surface an inscription which had apparently been punched into the metal letter by letter, and which read:

“The Contents hereof are the Property of Percival Blake, MD of Beauchamp Blake in Buckinghamshire, or the Heirs of his Body, AD 1746.”

“That,” said Sir Lawrence, as Winifred read the inscription aloud, “settles the ownership of the documents. You can take possession of the jar and its contents with perfect confidence. And now perhaps it would be as well to see what is inside the jar.”

Polton, who had apparently been waiting for this cue, now lit a small spirit blow-pipe. The posset-pot was tenderly lifted out by Winifred and deposited on a pew-bench, and Polton, having hoisted out the jar and placed it on a chair, began cautiously to let the flame of the blow-pipe play on the joint of the lid, which had been thickly coated with wax. When the wax began to liquefy, he introduced the edge of the jemmy into the joint, and with a deft turn of the wrist, raised the lid, which he then took off.

Winifred peered into the jar and announced: “It seems to be full of rolled-up parchments; a statement which we all verified in turn.”

“I would suggest,” said Mr. Yersbury, “that we carry the jar into the vestry. There is a good-sized table there, which will be a convenience if you are going to examine the documents.”

This suggestion was instantly agreed to. Polton took up the rather ponderous jar and made his way to the vestry under the guidance of the clergyman, and the rest of us followed, Winifred carrying the precious posset-pot. Arrived at the vestry, Polton set down the jar on the table, and Sir Lawrence proceeded at once to extract the roll of stiff and yellow parchment and vellum documents. Unrolling them carefully—for they were set into a rigid cylinder—he glanced over them quickly with the air of one looking for some particular thing.

“These are undoubtedly the title-deeds,” he said, still turning over the pages quickly with but a cursory glance at their contents, “but—ha! Yes. These are what we really wanted. I had hoped that we should find them here.”

He drew out from between the leaves of the deeds two small squares of parchment which he exhibited triumphantly and then read aloud:

“I hereby certify and declare that on the thirteenth day of June in the Year of Our Lord seventeen hundred and forty-two, at the church of St Peter by the Shambles, near by Aldgate, the following persons were by me joined together in Holy Matrimony to wit Percival Blake of Beauchamp Blake in the County of Buckinghamshire, Bachelor and Judith Western of Cricklewood in the County of Middlesex, Spinster.

“Stephen Rumbold, MA,

Rector of the said

Church of St Peter by the Shambles.

20th May 1746.”

“That,” said Sir Lawrence, “is what principally matters, but this second certificate clenches the proof. I will read it out:

“I hereby certify and declare that James the Son of Percival and Judith Blake of Beauchamp Blake in the County of Buckinghamshire was baptized by me according to the rites of Holy Church on the thirtieth of May in the Year of Our Lord seventeen hundred and forty-three at the Church of St Peter by the Shambles near by Aldgate.

“Stephen Rumbold, MA,

Rector of the said

Church of St Peter

by the Shambles.

20th May 1746.”

“That,” continued Drayton, “with the other certificates, which I understand you have, establishes a direct descent. And seeing that the estate is at present without an owner, this is a peculiarly opportune moment for putting forward a claim. What do you say, Brodribb?”

“I should like,” said Brodribb, “to have fuller particulars before giving a definite opinion.”

“Oh, come, Brodribb,” Sir Lawrence protested, “you needn’t be so infernally cautious. We’re all friends, you know. Would you be prepared to act for Miss Blake?”

“I don’t see why not,” replied Brodribb. “I am not committed to any other claimant. Yes, I should be very happy to act for her.”

“Then,” said Drayton, “we must arrange a consultation and find out exactly how we stand. I will call at your office for a preliminary talk tomorrow, if that will suit you.”

“Very well,” agreed Brodribb, “come in at one o’clock, and we can lunch together and talk over the preliminaries.”

While this conversation was proceeding, I had observed Thorndyke peering inquisitively into the now empty jar. From this he transferred his attention to the posset-pot which Winifred was guarding jealously. It was a fine specimen of its kind, a comparatively large vessel of many-coloured slip-ware. On the front was a sort of escutcheon, on which was a heart surmounted by a B with the letters H and M on either side and the date 1708 below. Just under the rim was a broad band bearing the following quaint inscription:

“Here is the Gest of the Barly Korne, Glad Ham I the child is Borne.—JM”

“Isn’t it a lovely old thing?” murmured Winifred. “So human and personal and so charming too.”

“Yes,” Thorndyke agreed “it is a fine piece of work. Old Martin was something more than a common village potter. Have you looked inside it?”

“No,” replied Winifred. She took the knob in her fingers and delicately lifted off the cover; and then she uttered a cry of surprise.

“Why,” she exclaimed, “it is the Cat’s Eye—the real cat’s eye this time. And what a beauty!”

She lifted out of the pot a small pendant, curiously like the other one—so much so, in fact, as to suggest that the latter had been a copy. But, whereas the stone in the counterfeit had been a rather dull grey, this one was of a beautiful deep yellow with a brilliant streak of golden light. Attached to the pendant was a slender gold chain and a clasp, which, like the pendant itself, was smooth and rounded with years of wear. After gazing for a while at the flashing stone, Winifred turned the pendant over and looked at the back. The inscription was half-obliterated by wear, but we read without difficulty:

“God’s Providence is Mine Inheritance.”

“It is extremely appropriate,” she commented when she had read it aloud, “though it isn’t quite what one expected. But what I don’t understand is how it comes to be here. Percival distinctly says that he had the jewel and that he intended to give it to Jenifer to keep for the child.”

“Not the jewel,” Thorndyke corrected. “He speaks of ‘the bauble’ and ‘the trinket,’ never of ‘the jewel.’”

“You think he was referring to some other trinket?”

“Obviously,” replied Thorndyke. And then, looking at Winifred with a smile, he exclaimed: “O blind generation! Don’t you see. Miss Blake, that events have shaped themselves precisely as Percival designed? Here is his descendant, the child of his children’s children, coming to the hiding-place wearing the precious bauble around her neck and guided by it to the possessions of her fathers. Could anything be more complete?”

Winifred was thunderstruck. For a while she sat, motionless as a statue, gazing at Thorndyke in speechless amazement. At length she exclaimed: “But this is astounding, Dr Thorndyke! Do you mean that this little locket is the trinket that was given to Jenifer and which she lost?”

“Undoubtedly,” he replied, “and the really strange and romantic circumstance is that it was given into your hand by the very impostor who was seeking to rob you for ever of your inheritance.”

“Then,” exclaimed Sir Lawrence, who was almost as overcome as Winifred herself, “it was actually poor Andrew’s ‘little Sphinx’ that gave you the clue to this hiding-place?”

“Yes,” replied Thorndyke, “only the sphinx was really an oracle, just waiting for the question to be asked.”

Winifred’s eyes filled. Impulsively she grasped my colleague’s hand, murmuring shakily: “What can I say to you, Dr Thorndyke? How can I ever thank you for all that you have done for my brother and me?”

“You need say nothing,” he replied “but that which is written on the back of the cat’s eye.”

Our business being now concluded, Sir Lawrence carefully returned the precious documents to the jar and replaced the cover. From without, a dull tapping that had been audible for some time past, had told us that Polton was at work on the second pillar. But that was no concern of ours.

“What are we going to do now?” asked Sir Lawrence. “It seems as if we should mark the occasion in some way.”

“I agree with you, Drayton,” said Thorndyke, “and I have, in fact, arranged a little festival at my chambers; just a simple tavern dinner, since Polton was otherwise engaged. Will that satisfy the requirements?”

“It will satisfy mine,” replied Drayton, “and I think I can answer for Brodribb.”

“Then,” said Thorndyke, “if Miss Blake will consent to combine the function of hostess with that of principal guest, we will capture Polton and betake ourselves to the Temple.”

We strolled out into the church, where Polton and the rector were gloatingly examining the newly-recovered sacred vessels, and having thanked the friendly clergyman and bidden him a warm farewell, we went forth in search of conveyances. Polton heading the procession with the heavy jar under his arm, and Winifred tenderly carrying the posset-pot swathed in her silken shawl.

In Whitechapel High Street we had the unexpected good fortune to encounter an unoccupied taxi-cab, which was by universal consent assigned to Winifred, Polton, and me. In this we bestowed ourselves and were forthwith spirited away, leaving our companions to follow as best they could. But they were not far behind, for we had barely arrived in the chambers and disposed of our treasure-trove, when a second cab drew up in King’s Bench Walk and our three friends made their appearance at the rendezvous.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Q.E.D.

To an enthusiastic and truly efficient gourmet it might be difficult to assess the respective merits of the different stages of a really good dinner; to compare the satisfactions yielded, for instance, by the first tentative approaches—the little affairs of outposts—with the voracious joy of the grand onslaught on tangible and manducable solids; or again with the placid diminuendo, the half-hearted rear-guard actions, concerned with the unsubstantial trifles on which defeated appetite delivers its expiring kick. For my own part, I can offer no opinion—at any rate, without refreshing my memory as to the successive sensations; but I recall that as our dinner drew to a close, signs of expectancy began to manifest themselves (in Mr. Brodribb’s case they seemed to be associated with the advent of the port decanter), and when Polton had evacuated the casualties to an aid-post established in the adjacent office, Sir Lawrence gave expression to the prevailing state of mind.

“I suppose, Thorndyke, you know what is expected of you?”

Thorndyke turned an impassive face towards his guest. “On these triumphal occasions,” said he, “I usually smoke a Trichinopoly cigar. On this occasion, I presume, I am expected to refrain.”

“Not at all,” replied Drayton. “I think we can endure the Trichy with reasonable fortitude; what we can’t endure is the agony of curiosity. We demand enlightenment.”

“You want to know how the ‘little Sphinx’ answered its own riddle. Is that your demand?”

“I understood you to say,” said I, “that the problem of the crime and that of the missing deeds were one and the same.”

“I said that they were closely connected. But if you want an exposition of the unravelment, it will be more convenient to take them separately and in the order in which they were presented. In which case we begin with the crime.”

He paused, and I saw him glance with an indulgent smile towards the office door which was incompletely closed, and from which issued faint sounds of furtive movement which informed us that Polton had elected to take his dinner within earshot of the exposition.

“We had better begin,” he proceeded, “with the facts presented to us on the night of the tragedy. First as to the criminals. There were traces of two men, and only two. One of these was a tall man, as shown by the size of his feet. He appeared to suffer from some weakness of the left leg. The sound of his footsteps, as heard by Anstey, suggested a slightly lame man, but as he ran away rapidly he could not have been very lame. Yet there was some distinct disability, since he had to draw up a garden seat to enable him to get over a fence which we climbed easily; and the faint impression of the left foot under the fence showed that, when he jumped down, the weight was taken principally by the right. Examination of the cast of his left hand showed a depressed scar on the tip of the forefinger. We also gathered that he carried a Baby Browning pistol and appeared to be a skilful pistol shot.

“Of the other man we learned less. He was noticeably small and slight; he was left-handed; he had dark hair, and at the time of the robbery he was wearing gloves, apparently of kid or thin leather. But later, when examining the tuft of his hair that was found grasped by the deceased, we made an important discovery. Among those dark hairs was a single blonde hair—not white, but golden—which could not have come from his own head. Of its presence there seemed to be only two possible explanations: either it had been rubbed off, or had fallen from the head of some other person, or it had become detached from the inside of a wig. But the first explanation was ruled out—”

“How?” demanded Brodribb.

“By its appearance under the microscope. When you find an alien hair, on your coat-sleeve, for instance—”

“I don’t,” said Brodribb, “at my time of life.”

“—If you examine it under the microscope, or even with a strong lens, you will invariably find it to be a dead hair—a hair which has completed its growth and dropped out of its sheath. You can identify it by the presence of the complete bulb and the absence of the inner root-sheath (which would be adherent to it if it had been pulled out while growing). Well, this blonde hair had no bulb. It had both ends broken, which suggested unusual brittleness, as if it had been treated with some bleach, such as chlorine or hydrogen peroxide. But the hair of wigs shows absence of bulbs and is commonly so treated and is usually somewhat brittle. Thus the probability was that this man had recently worn a wig of artificially bleached hair.

“These were our initial data concerning these two men. There were also some fingerprints, but we will consider those separately. The initial data included the character of the things stolen. These were of insignificant intrinsic value and were very easily identifiable. They were thus quite unacceptable to the ordinary professional thief, yet the evidence (of the suspicious visitor) suggested that they knew what they were stealing. One of the things stolen—the cat’s eye pendant—was known to have an extrinsic value and to have been eagerly sought by other persons, and there was thus the bare suggestion that this pendant might have been the object of the robbery.

“We now come to the fingerprints. These presented some very remarkable anomalies. In the first place, they were not the fingerprints of either of the robbers. That was certain. The small man wore gloves, so they could not have been his; and the tall man had a depressed scar on the tip of his left forefinger, whereas there was no trace of any such scar on the corresponding fingerprint. But if they were not the fingerprints of either of the robbers, whose fingerprints were they? There was no trace of any third person, and it was practically certain that no third person was present.

“But there was another striking anomaly. Although there were numerous impressions, only six digits were represented—the forefinger and thumb of the left hand and the thumb and the first three fingers of the right. Every impression of the right hand showed the same four digits, every impression of the left showed the same two.

“Now what could be the explanation of this curious repetition? Anstey’s very reasonable suggestion was that the man had soiled these particular digits with some foreign substance and that, consequently, the soiled digits alone had made prints. This suggestion received a certain amount of support from the fact that a foreign substance actually was present—it proved, on examination, to be Japanese wax. But though the presence of the wax accounted for the distinctness of the fingerprints that were there, it did not explain why the other fingers had made no mark at all. I examined the glass which bore the fingerprints with the utmost minuteness, but in no case was there the faintest trace of the other fingers. Yet those fingers, if they had existed, must have touched the glass, and if they had touched it they would have made marks. The only explanation seemed to be that there were no other fingers; that the prints were not real fingerprints at all, but counterfeits made by means of facsimile stamps of rubber, roller-composition, or—more probably—chrome gelatine.

“It seemed a far-fetched hypothesis. But it fitted all the facts, and there seemed to be no other explanation. Thus the use of a set of stamps would explain the existence of a set of fingerprints which were not those of either of the parties present; it would explain the repetition of the same group of digits (on the assumption that only six stamps were available which might easily be the case if these stamps were copies of a particular group of fingerprints); and lastly, it would explain the presence of the Japanese wax.”

“How would it?” I asked.

“Well, some foreign substance would be necessary. In a real fingerprint—on glass, for instance—the mark is produced by the natural grease of the fingers. But a rubber or gelatine stamp has no natural grease. It is quite dry, and would make no mark at all unless it were charged with some sticky or greasy material. Now Japanese wax is an ideal material for the purpose. It is markedly sticky and would consequently develop up splendidly with dusting powder; it has no tendency to spread or run, so that it gives very clear impressions; and it might easily be mistaken for natural skin-grease.

“The counterfeit fingerprints hypothesis was, therefore, the only one that explained the facts, and I adopted it provisionally, assuming that the stamps were probably thin plates of rubber or gelatine cemented on the finger tips of the gloves worn by the short man.

“A few days later I received a visit from Detective-Superintendent Miller who informed me that the fingerprints had been identified at the registry as those of a well-known ‘habitual’ named Hedges, more commonly known as Moakey. Of course this did not alter the position since there was no evidence that Moakey had ever been on the premises. However, I decided to wait until he was arrested and hear what he had to say. But he never was arrested. A day or two later, the Superintendent called on me again, and this time he settled the matter finally. My impression was, and is, that he came intending to make a clean breast of the matter, but that at the last moment he shied at the responsibility of giving away official secrets. What he actually said was that there had been a mistake; that the fingerprints were not Moakey’s after all.

“Of course this was absurd. A mistake might occur with a single fingerprint, but with a set of six it was incredible. What had happened appeared to me quite obvious. The fingerprints had been submitted to the experts, who had at once identified them as Moakey’s. Then the executive had set out to arrest Moakey—and had discovered that he was in prison. If that was really what had happened, it furnished conclusive proof that the fingerprints were forgeries.

“At once I set to work to ascertain if it were so. I searched the lists of convictions at assizes, quarter-sessions, and so forth, and eventually ran Moakey to earth. He had been convicted six months previously and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour. So, at the date of the murder, he had been in prison about six months.

“We were now on solid ground. We knew that the fingerprints were forgeries. But we knew more than this. The forgery of a fingerprint, unlike that of a signature, is a purely mechanical operation, carried out either by photography or by some other reproductive process. The forged print is necessarily a mechanical copy of an existing real print. Whence it follows that the existence of a forgery is evidence of the existence of an original. And more than that, it is evidence that the forger had access to that original. Now these forgeries were copies of Moakey’s fingerprints. It followed that we had to look for somebody who had had access to Moakey’s fingerprints.

“Fortunately we had not far to look. At the first interview the Superintendent had referred to a previous exploit of Moakey’s; a burglary at a country house, when that artist was apprehended and convicted on the evidence of his fingerprints, which were found on a silver salver. A photograph of these fingerprints was immediately taken by the owner of the house and given to the police, who took them straight to Scotland Yard. I looked up the report of that case and had the good fortune to find that the fingerprints were described. There were six of them, the thumb and first three fingers of the right hand, and the forefinger and thumb of the left hand.

“This was extremely interesting. But still more so was the fact that the house which was broken into was Beauchamp Blake, and the further fact that the owner who photographed the fingerprints was Mr. Arthur Blake.

“I need not point out the importance of the discovery. It told us that Arthur Blake had had, and presumably still had, in his possession, a set of negatives with which it was possible to make the stamps of these very fingerprints. It did not, however, follow that he had made the stamps, for that would demand an amount of technical knowledge and skill far beyond that of an ordinary photographer; knowledge ordinarily possessed only by professional photo-engravers. He might have such knowledge or he might have employed some one else. At any rate, he had the negatives and had made them himself.

“But Blake was not only associated with the fingerprints. He was also associated with the stolen property. Of all the persons known to us, he was the most likely to wish to acquire the cat’s eye pendant. So, you see, the investigation, which started with a certain connection with Beauchamp Blake, led us straight to Beauchamp Blake again. And there we will leave it for the moment and approach the problem from one or two different directions.

“First we will consider the mysterious woman who came into view on the day of the inquest and who presumably sent the poisoned chocolates. Who was she? And what was her connection with the case? Now, the first thing that struck me in the description of her was her hair. It was of that brassy, golden tint that one associates with bleaches such as hydrogen peroxide. I recalled the stray hair from the small man’s head which had suggested that he had worn a wig of precisely this character. The obvious suggestion was that this woman and that small man were one and the same person. They appeared to be similar in stature, there were good reasons why they should be the same, and no reasons why they should not. But, assuming them to be the same (it was afterwards proved that they were) the question arose, is this woman a disguised man or was that man a disguised woman? The latter view was clearly the more probable, for whereas a woman, if she cuts her hair short, will pass easily for a clean-shaved man, a clean-shaved man does not pass so easily for a woman, especially if he is dark, as this person was. It seemed probable, therefore, that this was really a woman—a dark woman wearing a fair wig. But who she was, and what—if any—was her relation to Blake, remained for the present a mystery.

“We now come to the man Halliburton. Obviously he was an object of deep suspicion. His only known address was an hotel. He visited Andrew Drayton without any reasonable purpose. He tried unsuccessfully to purchase the cat’s eye pendant, and within four days of his failure the jewel was stolen. Then he disappeared, leaving no trace.

“Anstey and I called at his hotel to make enquiries about him. There we obtained a photograph of his signature, which we have not used, but which will be produced at the inquest, and we acquired some information which has been invaluable. He had lost, and left behind, a mascot which he valued so highly that he offered ten pounds reward for its recovery. We got the loan of it, and Polton made this indistinguishable facsimile.” Here Thorndyke passed round Polton’s masterpiece for inspection. “Now,” he continued, “in connection with this mascot, two very important facts emerged. One was that, as Anstey expressed it, this man was a superstitious ass, a man who believed in the occult properties of mascots and charms. The importance of that becomes evident when we remember that the cat’s eye was, in effect, a mascot—an object credited with occult powers affecting the fortunes of its owner. It enables us to understand his anxiety to possess the cat’s eye.

“The other important fact emerges from the nature of the thing itself. It is a neck vertebra of an Echidna, or porcupine ant-eater, decorated with aboriginal ornament. The Echidna is an animal peculiar to Tasmania and Australia, and the ornament is distinctive of the locality. This mascot, therefore, established some connection between Halliburton and Australasia. But Blake had lived most of his adult life in Australia. There was, however, a difficulty. Punched on the mascot—apparently with typefounder’s steel punches—were the letters o and h. The name signed in the hotel register was Oscar Halliburton, and these letters seemed to be his initials. But if that was so, Oscar Halliburton would appear to be a real person and consequently could not be Arthur Blake.

“Thus, at this stage of the inquiry, on the hypothesis that the robbery had been committed by Blake, we had two persons whom we could not account for—the unknown woman (possibly a man) and Mr. Oscar Halliburton.

“But just as we appeared to have reached an impasse, Mr. Brodribb threw a flood of light on the problem. For different reasons, Sir Lawrence and I were anxious to obtain some particulars of Arthur Blake and his affairs, and these particulars Mr. Brodribb was fortunately in a position to supply. The information that he furnished amounted to this:

“Arthur Blake appeared to be a decent, industrious man with nothing against him but the rather queer company that he had kept. He had been associated in Australia with a man named Hugh Owen, who was a person of shady antecedents, and who, on his side, was associated with a woman named Laura Levinsky who appeared to be definitely a bad character, and who, like Owen, was under police observation. These two persons seem to have separated immediately after Blake’s departure for England, and both disappeared. Levinsky was lost sight of for good, but Owen’s body—or rather unrecognisable remains—came to light some years later and was identified by a ring which was known to have belonged to Owen.

“Certain particulars that Mr. Brodribb gave concerning Owen made a considerable impression on me. For instance, it appeared that Owen was originally a photo-engraver by trade and that he had later owned a small type-foundry. Also that he had fractured his left kneecap and that this injury was certainly never completely repaired. But the first thing that struck me on looking at this party of three was that whereas Blake appears to have been a respectable man and most unlikely to have committed an atrocious crime such as the one we were investigating, the same could not be said of his two companions, and inevitably I found the question creeping into my mind: Is it certain that those remains were really the remains of Owen? Or may it have been that they were those of Arthur Blake? That these two criminals had murdered Blake when Brodribb’s letter arrived: that Owen had taken the papers and credentials and come to England personating Blake, and that Levinsky had come by another route?

“It seemed, perhaps, a rather violent supposition; but it was quite possible; and the instant it was adopted as a working hypothesis, all the difficulties of the case vanished as if by magic. We could now account for the mysterious woman. We could also account for Halliburton, for the letters on the mascot could be read either way-o h for Oscar Halliburton or h o for Hugh Owen; and Owen had possessed and used in his type-foundry steel punches exactly like those with which the letters had been made; and further, Owen was a native of Tasmania and had lived many years in Australia. He fitted the mascot perfectly.

“Then Owen had been a photo-engraver; that is to say, he possessed the very kind of knowledge and skill that was necessary to make the stamps for the fingerprints; and he agreed with the taller of the two criminals in that he had a marked weakness of the left leg. In short, the agreements were so striking as to leave little doubt in my mind that our two criminals were Owen and Levinsky, and that the former was in possession of Beauchamp Blake, personating the murdered owner.

“One point only remained to be verified in order to complete this aspect of the case. We had to ascertain whether the man who was posing as Arthur Blake had, in fact, fractured knee-cap. I was casting about for some means of getting this information when the third attempt was made on Miss Blake’s life, and it became evident that the danger to her was too great to admit of further delay. Just then Sir Lawrence asked me to go down with him to Aylesbury, and that proposal suggested to me the plan of visiting Beauchamp Blake and making an unmistakable demonstration. I had learned from Mr. Brodribb something of the squire’s habits, and I got further details from the landlord of the ‘King’s Head.’ With the help of the latter I obtained access to the park at the time when the squire would be coming out, and I planted myself, with Anstey, where we were bound to be noticed.

“My object was twofold. First, I wanted to ascertain, if possible, whether the squire had any abnormal condition of the left leg, and if so, whether that condition was probably due to a fractured knee-cap, and secondly, I proposed to make such a demonstration as would convince him (if he were really Owen) that it was useless to murder Miss Blake until he had settled with me, and that it would be highly unsafe to make any further attempts. To this latter end I attached Polton’s facsimile of the mascot to my watch-guard, where it could hardly fail to be seen, and then, as I have said, I planted myself on the road leading to the gate.

“Both purposes were achieved. I was able to verify with my own eyes the landlord’s statement that the squire habitually mounted his horse from the off-side, a most inconvenient method of mounting, but one that would be rendered absolutely necessary by a fractured left knee-cap. Then, as I had expected, he recognised me instantly—no doubt from the portrait published in the newspapers—and dismounted to examine me more closely; and when he came near, he saw the mascot and it was obvious that he recognised it. I detached it and handed it to him, giving him such details as must have made clear to him that I knew its history and knew of his connection with it. His manner left me in no doubt that he fully understood the hint and that he accepted my challenge, and further proof was furnished by the fact that he sent a man to shadow us home and ascertain for certain who we were. So that matters were now on a perfectly definite footing, and I may add that further verification, if it had been needed, was supplied by the circumstance that, on this very day, Anstey caught a glimpse of Levinsky, disguised as a man, in the market square at Aylesbury. The rest of the story I think you all know.”

“Yes,” said Drayton, “we gathered that from your written statement. But what is not clear to me is why you considered it necessary to thrust your head into the lion’s jaws. You seem to have had a complete case against these two wretches. Why couldn’t you have lodged an information and had them arrested?”

“I was afraid to take the risk,” replied Thorndyke. “To us the case looks complete. But how would it have looked to the police? or to a possibly unimaginative magistrate? or, especially to a jury of ordinary, and perhaps thick-headed, tradesmen and artisans? Juries like direct evidence, and that was what I was trying to produce. I had no doubt that these two persons would try to murder me and Anstey, and that we should prevent them from succeeding. Then we could charge them with the attempt and prove it by direct evidence, after which we could have proceeded confidently with the second charge of the murder of Andrew Drayton.”

“I think Thorndyke was right,” said I, seeing that Sir Lawrence still looked doubtful. “From my large experience of juries in criminal cases, I feel that this intricate train of inferential evidence would have been rather unconvincing by itself, but that it would have been quite effective if it had come after a charge supported by the testimony of eye-witnesses, such as we should have been.”

“Well,” said Drayton, “we will agree that the circumstances justified the risk, and certainly the unravelment of this case by means of such almost invisible data is a most remarkable achievement. This exposition has whetted my appetite for the explanation of the other mystery.”

“Yes,” said Winifred. “I am on tenterhooks to hear how you made the ‘little Sphinx’ answer its own riddle. Shall I hand you the locket?”

“If you please; and the Book of Hours. And if we can get Polton to put the microscope on the table with the slide that is on the stage, we shall have all that we want for the demonstration.”

At this Polton emerged unblushingly from the office, and having put the microscope on the table, carefully adjusted the mirror and then, with brazen effrontery, took a long and intent look through the instrument, under the pretence of seeing that the specimen was properly lighted.

“There is no need for you to go back to the office, Polton,” my colleague said with a smile at his familiar. “We shall want your help with the microscope presently. Draw up a chair for yourself.”

Polton seated himself opposite the instrument with a smile of intense gratification, and Thorndyke then resumed:

“This investigation was a much simpler affair than the other. You may remember, Miss Blake, showing me the locket that night when I called with Anstey at your studio, and you will remember that we noted the very unusual construction; the evident purpose of the maker to render it as strong and durable as workmanship could make it. This curious construction—which I pointed out at the time—caused me to examine it rather closely. And then I made a rather strange discovery.”

Winifred leaned forward and gazed at him with breathless expectancy.

“It was concerned with the hallmark,” he continued. “There are, as you see, four punch-marks. The first is a capital A with two palm-leaves surmounted by a crown. The second is an escutcheon or shape with the initials A.H. surmounted by a crown and over that a fleur-de-lis. The third is a capital L, and the fourth is the head of an animal which looks like a horse. This grouping shows that the piece is French. The first mark is the town mark, the second the maker’s mark, the third is the date letter, and the fourth is the mark of the Farmer of the Duty. Now, I happened to have had occasion to give some attention to the marks on old French plate, and I happened to have read, only an hour or two previously, the fragmentary narrative of Percival Blake. Accordingly, when I examined the hallmark and learned from it that this locket had been made in Paris in the year 1751, that fact at once arrested my attention.”

“How did you learn that from the hallmark?” Winifred asked.

“It is the function of the hallmark to give that information,” he replied. “The town-mark of Paris is a capital A surmounted by a crown, but it varies in style from year to year. This one is a Roman capital with two palm-leaves and a very small crown. That is the form used in the middle of the eighteenth century, but the date is definitely fixed by the date-letter—in this case a capital L, which indicates the year 1751.

“It was, of course, a very remarkable coincidence that this locket should have been made at the place and in the year of Judith Blake’s death, and it naturally caused me to look at the little trinket more narrowly. Hitherto I had assumed, as you did, that the object that Percival referred to was the cat’s eye pendant. But I now recalled that he had not specifically mentioned the pendant, and that he had spoken of it as ‘the bauble’ or ‘the trinket,’ never as ‘the jewel.’ It was thus just barely conceivable that this mysterious little object might be the one to which he was referring; and the instant the question was raised, the evidence supporting it began to run together like drops of water.

“First, there was the inscription, ‘O BIOC BPAXYO H AE TEXNH MAKPH,’ ‘Life is short but Art is long.’ It was the motto of the practitioner of some art or craft. But artists and craftsmen almost invariably use the Latin form, ‘Ars longa, Vita brevis,’ ‘Art is long. Life is short. But there is one body of craftsmen who use the Greek form. It is the motto of the London College of Physicians, and moreover it is written by them in the same uncial characters, with the round, C-shaped sigma. Now Percival was a physician and a fellow of this very college, and he was an enthusiast who originally practised his profession for love and not from necessity or for a livelihood. What more natural than that he should use the motto of his own college?

“Then there was the construction of the locket—everything sacrificed to permanence and durability. It fitted the circumstances perfectly. And there were the unusual suspension rings, specially adapted to take a cord or thong. I recalled the enigmatic words ‘gave me a string from his bass viol, which he says will be the best of all.’ Remembering that the bass viol would be a viol da gamba or violoncello, not a double-bass, we see that this was true; the stout gut string would last for a century or more.

“Then again there were the scripture references which you showed me. The first was ‘And then shall he depart from thee, both he and his children with him, and shall return unto his own family, and unto the possession of his fathers shall he return.’ That was a most striking passage. It was an exact statement of Percival’s aim—incidentally illustrating the way in which the other passages were to be treated; and when I noted that the principal word in the last reference was ‘parchments,’ I felt that a prima facie case had been made out. I had little doubt that this locket was the ‘precious bauble’ that was handed to—and presumably lost by—Jenifer.

“But after all this was only guesswork. We had to get down to certainties. And, fortunately, there was available an excellent and conclusive test. If the locket was Percival’s, the hair in it was almost certainly Judith’s. Now there was something very unusual about Judith’s hair. During her imprisonment it had undergone a most extraordinary change. Percival tells us that when she was released, ‘her hair, that had been like spun gold, was turned to a strange black.’ This was very remarkable. Judith was evidently a true blonde, and when she was arrested, she must have been getting on for thirty years of age. But the hair of a blonde adult does not turn black from ill-health and grief. It tends rather to turn white. What could be the explanation of the change?

“It is a very curious one. Judith had been labouring in the mines in the Harz Mountains. These mines yield a number of different metals, and some of them are extremely poisonous. They are ancient mines, and in the Middle Ages, when the properties of metals were less understood, the terrible condition to which persons who worked in them were reduced by chronic poisoning was put down to the influence of a race of malignant gnomes who were believed to inhabit the mines and who were known as kobolds. In particular, the influence of the kobolds came to be associated with a particular, uncanny ore from which no metal could be—in those days—extracted, and in the end this ore came to be known by the name of these mine-gnomes or kobolds, and that name it bears this day, in the slightly altered form of cobalt.

“Now, the metal, cobalt, has one or two very distinctive properties. One is that of imparting a powerful and beautiful blue colour to substances with which it combines. This was the value of the ore, and for this it has been prized from quite ancient times. We find it in use everywhere. The blue of all the Chinese porcelain is cobalt. The blue of the old Delft pottery is cobalt. The blue in all the old stained-glass windows—and modern ones too—is cobalt.

“Then this metal has another curious property which it shares with arsenic and one or two other metals. It is capable of being absorbed into the body and producing poisonous effects, and when so absorbed, it becomes deposited in the skin, or, more correctly speaking, in the epidermis and its appendages—the fingernails and the hair. But whereas the outer skin and the nails wear away and are cast off, the hair—especially a woman’s hair—remains attached for long periods. Consequently, in chronic cobalt poisoning, the hair becomes charged with a cobalt compound—probably an oxide—and is stained blue.

“Bearing these facts in mind, we can now understand what had happened to Judith. She had been sent to labour in a mine which yielded cobalt, and probably nickel. Her hair had not turned black, it had turned blue, though, in the mass, it would appear black—a strange, unnatural black, as Percival tells us. Thus, if the hair in this locket was the hair of Judith Blake, it would appear blue when properly examined. I took an opportunity to get possession of the locket, and that very night I removed the remains of the cover-glass and picked out a single hair, which I mounted in Canada balsam and examined under the microscope. That hair is on the stage of the microscope now. Polton will bring it round and let you see it.”

Our assistant tenderly carried the microscope round and set it before Winifred, and having adjusted the light and the focus, stepped back to watch the effect.

“But how extraordinary!” she exclaimed as she looked into the eyepiece. “It looks like a thread of blue glass! And how strange and romantic!”

Brodribb and Drayton rose from their chairs and came round, all agog to see this prodigy. In succession they gazed at it with murmurs of astonishment and then went back to their seats, still muttering.

“The appearance of that hair,” Thorndyke resumed, “settled the question conclusively. This was Percival’s trinket beyond a doubt, and all that remained was to read the message inside. As we now knew what to look for, this presented no difficulty at all. It was no cipher or cryptogram. It was simply a collection of texts, from each of which, as the first one showed, the instructed reader would have no difficulty in picking out the significant word or phrase. We may as well just run through them and see what they tell us.

“Number one, Leviticus 25. 41, we have already considered. It is the preamble which indicates the purport of the remainder. I see you have your notebook. Will you read us out the next?”

“Number two,” said Winifred, “is Psalms 121, 1: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help!’ That is the passage, but it doesn’t convey any intelligible meaning to me.”

“No,” said Thorndyke, “it doesn’t, because you have got the wrong Psalm. You looked up your reference in the English Authorised Version, overlooking the fact that Percival was probably a Catholic and certainly a resident in France, and also that the references were given with Latin titles, suggesting that he used the Latin Vulgate. This happens to be matter of vital importance in this case, as the Psalms are not numbered quite alike in the two Bibles. Psalm 121 in the Vulgate is 122 in the Authorised Version. Here is the Douay Bible, which is the official translation of the Vulgate, and if we refer to Psalm 121.1 in it, we find ‘I rejoiced at the things that were said to me; We shall go into the house of the Lord.’ That is quite illuminating. It tells us that we are concerned with a church, and the next reference tells us what church. It is Actus Apostolorum 10.5”

“Yes,” said Winifred, “‘And now send men to Joppa, and call for one Simon, whose surname is Peter.’”

“That,” said Thorndyke, “gives us the church of St Peter. The next,” he continued, glancing at the notebook which Winifred had handed to him, “is Nehemias 8. 4. ‘And Ezra the scribe stood upon a pulpit of wood’—we need not complete the passage. The pulpit of wood is obviously the significant part. Then we come to 3 Lib. Regum 7. 41—by the way, that third book of Kings might have given you a hint that you were not dealing with the Authorised Version. It reads: ‘The two pillars, and the two bowls of the chapiters that were on the top of the two pillars,’ etc. The meaning of this passage was not very clear. It had some connection with the pulpit of St Peters Church, but what the connection was, it was not easy to guess. Of course, directly one saw the pulpit, the meaning was obvious.

“The next reference is to Psalm 31. 7, and again you have taken the Authorised Version and got the wrong Psalm. Psalm 31 in the Vulgate is Psalm 32 in the Authorised Version. Your reading is ‘I will be glad and rejoice in thy mercy: for thou hast considered my trouble; thou hast known my soul in adversities.’ This, as you say, seems quite irrelevant, but if you had turned forward to Psalm 32. 7, you would have read: ‘Thou art my hiding-place’ or ‘refuge,’ as the Vulgate has it, which is very relevant indeed. The last reference is 2 Epist. ad Tim. ‘The cloak that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments.’

“Thus, taking the references together, they suggest to us the ideas of parchments, a hiding-place, and the two pillars (and their capitals) of the wooden pulpit of the church of St Peter. It was perfectly plain and simple to a reader who knew the kind of information that was being given and who knew of the existence of this particular church. To a stranger, on the other hand, it was perfectly meaningless and undecipherable.”

“It certainly looks very simple now that we have heard the explanation,” said Winifred, “but it didn’t seem so when I was trying to work it out myself. There didn’t seem to be anything to go on.”

“No,” agreed Sir Lawrence, “there didn’t seem to be anything to go on in either case. The clues were perfectly invisible, and I don’t believe any one but our friend would have discovered a particle of evidence.”

Brodribb chuckled and reached out for the decanter. “I agree with you, Drayton,” said he. “Thorndyke reminds me of that, probably fabulous, kind of Indian juggler who throws a rope into the air and proceeds to climb up it and pull it up after him. He can work without any visible means of support. However, he has conducted our various affairs to a highly satisfactory conclusion, and I propose that we charge our glasses in his honour and invite him to light the Trichinopoly, which, I believe, is his disgusting habit on occasions of this kind.”

Accordingly the glasses were filled, the toast pledged, and the virulent little cheroot duly lighted; with which mystical rite the case of the Cat’s Eye was formally closed and dismissed into the domain of memory.

There is little more to tell. I am finishing this narrative in a pleasant, panelled room in the old mansion of Beauchamp Blake, one of a suite assigned by Percy to Winifred and me, in which we commonly spend our weekends—for our normal abiding-place is still the Temple. Percy is growing apace, and like his ancestor and namesake, refuses to abandon his professional ambitions. At present he is engaged, under the direction of a famous architect, in restoring the old house to its former comeliness, and only this morning I saw them together superintending the replacement of a perished fascia with a sturdy oaken plank, enriched with fine carving and bearing in raised letters the legend: “God’s Providence is Mine Inheritance.”

THE MYSTERY OF ANGELINA FROOD (1924) [Part 1]

CHAPTER I

The Doper’s Wife

It takes a good deal to surprise a really seasoned medical practitioner, and still more to arouse in him an abiding curiosity. But at the time when I took charge of Dr. Humphrey’s practice in Osnaburgh-street, Regent’s Park, I was far from being a seasoned practitioner, having, in fact, been qualified little more than a year, in which short period I had not yet developed the professional immunity from either of the above mental states. Hence the singular experience which I am about to relate not only made a deep impression on me at the time, but remained with me for long after as a matter of curious speculation.

It was close upon midnight, indeed an adjacent church clock had already struck the third quarter, when I laid aside my book and yawned profoundly, without prejudice to the author who had kept me so long from my bed. Then I rose and stretched myself, and was in the act of knocking the long-extinct ashes out of my pipe when the bell rang. As the servants had gone to bed, I went out to the door, congratulating myself on having stayed up beyond my usual bedtime, but wishing the visitor at the devil all the same. The opening of the door gave me a view of a wet street with a drizzle of rain falling, a large closed car by the kerb, and a tallish man on the doorstep, apparently about to renew his attack on the bell.

“Dr. Pumphrey?” he asked; and by that token I gathered that he was a stranger.

“No,” I answered; “he is out of town, but I am looking after his practice.”

“Very well,” he said, somewhat brusquely. “I want you to come and see a lady who has been suddenly taken ill. She has had a rather severe shock.”

“Do you mean a mental or a physical shock?” I asked.

“Well, I should say mental,” he replied, but so inconclusively that I pressed him for more definite particulars.

“Has she sustained any injuries?” I inquired.

“No,” he answered, but still indecisively. “No; that is, so far as I know. I think not.”

“No wound, for instance?”

“No,” he replied, promptly and very definitely, from which I was disposed to suspect that there was an injury of some other kind. But it was of no use guessing. I hurried back into the surgery, and, having snatched up the emergency bag and my stethoscope, rejoined my visitor, who forthwith hustled me into the car. The door slammed, and the vehicle moved off with the silent, easy motion of a powerful engine.

We started towards Marylebone-road and swept round into Albany-street, but after that I lost my bearings: for the fine rain had settled on the windows so that it was difficult to see through them, and I was not very familiar with the neighbourhood. It seemed quite a short journey, but a big car is very deceptive as to distance. At any rate, it occupied but a few minutes, and during that time my companion and I exchanged hardly a word. As the car slowed down I asked:

“What is this lady’s name?”

“Her name,” he replied, in a somewhat hesitating manner, “is—she is a Mrs. Johnson.”

The manner of the reply suggested a not very intimate acquaintance, which seemed odd under the circumstances, and I reflected on it rapidly as I got out of the car and followed my conductor. We seemed to be in a quiet bystreet of the better class, but it was very dark, and I had but a glimpse as I stepped from the car to the gate of the house. Of the latter, all that I was able to note was that it appeared to be of a decent, rather old-fashioned type, standing behind a small front garden, that the windows were fitted with jalousie shutters, and that the number on the door was 43.

As we ascended the steps the door opened, and a woman was dimly discernible behind it. A lighted candle was on the hall table, and this my conductor picked up, requesting me to follow him up the stairs. When we arrived at the first floor landing, he halted and indicated a door which was slightly ajar.

“That is the room,” said he; and with that he turned and retired down the stairs.

I stood for a few moments on the dark landing, deeply impressed by the oddity of the whole affair, and sensible of a growing suspicion, which was not lessened when, by the thin line of light from within the room, I observed on the door-jamb one or two bruises as if the door had been forced from without. However, this was none of my business, and thus reflecting, I was about to knock at the door when four fingers appeared round the edge of it and drew it further open, and a man’s head became visible in the opening.

The fingers and the head were alike such as instantly to rivet the attention of a doctor. The former were of the kind known as “clubbed fingers,” fingers with bulbous ends, of which the nails curved over like nut-shells. The head, in form like a great William pear, presented a long, coffin-shaped face with high cheekbones, deepset eyes with narrow, slanting eye-slits, and a lofty, square forehead surmounted by a most singular mop of mouse-coloured hair which stood straight up like the fur of a mole.

“I am the doctor,” said I, having taken in these particulars in an instantaneous glance, and having further noted that the man’s eyes were reddened and wet. He made no reply, but drew the door open and retired, whereupon I entered the room, closing the door behind me, and thereby becoming aware that there was something amiss with the latch.

The room was a bedroom, and on the bed lay a woman, fully clothed, and apparently in evening dress, though the upper part of her person was concealed by a cloak which was drawn up to her chin. She was a young woman—about twenty-eight, I judged—comely, and, in fact, rather handsome, but deadly pale. She was not, however, unconscious, for she looked at me listlessly, though with a certain attention. In some slight embarrassment, I approached the bed, and, as the man had subsided into a chair in a corner of the room, I addressed myself to the patient.

“Good evening, Mrs. Johnson. I am sorry to see you looking so ill. What is the matter? I understand that you have had some kind of shock.”

As I addressed her, I seemed to detect a faint expression of surprise, but she replied at once, in a weak voice that was little more than a whisper: “Yes. I have had rather an upset. That is all. They need not really have troubled you.”

“Well, you don’t look very flourishing,” said I, taking the wrist that was uncovered by her mantle, “and your hand is as cold as a fish.”

I felt her pulse, checking it by my watch, and meanwhile looking her over critically. And not her alone. For on the wall opposite me was a mirror in which, by a little judicious adjustment of position, I was able to observe the other occupant of the room while keeping my back towards him; and what I observed was that he was sitting with his elbows on his knees, and his face buried in his hands.

“Might one inquire,” I asked, as I put away my watch, “what kind of shock it is that you are suffering from?”

The faintest trace of a smile stole across her pale face as she answered: “That isn’t really a medical question, Doctor, is it?”

“Perhaps it isn’t,” I replied, though, of course, it was.

But I thought it best to waive the question, as there seemed to be some reservation; and, noting this latter fact, I again considered her attentively. Whatever her condition was, and whatever it might be due to, I had to form my opinion unassisted, for I could see that no information would be furnished; and the question that I had to settle was whether her state was purely mental, or whether it was complicated by any kind of physical injury. The waxen pallor of her face made me uneasy, and I found it difficult to interpret the expression of the set features. Some strong emotion had left its traces; but whether that emotion was grief, horror, or fear, or whether the expression denoted bodily pain, I could not determine. She had closed her eyes, and her face was like a death mask, save that it lacked the serenity of a dead face.

“Are you in any pain!” I asked, with my fingers still on the thready pulse. But she merely shook her head wearily, without opening her eyes.

It was very unsatisfactory. Her appearance was consistent with all kinds of unpleasant possibilities, as was also the strange atmosphere of secrecy about the whole affair. Nor was the attitude of that ill-favoured man whom I could see in the glass, still sitting hunched up with his face buried in his hands, at all reassuring. And gradually my attention began to focus itself upon the cloak which covered the woman’s body and was drawn around her neck up to her chin. Did that cloak conceal anything? It seemed incredible, seeing that they had sent for a doctor. But the behaviour of everybody concerned was incredibly irrational. I produced my stethoscope, which was fitted with a diaphragm that enabled one to hear through the clothing, and, drawing the cloak partly aside, applied the chest-piece over the heart. On this the patient opened her eyes and made a movement of her hand towards the upper part of the cloak. I listened carefully to her heart—which was organically sound, though a good deal disordered in action—and moved the stethoscope once or twice, drawing aside the cloak by degrees. Finally, with a somewhat quick movement, I turned it back completely.

“Why,” I exclaimed, “what on earth have you been doing to your neck?”

“That mark?” she said in a half-whisper. “It is nothing. It was made by a gold collar that I wore yesterday. It was rather tight.”

“I see,” said I, truthfully enough; for the explanation of her condition was now pretty clear up to a certain point.

Of course, I did not believe her. I did not suppose that she expected me to. But it was evidently useless to dispute her statement or make any comment. The mark upon her neck was a livid bruise made by some cord or band that had been drawn tight with considerable force; and it was not more than an hour old. How or by whom the injury had been inflicted was not, in a medical sense, my concern. But I was by no means clear that I had not some responsibilities in the case other than the professional ones.

At this moment the man in the corner uttered a deep groan and exclaimed in low, intense tones, “My God! My God!” Then, to my extreme embarrassment, he began to sob audibly.

It was excessively uncomfortable. I looked from the woman—into whose ghastly face an expression of something like disgust and contempt had stolen—to the huddled figure in the glass. And as I looked, the man plunged one hand into his pocket and dragged out a handkerchief, bringing with it a little paper packet that fell to the floor. Something in the appearance of that packet, and especially in the hasty grab to recover it and the quick, furtive glance towards me that accompanied the action, made a new and sinister suggestion—a suggestion that the man’s emotional, almost hysterical state supported, and that lent a certain unpleasant congruity to the otherwise inexplicable circumstances. That packet, I had little doubt, contained cocaine. The question was how did that fact—if it were a fact—bear on my patient’s condition.

I inspected her afresh, and felt her pulse again. In the man’s case the appearances were distinctive enough. His nerves were in rags, and even across the room I could see that the hand that held the handkerchief shook as if with a palsy. But in the woman’s condition there was no positive suggestion of drugs; and something in her face—a strong, resolute face despite its expression of suffering—and her quiet, composed manner when she spoke, seemed to exclude the idea. However, there was no use in speculating. I had got all the information I was likely to get, and all that remained for me to do was to administer such treatment as my imperfect understanding of the case indicated. Accordingly I opened my emergency bag, and, taking out a couple of little bottles and a measure-glass, went over to the washstand and mixed a draught in the tumbler, diluting it from the water-bottle.

In crossing the room, I passed the fireplace, where, on and above the mantelpiece, I observed a number of signed photographs, apparently of actors and actresses, including two of my patient, both of which were in character costume and unsigned. From which it seemed probable that my patient was an actress; a probability that was strengthened by the hour at which I had been summoned and by certain other appearances in the room with which Dr. Pumphrey’s largely theatrical practice had made me familiar. But, as my patient would have remarked, this was not a medical question.

“Now, Mrs. Johnson,” I said, when I had prepared the draught—and as I spoke she opened her eyes and looked at me with a slightly puzzled expression—“I want you to drink this.”

She allowed me to sit her up enough to enable her to swallow the draught; and as her head was raised, I took the opportunity to glance at the back of her neck, where I thought I could distinctly trace the crossing of the cord or band that had been drawn round it. She sank back with a sigh, but remained with her eyes open, looking at me as I repacked my bag.

“I shall send you some medicine,” I said, “which you must take regularly. It is unnecessary for me to say,” I added, addressing the man, “that Mrs. Johnson must be kept very quiet, and in no way agitated.”

He bowed, but made no reply; and I then took my leave.

“Good night, Mrs. Johnson,” I said, shaking her cold hand gently. “I hope you will be very much better in an hour or two. I think you will if you keep quite quiet and take your medicine.”

She thanked me in a few softly spoken words and with a very sweet smile, of which the sad wistfulness went to my heart. I was loath to leave her, in her weak and helpless state, to the care of her unprepossessing companion, encompassed by I knew not what perils. But I was only a passing stranger, and could do no more than my professional office.

As I approached the door—with an inquisitive eye on its disordered lock and loosened striking-box—the man rose, and made as if to let me out. I wished him good-night, and he returned the salutation in a pleasant voice, and with a distinctly refined accent, quite out of character with his uncouth appearance. Feeling my way down the dark staircase, I presently encountered my first acquaintance, who came to the foot of the stairs with the candle.

“Well,” he said, in his brusque way, “how is she?”

“She is very weak and shaken,” I replied. “I want to send her some medicine. Shall I take the address, or are you driving me back?”

“I will take you back in the car,” said he, “and you can give me the medicine.”

The car was waiting at the gate, and we went out together. As I turned to close the gate after me, I cast a quick glance at the house and its surroundings, searching for some distinctive feature in case recognition of the place should be necessary later. But it was a dark night, though the rain had now ceased, and I could see no more than that the adjoining house seemed to have a sort of corner turret, crowned with a small cupola, and surmounted by a weather-vane.

During the short journey home not a word was spoken, and when the car drew up at Dr. Pumphrey’s door and I let myself in with the key, my companion silently followed me in. I prepared the medicine at once, and handed it to him with a few brief instructions. He took it from me, and then asked what my fee was.

“Do I understand that I am not required to continue the attendance?” I asked.

“They will send for you, I suppose, if they want you,” he replied. “But I had better pay your fee for this visit as I came for you.”

I named the fee, and, when he had paid it, I said: “You understand that she will require very careful and tender treatment while she is so weak?”

“I do,” he answered; “but I am not a member of the household. Did you make it clear to Mr.—her husband?”

I noted the significant hesitation, and replied: “I told him, but as to making it clear to him, I can’t say. His mental condition was none of the most lucid. I hope she has someone more responsible to look after her.”

“She has,” he replied; and then he asked: “You don’t think she is in any danger, I hope?”

“In a medical sense,” I answered, “I think not. In other respects you know better than I do.”

He gave me a quick look, and nodded slightly. Then, with a curt “good-night,” he turned and went out to the car.

When he was gone, I made a brief record of the visit in the day-book, and entered the fee in the cash column. In the case of the experienced Dr. Pumphrey, this would have been the end of the transaction. But, new as I was to medical practice, I was unable to take this matter-of-fact view of its incidents. My mind still surged with surprise, curiosity, and a deep concern for my fair patient. Filling my pipe, I sat down before the gas fire to think over the mystery to which I had suddenly become a party.

What was it that had happened in that house T Obviously, something scandalous and sinister. The secrecy alone made that manifest. Not only had the whereabouts of the house been withheld from me, but a false name had been given. I realized that when my late visitor stumbled over the name and substituted “her husband,” He had forgotten what name it was that he had given on the spur of the moment. I understood, too, the look of surprise that my patient had given when I addressed her by that false name. Clearly, something had happened which had to be hushed up if possible.

What was it? The elements of the problem, and the material for solving it, were the mark on the woman’s neck, the condition of the door, and a packet which I felt morally certain contained cocaine. I considered these three factors separately and together.

The mark on the neck was quite recent. Its character was unmistakable. A cord or band had been drawn tight and with considerable violence, either by the woman herself, or by some other person: that is to say, it was a case either of attempted suicide or attempted murder. To which of these alternatives did the circumstances point?

There was the door. It had been broken in, and had therefore been locked on the inside. That was consistent with suicide, but not inconsistent with murder. Then, by whom had it been broken in? By a murderer to get at his victim? Or by a rescuer? And if the latter, was it to avert suicide or murder?

Again, there was the drug—assumed, but almost certain.

What was the bearing of that? Could these three persons be a party of “dopers,” and the tragedy the outcome of an orgy of drug-taking? I rejected this possibility at once. It was not consistent with the patient’s condition nor with her appearance or manner; and the man who had fetched me and brought me back was a robust, sane-looking man who seemed quite beyond suspicion.

I next considered the persons. There were three of them: two men and a woman. Of the men, one was a virile, fairly good-looking man of perhaps forty; the other—the husband—was conspicuously unprepossessing, physically degenerate and mentally, as I judged, a hysterical poltroon. Here there seemed to be the making of trouble, especially when one considered the personal attractiveness of the woman.

I recalled her appearance very vividly. A handsome woman, not, perhaps, actually beautiful—though she might have been that if the roses of youth and health had bloomed in those cheeks that I had seen blanched with that ghastly pallor. But apart from mere comeliness, there was a suggestion of a pleasing, gracious personality. I don’t know how it had been conveyed to me, excepting by the smile with which she had thanked me and bidden me farewell: a smile that had imparted a singular sweetness to her face. But I had received that impression, and also that she was a woman of decided character and intelligence.

Her appearance was rather striking. She had a great mass of dark hair, parted in the middle, and drawn down over the temples, nearly covering the ears; darkish grey eyes, and unusually strong, black, level eyebrows, that almost met above the straight, shapely nose. Perhaps it was those eyebrows that gave the strength and intensity to her expression, aided by the compressed lips—though this was probably a passing condition due to her mental state.

My cogitations were prolonged well into the small hours, but they led to nothing but an open verdict. At length I rose with a slight shiver, and, dismissing the topic from my mind, crept up to bed.

But both the persons and the incident refused to accept their dismissal. For many days afterwards I was haunted by two faces; the one, ugly, coffin-shaped, surmounted by a shock of soft, furry, mouse-coloured hair; the other, sweet, appealing, mutely eloquent of tragedy and sorrow. Of course, I received no further summons; and the whereabouts of the house of mystery remained a secret until almost the end of my stay in Osnaburgh-street. Indeed, it was on the very day before Dr. Pumphrey’s return that I made the discovery.

I had been making a visit to a patient who lived near Regent’s Park, and on my way back had taken what I assumed to be a short cut. This led me into a quiet, old fashioned residential street, of which the houses stood back behind small front gardens. As I walked along the street I seemed to be aware of a faint sense of familiarity which caused me to observe the houses with more than usual attention. Presently I observed a little way ahead on the opposite side a house with a corner turret topped by a cupola, which bore above it a weather-vane. I crossed the road as I approached it, and looked eagerly at the next house. Its identity was unmistakable. My attention was immediately attracted by the jalousies with which the windows were fitted, and on looking at the front door I observed that the number was forty-three.

This, then, was the house of mystery, perhaps of crime.

But whatever that tragedy had been, its actors were there no longer. The windows were curtainless and blank; an air of Spring-cleaning and preparation pervaded the premises, and a bill on a little notice-board announced a furnished house to let, and invited inquiries. For a moment, I was tempted to accept that invitation. But I was restrained by a feeling that it would be in a way a breach of confidence. The names of those persons had been purposely withheld from me, doubtless for excellent reasons, and professional ethics seemed to forbid any unauthorized pryings into their private affairs. Wherefore, with a valedictory glance at the first-floor window, which I assumed to be that of the room that I had entered, I went on my way, telling myself that, now, the incident was really closed, and that I had looked my last on the persons who had enacted their parts in it.

In which, however, I was mistaken. The curtain was down on the first act, but the play was not over. Only the succeeding acts were yet in the unfathomed future. “Coming events cast their shadows before them,” but who can interpret those shadows, until the shapes which cast them loom up, plain and palpable, to mock at their own unheeded premonitions?

CHAPTER II

Re-Enter “Mr. Johnson”

It was a good many months before the curtain rose on the second act of the drama of which this narrative is the record. Rather more than a year had passed, and in that time certain changes had taken place in my condition, of which I need refer only to the one that, indirectly, operated as the cause of my becoming once more a party to the drama aforesaid. I had come into a small property, just barely sufficient to render me independent, and to enable me to live in idleness, if idleness had been my hobby. As it was not, I betook myself to Adam-street, Adelphi, to confer with my trusty medical agent, Mr. Turcival, and from that conference was born my connexion with the strange events which will be hereafter related.

Mr. Turcival had several practices to sell, but only one that he thought quite suitable. “It is a death vacancy,” said he, “at Rochester. A very small practice, and you won’t get much out of it, as the late incumbent was an old man and you are a young man—and you look ten years younger since you shaved off that fine beard and moustache. But it is going for a song, and you can afford to wait; and you couldn’t have a more pleasant place to wait in than Rochester. Better go down and have a look at it. I’ll write to the local agents, Japp and Bundy, and they will show you the house and effects. What do you say?”

I said “yes,” and so favourably was I impressed that the very next day found me in a first-class compartment en route for Rochester, with a substantial portmanteau in the guard’s van.

At Dartford it became necessary to change, and as I sauntered on the platform, waiting for the Rochester train, my attention was attracted to a man who sat, somewhat wearily and dejectedly, on a bench, rolling a cigarette. I was impressed by the swift dexterity with which he handled the paper and tobacco, a dexterity that was explained by the colour of his fingers, which were stained to the hue of mahogany. But my attention was quickly diverted from the colour of the fingers to their shape. They were clubbed fingers. At the moment when I observed the fact I was looking over his shoulder from behind, and could not see his face. But I could see that he had a large, pear-shaped head, surmounted by an enormous cap, from beneath which a mass of mouse-coloured hair stuck out like untidy thatch.

I suppose I must have halted unconsciously, for he suddenly looked round, casting at me a curious, quick, furtive, suspicious glance. He evidently did not recognize me—naturally, since my appearance was so much changed; but I recognized him instantly. He was “Mr.—, her husband.” And his appearance was not improved since I had last seen him. Inspecting him from the front, I observed that he was sordidly shabby and none too clean, and that his large, rough boots were white with dust as if from a long tramp on the chalky Kentish roads.

When the train came in, I watched him saunter to a compartment a few doors from my own, rolling a fresh cigarette as he went: and at each station when we stopped, I looked out of the window to see where he got out. But he made no appearance until the train slowed down at Rochester when I alighted quickly and strolled towards his compartment. It had evidently been well filled, for a number of passengers emerged before he appeared, contesting the narrow doorway with a stout workman. As he squeezed past, the skirt of his coat caught and was drawn back, revealing a sheath-knife of the kind known to seamen as “Green River,” attached to a narrow leather belt. I did not like the look of that knife. No landsman has any legitimate use for such a weapon. And the fact that this man habitually carried about him the means of inflicting lethal injuries—for it had no other purpose—threw a fresh light, if any were needed, on the sinister events of that memorable night in the quiet house near Regent’s Park.

As I had to look after my luggage, I lost sight of him; and when having deposited my portmanteau in the cloak room, I walked out across the station approach and looked up and down the street, he was nowhere to be seen. Dimly wondering what this man might be doing in Rochester, and whether his handsome wife were here, too—assuming her to be still in existence—I turned and began to saunter slowly westward. I had walked but two or three hundred yards when the door of a tavern which I was approaching opened, and a man emerged, licking his lips with uncommon satisfaction, and rolling a cigarette. It was my late fellow-traveller. He stood by the tavern door, looking about him, and glancing at the people on the footway. Just as I was passing him, he approached me and spoke.

“I wonder,” said he, “if you happen to know a Mrs. Frood who lives somewhere about here.”

“I am afraid I don’t,” I replied, thankful to be able to tell the truth—for I should have denied knowledge of her in any case. “I am a stranger to the town at present.”

He thanked me and turned away, and I walked on, but no longer at a saunter, wondering who Mrs. Frood might be and keeping an eye on the numbers of the houses on the opposite side of the street.

A few minutes walk brought into view the number I was seeking, painted in the tympanum of a handsome Georgian portico appertaining to one of a pair of pleasant old redbrick houses. I halted to inspect these architectural twins before crossing the road. Old houses always interest me, and these two were particularly engaging, as their owners apparently realized, for they were in the pink of condition, and the harmony of the quiet green woodwork and the sober red brick was no chance effect. Moreover they were painted alike to carry out the intention of the architect, who had evidently designed them to form a single composition; to which end he had very effectively placed, between the twin porticoes, a central door which gave access to a passage common to the two houses and leading, no doubt, to the back premises.

Having noted these particulars, I crossed the road and approached the twin which bore beside its doorway a brass plate, inscribed “Japp and Bundy, Architects and Surveyors.” In the adjoining bay window, in front of a green curtain, was a list of houses to let; and as I paused for a moment to glance at this, a face decorated with a pair of colossal tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, rose slowly above the curtain, and then, catching my eye, popped down again with some suddenness.

I ascended the short flight of steps to the open street door, and entering the hall, opened the office door and walked in. The owner of the spectacles was perched on a high stool at a higher desk with his back to me, writing in a large book. The other occupant of the office was a small, spare, elderly man, with a pleasant wrinkly face and a cockatoo-like crest of white hair, who confronted me across a large table on which a plan was spread out. He looked up interrogatively as I entered, and I proceeded at once to announce myself.

“I am Dr. Strangeways,” said I, drawing a bundle of papers from my pocket. “Mr. Turcival—the medical agent, you know—thought I had better come down and settle things up on the spot. So here I am.”

“Precisely,” said my new acquaintance, motioning me to a chair—it was a shield-back Heppelwhite, I noticed—“I agree with Mr. Turcival. It is all quite plain sailing. The position is this: Old Dr. Partridge died about three weeks ago, and the executor of his will, who lives in Northumberland, has instructed us to realize his estate. We have valued the furniture, fittings, and effects, have added a small amount to cover the drugs and instruments and the goodwill of the practice, and this is the premium. It is practically just the value of the effects.”

“And the lease of the house?”

“Expired some years ago and we allowed Dr. Partridge to remain as a yearly tenant, which he preferred. You could do the same or you could have a lease, if you wished.”

“Is the house your property?” I asked.

“No; but we manage it for the owner, a Mrs. Frood.”

“Oh, it belongs to Mrs. Frood, does it?”

He looked up at me quickly, and I noticed that the gentleman at the desk had stopped writing. “Do you know Mrs. Frood?” he asked.

“No; but it happens that a man who came down by my train asked me a few minutes ago if I could give him her address. Fortunately I couldn’t.”

“Why fortunately?”

The question brought me, up short. My prejudice against the man was due to my knowledge of his antecedents, which I was not prepared to disclose. I therefore replied evasively:

“Well, I wasn’t very favourably impressed by his appearance. He was a shabby-looking customer. I suspected that he was a cadger of some kind.”

“Indeed! Now, what sort of a person was he? Could you describe him?”

“He was a youngish man—from thirty-five to forty, I should say—apparently well educated but very seedy and not particularly clean. A queer-looking man, with a big, pear-shaped head and a mop of hair like the fur of a Persian cat. His fingers are clubbed at the ends, and stained with tobacco to the knuckles. Do you know him?”

“I rather suspect I do. What do you say, Bundy?”

Mr. Bundy grunted. “Hubby, I ween,” said he.

“You don’t mean Mrs. Frood’s husband?” I exclaimed.

“I do. And it is, as you said, very fortunate that you were not able to give him her address, as she is unable to live with him and is at present unwilling to let him know her whereabouts. It is an unfortunate affair. However, to return to your business; you had better go up and have a look at the house and see what you think of it. You might just walk up with Dr. Strangeways, Bundy.”

Mr. Bundy swung round on his stool, and, taking off his spectacles, stuck in his right eye a gold-rimmed monocle, through which he inspected me critically. Then he hopped off the stool, and, lifting the lid of the desk, took out a velour hat and a pair of chamois gloves, the former of which he adjusted carefully on his head before a small mirror, and, having taken down a labelled key from a key-board and provided himself with a smart, silver-mounted cane, announced that he was ready.

As I walked along the picturesque old street at Mr. Bundy’s side, I reverted to my late fellow passenger and my prospective landlady.

“I gather,” said I, “that Mrs. Frood’s matrimonial affairs are somewhat involved.”

“So do I,” said Bundy. “Seems to have made a regular mucker of it. I don’t know much about her, myself, but Japp knows the whole story. He’s some sort of relative of hers; uncle or second cousin or something of the kind. But Japp is a bit like the sailor’s parrot: he doesn’t let on unnecessarily.”

“‘What sort of a woman is Mrs. Frood?” I asked.

“Oh, quite a tidy sort of body. I’ve only seen her once or twice; haven’t been here long myself: tallish woman, lot of black hair; thick eyebrows; rather squeaky voice. Not exactly my idea of a beauty, but Frood seems quite keen on her.”

“By the way, how comes it that he doesn’t know her address? She’s a Rochester woman, isn’t she?”

“No. I don’t know where she comes from. London, I think. This property was left to her by an aunt who lived here: a cousin of Japp’s. Angelina came down here a few weeks ago on the q.t. to get away from hubby, and I fancy she’s been keeping pretty close.”

“She’s living in lodgings, then, I suppose?”

“Yes; at least she lives in a set of offices that Japp furnished for her, and the lady who rents the rest of the house looks after her. As a matter of fact, the offices are next door to ours; but you had better consider that information as confidential, at any rate while hubby is in the neighbourhood. This is your shanty.”

He halted at the door of a rather small, red brick house, and while I was examining the half-obliterated inscription on the brass plate, he thrust the key into the lock and made ineffectual efforts to turn it. Suddenly there was a loud click from within, followed by the clanking of a chain and the drawing of bolts. Then the door opened slowly, and a long-faced, heavy-browed, elderly woman surveyed us with a gloomy stare.

“Why didn’t you ring the bell?” she demanded, gruffly. “Had a key,” replied Bundy, extracting it, and flourishing it before her face.

“And what’s the good of a key when the door was bolted and chained?”

“But, naturally, I couldn’t see that the door was bolted and chained.”

“I suppose you couldn’t with that thing stuck in your eye. Well, what do you want?”

“I have brought this gentleman, Dr. Strangeways, to see you. He has seen your portraits in the shop windows and wished to be introduced. Also he wants to look over the house. He thinks of taking the practice.”

“Well, why couldn’t you say that before?” she demanded.

“Before what?” he inquired blandly.

She made no reply other than a low growl, and Bundy continued:

“This lady, Dr. Strangeways, is the renowned Mrs. Dunk, more familiarly known as La Giaconda, who administered the domestic affairs of the late Dr. Partridge, and is at present functioning as custodian of the premises.” He concluded the presentation by a ceremonious bow and a sweep of his hat, which Mrs. Dunk acknowledged by turning her back on him and producing a large bunch of keys, with which she proceeded to unlock the doors that opened on the hall.

“The upstairs rooms are unlocked,” she said, adding: “If you want me you can ring the bell,” and with this she retired to the basement stairs and vanished.

My examination of the rooms was rather perfunctory, for I had made up my mind already. The premium was absurdly small, and I could see that the house was furnished well enough for my immediate needs. As to the practice, I had no particular expectations.

“Better have a look at the books,” said Bundy when we went into the little surgery, “though Mr. Turcival has been through them, and I daresay he has told you all about the practice.”

“Yes,” I answered, “he told me that the practice was very small and that I probably shouldn’t get much of it, as Partridge was an old man and I am a young one. Still, I may as well glance through the books.”

Bundy laid the day book and ledger on the desk and placed a stool by the latter, and I seated myself and began to turn over the leaves and note down a few figures on a slip of paper, while my companion beguiled the time by browsing round the surgery, taking down bottles and sniffing at their contents, pulling out drawers and inspecting the instruments and appliances. A very brief examination of the books served to confirm Mr. Turcival’s modest estimate of the practice, and when I had finished, I closed them and turned round to report to Mr. Bundy, who was, at the moment, engaged in “sounding” the surgery clock with the late Dr. Partridge’s stethoscope.

“I think it will do,” said I. “The practice is negligible, but the furniture and fittings are worth the money, and I daresay I shall get some patients in time. At any rate, the premises are all in going order.”

“You are not dependent on the practice, then?” said he.

“No. I have enough just barely to exist on until the patients begin to arrive. But what about the house?”

“You can have a lease if you like, or you can go on with the arrangement that Partridge had. If I were you, I should take the house on a three years’ agreement with the option of a lease later if you find that the venture turns out satisfactorily.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “that seems a good arrangement. And when could I have possession?”

“You’ve got possession now if you agree to the terms. Say yes, and I’ll draft out the agreement when I get back. You and Mrs. Frood can sign it this evening. You give us a cheque and we give you your copy of the document, and the thing is d-u-n, done.”

“And what about this old woman?”

“La Giaconda Dunkibus? I should keep her if I were you. She looks an old devil, but she’s a good servant. Partridge had a great opinion of her, so Japp tells me, and you can see for yourself that the house is in apple-pie order and as clean as a new pin.”

“You think she would be willing to stay?”

Bundy grinned (he was a good deal given to grinning, and he certainly had a magnificent set of teeth). “Willing?” he exclaimed. “She’s going to stay whether you want her or not. She has been here the best part of her life and nothing short of a torpedo would shift her. You’ll have to take her with the fixtures, but I don’t think you’ll regret it.”

As Bundy was speaking, I had been, half-unconsciously, looking him over, interested in the queer contrast between his almost boyish appearance and gay irresponsible manner on the one hand, and, on the other, his shrewdness, his business capacity, and his quick, decisive, evidently forceful character.

To look at, he was just a young “nut,” small, spruce, dandified, and apparently not displeased with himself. His age I judged to be about twenty-five, his height about five feet six. In figure, he was slight, but well set-up, and he seemed active and full of life and energy. He was extraordinarily well turned-out. From his close-cropped head, with the forelock “smarmed” back in the correct “nuttish” fashion, so that his cranium resembled a large black-topped filbert, to his immaculately polished and remarkably small shoes, there was not an inch of his person that had not received the most careful attention. He was clean-shaved; so clean that on the smooth skin nothing but the faint blue tinge on cheek and chin remained to suggest the coarse and horrid possibilities of whiskers. And his hands had evidently received the same careful attention as his face; indeed, even as he was talking to me, he produced from his pocket some kind of ridiculous little instrument with which he proceeded to polish his fingernails.

“Shall I ring the bell?” he asked after a short pause, “and call up the spirit of the Dunklett from the vasty deep? May as well let her know her luck.”

As I assented he pressed the bell-push, and in less than a minute Mrs. Dunk made her appearance and stood in the doorway, looking inquiringly at Bundy, but uttering no sound.

“Dr. Strangeways is going to take the practice, Mrs. Dunk,” said Bundy, “inclusive of the house, furniture, and all effects, and he is also prepared to take you at a valuation.”

As the light of battle began to gleam in Mrs. Dunk’s eyes, I thought it best to intervene and conduct the negotiations myself.

“I understand from Mr. Bundy,” said I, “that you were Dr. Partridge’s housekeeper for many years, and it occurred to me that you might be willing to act in the same capacity for me. What do you say?”

“Very well,” she replied. “When do you want to move in?”

“I propose to move in at once. My luggage is at the station.”

“Have you checked the inventory?” she asked.

“No, I haven’t, but I suppose nothing has been taken away?”

“No,” she answered. “Everything is as it was when Dr. Partridge died.”

“Then we can go over the inventory later. I will have my things sent up from the station, and I shall come in during the afternoon to unpack.”

She agreed concisely to this arrangement, and, when we had settled a few minor details, I departed with Bundy to make my way to the station and thereafter to go in search of lunch.

“You think,” said I, as we halted opposite the station approach, “that we can get everything completed today?”

“Yes,” he replied, “I will get the agreement drawn up in the terms that we have just settled on, and will make an appointment with Mrs. Frood. You had better look in at the office about half-past six.”

He turned away with a friendly nod and a flash of his white teeth, and bustled off up the street, swinging his smart cane jauntily, and looking, with his trim, well-cut clothes, his primrose-coloured gloves, and his glistening shoes, the very type of cheerful, prosperous, self-respecting and self-satisfied youth.

CHAPTER III

Angelina Frood

Punctually at half-past six I presented myself at the office of Messrs. Japp and Bundy. The senior partner was seated at a writing-table covered with legal-looking documents, and, as I entered, he looked up with a genial, wrinkly smile of recognition, and then turned to his junior.

“You’ve got Dr. Strangeways’s agreement ready, haven’t you, Bundy?” he asked.

“Just finished it five minutes ago,” was the reply. “Here you are.”

Bundy swung round on his stool and held out the two copies. “Would you mind going through it with Dr. Strangeways?” said Japp. “And then you might go with him to Mrs. Frood’s and witness the signatures. I told her you were coming.”

Bundy pulled out his watch, and glared at it through his great spectacles.

“By Jove!” he exclaimed, “I’m afraid I can’t. There’s old Baldwin, you know. I’ve got to be there at a quarter to seven.”

“So you have,” said Japp, “I had forgotten that. You had better be off now. I’ll see to Dr. Strangeways, if he isn’t in a hurry for a minute or two.”

“I’m not in a hurry at all,” said I. “Don’t put yourself out for me.”

“Well, if you really are not,” said Japp, “I’ll just finish what I am doing, and then I’ll run in with you and get the agreement completed. You might look through it while you are waiting and see that it is all in order.”

Bundy handed me the agreement, and, as I sat down to study it, he removed his spectacles, hopped off his perch, brought forth his hat, gloves, and stick, and, having presented his teeth for my inspection, took his departure.

I read through the agreement carefully to ascertain that it embodied the terms agreed on verbally and compared the two copies. Then, while Mr. Japp continued to turn over the leaves of his documents, I let my thoughts stray from the trim, orderly office to the house of mystery in London and the strange events that had befallen there on that rainy night more than a year ago. Once more I called up before the eyes of memory the face of my mysterious patient, sweet and gracious in spite of its deathly pallor. Many a time, in the months that had passed, had I recalled it: so often that it seemed, in a way, to have become familiar. In a few minutes I was going to look upon that face again—for there could be no reasonable doubt that my prospective landlady was she. I looked forward expectantly, almost with excitement, to the meeting. Would she recognize me? I wondered. And if she did not, should I make myself known? This was a difficult question, and I had come to no decision upon it when I was aroused from my reverie by a movement on the part of Mr. Japp, whose labours had apparently come to an end. Folding up the documents and securing them in little bundles with red tape, he deposited them in a cupboard with his notes, and from the same receptacle took out his hat.

“Now,” said he, “if you find the agreement in order, we will proceed to execute it. Are you going to pay the premium now’”

“I have my cheque-book with me,” I replied. “When we have signed the agreement, I will settle up for everything.”

“Thank you,” said he. “I have prepared a receipt which is, practically, an assignment of the furniture and effects and of all rights in the practice.”

He held the door open and I passed out. We descended the steps, and passing the central door common to the two houses, ascended to that of the adjoining house, where Mr. Japp executed a flourish on a handsome brass knocker. In a few moments the door was opened by a woman whom I couldn’t see very distinctly in the dim hall, especially as she turned about and retired up the stairs. Mr. Japp advanced to the door of the front room and rapped with his knuckles, whereupon a high, clear, feminine voice bade him come in. He accordingly entered, and I followed.

The first glance disposed of any doubts that I might have had. The lady who stood up to receive us was unquestionably my late patient, though she looked taller than I had expected. But it was the well-remembered face, less changed, indeed, than I could have wished, for it was still pale, drawn, and weary, as I could see plainly enough in spite of the rather dim light; for, although it was not yet quite dark, the curtains were drawn and a lamp lighted on a small table, beside which was a low easy-chair, on which some needlework had been thrown down.

Mr. Japp introduced me to my future landlady, who bowed, and having invited us to be seated, took up her needlework and sat down in the easy-chair.

“You are not looking quite up to the mark,” Japp observed, regarding her critically, as he turned over the papers.

“No,” she admitted, “I think I am a little run down.”

“H’m,” said Japp. “Oughtn’t to get run down at your age. Why, you are only just wound up. However, you’ve got a doctor for a tenant, so you will be able to take out some of the rent in medical advice. Let me see, I told you what the terms of the agreement were, but you had better look through it before you sign.”

He handed her one of the documents, which she took from him, and, dropping her needlework in her lap, leaned back in her chair to read it. Meanwhile, I examined her with a good deal of interest and curiosity, wondering how she had fared and what had happened to her in the months that had elapsed since I had last seen her. The light was not very favourable for a minute inspection, for the lamp on the table was the sole luminary, and that was covered by a red silk shade. But I was confirmed in my original impression of her. She was more than ordinarily good-looking, and rather striking in appearance, and I judged that under happier conditions she might have appeared even more attractive. As, it was, the formally parted dark hair, the strongly marked, straight eyebrows, the firm mouth, rather compressed and a little drawn down at the corners, and the pale complexion imparted to her face a character that was somewhat intense, sombre, and even troubled. But, for this I could fully account from my knowledge of her circumstances, and I was conscious of looking on her with a very sympathetic and friendly eye.

“This is quite satisfactory to me,” she said at length, in the clear, high-pitched voice to which Bundy had objected, “and if it is equally so to Dr. Strangeways, I suppose I had better sign.”

She laid the paper on the table, and, taking the fountain-pen that Japp proffered, signed her name, Angelina Frood, in a bold, legible hand, and then returned the pen to its owner; who forthwith affixed his signature as witness and spread out the duplicate for me to sign. When this also was completed, he handed me the copy signed by Mrs. Frood and the receipt for the premium, and I drew a cheque for the amount and delivered it to him.

“Many thanks,” said he, slipping it into a wallet and pocketing it. “That concludes our business and puts you finally in possession. I wish you every success in your practice. By the way, I mentioned to Mrs. Frood that you had seen her husband and that you know how she is placed; and she agreed with me that it was best that you should understand the position in case you should meet him again.”

“Certainly,” Mrs. Frood agreed. “There is no use in trying to make a secret of it. He came down with you from London, Mr. Japp tells me.”

“Not from London,” said I. “He got in at Dartford.” Here Mr. Japp rose and stole towards the door. “Don’t let me interrupt you,” said he, “but I must get back to the office and hear what Bundy has to report. Don’t get up. I can let myself out.”

He made his exit quietly, shutting the door after him, and as soon as he was gone Mrs. Frood asked:

“Do you mean that he changed into your train at Dartford?”

“No,” I answered. “I think he came to Dartford on foot. He looked tired and his boots were covered with white dust.”

“You are very observant, Dr. Strangeways,” she said.

“I wonder what made you notice him so particularly?”

“He is rather a noticeable man,” I said, and then, deciding that it was better to be quite frank, I added: “But the fact is I had seen him before.”

“Indeed!” said she. “Would you think me very inquisitive if I asked where you had seen him?”

“Not at all,” I answered. “It was a little more than a year ago, about twelve o’clock at night, in a house near Regent’s Park, to which I was taken in a closed car to see a lady.”

As I spoke she dropped her needlework and sat up, gazing at me with a startled and rather puzzled expression. “But,” she said, “you are not the doctor who came to see me that night?”

“I am, indeed,” said I.

“Now,” she exclaimed, “isn’t that an extraordinary thing? I had a feeling that I had seen you somewhere before. I seemed to recognize your voice. But you don’t look the same. Hadn’t you a beard then?”

“Yes, I am but the shaven and shorn remnant of my former self, but I am your late medical attendant.”

She looked at me with an odd, reflective, questioning expression, but without making any further comment. Presently she said:

“You were very kind and sympathetic though you were so quiet. I wonder what you thought of it all.”

“I hadn’t much to go on beyond the medical facts,” I replied evasively.

“Oh, you needn’t be so cautious,” said she, “now that the cat is out of the bag.”

“Well,” I said, “it was pretty obvious that there had been trouble of some kind. The door had been broken open, there was one man in a state of hysterics, another man considerably upset and rather angry, and a woman with the mark on her neck of a cord or band—”

“It was a knitted silk necktie, to be accurate. But you put the matter in a nut-shell very neatly; and I see that you diagnosed what novelists call ‘the eternal triangle.’ And to a certain extent you were right; only the triangle was imaginary. If you don’t mind, I will tell you just what did happen. The gentleman who came for you was a Mr. Fordyce, the lessee of one or two provincial theatres—I was on the stage then; but perhaps you guessed that.”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

“Well, Mr. Fordyce had an idea of producing a play at one of his houses, and was going to give me a leading part. He had been to our house once or twice to talk the matter over with Nicholas (my husband) and me, and we were more or less friendly. He was quite a nice, sober kind of man, and perfectly proper and respectful. On this night he had been at the theatre where I had an engagement, and, as it was a wet night, he drove me home in his car, and was coming in to have a few words with us about our business. He wanted to see a photograph of me in a particular costume, and when we arrived home I ran upstairs to fetch it. There I found Nicholas, who had seen our arrival from the window, and was in a state of furious jealousy. Directly I entered the room, he locked the door and flew at me like a wild beast. As to what followed, I think you know as much as I do, for I fainted, and when I recovered Nicholas was sobbing in a corner, and Mr. Fordyce was standing by the door, looking as black as thunder.”

“Had your husband been jealous of Mr. Fordyce previously?”

“Not a bit. But on this occasion he was in a very queer state. I think he had been drinking, and taking some other things that were bad for him—”

“Such as cocaine,” I suggested.

“Yes. But, dear me! What a very noticing person you are, Dr. Strangeways! But you are quite right. It was the cocaine that was the cause of the trouble. He was always a difficult man; emotional, excitable, eccentric, and not very temperate, but after he had acquired the drug habit he went to the bad completely. He became slovenly, and even dirty in his person, frightfully emotional, and gave up work of all kind, so that but for my tiny income and my small earnings we should have starved.”

“So you actually supported him?”

“Latterly I did. And I daresay, if I had remained on the stage, we should have done fairly well, as I was supposed to have some talent, though I didn’t like the life. But, of course, after this affair, I didn’t dare to live with him. He wasn’t safe. I should have been constantly in fear of my life.”

“Had he ever been violent before’”

“Not seriously. He had often threatened horrible things, and I had looked on his threats as mere vapourings, but this was a different affair. I must have had a really narrow escape. So the very next day, I went into lodgings. But that didn’t answer. He wouldn’t agree to the separation, and was continually dogging me and making a disturbance. In the end, I had to give up my engagement and go off, leaving no address.”

“I suppose you went back to your people?”

“No,” she replied. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t any people. My mother died when I was quite a child, and I lost my father when I was about seventeen. He died on the Gold Coast, where he held an appointment as District Commissioner.”

“Ah,” said I, “I thought you were in some way connected with West Africa. I noticed the zodiac ring on your finger when you were signing the agreement. When I was newly qualified I took a trip down the West Coast as a ship’s surgeon, and bought one of those rings at Cape Coast.”

“They are quaint little things, aren’t they?” she remarked, slipping the ring off her finger and handing it to me. “I don’t often wear it, though. It is rather clumsy, and it doesn’t fit very well; and I don’t care much for rings.”

I turned the little trinket over in my hand and examined it with reminiscent interest. It was a roughly wrought band of yellow native gold, with the conventional signs of the zodiac worked round it in raised figures. Inside I noticed that the letters A. C. had been engraved.

“It was given to you before you were married, I presume,” said I, as I returned it to her.

“Yes,” she replied, “those are the initials of my maiden name—Angelina Carthew.” She took the ring from me, but instead of replacing it on her finger, dropped it into a little pouch-like purse with metal jaws, which she had taken from her pocket.

“Your position is a very disagreeable one,” said I, reverting to the main topic. “I wonder that you haven’t applied for a judicial separation. There are ample grounds for making the application.”

“I suppose there are. But it wouldn’t help me really, even if it were granted. I shouldn’t get rid of him.”

“You could apply to the police if he molested you.”

“No doubt. But that doesn’t sound very restful, does it?”

“I am afraid it doesn’t. But it would be better than being constantly molested without having any remedy or refuge.”

“Perhaps it would,” she agreed doubtfully, and then, with a faint smile, she added: “I suppose you are wondering what on earth made me marry him?”

“Well,” I replied, “it appears to me that his good fortune was more remarkable than his personal attractions.”

“He wasn’t always like he is now,” said she. “I married him nearly ten years ago, and he was fairly presentable then. His manners were quite nice and he had certain accomplishments that rather appealed to a young girl—I was only eighteen and rather impressionable. He was then getting a living by writing magazine stories—love stories, they were, of a highly emotional type—and occasional verses. They were second-rate stuff, really, but to me he seemed a budding genius. It was not until after we were married that the disillusionment came, and then only gradually as his bad habits developed.”

“By the way, what do you suppose he has come down here for? What does he want? I suppose he wishes you to go back to him?”

“I suppose he does. But, primarily, I expect he wants money. It is a horrible position,” she added, with sudden passion. “I hate the idea of hiding away from him when I suspect that the poor wretch has come down to his last few shillings. After all, he is my husband; and I am not so deadly poor now.”

“He seemed to have the wherewith to provide a fair supply of tobacco, to say nothing of the cocaine and a ‘modest quencher’ at the tavern,” I remarked drily. “At any rate, I hope he won’t succeed in finding out where you live.”

“I hope not,” said she. “If he does, I shall have to move on, as I have had to do several times already, and I don’t want to do that. I have only been here a little over two months, and it has been very pleasant and peaceful. But you see, Dr. Strangeways, that, if I am to follow Mr. Japp’s advice, I shall inflict on you a very unpromising patient. There is no medical treatment for matrimonial troubles.”

“No,” I agreed, rising and taking up my hat, “but the physical effects may be dealt with. If I am appointed your medical advisor, I shall send you a tonic, and if I may look in now and again to see how you are getting on, I may be able to help you over some of your difficulties.”

“It is very kind of you,” she said, rising and shaking my hand warmly; and, accepting my suggestion that she had better not come to the street door, she showed me out into the hall and dismissed me with a smile and a little bow.

When I reached the bottom of the steps, I stood irresolutely for a few moments and then, instead of making my way homeward, turned up the street towards the cathedral and the bridge, walking slowly and reflecting profoundly on the story I had just heard. It was a pitiful story; and the quiet, restrained manner of the telling made it the more impressive. All that was masculine in me rose in revolt against the useless, inexcusable wrecking of this poor woman’s life. As to the man, he was, no doubt, to be pitied for being the miserable, degenerate wretch that he was. But he was doomed beyond any hope of salvation. Such wretches as he are condemned in the moment of their birth; they are born to an inheritance of misery and dishonour. But it is infamous that in their inevitable descent into the abyss—from which no one can save them—they should have the power to drag down with them sane and healthy human beings who were destined by nature to a life of happiness, of usefulness, and honour. I thought of the woman I had just left—comely, dignified, energetic, probably even talented. What was her future to be? So far as I could see, the upas shadow of this drug-sodden wastrel had fallen upon her, never to be lifted until merciful death should dissolve the ill-omened union.

This last reflection gave my thoughts a new turn. What was this man’s purpose in pursuing her? Was he bent merely on extorting money or on sharing her modest income? Or was there some more sinister motive? I recalled his face; an evil, sly, vindictive face. I considered what I knew of him; that he had undoubtedly made one attempt to murder this woman, and that, to my knowledge, he carried about his person the means of committing murder. For what purpose could he have provided himself with that formidable weapon? It might be merely as a means of coercion, or it might be as a means of revenge.

Thus meditating, I had proceeded some distance along the street when I observed, on the opposite side, an old, three-gabled house which looked like some kind of institution. A lamp above the doorway threw its light on a stone tablet on which I could see an inscription of some length, and, judging this to be an ancient almshouse, I crossed the road to inspect it more closely. A glance at the tablet told me that this was the famous rest-house established in the sixteenth century by worthy Richard Watts, to give a night’s lodging and entertainment to six poor travellers, with the express proviso that the said travellers must be neither rogues nor proctors. I had read through the quaint inscription and was speculating, as many others have speculated, on the nature of Richard Watts’s grievance against proctors as a class, when the door opened suddenly and a man rushed out with such impetuosity that he nearly collided with me. I had moved out of his way when he halted and addressed me excitedly.

“I say, governor, can you tell me where I can find a doctor?”

“You have found one,” I replied. “I am a doctor. What is the matter?”

“There’s a bloke in here throwing a fit,” he answered, backing into the doorway and holding the door open for me. I entered, and followed him down a passage to a largish, barely furnished room, where I found four men and a woman, who looked like a hospital nurse, standing around and watching anxiously a man who lay on the floor.

“Here’s a doctor, matron,” said my conductor, as he ushered me in.

“Well, Simmonds,” said the matron, “you haven’t wasted much time.”

“No, mum,” replied Simmonds, “I struck it lucky. Caught him just outside.”

Meanwhile I had stepped up to the prostrate man, and at the first glance I recognized him. He was Mrs. Frood’s husband. And, whatever he might be “throwing,” it was not a fit—in the ordinary medical sense; that is to say, it was not epilepsy or apoplexy; nor was it a fainting fit of an orthodox kind. If the patient had been a woman one would have called it a hysterical seizure, and I could give it no other name, though I was not unmindful of the paper packet that I had seen on that former occasion. But the emotional element was obvious. The man purported to be insensible, and manifestly was not. The tightly closed eyes, the everted lips—showing a row of blackened teeth—the clutching movements of the clawlike hands—all were suggestive of at least half-conscious simulation. I stood for a while, stooping over him and watching him intently, and as I did so the bystanders watched me. Then I felt his pulse, and found it, as I had expected, quick, feeble, and irregular; and finally, producing my stethoscope, listened to his heart with as little disturbance of his clothing as possible.

“Well, doctor,” said the matron, “what do you think of him?”

“He is decidedly ill,” I replied. “His heart is rather jumpy, and not very strong. Too much tobacco, I fancy, and perhaps some other things that are not very good, and possibly insufficient food.”

“He told me, when he came in,” said the matron, “that he was practically destitute.”

“Ah,” murmured Simmonds, “I expect he’s been blowing all his money on Turkish baths,” whereupon the other poor travellers sniggered softly, and were immediately extinguished by a reproving glance from the matron.

“Do you know what brought this attack on?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied; “he had a little dispute with Simmonds, here, and suddenly became violently excited, and then he fell down insensible, as you see him. It was all about nothing.”

“I jest arsked ’im,” said Simmonds, “if ’e could give me the name of the cove what done ’is ’air, ’cos I thought I’d like to ’ave mine done in the same fashionable style. That seemed to give ’im the fair pip. ’E jawed me something chronic, until I got shirty and told ’im if ’e didn’t shut ’is face I’d give ’im a wipe acrost the snout. Then blow me if ’e didn’t start to throw a fit.”

While this lucid explanation was proceeding I noticed that the patient was evidently listening intently, though he continued to twitch his face, exhibit his unlovely teeth, and wriggle his fingers. He was apparently waiting for my verdict with some anxiety.

“The question is,” said the matron, “what is to be done with him? Do you think he is in any danger?”

As she spoke, we drifted towards the door, and when we were in the passage, out of earshot, I said:

“The best place for that man is the infirmary. There is nothing much the matter with him but dope. He has been dosing himself with cocaine, and he has probably got some more of the stuff about him. He is in no danger now, but if he takes any more he may upset himself badly.”

“It is rather late to send him to the infirmary,” she said, “and I don’t quite like to do it. Poor fellow, he seems fearfully down on his luck, and he is quite a superior kind of man. Do you think it would be safe for him to stay here for the night if he had a little medicine of some kind?”

“It would be safe enough,” I replied, “if you could get possession of his coat and waistcoat and lock them up until the morning.”

“Oh, I’ll manage that,” said she; “and about the medicine?”

“Let Simmonds walk up with me—I have taken Dr. Partridge’s practice—and I will give it to him.”

We re-entered the supper-room and found the conditions somewhat changed. Whether it was that the word “infirmary” had been wafted to the patient’s attentive ears, I cannot say; but there were evident signs of recovery. Our friend was sitting up, glaring wildly about him, and inquiring where he was; to which questions Simmonds was furnishing answers of a luridly inaccurate character. When I had taken another look at the patient, and received a vacant stare of almost aggressive unrecognition, I took possession of the facetious Simmonds, and, having promised to look in in the morning, wished the matron good-night and departed with my escort; who entertained me on the way home with picturesque, unflattering, and remarkably shrewd comments on the sufferer.

I had made up a stimulant mixture, and handed it to Simmonds when I remembered Mrs. Frood and that Simmonds would pass her house on his way back. For an instant, I thought of asking him to deliver her medicine for me; and then, with quite a shock, I realized what a hideous blunder it would have been. Evidently, the poor travellers gave their names, and if the man, Frood, had given his correctly, the coincidence of the names would have impressed Simmonds instantly, and then the murder would have been out, and the fat would have been in the fire properly. It was a narrow escape, and it made me realize how insecure was that unfortunate lady’s position with this man lurking in the town. And, realizing this, I determined to trust the addressed bottle to nobody, but to leave it at the house myself. Accordingly, having made up the medicine and wrapped it neatly in paper, I thrust it into my pocket, and, calling out to Mrs. Dunk that I should be back to supper in about half an hour, I set forth, and in a few minutes arrived at the little Georgian doorway and plied the elegant brass knocker. The door was opened—rather incautiously, I thought—by Mrs. Frood herself.

“I am my own bottle-boy, you see, Mrs. Frood,” said I, handing her the medicine. “I thought it safer not to send an addressed packet under the circumstances.”

“But how good of you!” she exclaimed. “How kind and thoughtful! But you shouldn’t have troubled about it tonight.”

“It was only a matter of five minutes’ walk,” said I, “and besides, there was something that I thought you had better know,” and hereupon I proceeded to give her a brief account of my recent adventures and the condition of her precious husband. “Is he subject to attacks of this kind?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered. “When he is put out about anything in some ways he is rather like a hysterical woman. But, you see, I was right. He is penniless. And that—now I come to think of it—makes it rather odd that he should be here. But won’t you come in for a moment?”

I entered and shut the door. “Why is it odd?” I asked.

“Because he would be getting some money tomorrow. I make him a small allowance; it is very little, but it is as much as I can possibly manage; and it is paid monthly, on the fifteenth of the month. But he has to apply for it personally at the bank or send an accredited messenger with a receipt; and as tomorrow is the fifteenth, the question is, why on earth is he down here now? I mean that it is odd that he should not have waited to collect the allowance before coming to hunt me up.”

“If he is in communication with your banker,” said I, “he could, I suppose, get a letter forwarded to you?”

“No,” she replied; “the banker who pays him is the London agent of Mr. Japp’s banker, and he doesn’t know on whose behalf the payments are made. I had to make that arrangement, or he would have bombarded me with letters.”

“Well,” I said, “you had better keep close for a day or two. If his search for you is unsuccessful, he may get discouraged and raise the siege. I will let you know what his movements are, so far as I can.”

She thanked me once more with most evident sincerity, and as I made my way to the door, she let me out with a cordial and friendly shake of the hand.

CHAPTER IV

Deals with Charity and Archaeology

Immediately after breakfast on the following morning I made my way to Mr. Richard Watts’s establishment, where I learned that all the poor travellers had departed with the exception of my patient, who had been allowed to stay pending my report on him.

“I shall be glad to see the back of him, poor fellow,” said the matron, “for, of course, we have no arrangements for dealing with sick men.”

“Do you often get cases of illness here?” I asked.

“I really don’t know,” she answered. “You see, I am only doing temporary duty here while the regular matron is away. But I should think not, though little ailments are apt to occur in the case of a poor man who has been on the road for a week or so.”

“This man is on tramp, is he’” said I.

“Well, no,” she replied. “It seems, from what he tells me, that his wife has left him, and he had reason to believe that she was staying in this town. So he came down here to try to find her. He supposed that Rochester was a little place where everybody knew everybody else, and that he would have no difficulty in discovering her whereabouts. But all his inquiries have come to nothing. Nobody seems to have heard of her. I suppose you don’t happen to know the name—Frood?”

“I only came here yesterday, myself,” was my evasive reply. “I am a stranger to the town. But is he certain that she is here?”

“I don’t think he is. At any rate, he seems inclined to give up the search for the present, and he is very anxious to get back to London. But I don’t know how he is going to manage it. He isn’t fit to walk.”

“Well,” I said, “if it is only the railway fare that stands in the way, that difficulty can be got over. I will pay for his ticket; but I should like to be sure that he really goes.”

“Oh, I’ll see to that,” she said, with evident relief. “I will go with him to the station, and get his ticket and see him into the train. But you had better just have a look at him, and see that he is fit to go.”

She conducted me to the supper-room, where our friend was sitting in a Windsor armchair, looking the very picture of misery and dejection.

“Here is the doctor come to see you, Mr. Frood,” the matron said cheerfully, “and he is kind enough to say that, if you are well enough to travel, he will pay your fare to London. So there’s an end of your difficulties.”

The poor devil glanced at me for an instant, and then looked away; and, to my intense discomfort, I saw that his eyes were filling.

“It is indeed good of you, Sir,” he murmured, shakily, but in a very pleasant voice and with a refined accent; “most good and kind to help a lame dog over a stile in this way. I don’t know how to thank you.”

Here, as he showed a distinct tendency to weep, I replied hastily:

“Not at all. We’ve all got to help one another in this world. And how are you feeling? Hand is still a little bit shaky, I see.”

I put my finger on his wrist and then looked him over generally. He was a miserable wreck, but I judged that he was as well as he was ever likely to be.

“Well,” I said, “you are not in first-class form, but you are up to a short railway journey. I suppose you have somewhere to go to in London?”

“Yes,” he replied, dismally, “I have a room. It isn’t in the Albany, but it is a shelter from the weather.”

“Never mind,” said I. “We must hope for better times. The matron is going to see you safely to the station and comfortably settled in the train—and”—here I handed her a ten shilling note—“you will get Mr. Frood’s ticket, matron, and you had better give him the change. He may want a cab when he gets to town.”

He glowered sulkily at this arrangement—I suspect he had run out of cigarettes—but he thanked me again, and, when I had privately ascertained the time of the train which was to bear him away, I wished him adieu.

“I suppose,” said I, “there is no likelihood of his hopping out at Strood to get a drink and losing the train?”

The matron smiled knowingly. “He will start from Strood,” said she. “I shall take him over the bridge in the tram and put him into the London express there. We don’t want him back here tonight.”

Much relieved by the good lady’s evident grasp of the situation, I turned away up the street and began to consider my next move. I had nothing to do this morning, for at present there was not a single patient on my books with the exception of Mrs. Frood; and it may have been in accordance with the prevailing belief that to persons in my condition, an individual, familiarly known as “the old gentleman,” obligingly functions as employment agent, that my thoughts turned to that solitary patient. At any rate they did. Suddenly, it was borne in on me that I ought, without delay, to convey to her the glad tidings of her husband’s departure. Whether the necessity would have appeared as urgent if her personal attractions had been less, I will not presume to say; nor whether had I been more self-critical, I should not have looked with some suspicion on this intense concern respecting the welfare of a woman who was almost a stranger to me. As it was, it appeared to me that I was but discharging a neighbourly duty when I executed an insinuating rat-tat on the handsome brass knocker which was adorned—somewhat inappropriately, under the circumstances—with a mask of Hypnos.

After a short interval, the door was opened by a spare, middle-aged woman of melancholic aspect, with tow-coloured hair and a somewhat anemic complexion, who regarded me inquiringly with a faded blue eye.

“Is Mrs. Frood at home?” I asked briskly.

“I am afraid she is not,” was the reply, uttered in a dejected tone. “I saw her go out some time ago, and I haven’t heard her come back. But I’ll just see, if you will come in a moment.”

I entered the hall and listened with an unaccountable feeling of disappointment as she rapped on the door first of the front room, and then of the back.

“She isn’t in her rooms there,” was the dispirited report, “but she may be in the basement. I’ll call out and ask.”

She retired to the inner hall and gave utterance to a wail like that of an afflicted seagull. But there was no response; and I began to feel myself infected by her melancholy.

“I am sorry you have missed her, Sir,” said she; and then she asked: “Are you her doctor, Sir?”

I felt myself justified in affirming that I was, whereupon she exclaimed:

“Ah, poor thing! It is a comfort to know that she has someone to look after her. She has been looking very sadly of late. Very sadly, she has.”

I began to back cautiously towards the door, but she followed me up and continued: “I am afraid she has had a deal of trouble; a deal of trouble, poor dear. Not that she ever speaks of it to me. But I know. I can see the lines of grief and sorrow—like a worm in the bud, so to speak, Sir—and it makes my heart ache. It does, indeed.”

I mumbled sympathetically and continued to back towards the door.

“I don’t see very much of her,” she continued in a plaintive tone. “She keeps herself very close. Too close, I think. You see, she does for herself entirely. Now and again, when she asks me, which is very seldom, I put a bit of supper in her room. That is all. And I do think that it isn’t good for a young woman to live so solitary; and I do hope you’ll make her take a little more change.”

“I suppose she goes out sometimes,” said I, noting that she was out at the present moment.

“Oh, yes,” was the reply. “She goes out a good deal. But always alone. She never has any society.”

“And what time does she usually come in?” I asked, with a view to a later call.

“About six; or between that and seven. Then she has her supper and puts the things out on the hall table. And that is the last I usually see of her.”

By this time I had reached the door and softly unfastened the latch.

“If you should see her,” I said, “you might tell her that I shall look in this evening about half-past seven.”

“Certainly, Sir,” she replied. “I shall see her at lunch-time, and I will give her your message.”

I thanked her, and, having now got the door open, I wished her good morning, and retreated down the steps.

As I was in the act of turning away, my eye lighted on the adjacent bay window, appertaining to the office of Messrs. Japp and Bundy, and I then perceived’ above the green curtain the upper half of a human face, including a pair of tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles; an apparition which informed me that Mr. Bundy had been—to use Sam Weller’s expression—“a-twigging of me.” On catching my eye, the face rose higher, disclosing a broad grin; whereupon, without any apparent reason, I felt myself turning somewhat red. However, I mounted the official steps, and, opening the office door, confronted the smiler and his more sedate partner.

“Ha!” said the former, “you drew a blank, doctor. I saw the lovely Angelina go out about an hour ago. Whom did you see?”

“The lady of the house, I presume; a pale, depressed female.”

“I know,” said Bundy. “Looks like an undertaker’s widow. That’s Mrs. Gillow. Rhymes with willow—very appropriate, too,” and he began to chant in an absurd, Punch-like voice: “Oh, all round my hat I’ll wear the green—”

“Be quiet, Bundy,” said Mr. Japp, regarding his partner with a wrinkly and indulgent smile.

Bundy clapped his hand over his mouth and blew out his cheeks, and I took the opportunity to explain: “I called on Mrs. Frood to let her know that her husband is leaving the town.”

“Leaving the town, is he?” said Mr. Japp, elevating his eyebrows and thereby causing his forehead to resemble a small Venetian blind. “Do you know when?”

“He goes this morning by the ten-thirty express to London.”

“Hooray!” ejaculated Bundy, with a flourish of his arms that nearly capsized his stool. He recovered himself with an effort, and then, fixing his eyes on me, proceeded to whistle the opening bars of “O! Thou that tellest good tidings to Zion!”

“That’ll do, Bundy,” said Mr. Japp. Then turning to me, he asked: “Where did you learn these good tidings, Doctor’”

I gave them a brief account of the happenings of the previous night and this morning’s sequel, to which they listened with deep attention. When I had finished Mr. Japp said: “You have done a very great kindness to my friend Mrs. Frood. It will be an immense relief to her to know that she can walk abroad without the danger of encountering this man. Besides, if he had stayed here he would probably have found her out.”

“He might even have found her at home,” said Bundy, “and that would have been worse. So I propose a vote of thanks to the doctor—with musical honours. For-hor he’s a jolly good fell—”

“There, that’ll do, Bundy, that’ll do,” said Mr. Japp. “I never saw such a fellow. You’ll have the neighbours complaining.”

Bundy leaned towards me confidentially and remarked in a stage whisper, glancing at his partner: “Fidgetty old cove; regular old killjoy.” Then, with a sudden change of manner, he asked: “What about that wall job, Japp? Are you going to have a look at them?”

“I can’t go at present,” said Japp. “Bulford will be coming in presently and I must see him. Have you got anything special to do?”

“Only old Jeff’son’s lease, and that can wait. Shall I trot over and see what sort of mess they are making of things?”

“I wish you would,” said Japp; whereupon Mr. Bundy removed his spectacles, stuck in his monocle, extracted from the desk his hat and gloves which he assumed with the aid of the looking-glass, and took his stick from the corner. Then he looked at me reflectively and asked:

“Are you interested in archaeology, Doctor?”

“Somewhat,” I replied. “Why do you ask?”

“Because we are putting some patches in the remains of the city wall. It isn’t much to look at, and there isn’t a great deal of the original Roman work left; but if you would care to have a look at it you might walk up there with me.”

I agreed readily, being, as I have said, somewhat at a loose end, and we set forth together, Bundy babbling cheerfully as we went.

“I have often thought,” said he, “that there must have been something rather pleasant and restful about the old walled cities, particularly after curfew when the gates were shut—that is, provided you were inside at the time.”

“Yes,” said I. “An enclosed precinct has a certain agreeable quality of seclusion that you can’t get in an open town or village. When I was a student, I lived for a time in chambers in Staple Inn, and it was, as you say, rather pleasant, when one came home at night, and the porter had let one in at the wicket, to enter and find the gates closed, the courts all quiet and empty, and to know that all traffic was stopped and all strangers shut out until the morning. But it doesn’t appear to be in accordance with modern taste, for those old Chancery Inns have nearly all gone, and there is no tendency to replace them with anything similar.”

“No,” Bundy agreed, stopping to look up at an old timber house, “taste in regard to buildings, if there is any—Japp says there isn’t—has changed completely in the last hundred years or so. Look at this alley we are in now. Every house has got a physiognomy of its own. But when we rebuild it, we shall fill it up with houses that will look as if they had been bought in packets like matchboxes.”

Gossiping thus, we threaded our way through all sorts of queer little alleys and passages. At length Bundy stopped at a wooden gate in a high fence, and, pushing it open, motioned for me to enter; and as I did so he drew out the key which was in the lock and put it in his pocket.

The place which we had entered was a space of waste land, littered with the remains of some old houses that had been demolished and enclosed on three sides by high fences. The fourth side was formed by a great mass of crumbling rubble, patched in places with rough masonry and brickwork, and showing in its lower part the remains of courses of Roman bricks. It rose to a considerable height, and was evidently of enormous thickness, as could be seen where large areas of the face had crumbled away, exposing great cavities, in which wall-flowers, valerian and other rock-haunting plants, had taken up their abode. On one of these a small gang of men were at work, and it was evident that repairs on a considerable scale were contemplated, for there were several large heaps of rough stone and old bricks, and in a cart-shed in a corner of the space were a large number of barrels of lime.

As we entered, the foreman came forward to meet us, and Bundy handed him the key from the gate.

“Better keep it in your pocket,” said he. “Mr. Japp is rather particular about keys that he has charge of. He doesn’t like them left in doors or gates. How are the men getting on?”

“As well as you can expect of a lot of casuals like these,” was the reply. “There isn’t a mason or a bricklayer among them, excepting that old chap that’s mixing the mortar. However, it’s only a rough job.”

We walked over to the part of the old wall where the men were at work, and the appearances certainly justified the foreman’s last remark. It was a very rough job. The method appeared to consist in building up outside the cavity a primitive wall of unhewn stone with plenty of mortar, and, when it had risen a foot or two, filling up the cavity inside with loose bricks, lumps of stone, shovelfuls of liquid mortar, and chunks of lime.

I ventured to remark that it did not look a very secure method of building, upon which Bundy turned his monocle on me and smiled knowingly.

“My dear Doctor,” said he, “you don’t appear to appreciate the subtlety of the method. The purpose of these activities is to create employment. That has been clearly stated by the town council. But if you want to create employment you build a wall that will tumble down and give somebody else the job of putting it up again.”

Here, as a man suddenly bore down on us with a bucket of mortar, Bundy hopped back to avoid the unclean contact, and nearly sat down on a heap of smoking lime.

“You had a narrow escape that time, mister,” remarked the old gentleman who presided over the mortar department, as Bundy carefully dusted his delicate shoes with his handkerchief; “that stuff would ’ave made short work of them fine clothes of yourn.”

“Would it?” said Bundy, dusting his shoes yet more carefully and wiping the soles on the turf.

“Ah,” rejoined the old man; “terrible stuff is quicklime. Eats up everything same as what fire does.” He rested his hands on his shovel, and, assuming a reminiscent air, continued: “There was a pal o’ mine what was skipper of a barge. A iron barge, she was, and he had to take on a lading of lime from some kilns. The stuff was put aboard with a shoot. Well, my pal, he gets ’is barge under the shoot and then ’e goes off, leavin’ ’is mate to see the lime shot into the hold. Well, it seems the mate had been takin’ some stuff aboard, too. Beer, or p’raps whisky. At any rate, he’d got a skinful. Well, presently the skipper comes back, and he sees ’em a-tippin’ the trucks of lime on to the shoot, and he sees the barge’s hold beginning to fill, but ’e don’t see ’is mate nowhere. He goes aboard, down to the cabin, but there ain’t no signs of the mate there, nor yet anywheres else. Well, they gets the barge loaded and the hatch-covers on, and everything ready for sea; and still there ain’t no signs of the mate. So my pal, rememberin’ that the mate—his name was Bill—rememberin’ that Bill seemed a bit squiffy, supposed he must ’ave gone overboard. So ’e takes on a fresh hand temporary and off ’e goes on ’is trip.

“Well, they makes their port all right and brings up alongside the wharf, but owing to a strike among the transport men they can’t unload for about three weeks. However, when the strike is over, they rigs a whip and a basket and begins to get the stuff out. All goes well until they get down to the bottom tier. Then one of the men brings upa bone on his shovel. ‘Hallo!’ says the skipper, ‘what’s bones a-doin’ in a cargo of fresh lime?” He rakes over the stuff on the floor and up comes a skull with a hole in the top of it. ‘Why, blow me,’ says the skipper, ‘if that don’t look like Bill. He warn’t as thin in the face as all that, but I seem to know them teeth.’ Just then one of the men finds a clay pipe—and the skipper reckernizes it at once. ‘That there’s Bill’s pipe,’ sez he, ‘and them bones is Bill’s bones,’ ’e sez. And so they were. They found ’is belt-buckle and ’is knife, and ’is trouser buttons and the nails out of ’is boots. And that’s all there was left of Bill. He must have tumbled down into the hold and cracked his nut, and then the first truckful of lime must ’ave covered ’im up. So, if you sets any value on them ’andsome shoes o’ yourn, don’t you go a-treadin’ in quick lime.”

Bundy looked down anxiously at his shoes, and, having given them an additional wipe, he moved away from the dangerous neighbourhood of the lime and we went together to examine the ancient wall.

“That was rather a tall yarn of the old man’s,” remarked Bundy. “Is it a fact that lime is as corrosive as he made out?”

“I don’t really know very much about it,” I replied. “There is a general belief that it will consume almost anything but metal. How true that is I can’t say, but I remember that at the Crippen trial one of the medical experts—I think it was Pepper—said that if the body had been buried in quicklime it would have been entirely consumed—excepting the bones, of course. But it is difficult to believe that a body could disappear completely in three weeks, or thereabouts, as our friend said. How fine this old wall looks with those clumps of valerian and wallflowers growing on it! I suppose it encircled the town completely at one time?”

“Yes,” he replied, “and it is a pity there isn’t more of it left, or at least one or two of the gateways. A city gate is such a magnificent adornment. Think of the gates of Canterbury and Rye, and especially at Sandwich, where you actually enter the town through the barbican; and think of what Rochester must have been before all the gates were pulled down. But you must hear Japp on the subject. He’s a regular architectural Jeremiah. By the way, what did you think of Mrs. Frood? You saw her last night, didn’t you?”

“Yes. I was rather taken with her. She is very nice and friendly and unaffected, and good-looking, too. I thought her distinctly handsome.”

“She isn’t bad-looking,” Bundy admitted. “But I can’t stand her voice. It gets on my nerves. I hate a squeaky voice.”

“I shouldn’t call it squeaky,” said I. “It is a high voice, and rather sing-song; and it isn’t, somehow, quite in keeping with her appearance and manner.”

“No,” said Bundy, “that’s what it is. She’s too big for a voice like that.”

I laughed at the quaint expression. “People’s voices,” said I, “are not like steamers’ whistles, graduated in pitch according to their tonnage. Besides, Mrs. Frood is not such a very big woman.”

“She is a good size,” said he. “I should call her rather tall. At any rate, she is taller than I am. But I suppose you will say that she might be that without competing with the late Mrs. Bates.”

“Comparisons between the heights of men and women,” I said cautiously, “are rather misleading,” and here I changed the subject, though I judged that Bundy was not sensitive in regard to his stature, for while he was cleaning the lime from his shoes I had noticed that he wore unusually low heels. Nor need he have been, for though on a small scale, he was quite an important-looking person.

“Don’t you think,” he asked, after a pause, “that it is rather queer that the man Frood should have gone off so soon. He only came down yesterday, and he can’t have made much of a search for Madame.”

“The queer thing is that he should have come down on that particular day,” I replied. “It seems that he draws a monthly allowance on the fifteenth. That was what made him so anxious to get back; but it is odd that he didn’t put off his visit here until he had collected the money.”

“If he had run his wife to earth, he could have collected it from her,” said Bundy. “I wonder how he found out that she was here.”

“He evidently hadn’t very exact information,” I said, “nor did he seem quite certain that she really was here. And his failure to get any news of her appears to have discouraged him considerably. It is just possible that he has gone back to get more precise information if he can, when he has drawn his allowance.”

“That is very likely,” Bundy agreed; “and it is probable that we haven’t seen the last of him yet.”

“I have a strong suspicion that we haven’t,” said I.

“If he is sure she is here, and can get enough money together to come and spend a week here, he will be pretty certain to discover her whereabouts. It is a dreadful position for her. She ought to get a judicial separation.”

“I doubt if she could,” said he. “You may be sure he would contest that application pretty strongly, and what case would she have in support of it? He is an unclean blighter; he doesn’t work; he smokes and drinks too much, and you say he takes drugs. But he doesn’t seem to be violent or dangerous or threatening, or to be on questionable terms with other women—at least, I have never heard anything to that effect. Have you?”

“No,” I answered—I had said nothing to him or Japp about the London incident. “He seems to have married the only woman in the world who would look at him.”

Bundy grinned. “An unkind cut, that, Doctor,” said he; “but I believe you’re right. And here we are, back at the official premises. Are you coming in?”

I declined the invitation, and as he skipped up the steps I turned my face homewards.

CHAPTER V

John Thorndyke

The sexual preferences or affinities of men and women have always impressed me as very mysterious and inexplicable. I am referring to the selective choice of individuals, not to the general attraction of the sexes for one another. Why should a particular pair of human beings single one another out from the mass of their fellows as preferable to all others? Why to one particular man does one particular woman and no other become the exciting cause of the emotion of love? It is not a matter of mere physical beauty or mental excellence, for if it were men and women would be simply classifiable into the attractive and the non-attractive; whereas we find in practice that a woman who may be to the majority of men an object of indifference, is to some one man an object of passionate love; and vice-versa. Nor is love necessarily accompanied by any delusions as to the worth of its object, for it will persist in spite of the clear recognition of personal defects and in conscious conflict with judgment and reason.

The above reflections, with others equally profound, occupied my mind as I sat on a rather uncomfortable little rush-seated chair in the nave of Rochester Cathedral; whither I had proceeded in obedience to orders from Mrs. Dunk, to attend the choral afternoon service; and they were occasioned by the sudden recognition—not without surprise—of the very deep impression that had been made on me by my patient, Mrs. Frood. For the intensity of that impression I could not satisfactorily account. It is true that her circumstances were interesting and provocative of sympathy. But that was no reason for the haunting of my thoughts by her, of which I was conscious. She was not a really beautiful woman, though I thought her more than commonly good-looking; and she had evidently made no particular impression on Bundy. Yet, though I had seen her but three times, including my first meeting with her a year ago, I had to recognize that she had hardly been out of my thoughts since, and I was aware of looking forward with ridiculous expectancy to my proposed visit to her this evening.

Thus, speculations on the meaning of this preoccupation mingled themselves with other speculations, as, for instance, on the abrupt changes of intention suggested by half of an Early English arch clapped up against a Norman pier; and as my thoughts rambled on, undisturbed by a pleasant voice, intoning with soothing unintelligibility somewhere beyond the stone screen, I watched with languid curiosity the strangers who entered and stole on tiptoe to the nearest vacant chair. Presently, however, as the intoning voice gave place to the deep, pervading hum of the organ, a visitor entered who instantly attracted my attention.

He was obviously a personage—a real personage; not one of those who have achieved greatness by the free use of their elbows, or have had it thrust upon them by influential friends. This was an unmistakable thoroughbred. He was a tall man, very erect and dignified in carriage, and in spite of his iron-grey hair, evidently strong, active, and athletic. But it was his face that specially riveted my attention: not merely by reason that it was a handsome, symmetrical face, inclining to the Greek type, with level brows, a fine, straight nose, and a shapely mouth, but rather on account of its suggestion of commanding strength and intelligence. It was a strangely calm—even immobile—face; but yet it conveyed a feeling of attentiveness and concentration, and especially of power.

I watched the stranger curiously as he stepped quietly to a seat not far from me, noting how he seemed to stand out from the ordinary men who surrounded him, and wondering who he was. But I was not left to wonder very long. A few moments later another visitor arrived, but not a stranger this time; for in this newcomer I recognized an old acquaintance, a Dr. Jervis, whom I had known when I was a student and when he had taken temporary charge of my uncle’s practise. Since then, as I had learned, he had qualified as a barrister and specialized in legal medicine as the coadjutor of the famous medical jurist, Dr. John Thorndyke.

For a few moments Jervis stood near the entrance looking about the nave, as if in search of someone. Then, suddenly, his eye lighted on the distinguished stranger, and he walked straight over to him and sat down by his side; from which, and from the smile of recognition with which he was greeted, I inferred that the stranger was none other than Dr. Thorndyke himself.

Jervis had apparently not seen, or at least not recognized me, but, as I observed that there was a vacant chair by his side, I determined to renew our acquaintance and secure, if possible, a presentation to his eminent colleague. Accordingly, I crossed the nave, and, taking the vacant chair, introduced myself, and was greeted with a cordial hand-shake.

The circumstances did not admit of conversation, but presently, when the anthem appeared to be drawing to a close, Jervis glanced at his watch and whispered to me: “I want to hear all your news, Strangeways, and to introduce you to Thorndyke; and we must get some tea before we go to the station. Shall we clear out now?”

As I assented he whispered to Thorndyke, and we all rose and filed silently towards the door, our exit covered by the concluding strains of the anthem. As soon as we were outside Jervis presented me to his colleague, and suggested an immediate adjournment to some place of refreshment. I proposed that they should come and have tea with me, but Jervis replied: “I’m afraid we haven’t time today. There is a very comfortable teashop close to the Jasperian gatehouse. You had better come there and then perhaps you can walk to the station with us.”

We adopted this plan, and when we had established ourselves on a settle by the window of the ancient, low-ceiled room and given our orders to a young lady in a becoming brown costume, Jervis proceeded to interrogate.

“And what might you be doing in Rochester, Strangeways?”

“Nominally,” I replied, “I am engaged in medical practice. Actually, I am a gentleman at large. I have taken a death vacancy here, and I arrived yesterday morning.”

“Any patients?” he inquired.

“Two at present,” I answered. “One I brought down with me and returned empty this morning. The other is his wife.”

“Ha,” said Jervis, “a concise statement, but obscure. It seems to require amplification.”

I accordingly proceeded to amplify, describing in detail my journey from town and my subsequent dealings with my fellow-traveller. The circumstances of Mrs. Frood, being matters of professional confidence, I was at first disposed to suppress; but then, reflecting that my two friends were in a position to give expert opinions and advice, I put them in possession of all the facts that were known to me, excepting the Regent’s Park incident, which I felt hardly at liberty to disclose.

“Well,” said Jervis, when I had finished, “if the rest of your practice develops on similar lines, we shall have to set up a branch establishment in your neighbourhood. There are all sorts of possibilities in this case. Don’t you think so, Thorndyke?”

“I should hardly say ‘all sorts,’” was the reply. “The possibilities seem to me to be principally of one sort; extremely disagreeable for the poor lady. She has the alternatives of allowing herself to be associated with this man—which seems to be impossible—or of spending the remainder of her life in a perpetual effort to escape from him; which is an appalling prospect for a young woman.”

“Yes,” agreed Jervis, “it is bad enough. But there seems to me worse possibilities with a fellow of this kind; a drinking, drug-swallowing, hysterical degenerate. You never know what a man of that type will do.”

“You always hope that he will commit suicide,” said Thorndyke; “and to do him justice, he does fairly often show that much perception of his proper place in nature. But, as you say, the actions of a mentally and morally abnormal man are incalculable. He may kill himself or he may kill somebody else, or he may join with other abnormals to commit incomprehensible and apparently motiveless political crimes. But we will hope that Mr. Frood will limit his activities to sponging on his wife.”

The conversation now turned from my affairs to those of my friends, and I ventured to inquire what had brought them to Rochester.

“We came down,” said Jervis, “to watch an inquest for one of our insurance clients. But after all it has had to be adjourned for a fortnight. So we may have the pleasure of seeing you again.”

“We won’t leave it to chance,” said I. “Let us settle that you come to lunch with me, if that will be convenient. You can fix your own time.”

My two friends consulted, and, having referred to their timetable, accepted the invitation for one o’clock on that day fortnight; and when I had “booked the appointment,” we finished our tea and sallied forth, making our way over the bridge to Strood Station, at the main entrance to which I wished them adieu.

As I turned away from the station and sauntered slowly along the shore before recrossing the bridge, I recalled the conversation of my two colleagues with a certain vague discomfort. To both of them, it was evident, the relations of my fair patient and her husband presented sinister possibilities, although I had not informed them of the actual murderous attack; and though the more cautious reticent Thorndyke had seemed to minimize them, his remarks had expressed what was already in my own mind, accentuated by what I knew. These nervy, abnormal men are never safe to deal with. Their unstable emotions may be upset in a moment and then no one can tell what will happen. It was quite possible that Frood had come to Rochester with the perfectly peaceable intention of inducing his wife to return to him. But this was far from certain, and I shuddered to think of what might follow a refusal on her part. I did not like that knife. I have a sane man’s dislike of lethal weapons of all kinds; but especially do I dislike them in the hands of those whose self-control is liable to break down suddenly.

It was true that this man had not succeeded in finding his wife, and even seemed to have given up the search. But I felt pretty certain that he had not. Somehow, he had discovered that she was in the town, and from the same source he might get further information; and, in any case, I felt no doubt that he would renew the pursuit, and that, in the end, he would find her. And then—but at this point I found myself opposite the house and observed Mrs. Gillow standing on the doorstep, fumbling in her pocket for the latch-key. She had just extracted it, and was in the act of inserting it into the latch when I crossed the road and made my presence known. She greeted me with a wan smile as I ascended the steps, and, having by this time got the door open, admitted me to the hall.

“I gave Mrs. Frood your message at lunch-time, sir,” said she, in a depressed tone, “and I believe she has come in.” Here, having closed the street door, she rapped softly with her knuckles at that of the front room, whereupon the voice to which Bundy objected so much called out: “Come in, Mrs. Gillow.”

The latter threw the door open. “It is the doctor, Madam,” said she; and on this announcement, I walked in.

“I didn’t hear you knock,” said Mrs. Frood, rising, and holding out her hand.

“I didn’t knock,” I replied. “I sneaked in under cover of Mrs. Gillow.”

“That was very secret and cautious of you,” said she.

“You make me feel like a sort of feminine Prince Charlie, lying perdu in the robbers’ cavern; whereas, I have actually been taking my walks abroad and brazenly looking in the shop windows. But I have kept a sharp lookout, all the same.”

“There really wasn’t any need,” said I. “The siege is raised.

“You don’t mean that my husband has gone?” she exclaimed.

“I do, indeed,” I answered; and I gave her a brief account of the events of the morning, suppressing my unofficial part in the transaction.

“Do you think,” she asked, “that the matron paid his fare out of her own pocket?”

“I am sure she didn’t,” I answered hastily. “She touched some local altruist for the amount; it was only a few shillings, you know.”

“Still,” she said, “I feel that I ought to refund those few shillings. They were really expended for my benefit.”

“Well, you can’t,” I said with some emphasis. “You couldn’t do it without disclosing your identity, and then you would have some philanthropist trying to effect a reconciliation. Your cue is to keep yourself to yourself for the present.”

“For the present!” she echoed. “It seems to me that I have got to be a fugitive for the rest of my natural life. It is a horrible position, to have to live in a state of perpetual concealment, like a criminal, and never dare to make an acquaintance.”

“Don’t you know anyone in Rochester?” I asked.

“Not a soul,” she replied, “excepting Mr. Japp, who is a relative by marriage—he was my aunt’s brother-in-law—his partner, and Mrs. Gillow and you. And you all know my position.”

“Does Mrs. Gillow know the state of affairs?” I asked in some surprise.

“Yes,” she answered, “I thought it best to tell her, in confidence, so that she should understand that I want to live a quiet life.”

“I suppose you haven’t cut yourself off completely from all your friends?” said I.

“Very nearly. I haven’t many friends that I really care about much, but I keep in touch with one or two of my old comrades. But I have had to swear them to secrecy—though it looks as if the secret had leaked out in some way. Of course they all know Nicholas—my husband.”

“And I suppose you have been able to learn from them how your husband views the separation?”

“Yes. Of course he thinks I have treated him abominably, and he evidently suspects that I have some motive for leaving him other than mere dislike of his unpleasant habits. The usual motive, in fact.”

“What Sam Weller would call a ‘priory attachment’?” I suggested.

“Yes. He is a jealous and suspicious man by nature. I had quite a lot of trouble with him in that way before that final outbreak, though I have always been most circumspect in my relations with other men. Still, a woman doesn’t complain of a little jealousy. Within reason, it is a natural, masculine failing.”

“I should consider a tendency to use a knitted silk necktie for purposes which I need not specify as going rather beyond ordinary masculine failings,” I remarked drily; on which she laughed and admitted that perhaps it was so. There was a short pause; then, turning to a fresh subject, she asked: “Do you think you will get any of Dr. Partridge’s practice?”

“I suspect not, or at any rate very little; and that reminds me that I have not yet inquired as to my patient’s condition. Are you any better?”

As I asked the question, I looked at her attentively, and noted that she was still rather pale and haggard, so far as I could judge by the subdued light of the shaded lamp, and that the darkness under the eyes remained undiminished.

“I am afraid I am not doing you much credit,” she replied, with a faint smile. “But you can’t expect any improvement while these unsettled conditions exist. If you could induce my respected husband to elope with another woman you would effect an immediate cure.”

“I am afraid,” said I, “that is beyond my powers, to say nothing of the inhumanity to the other woman. But we must persevere. You must let me look in on you from time to time, just to keep an eye on you.”

“I hope you will,” she replied, energetically. “If it doesn’t weary you to listen to my complaints and gossip a little, please keep me on your visiting list. With the exception of Mr. Japp, you are the only human creature that I hold converse with. Mrs. Gillow is a dear, good creature, but instinct warns me not to get on conversational terms with her. She’s rather lonely, too.”

“Yes; you might find it difficult to turn the tap off. I am always very cautious with housekeepers and landladies.”

She darted a mischievous glance at me. “Even if your landlady happens to be your patient?” she asked.

I chuckled as I remembered our dual relationship.

“That,” said I “is an exceptional case. The landlady becomes merged in the patient, and the patient tends to become a friend.”

“The doctor,” she retorted, “tends very strongly to become a friend, and a very kind and helpful friend. I think you have been exceedingly good to me—a mere waif who has drifted across your horizon.”

“Well,” I said, “if you think so, far be it from me to contradict you. One may as well pick up gratefully a stray crumb of commendation that one doesn’t deserve to set off against the deserved credit that one doesn’t get. But I should like to think that all my good deeds in the future will be as agreeable in the doing.”

She gave me a prim little smile. “We are getting monstrously polite,” she remarked, upon which we both laughed.

“However,” said I, “the moral of it all is that you ought to have a friendly medical eye kept on you, and, as mine is the eye that happens to be available, and as you are kind enough to accept the optical supervision, I shall give myself the pleasure of looking in on you from time to time to see how you are and to hear how the world wags. What is the best time to find you at home’”

“I am nearly always at home after seven o’clock, but perhaps that is not very convenient for you. I don’t know how you manage your practice.”

“The fact is,” said I, “that at present you are my practice, so I shall adapt my visiting round to your circumstances, and make my call at, or after, seven. I suppose you get some exercise?”

“Oh, yes. Quite a lot. I walk out in the country, and wander about Chatham and Gillingham and out to Frindsbury. I have been along the Watling Street as far as Cobham. Rochester itself I rather avoid for fear of making acquaintances, though it is a pleasant old town in spite of the improvements.”

As she spoke of these solitary rambles the idea floated into my mind that, later on, I might perchance offer to diminish their solitude. But I quickly dismissed it. Her position was, in any case, one of some delicacy—that of a young woman living apart from her husband. It would be an act the very reverse of friendly to compromise her in any way; nor would it tend at all to my own professional credit. A doctor’s reputation is nearly as tender as a woman’s.

Our conversation had occupied nearly three quarters of an hour, and, although I would willingly have lingered, it appeared to me that I had made as long a visit as was permissible. I accordingly rose, and, having given a few words of somewhat perfunctory professional advice, shook hands with my patient and let myself out.

CHAPTER VI

The Shadows Deepen

The coming events, whose premonitory shadows had been falling upon me unnoted since I came to Rochester, were daily drawing nearer. Perhaps it may have been that the deepening shadows began dimly to make themselves felt; that some indistinct sense of instability and insecurity had begun to steal into my consciousness. It may have been so. But, nevertheless, looking back, I can see that when the catastrophe burst upon me it found me all unsuspicious and unprepared.

Nearly a fortnight had passed since my meeting with my two friends in the Cathedral, and I was looking forward with some eagerness to their impending visit. During that fortnight little seemed to have happened, though the trivial daily occurrences were beginning to acquire a cumulative significance not entirely unperceived by me. My promise to Mrs. Frood had been carried out very thoroughly: for at least every alternate evening had found me seated by the little table with the red-shaded lamp, making the best pretence I could of being there in a professional capacity.

It was unquestionably indiscreet. The instant liking that I had taken to this woman should have warned me that here was one of those unaccountable “affinities” that are charged with such immense potentialities of blessing or disaster. The first impression should have made it clear to me that I could not safely spend much time in her society. But unfortunately the very circumstance that should have warned me to keep away was the magnet that drew me to her side.

However, there was one consoling fact: if the indiscretion was mine, so by me alone were the consequences supported. Our relations were of the most unexceptionable kind; indeed, she was not the sort of woman with whom any man would have taken a liberty. As to my feelings towards her, I could not pretend to deceive myself, but similarly, I had no delusions as to her feelings towards me. She welcomed my visits with that frank simplicity that is delightful to a friend and hopeless to a lover. It was plain to me that the bare possibility of anything beyond straightforward, honest friendship never entered her head. But this very innocence and purity, while at once a rebuke and a reassurance, but riveted my fetters the more firmly.

Such as our friendship was (and disregarding the secret reservation on my side), it grew apace; indeed, it sprang into existence at our first meeting. There was between us that ease and absence of reserve that distinguishes the intercourse of those who like and understand one another. I never had any fear of unwittingly giving offence. In our long talks and discussions, we had no need of choosing our words or phrases or of making allowances for possible prejudices. We could say plainly what we meant with the perfect assurance that it would be neither misunderstood nor resented. In short, if my feelings towards her could only have been kept at the same level as hers towards me, our friendship would have been perfect.

In the course of these long and pleasant gossiping visits, I observed my patient somewhat closely, and, quite apart from the personal affinity, I became more and more favourably impressed. She was a clever woman, quick and alert in mind, and evidently well informed. She seemed to be kindly, and was certainly amiable and even-tempered, though not in the least weak or deficient in character. Probably, in happier circumstances, she would have been more gay and vivacious, for, though she was habitually rather grave and even sombre, there were occasional flashes of wit that suggested a naturally lively temperament.

As to her appearance—to repeat in more detail what I have already said—she was a rather large woman, very erect and somewhat stately in bearing; distinctly good-looking (though of this I was not, perhaps, a very good judge). Her features were regular, but not in any way striking. Her expression was, as I have said, a little sombre and severe, the mouth firmly set and slightly depressed at the corners, the eyebrows black, straight, and unusually well-marked and nearly meeting above the nose. She had an abundance of black, or nearly black, hair, parted low on the forehead and drawn back loosely, covering the ears and temples, and she wore a largish coil nearly on the top of the head; a formal, matronly style that accentuated the gravity of her expression.

Such was Angelina Frood as I looked on her in those never-to-be-forgotten evenings; as she rises before the eyes of memory as I write, and as she will remain in my recollection so long as I live.

In this fortnight one really arresting incident had occurred. It was just a week after my meeting with Dr. Thorndyke, when, returning from a walk along the London Road as far as Gad’s Hill, I stopped on Rochester Bridge to watch a barge which had just passed under, and was rehoisting her lowered mast. As I was leaning on the parapet, a man brushed past me, and I turned my head idly to look at him. Then, in an instant, I started up; for though the man’s back was towards me, there was something unmistakably familiar in the gaunt figure, the seedy clothes, the great cloth cap, the shock of mouse-coloured hair, and the thick oaken stick that he swung in his hand. But I was not going to leave myself in any doubt on the subject. Cautiously I began to retrace my steps, keeping him in view but avoiding overtaking him, until he reached the western end of the bridge, when he halted and looked back. Then any possible doubt was set at rest. The man was Nicholas Frood. I don’t know whether he saw me; he made no sign of recognition; and when he turned and walked on, I continued to follow, determined to make sure of his destination.

As I had hoped and expected, he took the road to the right, leading to the river bank and the station. Still following him, I noted that he walked at a fairly brisk pace and seemed to have recovered completely from his debility—if that debility had not been entirely counterfeit. Opposite the pier he turned into the station approach, and when from the corner I had watched him enter the station, I gave up the pursuit, assuming that he was returning to London.

But how long had he been in Rochester? What had he been doing, and what success had he had in his search? These were the questions that I asked myself as I walked back over the bridge. Probably he had come down for the day; and since he was returning, it was reasonable to infer that he had had no luck. As I entered the town and glanced up at the great clock that hangs out across the street from the Corn Exchange, like a sort of horological warming-pan, I saw that it was close upon eight. It was a good deal after my usual time for calling on Mrs. Frood, but the circumstances were exceptional and I felt that it was necessary to ascertain whether anything untoward had occurred. I was still debating what I should do when, as I came opposite the house, I saw Mrs. Gillow coming out of the door. Immediately I crossed the road and accosted her.

“Have you seen Mrs. Frood this evening, Mrs. Gillow?” I asked, after passing the usual compliments.

“Yes, sir,” was the reply. “I left her only a few minutes ago working at one of the drawings that she does for Mr. Japp. She seems better this evening—brighter and more cheerful. I think your visits have done her good, sir. It is a lonely life for a young woman—having no one to talk to all through the long evenings. I’m always glad to hear your knock, and so, I think, is she.”

“I’m pleased to hear you say so, Mrs. Gillow,” said I. “However, as it is rather late, and she has something to occupy her, I don’t think I will call this evening.”

With this I took my leave and went on my way in better spirits. Evidently all was well so far. Nevertheless, the reappearance of this man was an uncomfortable incident. It was clear that he had not given up the pursuit, and, seeing that Rochester was only some thirty miles from London, it would be quite easy for him to make periodical descents on the place to continue the search. There was no denying that Mrs. Frood’s position was extremely insecure, and I could think of no plan for making it less so, excepting that of leaving Rochester, for a time at least, a solution which ought to have commended itself to me, but did not.

Perhaps it was this fact that decided me not to say anything about the incident. The obvious thing was to have told her and put her on her guard. But I persuaded myself that it would only make her anxious to no purpose; that she could not prevent him from coming nor could she take any further measures for concealment. And then there was the possibility that he might never come again.

So far as I know, he never did. During the rest of the week I perambulated the town hour after hour, looking into the shops, scanning the faces of the wayfarers in the streets and even visiting the stations at the times when the London trains were due; but never a glimpse did I catch of that ill-omened figure.

And all the time, the shadows were deepening, and that which cast them was drawing nearer.

It was nearly a week after my meeting with Nicholas Frood that an event befell at which I looked askance at the time and which was, as it turned out, the opening scene of a new act. It was on the Saturday. I am able to fix the date by an incident, trivial enough in itself, but important by reason of its forming thus a definite point of departure. My visitors were due on the following Monday, and it had occurred to me that I had better lay in a little stock of wine; and as Mr. Japp was an old resident who knew everybody in the town, I decided to consult him as to the choice of a wine merchant.

It was a little past mid-day when I arrived at the office, and as I entered I observed that some kind of conference was in progress. A man, whom I recognized as the foreman of the gang who were working on the old wall, was standing sheepishly with his knuckles resting on the table; Bundy had swung round on his stool and was glaring owlishly through his great spectacles, while Mr. Japp was sitting bolt upright, his forehead in a state of extreme corrugation and his eyes fixed severely on the foreman.

“I suppose,” said Bundy, “you left it in the gate?”

“I expect Evans did,” replied the foreman. “You see, I had to call in at the office, so I gave the key to Evans and told him to go on with the other men and let them in. When I got there the gate was open and the men were at work, and I forgot all about the key until it was time to come away and lock up. Then I asked Evans for it, and he said he’d left it in the gate. But when I went to look for it it wasn’t there. Someone must have took it out.”

“Doesn’t seem very likely,” said Bundy. “However, I suppose it will turn up. It had one of our wooden labels tied to it. Shall I give him the duplicate to lock up the place?”

“You must, I suppose,” said Japp; “but it must be brought straight back and given to me. You understand, Smith? Bring it back at once, and deliver it to me or to Mr. Bundy. And look here, Smith. I shall offer ten shillings reward for that key; and if it is brought back and I have to pay the reward you will have to make it up among you. You understand that?”

Smith indicated grumpily that he understood; and when Bundy had handed him the duplicate key, he took his departure in dudgeon.

When he had gone I stated my business, and Bundy pricked up his ears.

“Wine, hey?” said he, removing his spectacles and assuming his monocle. “Tucker will be the man for him, won’t he, Japp? Very superior wine merchant is Tucker. Old and crusted; round and soft; rare and curious. I’d better pop round with him and introduce him, hadn’t I? You’ll want to taste a few samples, I presume, Doctor?”

“I’m not giving a wholesale order,” said I, smiling at his enthusiasm. “A dozen or so of claret and one or two bottles of port is all I want.”

“Still,” said Bundy, “you want to know what the stuff’s like. Not going to buy a pig in a poke. You’ll have to taste it, of course. I’ll help you. Two heads are better than one. Come on. You said Tucker, didn’t you, Japp?”

“As a matter of fact,” said Japp, wrinkling his face up into an appreciative smile, “I didn’t say anything. But Tucker will do; only he won’t let you taste anything until you have bought it.”

“Won’t he!” said Bundy. “We shall see. Come along, Doctor.”

He dragged me out of the office and down the steps, and we set forth towards the bridge; but we had not walked more than a couple of hundred yards when he suddenly shot up a narrow alley and beckoned to me mysteriously. I followed him up the alley, and as he halted I asked:

“What have you come here for?”

“I want you,” he replied impressively, “to take a look at this wall.”

I scrutinized the wall with minute attention but failed to discover any noteworthy peculiarities in it.

“Well,” I said, at length, “I don’t see anything unusual about this wall.”

“Neither do I,” he replied, looking furtively down the alley.

“Then, what the deuce—” I began.

“It’s all right,” said he. “She’s gone. That damsel in the pink hat. I just popped up here to let her pass. The fact is,” he explained, as he emerged cautiously into the High Street, glancing up and down like an Indian on the war-path, “these women are the plague of my life; always trying to hook me for teas or bazaars or garden fetes or some sort of confounded foolishness; and that pink-hatted lady is a regular sleuth-hound.”

We walked quickly along the narrow pavement, Bundy looking about him warily, until we reached the wine-merchant’s premises, into which my companion dived like a harlequin and forthwith proceeded to introduce me and my requirements. Mr. Tucker was a small, elderly man; old and crusted and as dry as his own Amontillado; but he was not proof against Bundy’s blandishments. Before I had had time to utter a protest, I found myself in a dark cavern at the rear of the shop, watching Mr. Tucker fill a couple of glasses from a mouldy-looking cask.

“Ha!” said Bundy, sipping the wine with a judicial air. “H’m. Yes. Not so bad. Slightly corked, perhaps.”

“Corked!” exclaimed Tucker, staring at Bundy in amazement. “How can it be corked when it is just out of the cask?”

“Well, bunged, then,” Bundy corrected.

“I never heard of wine being bunged,” said Tucker. “There’s no such thing.”

“Isn’t there? Well, then, it can’t be. Must be my fancy. What do you think of it, Doctor?”

“It seems quite a sound claret,” said I, inwardly wishing my volatile friend at the devil, for I felt compelled, by way of soothing the wine merchant’s wounded feelings, to order twice the quantity that I had intended. We had just completed the transaction, and were crossing the outer shop when the doorway became occluded by two female figures, and Bundy uttered a half-suppressed groan. I drew aside to make way for the newcomers—two ladies whom polite persons would have described as middle-aged, on the assumption that they contemplated a somewhat extreme degree of longevity—and I was aware that Bundy was endeavouring to take cover behind me. But it was of no use. One of them espied him instantly and announced her discovery with a little squeak of ecstasy.

“Why, it’s Mr. Bundy. I do declare! Now, where have you been all this long time? It’s ages and ages and ages since you came to see us, isn’t it, Martha? Let me see, now, when was it?” She fixed a reflective eye on her companion, while Bundy smiled a sickly smile and glanced wistfully at the open door.

“I know,” she exclaimed, triumphantly. “It was when we had the feeble-minded children to tea, and Mr. Blote showed them the gold fish trick—at least he tried to, but the glass bowl stuck in the bag under his coat-tails and wouldn’t come out; and when he tried to pull it out it broke—”

“I think you are mistaken, Marian,” the other lady interrupted. “It wasn’t the feeble-minded tea. It was after that, when we helped the Jewbury-Browns to get up that rumble sale—”

“Jumble sale, you mean, dear,” her companion corrected.

“I mean rummage sale,” the lady called Martha insisted, severely. “If you will try to recall the circumstances, you will remember that the jumble sale took place after—”

“Not after,” the other lady corrected. “It was before—several days before, I should say, speaking from a somewhat imperfect memory. If you will try to recollect, Martha, dear—”

“I recollect quite distinctly,” the lady called Martha interposed, a little haughtily. “There was the feeble-minded tea—that was on a Tuesday—or was it a Thursday—no, it was a Tuesday, or at least—well, at any rate, it was some days before the jum—rum—”

“Not at all,” the other lady dissented emphatically. At this point, catching the eye of the lady called Marian, I crept by slow degrees out on the threshold and turned an expectant eye on Bundy. The rather broad hint took immediate effect, for the lady said to her companion: “I am afraid, Martha, dear, you are detaining Mr. Bundy and his friend. Good-bye, Mr. Bundy. Shall we see you next Friday evening? We are giving a little entertainment to the barge-boys. We are inviting them to come and bring their mouth-organs and get up a little informal concert. Do come if you can. We shall be so delighted. Good-bye.”

Bundy shook hands effusively with the two ladies and darted out after me, seizing my arm and hurrying me along the pavement.

“Bit of luck for me, Doctor, having you with me. If I had been alone and unprotected I shouldn’t have escaped for half-an-hour; and I should have been definitely booked for the barge-boys’ pandemonium. Hallo! What’s Japp up to? Oh, I see. He’s sticking up the notice about that key. I ought to have done that. Japp writes a shocking fist. I must see if it is possible to make it out.”

As we approached the office I glanced at the sheet of paper which Mr. Japp had just affixed to the window, and was able to read the rather crabbed heading, “Ten Shillings Reward.” The rest of the inscription being of no interest to me, I wished Bundy adieu and went on my way, leaving him engaged in a critical inspection of the notice. Happening to look back a few moments later, I saw him still gazing earnestly at the paper, all unconscious of a lady in a pink hat who was tripping lightly across the road and bearing down on him with an alluring smile.

Threading my way among the foot-passengers who filled the narrow pavements, I let my thoughts ramble idly from subject to subject; from the expected visit of my two friends on the following Monday to the alarming character of the local feminine population. But always they tended to come back to my patient, Mrs. Frood. I had seen her on the preceding night and had been very ill-satisfied with her appearance. She had been paler than usual—more heavy-eyed and weary-looking; and she had impressed me as being decidedly low-spirited. It seemed as though the continual uncertainty and unrest, the abiding threat of some intolerable action on the part of her worthless husband, were becoming more than she could endure; and unwillingly I was beginning to recognize that it was my duty, both as her doctor and as her friend, to advise her to move, at least for a time, to some locality where she would be free from the constant fear of molestation.

The question was: when should I broach the subject?

And that involved the further question: when should I make my next visit? Inclination suggested the present evening, but discretion hinted that I ought to allow a decent interval between my calls; and thus oscillating between the two, I found myself in a state of indecision which lasted for the rest of the day. Eventually discretion conquered, and I decided to postpone the visit and the proposal until the following evening.

The decision was reached about the time I should have been setting forth to make the visit, and no sooner had that time definitely passed than I began to regret my resolution and to be possessed by a causeless anxiety. Restlessly I wandered from room to room; taking up books, opening them and putting them down again, and generally displaying the typical symptoms of an acute attack of fidgets until Mrs. Dunk proceeded with a determined air to lay the supper, and drew my attention to it with an emphasis which it was impossible to disregard.

I had just drawn the cork of a bottle of Mr. Tucker’s claret when the doorbell rang, an event without precedent in my experience. Silently I replaced the newly-extracted cork and listened. Apparently it was a patient, for I heard the street door close and footsteps proceed to the consulting-room. A minute later Mrs. Dunk opened the dining-room door and announced:

“Mrs. Frood to see you, sir.”

With a slight thrill of anxiety at this unexpected visit, I strode out, and, crossing the hall, entered the somewhat dingy and ill-lighted consulting-room. Mrs. Frood was seated in the patients’ chair, but she rose as I entered and held out her hand; and as I grasped it, I noticed how tall she looked in her outdoor clothes. But I also noticed that she was looking even more pale and haggard than when I had seen her last.

“There is nothing the matter, I hope?” said I.

“No,” she answered; “nothing much more than usual; but I have come to present a petition.”

I looked at her inquiringly, and she continued:

“I have been sleeping very badly, as you know. Last night I had practically no sleep at all, and very little the night before; and I feel that I really can’t face the prospect of another sleepless night. Would you think it very immoral if I were to ask you for something that would give me a few hours’ rest?”

“Certainly not,” I answered, though with no great enthusiasm, for I am disposed to take hypnotics somewhat seriously. “You can’t go on without sleep. I will give you one or two tablets to take before you go to bed. They will secure you a decent night’s rest, and then I hope you will feel a little brighter.”

“I hope so,” she said, with a weary sigh.

I looked at her critically. She was, as I have said, pale and haggard; but there seemed to be something more; a certain wildness in her eyes and a suggestion or fear.

“You are not looking yourself at all tonight,” I said. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “The same old thing, I suppose. But I do feel rather miserable. I seem to have come to the end of my’ endurance. I look into the future and it all seems dark. I am afraid of it. In fact, I seem to have—you’ll think me very silly, I know—but I have a sort of presentiment of evil. Of course, it’s all nonsense. But that is what I feel.”

“Is there any reason for this presentiment?” I asked uneasily; for my thoughts flew at once to that ill-omened figure that I had seen on the bridge. “Has anything happened to occasion these forebodings?”

“Oh, nothing in particular,” she replied. But she spoke without looking at me—an unusual thing for her to do—and I found in her answer something ambiguous and rather evasive. Could it be that she had seen her husband on that day when I had followed him? Or had he been in the town again—this very day, perhaps? Or was there something yet more significant, something even more menacing? That this deep depression of spirits, these forebodings, were not without some exciting cause I felt the strongest suspicion. But whatever the cause might be, she was evidently unwilling to speak about it.

While I was speculating thus, I found myself looking her over with a minute attention of which I was not conscious at the time; noting little trivial details of her appearance and belongings with an odd exactness of observation. My eyes travelled over the little handbag, stamped with her initials, that rested on her lap; her dainty, high-heeled shoes with their little oval buckles of darkened bronze; the small brooch at her throat with the large opal in the middle and the surrounding circle of little pearls, and even noted that one of the pearls was missing and that the vacant place corresponded to the figure three on a clock-dial. And then they would come back to her face; to the set mouth and the downcast eyes with their expression of gloomy reverie.

I was profoundly uneasy and was on the point of opening the subject of her leaving the town. Then I decided that I would see her on the morrow and would go into the matter then. Accordingly I went into the surgery and put a few tablets of sulphonal into a little box, and having stuck one of Dr. Partridge’s labels on it, wrote the directions and then wrapped it up and sealed it.

“There,” I said, giving it to her, “take a couple of those tablets and go to bed early, and let me find you looking a little more cheerful tomorrow.”

She took the packet and dropped it into her bag. “It is very good of you,” she said warmly. “I know you don’t like doing it, and that makes it the more kind. But I will do as you tell me. I have just to go in to Chatham, but when I get back I will go to bed quite early.”

I walked with her to the door, and when I had opened it she stopped and held out her hand. “Good night,” she said, “and thank you so very much. I expect you will find me a great deal better tomorrow.” She pressed my hand slightly, made me a little bow, smiled, and, turning away, passed out; and I now noticed that the haze which had hung over the town all the afternoon had thickened into a definite fog. I stepped out on to the threshold and watched her as she walked quickly down the street, following the erect, dignified figure wistfully with my eyes as it grew more and more shadowy and unsubstantial until it faded into the fog and vanished. Then I went in to my solitary supper, with an unwonted sense of loneliness; and throughout the long evening I turned over again and again our unsatisfying talk and wondered afresh whether that presentiment of evil was but the product of insomnia and mental fatigue, or whether behind it was some sinister reality.

CHAPTER VII

Mrs. Gillow Sounds the Alarm

Nine o’clock on the following morning found me still seated at the breakfast table, with the debris of the meal before me and the Sunday paper propped up against the coffee-pot. It was a pleasant, sunny morning at the end of April. The birds were twittering joyously in the trees at the back of the house, a premature bluebottle perambulated the window-pane, after an unsuccessful attempt to crawl under the dish-cover, and somewhere in the town an optimistic bell-ringer was endeavouring to lure unwary loiterers out of the sunshine into the shadow of the sanctuary.

It was all very agreeable and soothing. The birds were delightful in the exuberance of their spirits; even the bluebottle was a harbinger of summer; and the solo of the bellringer, softened by distance, impinged gently on the appreciative ear, awakening a grateful sense of immunity. The sunshine and the placid sounds were favourable to reflection, which the Sunday paper was powerless to disturb. As my eye roamed inattentively down the inconsequent column of printers’ errors, my mind flitted, beelike, from topic to topic; from my vague professional prospects to the visitors whom I was expecting on the morrow and from them to the rather disturbing incident of the previous evening. But here my thoughts had a tendency to stick; and I was just considering whether the proprieties admitted of my making a morning call on Mrs. Frood, with a view to clearing up the obscurity, when the street-door bell rang. The unusual sound at such an unlikely time caused me to sit up and listen with just a tinge of uneasy expectancy. A few moments later Mrs. Dunk opened the door, and having stated concisely and impassively, “Mrs. Gillow,” retired, leaving the door ajar. I started up in something approaching alarm, and hurried across to the consulting-room, where I found Mrs. Gillow standing by the chair with anxiety writ large on her melancholy face.

“There’s nothing amiss, I hope, Mrs. Gillow?” said I.

“I am sorry to say there is, sir,” she replied. “I hope you’ll excuse me for disturbing you on a Sunday morning, but I thought, as you were her doctor, and a friend, too, and I may say—”

“But what has happened?” I interrupted impatiently.

“Why, sir, the fact is that she went out last night and she hasn’t come back.”

“You are quite sure she hasn’t come back?”

“Perfectly. I saw her just before she went out, and she said she was coming to see you, to get something to make her sleep, and then she was just going into Chatham, and that she would be back soon, so that she could go to bed early. I sat up quite late listening for her, and before I went to bed I went down and knocked at both her doors, and as I didn’t get any answer, I looked into both rooms. But she wasn’t in either, and her little supper was untouched on the table in the sitting-room. I couldn’t sleep a wink all night for worrying about her, and the first thing this morning I went down, and, when I found the door unbolted and unchained, I went into her rooms again. But there was no sign of her. Her supper was still there, untouched, and her bed had not been slept in.”

“Did you look downstairs?” I asked.

“Yes. She usually kept the door of the basement stairs locked, I think, but it was unlocked this morning, so I went down and searched all over the basement; but she wasn’t there.”

“It is very extraordinary, Mrs. Gillow,” I said, “and rather alarming. I certainly understood that she was going home as soon as she had been to Chatham. By the way, do you know what she was going to Chatham for?”

“I don’t, sir. She might have been going there to do some shopping, but it was rather late, though it was Saturday night.”

“You don’t know, I suppose, whether she took any things with her—though she couldn’t have taken much, as she had only a little handbag with her when she came here.”

“She hasn’t taken any of her toilet things,” said Mrs. Gillow, “because I looked over her dressing-table, and all her brushes and things were there; and, as you say, she couldn’t have taken much in that little bag. What do you think we had better do, sir?”

“I think,” said I, “that, in the first place, I will go and see Mr. Japp. He is a relative and knows more about her than we do, and, of course, it will be for him to take any measures that may seem necessary. At any rate, I will see him and hear what he says.”

“Don’t you think we ought to let the police know?” she asked.

“Well, Mrs. Gillow,” I said, “we mustn’t be too hasty. Mrs. Frood had reasons for avoiding publicity. Perhaps we had better not busy ourselves too much until we are quite certain that she has gone. She may possibly return in the course of the day.”

“I am sure I hope so,” she replied despondently. “But I am very much afraid she won’t. I have a presentiment that something dreadful has happened to her.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked. “Have you any reason for thinking so?”

“I have no actual reason,” she answered, “but I have always thought that there was something behind her fear of meeting her husband.”

Having no desire to discuss speculative opinions, I made no direct reply to this. Apparently Mrs. Gillow had no more to tell, and as I was anxious to see Mr. Japp and hear if he could throw any light on the mystery, I adjourned the discussion on which she would have embarked and piloted her persuasively towards the door. “I shall see you again later, Mrs. Gillow,” I said, “and will let you know if I hear anything. Meanwhile, I think you had better not speak of the matter to anybody.”

As soon as she was gone I made rapid preparations to go forth on my errand, and a couple of minutes later was speeding down the street at a pace dictated rather by the agitation of my mind than by any urgency of purpose. Although, by an effort of will, I had preserved a quiet, matter-of-fact demeanour while I was talking to Mrs. Gillow, her alarming news had fallen on me like a thunderbolt; and even now, as I strode forward swiftly, my thoughts seemed numbed by the suddenness of the catastrophe. That something terrible had happened I had little more doubt than had Mrs. Gillow, and a good deal more reason for my fears; for that last interview with the missing woman, looked back upon by the light of her unaccountable disappearance, now appeared full of dreadful suggestions. I had thought that she looked frightened, and she admitted to a presentiment of evil. Of whom or of what was she afraid? And what did she mean by a presentiment? Reasonable people do not have gratuitous presentiments; and I recalled her evasive reply when I asked if she had any reasons for her foreboding of evil. Now, there was little doubt that she had; that the shadow of some impending danger had fallen on her and that she knew it.

As I approached the premises of Japp and Bundy, I was assailed by a sudden doubt as to whether Mr. Japp lived there; and this doubt increased when I had executed two loud knocks at the door without eliciting any response. I was just raising my hand to make a third attack when I became aware of Bundy’s head rising above the curtain of the office window; and even in my agitation I could not but notice its extremely dishevelled state. His hair—usually “smarmed” back neatly from the forehead and brushed over the crown of his head—now hung down untidily over his face like a bunch of rat’s tails, and the unusualness of his appearance was increased by the fact that he wore neither spectacles nor the indispensable monocle. The apparition, however, was visible but for a moment, for even as I glanced at him he made a sign to me to wait and forthwith vanished.

There followed an interval of about a minute, at the end of which the door opened and I entered, discovering Bundy behind it in a dressing-gown and pyjamas, but with his hair neatly brushed and his monocle duly adjusted.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Doc,” said he. “Fact is, your knock woke me. The early bird catches the worm in his pyjamas.”

“I apologize for disturbing your slumbers,” said I, “but I wanted to see Japp. Isn’t he in?”

“Japp doesn’t live here,” said Bundy, motioning to me to follow him upstairs. “He used to, but the house began to fill up with the business stuff and we had to make a drawing office and a store-room, so he moved off to a house on Boley Hill, and now I live here like Robinson Crusoe.”

“Do you mean that you do your own cooking and housework?”

“Lord, no,” he replied. “I get most of my meals at Japp’s place. Prepare my own breakfast sometimes—I’m going to now: and I make tea for us both. Got a little gas-stove in the kitchen. And a charlady comes in every day to wash up and do my rooms. If you are not in a hurry, I’ll walk round with you to Japp’s house.”

“I am in rather a hurry,” said I; “at least—well, I don’t know why I should be; but I am rather upset. The fact is, a very alarming thing has happened. I have just heard of it from Mrs. Gillow. It seems that Mrs. Frood went out last evening and has not come back.”

Bundy whistled. “She’s done a bolt,” said he. “I wonder why. Do you think she can have run up against hubby in the town?”

“I don’t believe for a moment that she has gone away voluntarily,” said I. “She came to see me last night to get a sedative because she couldn’t sleep, and she said that she was going home as soon as she had been to Chatham, and that she was going to take her medicine and go to bed early.”

“That might have been a blind,” suggested Bundy; “or she might have run up against her husband in Chatham.”

I shook my head impatiently. “That is all nonsense, Bundy. A woman doesn’t walk off into space in that fashion. Something has happened to her, I feel sure. I only hope it isn’t something horrible; one doesn’t dare to think of the possibilities that the circumstances suggest.”

“No,” said Bundy, “and it’s better not to. Great mistake to let your imagination run away with you. Don’t you worry, Doc. She’ll probably turn up all right, or send Japp a line to say where she has gone to.”

“Devil take it, Bundy!” I exclaimed irritably, “you are talking as if she were just a cat that had strayed away. If you don’t care a hang what becomes of her, I do. I am extremely alarmed about her. How soon will you be ready?”

“I’ll run and get on my things at once,” he replied, with a sudden change of manner. “You must excuse me, old chap. I didn’t realize that you were so upset. I’ll be with you in a few minutes and then we will start. Japp will be able to give me some breakfast.”

He bustled off—to the next room, as I gathered from the sound—and left me to work off my impatience by gazing out of the window and pacing restlessly up and down the barely-furnished sitting-room. But, impatient as I was, the rapidity with which he made his toilet surprised me, for in less than ten minutes he reappeared, spick and span, complete with hat, gloves, and stick, and announced that he was ready.

“I am not usually such a sluggard,” he said, as we walked quickly along the street, “but yesterday evening I got a novel. I ought not to read novels. When I do, I am apt to make a single mouthful of it; and that is what I did last night. I started the book at nine and finished it at two this morning; and the result is that I am as sleepy as an owl even now.”

In illustration of this statement he gave a prodigious yawn and then turned up the steep little thoroughfare, where be presently halted at the door of a small, old-fashioned house and rang the bell. The door was opened by a middle-aged servant, from whom he learned that Mr. Japp was at home, and to whom Bundy communicated his needs in the matter of breakfast. We found Mr. Japp seated by the dining-room window, studying a newspaper with the aid of a large pipe, and Bundy proceeded to introduce me and the occasion of my visit in a few crisp sentences.

Mr. Japp’s reception of the news was very different from his partner’s. Starting up from his chair and taking his pipe from his mouth, he gazed at me for some seconds in silent dismay.

“I suppose,” he said at length, “there is no mistake. It is really certain that she did not come back last night?”

“I am afraid there is no doubt of the fact,” I replied, and I gave him the details with which Mrs. Gillow had furnished me.

“Dear! dear!” he exclaimed. “I don’t like the look of this at all. What the deuce can have happened to her?”

Here Bundy repeated the suggestion that he had made to me, but Japp shook his head. “She wouldn’t have gone off without letting me or the doctor know. Why should she? We are friends, and she knew she could trust us. Besides, the thing isn’t possible. A middle-class woman can’t set out like a tramp without any luggage or common necessaries. There’s only one possibility,” he added after a pause. “She might have seen Nicholas prowling about and gone straight to the station and taken a train to London. One of her woman friends would have been able to put her up for the night.”

“Or,” suggested Bundy, “she might even have gone up to town with Nick himself if he met her and threatened to make a scene.”

“Yes,” said Japp doubtfully, “that is, I suppose, possible. But it isn’t in the least likely. For that matter, nothing is likely. It is a most mysterious affair, and very disturbing, very disturbing, indeed.”

“The question is,” said I, “what is to be done? Do you think we ought to communicate with the police?”

“Well, no,” he replied; “not immediately. If we don’t hear anything, say tomorrow, I suppose we shall have to. But we had better not be precipitate. If we go to the police, we shall have to tell them everything. Let us give her time to communicate, in case she has had to make a sudden retirement—a clear forty-eight hours, as it is a weekend. But we had better make some cautious inquiries meanwhile. I suggest that we walk up to the hospital. They know me pretty well there, and I could just informally ascertain whether any accidents had been admitted, without giving any detailed reasons for the inquiry. Are you coming with us, Bundy?”

“Yes,” replied Bundy, who, having been provided with a light breakfast, was despatching it with lightning speed; “I shall be ready by the time you have got your boots on.”

A few minutes later we set forth together, and made our way straight to the hospital. Bundy and I waited outside while Japp went in to make his inquiries; and, as we walked up and down, my imagination busied itself in picturing the hideous possibilities suggested by a somewhat extensive experience of the casualty department of a general hospital. Presently Japp emerged, shaking his head.

“She is not there,” said he. “There were no casualties of any kind admitted last night or since.”

“Is there no other hospital?” I asked.

“None but the military hospital,” he replied. “All the casualties from the district would be brought here. So we seem to be at the end of our resources, short of inquiring at the police-station; and even if that were advisable, it would be useless, for if—anything had happened—anything, I mean, that we hope has not happened—Mrs. Gillow would have heard. She will be sure to have had something about her by which she could have been identified.”

“She had,” said I. “The little box that I gave her had her name and my address on it.”

“Then,” said Japp. “I don’t see that we can do anything more. We can only wait until tomorrow evening or Tuesday morning, and if we don’t get any news of her by then, notify the police.”

Unwillingly I had to admit that this was so; and when I had walked back with the partners to Mr. Japp’s house, I left them and proceeded to report to Mrs. Gillow and to ascertain whether, in the meantime, she had received any tidings of her missing tenant.

It was with more of fear than hope that I plied the familiar knocker, but the eager, expectant face that greeted me when the door opened, while it relieved the one, banished the other. She had heard nothing, and when I had communicated my own unsatisfactory report she groaned and shook her head.

“You are quite sure,” I said, after an interval of silence, “that she did not return from Chatham?”

“I don’t see how she could have done,” was the reply.

“You see, it was like this: I was going to see my sister at Frindsbury, and as I came down to the hall, Mrs. Frood opened her door and spoke to me. She had her hat on then, and she told me she was coming to you, and then going on to Chatham, but that she would be back pretty soon, and was going to bed early. I went out, leaving her at her room door, and took the tram to Frindsbury, and I got back home about a quarter to ten. Her sitting-room door was open, and I could see that she hadn’t gone to bed, because her lamp was alight and her supper tray was on the table and hadn’t been touched. I knocked at her bedroom door, but there was no answer, so I went upstairs and sat up listening for her, and before I went to bed I went down again, as I told you.”

“What time was it when you went out?” I asked.

“About a quarter past eight. I told her I was going to Frindsbury, and that I should be home before ten, and I asked her not to bolt the door if she came in before me.”

“Then,” said I, “she must have gone out directly after you, because it was only a little after half-past eight when she called on me; and presumably she went straight on to Chatham. If we only knew what she was going there for we might be able to trace her. Did she know anybody at Chatham?”

“So far as I know,” replied Mrs. Gillow, “she didn’t know anybody here but you and Mr. Japp. I can’t imagine what she could have been going to Chatham for.”

After a little further talk, I took my leave and walked homeward in a very wretched frame of mind. Tormented as I was with a gnawing anxiety, inaction was intolerable. Yet there was nothing to be done; nothing but to wait in the feeble hope that the morning might bring some message of relief, and with a heavy foreboding that the tidings, when they came, would be evil tidings. But I found it impossible to wait passively at home. At intervals during the day I went forth to wander up and down the streets; and some impulse which I hardly dared to recognize directed my steps again and again to the wharves and foreshore that lie by the bend of the river between Rochester and Chatham.

On the following morning I betook myself as early as I decently could to the office of Japp and Bundy. No letter had arrived by the early post, nor, when I repeated my visit later, was there any news, either by post or telegram, or from Mrs. Gillow. I paid a furtive visit to the police-station and glanced nervously over the bills on the notice-board, and I made another perambulation of the waterside districts, which occupied me until it was time for me to repair to the station to meet the train by which my friends were expected to arrive, and did, in fact, arrive.

As we walked from the station to my house Jervis looked at me critically from time to time. After one of these inspections he remarked:

“I don’t know whether it is my fancy, Strangeways, but it seems to me that the cares of medical practice are affecting your spirits. You look worried.”

“I am worried,” I replied. “There has been a very disturbing development of that case that I was telling you about.”

“The doper, you mean?”

“His wife. She has disappeared. She went out on Saturday night and has not been seen since.”

“That sounds rather ominous,” said Jervis. “I presume the circumstances—if you know them—could be communicated without any breach of confidence.”

“They will have to be made fully public if she doesn’t turn up by this evening,” I replied, “and I am only too glad of the chance to talk the matter over with you,” and forthwith I proceeded to give a circumstantial account of the events connected with the disappearance, not omitting any detail that seemed to have the slightest bearing. And I now felt justified in relating my experience when I was acting for Dr. Pumphrey. The narrative was interrupted by our arrival at my house, but when we had taken our places at the table it was continued and listened to with intense interest by my two friends.

“Well,” said Jervis, when I had finished, “it has an ugly look, especially when one considers it in connexion with that affair in London. But there is something to be said for your friend Bundy’s suggestion. Don’t you think so, Thorndyke?”

“Something, perhaps,” Thorndyke agreed, “but not much; and if no letter arrives tonight or tomorrow morning, I should say it is excluded. This lady seems to have had complete confidence in Strangeways and in Mr. Japp. She could depend on their secrecy if she had to move suddenly to a fresh locality; and she seems to have been a responsible person who would not unnecessarily expose them to anxiety about her safety. Moreover, she would know that, if she kept them in the dark, they must unavoidably put the police on her track, which would be the last thing that she would wish.”

“Can you make any suggestion as to what has probably happened?” I asked.

“It is not of much use to speculate,” replied Thorndyke.

“If we exclude a voluntary disappearance, an accident or sudden illness, as we apparently can, there seems to remain only the possibility of crime. But to the theory of crime—of murder, to put it bluntly—there is a manifest objection. So far as the circumstances are known to us, a murder, if it had occurred, would have been an impromptu murder, committed in a more or less public place. But the first indication of a murder of that kind is usually—the discovery of the body. Here, however, thirty-six hours have elapsed, and no body has come to light. On the other hand, we have to bear in mind that there is a large, tidal river skirting the town. Into that river the missing lady might have fallen accidentally, or have been thrown, dead or alive. But it is not very profitable to speculate. We can neither form any opinion nor take any action until we have some further facts.”

I must confess that, as I listened to Thorndyke thus calmly comparing the horrible possibilities, I experienced a dreadful sinking of the heart, but yet I realized that this passionless consideration of the essential evidence was more to the point, and promised more result than any amount of unskilful groping under the urge of emotion and personal feeling. And, realizing this, I formed the bold resolution of enlisting Thorndyke’s aid in a regular, professional capacity, and began to cast about for the means of introducing the rather delicate subject. But while I was reflecting, the opportunity, was gone, at least for the present. Lunch had virtually come to an end, for Mrs. Dunk had silently and with iron visage just placed the port and the coffee on the table and retired, when, Jervis, who had observed her with evident interest, inquired: “Does that old Sphinx do the cooking, Strangeways?”

“She does everything,” I answered. “I have suggested that she should get some help, but she just growled and ignored the suggestion.”

“Well,” said Jervis, “she doesn’t give you much excuse for growling. She has turned out a lunch that would have done credit to Delmonico’s. Are you coming to the inquest with us? We shall have to be starting in a few minutes.”

“I may as well,” said I. “Then I can bring you back to tea. And I want to make a proposal, which we can discuss as we go along. It is with regard to the case of Mrs. Frood.”

As my two friends looked at me inquiringly but made no remark, I poured out the coffee and continued: “You see, Mrs. Frood was my patient, and, in a way, my friend; in fact, with the exception of Japp, I was the only friend she had in the place. Consequently I take it as my duty to ascertain what has happened to her, and, if she has come to any harm, to see that the wrongdoers are brought to account. Of course, I am not competent to investigate the case myself, but I am in the position to bear any costs that the investigation would entail.”

“Lucky man,” said Jervis. “And what is the proposal?”

“I was wondering,” I replied, a little nervously, “whether I could prevail on you to undertake the case.”

Jervis glanced at his senior, and the latter replied:

“It is just a little premature to speak of a ‘case.’ The missing lady may return or communicate with her friends. If she does not, the inquiry will fall into the hands of the police; and there is no reason to suppose that they will not be fully competent to deal with it. They have more means and facilities than we have. But if the inquiry should become necessary, and the police should be unsuccessful, Jervis and I would be prepared to render you any assistance that we could.”

“On professional terms,” I stipulated.

Thorndyke smiled. “The financial aspects of the case,” said he, “can be considered when they arise. Now, I think, it is time for us to start.”

As we walked down to the building where the inquest was to be held, we pursued the topic, and Thorndyke pointed out my position in the case.

“You notice, Strangeways,” said he, “that you are the principal witness. You are the last person who saw Mrs. Frood before her disappearance, you heard her state her intended movements, you knew her circumstances, you saw and examined her husband, and you alone can give an exact description of her as she was at the time when she disappeared. I would suggest that, during the inquest, which will not interest you, you might usefully try to reconstitute that last interview and make full notes in writing of all that occurred with a very careful and detailed description of the person, clothing, and belongings of the missing lady. The police will want this information, and so shall I, if I am to give any consideration to the case.”

On this suggestion I proceeded to act as soon as we had taken our places at the foot of the long table occupied by the coroner and the jury, detaching myself as well as I could from the matter of the inquest; and by the time that the deliberations were at an end and the verdict agreed upon, I had drafted out a complete set of notes and made two copies, one for the police and one for Thorndyke.

As soon as we were outside the court I presented the latter copy, which Thorndyke read through.

“This is admirable, Strangeways,” said he, as he placed it in his note-case. “I must compliment you upon your powers of observation. The description of the missing lady is remarkably clear and exhaustive. And now I would suggest that you call in at Mr. Japp’s office on our way back, and ascertain whether any letter has been received. If there has been no communication we shall have to regard the appearances as suspicious, and calling for investigation.”

Secretly gratified at the interest which Thorndyke seemed to be developing in the mystery, I conducted my friends up the High-street until we reached the office, which I entered, leaving my colleagues outside. Mr. Japp looked up from a letter which he was writing, and Bundy, who had been peeping over the curtain, revolved on his stool and faced me.

“Any news?” I asked.

Japp shook his head gloomily. “Not a sign,” said he.

“I shall wait until the first post is in tomorrow morning, and then, if there are no tidings of her, I shall go across to the police station. Perhaps you had better come with me, as you are able to give the particulars that they will want.”

“Very well,” I said, “I will look in at half-past nine,” and with this I was turning away when Bundy inquired: “Are those two toffs outside friends of yours?” and, on my replying in the affirmative, he continued: “They seem to be taking a deuce of an interest in Japp’s proclamation. You might tell them that if they happen to have found that key, the money is quite safe. I will see that Japp pays up.”

I promised to deliver the message, and, as Bundy craned up to make a further inspection of my colleagues, I departed to join the latter.

“There is no news up to the present,” I said, “but Japp proposes to wait until tomorrow morning for a last chance before applying to the police.”

“Was that Japp who was inspecting us through that preposterous pair of barnacles?” Jervis asked.

“No,” I answered. “That was Bundy. He suspects you of having found that key and of holding on to it until you are sure of the reward.”

“What key is it?” asked Jervis. “The key of the strong-room? They seem to be in a rare twitter about it.”

“No; it is just a gate-key belonging to a piece of waste land where they are doing some repairs to the old city wall. And, by the way, thereby hangs a tale; a horrible and tragic tale of a convivial bargee, which ought to have a special interest for a pair of medical jurists”—and here I related to them the gruesome story that was told to Bundy and me by the old mortar-mixer.

They both chuckled appreciatively at the denouement, and Jervis remarked:

“It would seem that the late Bill was a rather inflammable gentleman. The yarn recalls the tragic end of Mr. Krook in ‘Bleak House,’ only that Krook went one better than Bill, for he managed to combust himself in an hour or two without any lime at all.”

The story and the comment brought us to my house, which we had no sooner entered than Mrs. Dunk, who seemed to have been lying in wait for us, made her appearance with the tea; and while we were disposing of this refreshment Thorndyke reverted to the case of my missing patient.

“As I am to keep an eye on this ease,” said he, “I shall want to be kept in touch with it. Of course, the actual investigation—if there has to be one—will need to be conducted on the spot, which is not possible to me. What I suggest is that you write out a detailed account of everything that is known to you in connexion with it. Don’t select your facts. Put down everything in any way connected with the case and say all you know about the person concerned—Mrs. Frood herself and everybody who was acquainted with her. Send this statement to me and keep a copy. Then, if any new fact becomes known, let me have it and make a note of it for your own information. You are on the spot and I shall look to you for the data; and if I want any of them amplified or confirmed I shall communicate with you.

“There is one other matter. Do not confide to anyone that you have consulted me or that I am interested in the case; neither to Mr. Japp, to the police, nor to anybody else whatsoever; and I advise you to keep your own interest in the mystery to yourself as far as possible.”

“What is the need of this secrecy?” I asked, in some surprise.

“The point is,” replied Thorndyke, “that when you are investigating a crime you are playing against the criminal. But if the criminal is unknown to you, you are playing against an unseen adversary. If you are visible to him he can watch your moves and reply to them. Obviously your policy is to keep out of sight and make your moves unseen. And remember that as long as you do not know who the criminal is, you don’t know who he is not. Anyone may be the criminal, or may be his unconscious agent or coadjutor. If you make confidences they may be innocently passed on to the guilty parties. So keep your own counsel rigorously. If there has been a crime, that crime has local connexions and probably a local origin. The solution of the mystery will probably be discovered here. And if you intend to take a hand in the solution let it be a lone hand; and keep me informed of everything that you do or observe; and for my part, I will give you all the help I can.”

By the time we had finished our tea and our discussion the hour of my friends’ departure was drawing nigh. I walked with them to the station, and when I bade them farewell I received a warm invitation to visit them at their chambers in the Temple; an invitation of which I determined to avail myself on the first favourable opportunity.

CHAPTER VIII

Sergeant Cobbledick Takes a Hand

Punctually at half-past nine on the following morning I presented myself at the office, and, if I had indulged in any hopes of favourable news—which I had not—they would have been dispelled by a glance at Mr. Japp’s troubled face.

“I suppose you have heard nothing?” I said, when we had exchanged brief greetings.

He shook his head gloomily as he opened the cupboard and took out his hat.

“No,” he answered, “and I am afraid we never shall.”

He sighed heavily, and, putting on his hat, walked slowly to the door. “It is a dreadful affair,” he continued, as we went out together. “How she would have hated the idea of it, poor girl! All the horrid publicity, the posters, the sensational newspaper paragraphs, the descriptions of her person and belongings. And then, at the end of it all, God knows what horror may come to light. It won’t bear thinking of.”

He trudged along at my side with bent head and eyes cast down, and for the remainder of the short journey neither of us spoke. On reaching the police-station we made our way into a small, quiet office, the only tenant of which was a benevolent-looking, bald-headed sergeant, who was seated at a high desk, and, who presented that peculiar, decapitated aspect that appertains to a police officer minus his helmet. As we entered the sergeant laid down his pen and turned to us with a benign smile.

“Good morning, Mr. Japp,” said he. “What can I have the pleasure of doing for you?”

“I am sorry to say, Sergeant,” replied Japp, “that I have come here on very unpleasant business,” and he proceeded to give the officer a concise summary of the facts, to which our friend listened with close attention. When it was finished, the sergeant produced a sheet of blue foolscap, and, having folded a wide margin on it, dipped his pen in the ink and began his examination.

“1’d better take the doctor’s statement first,” said he. “The lady’s name is Angelina Frood, married, living apart from husband—I shall want his address presently—last seen alive by—”

“John Strangeways, M.D.,” said I, “of Maidstone-road, Rochester.”

The sergeant wrote this down, and continued: “Last seen at about 8.30 P.M. on Saturday, 26th April, proceeding towards Chatham, on unknown business. Can you give me a description of her?”

I described her person, assisted by Japp, and the sergeant, having committed the particulars to writing, read them out:

“‘Age 28, height 5 ft. 7 in., complexion medium, hazel eyes, abundant dark brown hair, strongly marked black eyebrows, nearly meeting over nose.’”

“No special marks that you know of?”

“No.”

“Now, doctor, can you tell us how she was dressed?”

“She was wearing a snuff-brown coat and skirt,” I replied, “and a straw hat of the same colour with a broad, dull green band. The hat was fixed on by two hat-pins with silver heads shaped like poppy-capsules. The coat had six buttons, smallish, bronze buttons—about half an inch in diameter—with a Tudor rose embossed on each. Brown suede gloves with fasteners—no buttons—brown silk stockings, and brown suede shoes with small, oval bronze buckles. She had a narrow silk scarf, dull green, with three purple bands at each end—one broad band and two narrow—and knotted fringe at the ends. She wore a small circular brooch with a largish opal in the centre and a border of small pearls, of which one was missing. The missing pearl was in the position of the figure three on a clock dial. She carried a small morocco handbag with the initials A. F. stamped on it, which contained a little cardboard box, in which were six white tablets; the box was labelled with one of Dr. Partridge’s labels, on which her name was written, and it was wrapped in white paper and sealed with sealing-wax. That is all I can say for certain. But she always wore a wedding-ring, and occasionally an African Zodiac ring; but sometimes she carried this ring in a small purse with metal jaws and a ball fastening. I believe she always carried the purse.”

As I gave this description, the sergeant wrote furiously, glancing at me from time to time with an expression of surprise, while Japp sat and stared at me open-mouthed.

“Well, doctor,” said the sergeant, when he had taken down my statement and read it out, “if I find myself ailing I’m going to pop along and consult you. I reckon there isn’t much that escapes your notice. With regard to that African ring now, I daresay you cart tell us what it is like.”

I was, of course, able to describe it in detail, including the initials A. C. inside, and even to give a rough sketch of some of the signs embossed on it, upon which the sergeant chuckled admiringly and wagged his head as he wrote down the description and pinned the sketch on the margin of his paper. The rest of my statement dealt with the last interview and the incidents connected with Nicholas Frood’s visits to Rochester, all of which the sergeant listened to with deep interest and committed to writing.

Finally, I recounted the sinister incident—now more sinister than ever—of the murderous assault in the house near Regent’s Park, whereat the sergeant looked uncommonly serious and took down the statement verbatim.

“Did you know about this, Mr. Japp?” he asked.

“I knew that something unpleasant had happened,” was the reply, “but I didn’t know that it was as bad as this.”

“Well,” said the sergeant, “it gives the present affair rather an ugly look. We shall have to make some inquiries about that gentleman.”

Having squeezed me dry, he turned his attention to Japp, from whom he extracted a variety of information, including the address of the banker who paid the allowance to Nicholas Frood, and that of a lady who had formerly been a theatrical colleague of Mrs. Frood’s, and with whom Mr. Japp believed the latter had kept up a correspondence.

“You haven’t a photograph of the missing lady, I suppose?” said the sergeant.

With evident reluctance Japp drew from his pocket an envelope and produced from it a cabinet photograph, which he looked at sadly for a few moments and then handed to me.

“I brought this photograph with me,” he said, “as I knew you would want it, but I rather hope that you won’t want to publish it.”

“Now, why do you hope that?” the sergeant asked in a soothing and persuasive tone. “You want this lady found—or, at any rate, traced. But what better means can you suggest than publishing her portrait?”

“I suppose you are right,” said Japp; “but it is a horrible thing to think of the poor girl’s face looking out from posters and newspaper pages.”

“It is,” the sergeant agreed. “But, you see, if she is alive it is her own doing, and if she is dead it won’t affect her.”

While they were talking I had been looking earnestly at the beloved face, which I now felt I should never look upon again. It was an excellent likeness, showing her just as I had known her, excepting that it was free from the cloud of trouble that had saddened her expression in these latter days. As the sergeant held out his hand for it, I turned it over and read the photographer’s name and address and the register number, and, having made a mental note of them, I surrendered it with a sigh.

Our business was now practically concluded. When we had each read over the statements and added our respective signatures, the sergeant attested them and, having added the date, placed the documents in his desk and rose.

“I am much obliged to you, gentlemen,” said he as he escorted us to the door. “If I hear anything that will interest you I will let you know, and if I should want any further information I shall take the liberty of calling on you.”

“Well,” said Japp, as we turned to walk back, “the fat’s in the fire now. I mean to say,” he added quickly, “that we’ve fairly committed ourselves. I hope we haven’t been too precipitate. We should catch it if she came back and found that we had raised the hue and cry and set the whole town agog.”

“I am afraid there is no hope of that,” said I. “At any rate, we had no choice or discretion in the matter. A suspected crime is the business of the police.”

Mr. Japp agreed that this was so; and having by this time arrived at the office, we separated, he to enter his premises and I to betake myself to Chatham with no very, defined purpose, but lured thither by a vague attraction.

As I walked along the High-street, making occasional digressions into narrow alleys to explore wharves and water-side premises, I turned over the statements that had been given to the police and wondered what they conveyed to our friend, the sergeant, with his presumably extensive experience of obscure crime. To me they seemed to furnish no means whatever of starting an investigation, excepting by inquiring as to the movements of Nicholas Frood, by communicating with Angelina’s late colleague or by publishing the photograph. And here I halted to write down in my notebook before I should forget them the name and address of that lady—Miss Cumbers—and of the photographers, together with the number of the photograph; for I had decided to obtain a copy of the latter for myself, and it now occurred to me that I had better get one also for Thorndyke. And this latter reflection reminded me that I had to prepare my précis of the facts for him, and that I should do well to get this done at once while the matter of the two statements was fresh in my mind. Accordingly, as I paced the deck of the Sun Pier, looking up and down the busy river, with its endless procession of barges, bawleys, tugs, and cargo boats, striving ineffectually to banish the dreadful thought that, perchance, somewhere, at this very moment there was floating on its turbid waters the corpse of my dear, lost friend: I tried to recall and write down the substance of Japp’s statement, as I had heard it made and had afterwards read it. At length, finding the neighbourhood of the river too disturbing, I left the pier and took my way homewards, calling in at a stationer’s on the way to provide myself with a packet of sermon paper on which to write out my summary.

When Thorndyke had given me my instructions, they had appeared to me a little pedantic. The full narrative which he asked for of all the events, without selection as to relevancy, and the account of what I knew of all the persons concerned in the case, seemed an excessive formality. But when I came to write the case out the excellence of his method became apparent in two respects. In the first place, the ordered narrative put the events in their proper sequence and exhibited their connexions; and in the second, the endeavour to state all that I knew, particularly of the persons, showed me how very little that was. Of the persons in any way concerned in the case there were but five: Angelina herself, her husband, Mrs. Gillow, Mr. Japp, and Bundy. Of the first two I knew no more than what I had observed myself and what Angelina had told me; of the last three I knew practically nothing. Not that this appeared to me of the slightest importance, but I had my instructions, and in compliance with them I determined to make such cautious inquiries as would enable me to give Thorndyke at least a few particulars of them. And this during the next few days I did; and I may as well set down here the scanty and rather trivial information that my inquiries elicited, and which I duly sent on to Thorndyke in a supplementary report.

Mrs. Gillow was the wife of a mariner who was the second mate of a sailing ship that plied to Australia, who had now been away about four months and was expected home shortly. She was a native of the locality and had known Mr. Japp for several years. She occupied the part of the house above the ground floor and kept no servant or dependent, living quite alone when her husband was at sea. She had no children. Her acquaintance with Angelina began when the latter became the tenant of the ground floor and basement; it was but a slight acquaintance, and she knew nothing of Angelina’s antecedents or affairs excepting that she had left her husband.

Mr. Japp was a native of Rochester and had lived in the town all his life, having taken over his business establishment from his late partner, a Mr. Borden. He was a bachelor and was related to Angelina by marriage, his brother—now deceased—having married Angelina’s aunt.

As to Bundy, he was hardly connected with the case at all, since he had seen Angelina only once or twice and had scarcely exchanged a dozen words with her. Moreover, he had but recently come to Rochester—about six weeks ago, I gathered—having answered an advertisement of Japp’s for an assistant with a view to partnership; and the actual deed had not yet been executed, though the two partners were evidently quite well satisfied with one another.

That was all the information that I had to give Thorndyke; and with the exception of the London incident it amounted to nothing. Nevertheless, it was as well to have established the fact that if anyone were concerned in Angelina’s disappearance, that person would have to be sought elsewhere than in Rochester.

Having sent off my summary and read over again and again the copy which I had kept, I began to realize the justice of Thorndyke’s observation that the inquiry was essentially a matter for the police, who had both the experience and the necessary facilities; for whenever I tried to think of some plan for tracing my lost friend, I was brought up against the facts that I had, nothing whatever to go on and no idea how to make a start. As to Thorndyke, he had no data but those that I had given him, and I realized clearly that these were utterly insufficient to form the basis of any investigation; and I found myself looking expectantly to the police to produce some new facts that might throw at least a glimmer of light on this dreadful and baffling mystery.

I had not very long to wait. On the Friday after our call on the sergeant, I was sitting after lunch in my dining-room with a book in my hand, while my thoughts strayed back to those memorable evenings of pleasant converse with the sweet friend who, I felt, had gone from me for ever, when the door bell rang, and Mrs. Dunk presently announced:

“Sergeant Cobbledick.”

“Show him in here, Mrs. Dunk,” said I, laying aside my book, and rising to receive my visitor; who proved to be, as I had expected, the officer who had taken our statements. He entered with his helmet in his hand, and greeted me with a smile of concentrated benevolence.

“Sit down, Sergeant,” said I, offering him an easy chair. “I hope you have some news for us.”

“Yes,” he replied, beaming on me. “I am glad to say we are getting on as well as we can expect. We have made quite a nice little start.”

He spoke as if he had something particularly gratifying to communicate, and, having carefully placed his helmet on the table, he drew from his pocket a small paper packet, which he opened with great deliberation, extracting from it a small object, which he held out in the palm of his hand.

“There, Doctor,” said he, complacently; “what do you say to that?”

I looked at the object, and my heart seemed to stand still. It was Angelina’s brooch! I stared at it in speechless dismay for some moments. At length I asked, huskily:

“Where did you get it?”

“I found it,” said the sergeant, gazing fondly at the little trinket, “where I hardly hoped to find it—in a pawnbroker’s shop in Chatham.”

“Did you discover who pawned it?” I asked.

“In a sense, yes,” the sergeant replied with a bland smile.

“How do you mean—in a sense?” I inquired.

“I mean that his name was John Smith—only, of course, it wasn’t; and that his address was 26, Swoffer’s-alley, Chatham—only he didn’t live there, because there is no such number. You see, Doctor, John Smith is the name of nearly every man who gives a false description of himself; and I went straight off to Swoffer’s-alley—it was close by—and found that there wasn’t any number 26.”

“Then you really don’t know who pawned it?”

“We won’t exactly say that,” he replied. “I got a fair description of the man from the pawnbroker’s wife, who made out the ticket and says she could swear to the man if she saw him. He was a seafaring man, dressed in sailor’s clothes—a peaked cap and pea-jacket—a shortish fellow, rather sunburnt, with a small, stubby, dark moustache and dark hair, and a mole or wart on the left side of his nose, near the tip. She asked him where he had got the brooch, and he said it had belonged to his old woman. I should say he probably picked it up.”

“Why do you think so?” I asked.

“Well, if he had—er—got it in any other way, he would hardly have popped it in Chatham forty-eight hours after the—after it was lost, with the chance that the pawnbrokers had already been notified—he pawned it on Monday night.”

“Then,” said I, “if he picked it up, he isn’t of much importance; and in any case you don’t know who he is.”

“Oh, but he is of a good deal of importance,” said the sergeant. “I’ve no doubt he picked it up, but that is only a guess. He may have got it the other way. But at any rate, he had it in his possession and he will have to give an account of how he obtained it. The importance of it is this: taken with the disappearance, the finding of this brooch raises a strong suspicion that a crime has been committed, and if we could find out where it was picked up, we should have a clue to the place where the affair took place. I want that man very badly, and I’m going to have a good try to get him.”

“I don’t quite see how,” said I. “You haven’t much to go on.”

“I’ve got his nose to go on,” replied the sergeant.

“But there must be plenty of other men with moles on their noses.”

“That’s their lookout,” he retorted. “If I come across a man who answers the description, I shall hang on to him until Mrs. Pawnbroker has had a look at him. Of course, if she says he’s not the man, he’ll be released.”

“But she won’t,” said I. “If he has a mole on his nose, she will be perfectly certain that he is the man.”

The sergeant smiled benignly. “There’s something in that,” he admitted. “Ladies are a bit cock-sure when it comes to identification. But you can generally check ’em by other evidence. And if this chap picked the brooch up, he would be pretty certain to tell us all about it when he heard where it came from. Still, we haven’t got him yet.”

For a while we sat, without speaking, each pursuing his own thoughts. To me, this dreadful discovery, though it did but materialize the vague fears that had been surging through my mind, had fallen like a thunderbolt. For, behind those fears, I now realized that there had lurked a hope that the mystery might presently be resolved by the return of the lost one. Now that hope had suddenly become extinct. I knew that she had gone out of my life for ever. She was dead. This poor little waif that had drifted back into our hands brought the unmistakable message of her death, with horrible suggestions of hideous and sordid tragedy. I shuddered at the thought; and in that moment, from the grief and horror that possessed my soul, there was born a passion of hatred for the wretch who had done this thing and a craving for revenge.

“There’s another queer thing that has come to light,” the sergeant resumed at length. “There may be nothing in it, but it’s a little queer. About the husband, Nicholas Frood.”

“What about him?” I asked, eagerly.

“Why, he seems to have disappeared, too. Of course, you understand, Doctor, that what I’m telling you is confidential. We are not talking about this affair outside, and we aren’t telling the Press much, at present.”

“Naturally,” said I. “You can trust me to keep my own counsel, and yours, too.”

“I’m sure I can. Well, about this man, Frood. It seems that last Friday he went away from his lodgings for a couple of days; but he hasn’t come back, and nobody knows what has become of him. He was supposed to be going to Brighton, where he has some relatives from whom he gets a little assistance occasionally, but they have seen or heard nothing of him. Quaint, isn’t it? You said you saw him here on the Monday.”

“Yes, and I haven’t seen him since, though I have kept a lookout for him. But he may have been here, all the same. It looks decidedly suspicious.”

“It is queer,” the sergeant agreed, “but we’ve no evidence that he has been in this neighbourhood.”

“Have you made any other inquiries?” I asked.

“We looked up that lady, Miss Cumbers, but we got nothing out of her. She had had a letter from Mrs. Frood on the 24th—yesterday week—quite an ordinary letter, giving no hint of any intention to go away from Rochester. So there you are. The mystery seems to be concerned entirely with this neighbourhood, and I expect we shall have to solve it on the spot.”

This last observation impressed me strongly. The sergeant’s view of the case was the same as Thorndyke’s, and expressed in almost the same words.

“Have you any theory as to what has actually happened?” I asked.

The sergeant smiled in his benignant fashion. “It isn’t much use inventing theories,” said he. “We’ve got to get the facts before we can do anything. Still, looking at the case as we find it, there are two or three things that hit us in the face. There is a strong suspicion of murder, there is no trace of the body, and there is a big tidal river close at hand. On Saturday night it was high water at half-past eleven, so there wouldn’t have been much of the shore uncovered at, say, half-past nine, and there would have been plenty of water at any of the piers or causeways.”

“Then you think it probable that she was murdered and her body flung into the river?”

“It is the likeliest thing, so far as we can judge. There is the river, and there is no sign of the body on shore. But, as I say, it is no use guessing. We’ve got people watching the river from Allington Lock to Sheerness, and that’s all we can do in that line. The body is pretty certain to turn up, sooner or later. Of course, until it does, there is no real criminal case; and even when we’ve got the body, we may not be much nearer getting the murderer. Excepting the man Frood, there is no one who seems to have had any motive for making away with her; and if it was just a casual robbery with murder it is unlikely that we shall ever spot the man at all.”

Having given expression to this rather pessimistic view, the sergeant rose, and, picking up his helmet, took his departure, after promising to let me know of any further developments.

As soon as he was gone, I wrote down the substance of what he had said, and then embodied it in a report for Thorndyke. While I was thus occupied, the afternoon post was delivered, and included a packet from the London photographer, to whom I had written, enclosing two copies of the photograph of Angelina that Mr. Japp had handed to the sergeant. Of these, I enclosed one copy in my communication to Thorndyke, on the bare chance that it might be of some assistance to him, and, having closed up the large envelope and stamped it, I went forth to drop it into the post-box.

CHAPTER IX

Jetsam

That portion of Chatham High-street which lies adjacent to the River Medway presents a feature that is characteristic of old riverside towns in the multitude of communications between the street and the shore. Some of these are undisguised entrances to wharves, some are courts or small thoroughfares lined with houses and leading to landing-stages, while others are mere passages or flights of steps, opening obscurely and inconspicuously on the street by narrow apertures, unnoticed by the ordinary wayfarer and suggesting the burrows of some kind of human water-rat.

In the days that followed the sergeant’s visit to me I made the acquaintance of all of them. Now I would wander down the cobbled cartway that led to a wharf, there to cast a searching eye over the muddy fore-shore or scan the turbid water at high tide as it eddied between the barges and around the piles. Or I would dive into the mouths of the burrows, creeping down slimy steps and pursuing the tortuous passages through a world of uncleanness until I came out upon the shore, where the fresh smell of seaweed mingled with odours indescribable. I began to be an object of curiosity—and perhaps of some suspicion—to the denizens of the little, ruinous, timber houses that lined these alleys, and of frank interest to the children who played around the rubbish heaps or dabbled in the grey mud. But never did my roving eye light upon that which it sought with such dreadful expectation.

One afternoon, about a week after the sergeant’s visit, when I was returning home from one of these explorations, I observed a man on my doorstep as I approached the house. His appearance instantly aroused my attention, for he was dressed in the amphibious style adopted by waterside dwellers, and he held something in his hand at which he looked from time to time. Before I reached the door it had opened and admitted him, and when I arrived I found him in the hall nervously explaining his business to Mrs. Dunk.

“Here is the doctor,” said the latter; “you’d better tell him about it.”

The man turned to me and held out an amazingly dirty fist. “I’ve got something here, sir,” said he, “what belongs to you, I think.” Here he unclosed his hand and exhibited a little cardboard box bearing one of Dr. Partridge’s labels. It was smeared with mud and grime, but I recognized it instantly; indeed, when I took it with trembling fingers from his palm and looked at it closely, the name, “Mrs. Frood,” was still decipherable under the smears of dirt.

“Where did you find this?” I asked.

“I picked it up on the strand,” he replied, “about halfway betwixt the Sun Pier and the end of Ship Alley, and just below spring tide high-water mark. Is it any good?”

“Yes,” I answered; “it is very important. I will get you to walk along with me to the police station.”

“What for?” he demanded suspiciously. “I don’t want no police stations. If it’s any good, give us what you think it’s worth, and have done with it.”

I gave him half-a-crown to allay his suspicions, and then said: “You had better come with me to the station. I expect the police will want you to show them exactly where you found this box and help them to search the place; and I will see that you are paid for your trouble.”

“But look ’ere, mister,” he objected; “what’s the police got to do with this ’ere box?”

I explained the position to him briefly, and then, suddenly, his face lit up. “I know,” he said excitedly. “I seen the bills stuck up on the dead-’ouse door. And d’you mean to say as this ’ere box was ’ers? Cos if it was it’s worth more ’n ’arf-a-crown.”

“Perhaps it is,” said I. “We will hear what the sergeant thinks,” and with this I opened the door and went out, and my new acquaintance now followed with the greatest alacrity, taking the opportunity, as we walked along, to remind me of my promise and to offer tentative suggestions as to the scale of remuneration for his services.

Our progress along the High-street was not unnoticed. Doubtless, we appeared a somewhat ill-assorted pair, for I observed a good many persons turn to look at us curiously, and when we passed the office, on the opposite side of the road, I saw Bundy’s face rise above the curtain with an expression of undissembled curiosity.

On arriving at the station, I inquired for Sergeant Cobbledick, and was fortunate enough to find him in his office. As I entered with my companion, he bestowed on the latter a quick glance of professional interest and then greeted me with a genial smile. It was hardly necessary for me to state my business, for the single quick glance of his experienced eye at my companion had furnished the diagnosis. I had only to produce the box and indicate the finder.

“This looks like a lead,” said he, reaching his helmet down from a peg. “What’s your name, sonny, and where do you live?”

Sonny affirmed, with apparent reluctance, that his name was Samuel Hooper and that his abode was situated in Foul Anchor Alley; and when these facts had been committed to writing by the sergeant, the latter put on his helmet and invited the said Hooper to “come along,” evidently assuming that I was to form one of the party.

As we approached the office this time I saw Bundy from afar off; and by the time we were abreast of the house he was joined by Japp, who must have stood upon tiptoe to bring his eyes above the curtain. Both men watched us with intense interest, and we had barely passed the house when Bundy’s head suddenly disappeared, and a few moments later its owner emerged from the doorway and hurriedly crossed the road.

“What is in the wind, Doctor?” he asked, as he came up with us. “Japp is in a rare twitter. Have they found the body?”

“No,” I answered; “only the little box that was in her handbag. We are going to have a look at the place where it was found.”

“To see if the bag is there, too?” said he. “It probably is, unless it has been picked up already. I think I’ll come along with you, if you don’t object. Then I can give Japp all the news.”

I did not object, nor did the sergeant—verbally; but his expression conveyed to me that he would willingly have dispensed with Mr. Bundy’s society. However, he was a suave and tactful man, and he made the best of the unwelcome addition to the party, even going so far as to offer the box for Bundy’s inspection.

“It is pretty dirty,” the latter observed, holding it delicately in his fingers. “Wasn’t it wrapped in paper when you gave it to her, Doctor?”

“It was wrapped up in paper when I found it,” said Hooper, “but I took off the paper to see what was inside, and, yer see, my ’ands wasn’t very clean, a-grubbin’ about in the mud.” In conclusive confirmation of this statement, he exhibited them to us, and then gave them a perfunctory wipe on his trousers.

“What struck me,” said Bundy, “was that it doesn’t seem to have been in the water.”

“It hadn’t,” said Hooper. “The outside paper was quite clean when I picked it up.”

“It looks,” observed the sergeant, “as if they had turned out the bag and thrown away what they didn’t want; and then they probably threw away the bag, too. It is ten chances to one that it has been picked up, but if it hasn’t it will probably be somewhere along the high-water mark. How are the tides, Hooper?”

“Just past the bottom of the nips,” was the reply; and a few moments later our guide added; “It’s down here,” and plunged into what looked like an open doorway. We followed, one at a time, cautiously descending a flight of very filthy stone steps and stooping to avoid knocking our heads against the overhanging story of an ancient timber house. At the bottom we proceeded, still in single file, along a narrow, crooked passage between grimy walls and ruinous tarred fences until, after many twistings and turnings, we came to a flight of rough wooden steps, thickly coated with yellow mud and slimy sea-grass, which led down to the shore.

“Now,” said the sergeant, turning up the bottoms or his trousers, “show us exactly where you picked the box up.”

“It was just oppersight that there schooner,” said our guide, taking his way along the muddy streak between the two lines of jetsam that corresponded to the springtide and neap-tide high-water marks; “betwixt her and the wharf.”

We followed him, picking our way daintly, and, having inspected the spot that he indicated, squeezed in between the schooner’s bilge and the piles and raked over the rubbish that the tide had deposited on the shore.

“Was you looking for anything in partickler?” Hooper asked.

“We are looking for a small leather handbag,” replied the sergeant, “or anything else we can find.”

“A ’andbag wouldn’t ’ave been ’ere long,” Hooper remarked. “Somebody would ’ave twigged it pretty quick, unless it got hidden under something big.” He straightened himself up and gave a searching look up and down the shore; and then suddenly he started off with an air of definite purpose. Glancing in the direction towards which he was shaping his course, I observed, in the corner of a stage that jutted out from the quay, a heap of miscellaneous rubbish surmounted by the mortal remains of a large hamper. It looked a likely spot and we all followed, though not at his pace, being somewhat more fastidious as to where we stepped. Consequently he arrived considerably before us, and having flung away the hamper, began eagerly to grub among the underlying raffle. Just as we had come within a dozen yards of him, anxiously making the perilous passage over a stretch of peculiarly slimy mud, he stood up with a howl of triumph, and we all stopped to look at him. His arm was raised above his head, and from his hand hung by its handle a little morocco bag.

“There’s no need to ask you to identify it, Doctor,” said the sergeant, as he despoiled the water-rat of his prize. “It fits your description to a T.”

Nevertheless, he handed it to me, drawing my attention to the initials “A. F.” stamped on the leather. I turned it over gloomily, noting that it showed signs of having been in the water—though not, apparently, for any considerable time—and that none of its contents remained excepting a handkerchief tucked into an inner pocket, and returned it to him without remark.

“Now, look here, Hooper,” said he, “I want you to stay down here and keep an eye on this shore until I send some of our men up, and then you can stay and help them, if you like. And remember that anything that you find—no matter what it is—you keep and hand over to me or my men; and you will be paid the full value and a reward for finding it as well. Do you understand that?”

“I do,” replied Hooper. “That’s a fair orfer, and you can depend on me to do the square thing. I’ll stay down here until your men come.”

Thereupon we left him, pursuing our way along the shore and keeping an attentive eye on all the rubbish and litter that we passed, until we came to a set of rough wooden steps by the Ship Pier.

“I had no authority to offer to pay that chap,” said the sergeant, as we walked up Ship Alley, “but the superintendent has put me on to work at this case, and I’m not going to lose any chances for the sake of a few shillings. It is well to keep in with these waterside people.”

“Have you published a list of things that are likely to turn up?” Bundy asked.

“We’ve posted up a description of the missing woman with full details of her dress and belongings,” replied the sergeant. “But perhaps a list of the things that might be washed up would be useful. People are such fools. Yes, it’s a good idea. I’ll have a list printed of everything that might get loose and be picked up, and stick it up on the wharves and waterside premises. Then there will be nothing left to their imagination.”

At the top of Ship Alley he halted, and having thanked me warmly for my prompt and timely information, turned towards Chatham Town, leaving me and Bundy to retrace our steps westward.

“That was a bit of luck,” the latter remarked, “finding that bag; and he hardly deserved it. He ought to have had that piece of shore under observation from the first. But he was wise to make an acceptable offer to that bodysnatcher, Hooper. I expect he lives on the shore, watching for derelict corpses and any unconsidered trifles that the river may throw up. I see there is a reward of two pounds for the body.”

“You have seen the bills, then?”

“Yes. We have got one to stick up in the office window. Rather gruesome, isn’t it?”

“Horrible,” I said; and for a while we walked on in silence. Presently Bundy exclaimed: “By Jove! I had nearly forgotten. I have a message for you. It is from Japp. He is taking a distinguished American archaeologist for a personally conducted tour round the town to show him the antiquities, and he thought you might like to join the party.”

“That is very good of him,” said I. “It sounds as if it should be rather interesting.”

“It will be,” said Bundy. “Japp is an enthusiast in regard to architecture and ancient buildings, and he is quite an authority on the antiquities of this town. You’d better come. The American—his name is Willard—is going to charter a photographer to come round with us and take records of all the objects of interest, and we shall be able to get copies of any photographs that we want. What do you say?”

“When does the demonstration take place?”

“The day after tomorrow. We shall do the Cathedral in the morning and the castle and the town in the afternoon. Shall I tell Japp you will join the merry throng?”

“Yes, please; and convey my very warm thanks for the invitation.”

“I will,” said he, halting as we arrived at the office, “unless you would like to come in and convey the joyful tidings yourself.”

“No,” he replied, “I won’t come in now. I will get home and change my boots.”

“Yes, by Jingo!” Bundy agreed, with a rueful glance at his own delicate shoes. “Mudlarking calls for a special outfit. And I clean my own shoes; but I’d rather do that than face Mrs. Dunk.”

With this he retired up the steps, and I turned homeward, deciding to profit by his last remark and forestall unfavourable comment by shedding my boots on the doormat.

CHAPTER X

Which Deals with Ancient Monuments and a Blue Boar

On arriving home, I found awaiting me a letter from Dr. Thorndyke suggesting—in response to a general invitation that I had given him some time previously—that he should come down on Saturday to spend the weekend with me. Of course, I adopted the suggestion with very great pleasure, not a little flattered at receiving so distinguished a guest; and now I was somewhat disposed to regret my engagement to attend Mr. Japp’s demonstration. However, as Thorndyke was not due until lunch time, I should have an opportunity of modifying my arrangement, if necessary.

But, as events turned out, I congratulated myself warmly on not having missed the morning visit to the Cathedral. It was a really remarkable experience; and not the least interesting part of it to me was the revelation of the inner personality of my friend, Mr. Japp. That usually dry and taciturn man of business was transfigured in the presence of the things that he really loved. He glowed with enthusiasm; he exhaled the very spirit of mediaeval romance; at every pore he exuded strange and recondite knowledge. Obedient to his behest, the ancient building told the vivid story of its venerable past, presented itself in its rude and simple beginnings; exhibited the transformations that had marked the passing centuries; peopled itself with the illustrious departed, whose heirs we were and whose resting-places we looked upon; and became to us a living thing whose birth and growth we could watch, whose vicissitudes and changing conditions we could trace until they brought us to its august old age. Under his guidance we looked down the long vista of the past, from the time when simple masons scalloped the Norman capitals within, while illustrious craftsmen fashioned the wonderful west doorway, to that last upheaval that swept away the modern shoddy and restored to the old fabric its modest comeliness.

Architectural antiquities, however, are not the especial concern of this history, though they were not without a certain influence in its unfolding. Accordingly, I shall not follow our progress—attended by the indispensable photographic recording angel—through nave and aisles, form choir to transepts, and from tower to undercroft. At the close of a delightful morning I betook myself homeward, charged with new and varied knowledge, and with a cordial invitation to my guest to join the afternoon’s expedition if he were archaeologically inclined.

Apparently he was, for when, shortly after his arrival, I conveyed the invitation to him he accepted at once.

“I always take the opportunity,” said he, “of getting what is practically first-hand information. Your friend, Mr. Japp, is evidently an enthusiast; he has expert technical knowledge, and he has apparently filled in his detail by personal investigation. A man like that can tell you more in an hour than guidebooks could tell you in a lifetime. We had better get a large-scale map of the town to enable us to follow the description, unless you have one.”

“I haven’t,” said I, “but we can get one on the way to the rendezvous. You got my report, I suppose?”

“Yes,” he replied, “I got it yesterday. That, in fact, was what determined me to come down. The discovery of that bag upon the shore dispels to some extent the ambiguity of our data. The finding of the brooch did not enlighten us much. It might simply have been dropped and picked up by some casual wayfarer. In fact, that is what the appearances suggested, for it is manifestly improbable that a person who had committed a crime would take the risk of pawning the product of robbery with violence in the very neighbourhood where the crime had been committed, and after an interval of time which would allow of the hue and cry having already been raised. Your sergeant is probably right in assuming that the man with the mole had nothing to do with the affair. But the finding of this bag is a different matter. It connects that disappearance with the river and it offers a strong suggestion of crime.”

“Don’t you think it possible that she might have fallen into the river accidentally?” I asked.

“It is possible,” he admitted. “But that is where the significance of the brooch comes in. If she had fallen into the river from some wharf or pier, there does not seem to be any reason why the brooch should have become detached and fallen on land—as it apparently did. The finding of the bag where it had been thrown up by the river, and of the brooch on shore, suggests a struggle on land previous to the fall into the water. You don’t happen, I suppose, to know what the bag contained?”

“I don’t—excepting the packet of tablets that I gave her. When the bag was found, it was empty; at least, it contained only the handkerchief, as I mentioned in my report.”

“Yes,” he said reflectively. “By the way, I must compliment you on those reports. They are excellent, and with regard to this one, there are two or three rather curious circumstances. First, as to the packet of tablets. You mention that it had not been unwrapped and that, when it was found, the paper was quite clean. Therefore it had never been in the water. Therefore it had been taken out of the bag—by somebody with moderately clean hands—before the latter was dropped into the river; and it must have been thrown away on the shore above highwater mark. Incidentally, since the disappearance occurred—presumably—on the evening of the 26th of April, and the packet was found on the 7th of May, it had been lying on the shore for a full ten days. Perhaps there is nothing very remarkable in that; but the point is that Mrs. Frood was carrying the bag in her hand and she would almost certainly have dropped it if there had been any struggle. How, then, did the bag come to be in the river, and how came some of its contents to be found on the shore clean and free from any traces of submersion?”

“We can only suppose,” said I, with an inward shudder—for the discussion of these hideous details made my very flesh creep—“that the murderer picked up the bag when he had thrown the body into the river, took out any articles of value, if there were any, and threw the rest on the shore.”

“Yes,” agreed Thorndyke, a little doubtfully, “that would seem to be what happened. And in that case, we should have to assume that the place where the packet was found was, approximately, the place where the crime was committed. For, as the packet was never immersed, it could not have been carried to that place by the tide, and one cannot think of any other agency by which it could have been moved. Its clean and unopened condition seems to exclude human agency. The question then naturally arises, Is the place where the packet was found, a place at, or near, which the tragedy could conceivably have occurred? What do you say to that?”

I considered for a few moments, recalling the intricate and obscure approach of the shore and the absence of anything in the nature of a public highway.

“I can only say,” I replied at length, “that it seems perfectly inconceivable that Mrs. Frood could have been at that place, or even near it, unless she went there for some specific purpose—unless, for instance, she were lured there in some way. It is a place that is, I should say, unknown to any but the waterside people.”

“We must go there and examine the place carefully,” said he, “for if it is, as you say, a place to which no one could imaginably have strayed by chance, that fact has an important evidential bearing.”

“Do you think it quite impossible that the package could have been carried to that place and dropped there?”

“Not impossible, of course,” he replied, “but I can think of no reasonably probable way in which it could have happened, supposing the murderer to have pocketed it, and afterwards to have thrown it away. That would be a considered and deliberate act; and it is almost inconceivable that he should not have opened the packet to see what was inside, and that he should have dropped it on the dry beach when the river was close at hand. Remember that the bag was found quite near, and that it had been in the water.”

“And assuming the crime to have been committed at that place, what would it prove?”

“In the first place,” he replied, “it would pretty definitely exclude the theory of accidental death. Then it would suggest at least a certain amount of premeditation, since the victim would have had, as you say, to be enticed to that unlikely spot. And it would suggest that the murderer was a person acquainted with the locality.”

“One of the waterside people,” said I. “They are a pretty shady lot, but I don’t see why any of them should want to murder her.”

“It is not impossible,” said he. “She was said to be shopping in Chatham, and she might have had a well-filled purse and allowed it to be seen. But that is mere speculation. The fact is that we have no data at present. We know practically nothing about Mrs. Frood. We can’t say if she had any secret enemies, or if there was anyone who might have profited by her death or have had any motive for making away with her.”

“We know something about her husband,” said I, “and that he has disappeared in a rather mysterious fashion; and that his disappearance coincides with that of his wife.”

“Yes,” Thorndyke agreed, “those are significant facts. But we mustn’t lose sight of the legal position. Until the body is recovered, there is no evidence of death. Until the death is proved, no charge of murder can be sustained. When the body is found it will probably furnish some evidence as to how the death occurred, if it is recovered within a reasonable time. As a matter of fact, it is rather remarkable that it has not yet been found. The death occurred—presumably—nearly a fortnight ago. Considering how very much frequented this river is, it is really rather unaccountable that the body has not come to light. But I suppose it is time that we started for the rendezvous.”

I looked at my watch and decided that it was, and we accordingly set forth in the direction of the office, which was the appointed meeting-place, calling at a stationer’s to provide ourselves each with a map. We chose the six inch town plan, which contained the whole urban area, including the winding reaches of the river, folding them so as to show at an opening the peninsula on which the city of Rochester is built.

“A curious loop of the river, this,” said Thorndyke, scanning the map as we went along. “Rather like that of the Thames at the Isle of Dogs. You notice that there are quite a number of creeks on the low shore at both sides. Those will be places to watch. A floating body has rather a tendency to get carried into shallow creeks and to stay there. But I have no doubt the longshoremen are keeping an eye on them as a reward has been offered. Perhaps we might be able to go down and have a look at the shore when we have finished our perambulation of the town.”

“I don’t see why not,” I replied, though, to tell the truth, I was not very keen on this particular exploration. To Thorndyke this quest was just an investigation to be pursued with passionless care and method. To me it was a tragedy that would colour my whole life. To him, Angelina was but a missing woman whose disappearance had to be explained by patient inquiry. To me she was a beloved friend whose loss would leave me with a life-long sorrow. Of course, he was not aware of this; he had no suspicion of the shuddering horror that his calm, impersonal examination of the evidential details produced in me. Nor did I intend that he should. It was my duty and my privilege to give him what assistance I could, and keep my emotions to myself.

“You will bear in mind,” said he, as we approached the office, “that my connexion with the case of Mrs. Frood is not to be referred to. I am simply a friend staying with you for a day or two.”

“I won’t forget,” said I, “though I don’t quite see why it should matter.”

“It probably doesn’t matter at all,” he replied. “But one never knows. Facts which might readily be spoken of before a presumably disinterested person might be withheld from one who was known to be collecting evidence for professional purposes. At any rate, I make it a rule to keep out of sight as far as possible.”

These observations brought us to the office, where we found our three friends together with a young man, who was apparently acting as deputy during the absence of the partners, and the photographer. I presented Thorndyke to my friends, and when the introduction had been made Mr. Japp picked up his hat, and turned to the deputy.

“You know where to find me, Stevens,” he said, “if I should be really wanted—really, you understand. But I don’t particularly want to be found. Shall we start now? I propose to begin at the bridge, follow the Highstreet as far as Eastgate House, visit Restoration House, trace the city wall on the southwest side, and look over the castle. By that time we shall be ready for tea. After tea we can trace the north-east part of the wall and the gates that opened through it, and that will finish our tour of inspection.”

Hereupon the procession started, Mr. Japp and his guest leading, Thorndyke, Bundy, and I following, and the photographer bringing up the rear.

“Let me see,” said Bundy, looking up at Thorndyke with a sort of pert shyness, “weren’t you down here a week or two ago?”

“Yes,” replied Thorndyke; “and I think I had the honour of being inspected by you while I was reading your proclamation respecting a certain lost key.”

“You had,” said Bundy; “in fact, I may say that you raised false hopes in my partner and me. We thought you were going to find it.”

“What, for ten shillings!” exclaimed Thorndyke.

“We would have raised the fee if you had made a firm offer,” said Bundy, removing his monocle to polish it with his handkerchief. “It was a valuable key. Belonged to a gate that encloses part of the city wall.”

“Indeed!” said Thorndyke. “I don’t wonder you were anxious about it considering what numbers of dishonest persons there are about. Ha! Here is the bridge. Let us hear what Mr. Japp has to say about it.”

Mr. Japp’s observations were concise. Having cast a venomous glance at the unlovely structure, he turned his back on it and remarked acidly: “That is the new bridge. It is, as you see, composed of iron girders. It is not an antiquity, and I hope it never will be. Let us forget it and go on to the Guildhall.” He strode forward doggedly and Bundy turned to us with a grin.

“Poor old Japp,” said he, “he does hate that bridge. He has an engraving of the old stone one in his rooms, and I’ve seen him stand in front of it and groan. And really you can’t wonder. It is an awful come-down. Just think what the town must have looked like from across the river when that stone bridge was standing.”

Here we halted opposite the Guildhall, and when we had read the inscription, admired the magnificent ship weathercock—said to be a model of the Rodney—and listened to Japp’s observations on the architectural features of the building, the photographer was instructed to operate on its exterior while we entered to explore the Justice Room and examine the portraits. From the Guildhall we passed on to the Corn Exchange, the quaint and handsome overhanging clock of which had evidently captured Mr. Willard’s fancy.

“That clock,” said he, “is a stroke of genius. It gives a character to the whole street. But what in creation induced your City Fathers to allow that charming little building to be turned into a picture theatre?”

Japp shook his head and groaned. “You may well ask that,” said he, glaring viciously at the inane posters and the doorway, decorated in the film taste. “If good Sir Cloudesley Shovel, who gave it to the town, could rise from his grave and look at it, now he’d—bah! The crying need of this age is some means of protecting historic buildings from town councils. To these men an ancient building is just old-fashioned—out-of-date; a thing to be pulled down and replaced by something smart and up-to-date in the corrugated iron line.” He snorted fiercely, and as the photographer dismounted his camera, he turned and led the way up the street. I lingered to help the photographer with his repacking, and meanwhile Thorndyke and Bundy walked on together, chatting amicably and suggesting to my fancy an amiable mastiff accompanied by a particularly well-groomed fox terrier.

“Do you usually give your patients a weekend holiday?” Bundy was inquiring as I overtook them.

“I haven’t any patients,” replied Thorndyke. “My medical practice is conducted mostly in the Law Courts.”

“Good gracious!” exclaimed Bundy. “Do you mean that you live by resuscitating moribund jurymen and fattening up murderers for execution, and that sort of thing?”

“Not at all,” replied Thorndyke. “Nothing so harmless. I am what is known as a Medical Expert. I give opinions on medical questions that affect legal issues.”

“Then you are really a sort of lawyer?”

“Yes. A medico-legal hybrid; a sort of centaur or merman, with a doctor’s head and a lawyer’s tail.”

“Well,” said Bundy, “there are some queer professions; I once knew a chap in the furniture trade who described himself as a ‘worm-eater’—drilled worm-holes in faked antiques, you know.”

“And what,” asked Thorndyke, “might be the analogy that you are suggesting? You don’t propose to associate me with the diet of worms, I hope.”

“Certainly not,” said Bundy, “though I suppose your practice is sometimes connected with exhumations. But I was thinking that you must know quite a lot about crime.”

“A good deal of my practice is concerned with criminal cases,” Thorndyke admitted.

“Then you will be rather interested in our local mystery. Has the doctor told you about it?”

“You mean the mystery of the disappearing lady? But of what interest should it be to me? I was not acquainted with her.”

“I meant a professional interest. But I suppose you are not taking a ’bus-man’s holiday’: don’t want to be bothered with mysteries that don’t concern you. Still, I should like to hear your expert opinion on the case.”

“You mistake my functions,” said Thorndyke. “A common witness testifies to facts known to himself. An expert witness interprets facts presented to him by others. Present me your facts, and I will try to give you an interpretation of them.”

“But there are no facts. That is what constitutes the mystery.”

“Then there is nothing to interpret. It is a case for the police, and not for the scientific expert.”

Here our conversation was interrupted by our arrival at the House of the Six Poor Travellers, and by a learned disquisition by Japp on the connotation of the word Proctor—which, it appeared, was sometimes used in the Middle Ages in the sense of a cadger or swindler. Thence we proceeded to Eastgate House, where Japp mounted his hobby and discoursed impressively on the subject of ceilings, taking as his text a specimen modelled in situ, and bearing the date 1590.

“The fellow who put up that ceiling,” said he, “took his time about it, no doubt. But his work has lasted three hundred and fifty years. That is the best way to save time. Your modern plasterer will have his ceiling up in a jiffy; and it will be down in a jiffy, and to do all over again. And never worth looking at at all.”

Mr. Willard nodded. “It is very true,” said he. “What is striking me in looking at all this old work is the great economy of time that is effected by taking pains and using good material, to say nothing of the beauty of the things created.”

“If he goes on talking like that,” whispered Bundy, “Japp’ll kiss him. We must get them out of this.”

Mercifully—if such a catastrophe was imminent—the ceiling discourse brought our inspection here to an end. From Eastgate House we went back to the Maidstone-road, and when we had inspected Restoration House, began to trace out the site of the city wall, which Thorndyke carefully marked on his map, to Japp’s intense gratification. This perambulation brought us to the castle—which was dealt with rather summarily, as Mr. Willard had already examined it—and we then returned to the office for tea, which Bundy prepared and served with great success in his own sitting-room, while Japp dotted in with red ink on Thorndyke’s map the entire city wall, including the part which we had yet to trace; and ridiculously small the ancient city looked when thus marked out on the modern town.

After tea we retraced our steps to the site of the East Gate, and, having inspected a large fragment of the wall at the end of an alley, traced its line across the Highstreet, and then proceeded down Free School-lane to the fine angle-bastion at the northern corner of the lane. Thence we followed the scanty indications as far as the site of the North Gate, and thereafter through a confused and rather unlovely neighbourhood until, on the edge of the marshes, we struck into a narrow lane, enclosed by a dilapidated tarred fence, a short distance along which we came to a closed gate, which I recognized as the one through which I had passed with Bundy on the day when we were made acquainted with the tragic history of Bill the Bargee. As Japp unlocked the gate and admitted us to the space of waste land, Bundy remarked to Thorndyke: “That is the gate that the missing key belonged to. You see there is no harm done so far. The wall is still there.”

“Yes,” said Thorndyke, “and not much improved in appearance by your builders’ attentions. Those patches suggest the first attempts of an untalented dental student at conservation.”

“They are rather a disfigurement,” said Japp. “But the men had to have a job found for them, and that is the result. Perhaps they won’t show so much in the photograph.”

While the photographer was setting up his camera and making the exposure, Japp explained the relation of this piece of wall to the North Gate and the Gate that faced the bridge, and marked its position on Thorndyke’s map.

“And that,” he continued, “concludes our perambulation. The photographer is chartered by Mr. Willard, but I understand that we are at liberty to secure copies of the photographs, if we want them. Is that not so, Mr. Willard?”

“Surely,” was the cordial reply; “only I stipulate that they shall be a gift from me, and I shall ask a favour in return. If there is a plate left, I should like to have a commemorative group taken, so that when I recall this pleasant day, I can also recall the pleasant society in which I spent it.”

We all acknowledged the kindly compliment with a bow, and as the photographer announced that he had a spare plate, we grouped ourselves against a portion of undisfigured wall, removed our hats, and took up easy and graceful postures on either side of Mr. Willard. When the exposure had been made, and the photographer proceeded to pack up his apparatus, Thorndyke tendered his very hearty thanks to Mr. Japp and his friend for their hospitality.

“It has been a great privilege,” said he, “to be allowed to share in the products of so much study and research, and I assure you it is far from being unappreciated. Whenever I revisit Rochester—which I hope to do before long—I shall think of you gratefully, and of your very kind and generous friend, Mr. Willard.”

Our two hosts made suitable acknowledgments; and while these compliments were passing, I turned to Bundy.

“Can we get down to the shore from here?” I asked. “Thorndyke was saying that he would like to have a look at the river. If it is accessible from here we might take it on the way home.”

“It isn’t difficult to get at,” replied Bundy. “If he wants to get a typical view of the river with the below-bridge traffic, by far the best place is Blue Boar Pier. It isn’t very far, and it is on your way home—more or less. I’ll show you the way there if you like. Japp is dining with Willard, so he won’t want me.”

I accepted the offer gladly, and as the exchange of compliments seemed to be completed and our party was moving towards the gate, I tendered my thanks for the day’s entertainment and bade my hosts farewell, explaining that we were going riverwards. Accordingly we parted at the gate, Japp and Willard turning towards the town, while Thorndyke, Bundy, and I retraced our steps towards the marshes.

At the bottom of the lane Bundy paused to explain the topography. “That path,” said he, “leads to Gas House road and the marshes by the North Shore. But there isn’t much to see there. If we take this other track we shall strike Blue Boar-lane, which will take us to the pier. From there we can get a view of the whole bend of the river right across to Chatham.”

Thorndyke followed the description closely with the aid of his map, marking off our present position with a pencil. Then we struck into a rough cart-track, with the wide stretch of the marshes on our left, and, following this, we presently came out into the lower part of Blue Boar-lane and turned our faces towards the river. We had not gone far when I observed a man approaching whose appearance seemed to be familiar. Bundy also observed him, for he exclaimed: “Why, that is old Cobbledick! Out of uniform, too. Very irregular. I shall have to remonstrate with him. I wonder what he has been up to. Prowling about the river bank in search of clues, I expect. And he’ll suspect us of being on the same errand.”

Bundy’s surmise appeared to be correct, for as the sergeant drew nearer and recognized us, his face took on an expression of shrewd inquiry. But I noticed with some surprise that his curiosity seemed to be principally concerned with Thorndyke, at whom he gazed with something more than common attention. Under the circumstances I should have passed him with a friendly greeting, but he stopped, and, having wished me “Good evening,” said: “Could I have a few words with you, Doctor?” upon which I halted, and Thorndyke and Bundy walked on slowly. The sergeant looked after them, and, turning his back to them, drew from his pocket with a mysterious air a small dirty brown bundle, which he handed to me.

“I wanted you just to have a look at that,” he said.

I opened out the bundle, though I had already tentatively recognized it. But when it was unrolled it was unmistakable. It was poor Angelina’s scarf.

“I thought there couldn’t be any doubt about it,” the sergeant said cheerfully when I had announced the identification. “Your description was so clear and exact. Well, this gives us a pretty fair kick-off. You can see that it has been in the water—some time, too. So we know where to look for the body. The mysterious thing is, though, that we’ve still got to look for it. It ought to have come up on the shore days ago. And it hasn’t. There isn’t a longshoreman for miles up and down that isn’t on the lookout for it. You can see them prowling along the seawalls and searching the creeks in their boats. I can’t think how they can have missed it. The thing is getting serious.”

“Serious?” I repeated.

“Well,” he explained, “there’s no need for me to point out to a medical gentleman like you that bodies don’t last for ever, especially in mild weather such as we’ve been having, and in a river where the shore swarms with rats and shore-crabs. Every day that passes is making the identification more difficult.”

The horrible suggestions that emerged from his explanation gave me a sensation of physical sickness. I fidgeted uneasily, but still I managed to rejoin huskily: “There’s the clothing, you know.”

“So there is,” he agreed; “and very good means of identification in an ordinary case—accidental drowning, for instance. But this is a criminal case. I don’t want to have to depend on the clothing.”

“Was the scarf found floating?” I asked, a little anxious to change the subject to one less gruesome.

“No,” he replied. “It was on the shore by the small creek just below Blue Boar Pier, under an empty fish-trunk. One of the Customs men from the watch-house found it. He noticed the trunk lying out on the shore as he was walking along and went out to see if there was anything in it. Then, when he found it was empty, he turned it over, and there was the scarf. He recognized it at once—there’s a list of the articles stuck up on the watch-house—and kept it to bring to me. But it happened that I came down here—as I do every day—just after he’d found it. But I mustn’t keep you here talking, though I’m glad I met you and got your confirmation about this scarf.”

He smiled benignly and raised his hat, whereupon I wished him “Good evening” and went on my way with a sigh of relief. He was a pleasant, genial man, but his matter-of-fact way of looking at this tragedy that had eaten so deeply into my peace of mind, was to me positively harrowing. But, of course, he did not understand my position in the case.

“Well,” said Bundy, when I hurried up, “what’s the news? Old Cobbledick was looking mighty mysterious. And wasn’t he interested in us? Why he’s gazing after us still. Has he had a bite? Because if he hasn’t, I have. Some beastly mosquito.”

“Don’t rub it,” said Thorndyke, as Bundy clapped his hand to his cheek. “Leave it alone. We’ll put a spot of ammonia or iodine on it presently.”

“Very well,” replied Bundy, with a grimace expressive of resignation. “I am in the hands of the Faculty. What sort of fish was it that Isaak Walton Cobbledick had hooked? Or is it a secret?”

“I don’t think there is any secrecy about it,” said I. “One of the Customs men has found Mrs. Frood’s scarf,” and I repeated what the sergeant had told me as to the circumstances.

“It is a gruesome affair,” said Bundy, “this search for these ghastly relics. Look at those ghouls down on the shore there. I suppose that is the fish-trunk.”

As he spoke, we came out on the shore to the right of the pier and halted to survey the rather unlovely prospect. Outside the stunted sea-wall a level stretch of grey-green grass extended to the spring high-water mark, beyond which a smooth sheet of mud—now dry and covered with multitudinous cracks—spread out to the slimy domain of the ordinary tides. At the edge of the dry mud lay a derelict fish-trunk around which a group of bare-legged boys had gathered—and all along the shore, on the faded grass, on the dry mud and wading in the soft slime, the human water-rats were to be seen, turning over drift-rubbish, prying under stranded boats or grubbing in the soft mud. Hard by, on the grass near the sea-wall, an old ship’s long-boat had been hauled up above tide-marks to a permanent berth and turned into a habitation by the erection in it of a small house. A short ladder gave access to it from without and the resident had laid down a little causeway of flat stones leading to the wall.

“Mr. Noah seems to be at home,” observed Bundy, as we approached the little amphibious residence to inspect it. He pointed to a thin wisp of smoke that issued from the iron chimney; and, almost as he spoke, the door opened and an old man came out into the open stern-sheets of the boat with a steaming tin pannikin in his hand. His appearance fitted his residence to a nicety; for whereas the latter appeared to have been constructed chiefly from driftwood and wreckage, his costume suggested a collection of assorted marine salvage, with a leaning towards oil-skin.

“Mr. Noah” cast a malevolent glance at the searchers; then, having fortified himself with a pull at the pannikin, he turned a filmy blue eye on us.

“Good evening,” said Thorndyke. “There seems to be a lot of business-doing here,” and he indicated the fish-trunk and the eager searchers.

The old man grunted contemptuously. “Parcel of fules,” said he, “a-busyin’ theirselves with what don’t concern ’em, and lookin’ in the wrong place at that.”

“Still,” said Bundy, “they have found something here.”

“Yes,” the old man admitted, “they have. And that’s why they ain’t goin’ to find anything more.” He refreshed himself with a drink of—presumably—tea, and continued: “But the things is a-beginning to come up. It’s about time she come up. But she won’t come up here.”

“Where do you suppose she will come up?” asked Bundy.

The old man regarded him with a cunning leer. “Never you mind where she’ll come up,” said he. “It ain’t no consarn o’ yourn.”

“But how do you know where she’ll come up?” Bundy persisted.

“I knows,” the old scarecrow replied conclusively, “becos I do. Becos I gets my livin’ along-shore, and it’s my business for to know.”

Having made this pronouncement, Mr. Noah looked inquiringly into the pannikin, emptied it at a draught, and, turning abruptly, retired into the ark, shutting the door after him with a care suited to its evident physical infirmity.

“I wonder if he really does know,” said Bundy, as we walked away past the Customs watch-house.

“We can fairly take it that he doesn’t,” said Thorndyke, “seeing that the matter is beyond human calculation. But I have no doubt that he knows the places where bodies and other floating objects are most commonly washed ashore, and we may assume that he is proposing to devote his probably extensive leisure to the exploration of those places. It wouldn’t be amiss to put the sergeant in communication with him.”

“Probably the sergeant knows him,” said I, “but I will mention the matter the next time I see him.”

At the top of Blue Boar-lane Bundy halted and held out his hand to Thorndyke. “This is the parting of the ways,” said he.

“Oh, no, it isn’t,” replied Thorndyke. “You’ve got to have your mosquito-bite treated. Never neglect an insect-bite, especially on the face.”

“As a matter of fact,” said I, “you have got to come and have dinner with us. We can’t let you break up the party in this way.”

“It’s very nice of you to ask me,” he began, hesitatingly, a little shy, as I guessed, of intruding on me and my visitor; but I cut him short, and, hooking my arm through his, led him off, an obviously willing captive. And if his presence hindered me from discussing with Thorndyke the problem that had occasioned his visit, that was of no consequence, since we should have the following day to ourselves; and he certainly contributed not a little to the cheerfulness of the proceedings. Indeed, I seemed to find in his high spirits something a little pathetic; a suggestion that the company or two live men—one of them a man of outstanding intellect—was an unusual treat, and that his life with old Japp and the predatory females might be a trifle dull. He took to Thorndyke amazingly, treating him with a sort of respectful cheekiness, like a schoolboy dining with a favourite head-master; while Thorndyke, fully appreciative of his irresponsible gaiety, developed a quiet humour and playfulness which rather took me by surprise. The solemn farce of the diagnosis and treatment of the mosquito bite was an instance; when Thorndyke, having seated the patient in the surgery chair and invested him with a large towel, covered the table with an assortment of preposterous instruments and bottles of reagents, and proceeded gravely to examine the bite through a lens until Bundy was as nervous as a cat, and then to apply the remedy with meticulous precision on the point of a fine sable brush.

It was a pleasant evening, pervaded by a sense of frivolous gaiety that was felt gratefully by the two elder revellers and was even viewed indulgently by Mrs. Dunk. As to Bundy, his high spirits flowed unceasingly—but, I may add, with faultless good manners—and when, at length, he took his departure, he shook our hands with a warmth which, again, I found slightly pathetic.

“I have had a jolly evening!” he exclaimed, looking at me with a queer sort of wistfulness. “It has been a red-letter day,” and with this he turned abruptly and walked away.

We watched him from the threshold, bustling jauntily along the pavement; and as I looked at him, there came unbidden to my mind the recollection of that other figure that I had watched from this same threshold, walking away in the fading light—walking into the fog that was to swallow her up and hide her from my sight for ever.

From these gloomy reflections I was recalled by Thorndyke’s voice.

“A nice youngster, that, Strangeways. Gay and sprightly, but not in the least shallow. I often think that there was a great deal of wisdom in that observation of Spencer’s, that happy people are the greatest benefactors to mankind. Your friend, Bundy, has helped me to renew my youth; and who could have done one a greater service?”

THE MYSTERY OF ANGELINA FROOD (1924) [Part 2]

CHAPTER XI

The Man with the Mole

When I had seen my guest off by the last train on Saturday night, I walked homeward slowly, cogitating on the results of his visit. It seemed to me that they were very insignificant. In the morning we had explored the piece of shore on which the bag and the box of tablets had been found, making our way to it by the narrow and intricate alleys which seemed to be the only approach; and we had reached the same conclusion. It was an impossible place.

“If we assume,” said Thorndyke, “as we must, on the apparent probabilities, that the tragedy occurred here, we must assume that there are some significant circumstances that are unknown to us. Mrs. Frood could not have strayed here by chance. We can think of no business that could have brought her here; and since she was neither a child nor a fool, she could not have been enticed into such an obviously sinister locality without some plausible pretext. There is evidently something more than meets the eye.”

“Something, you mean, connected with her past life and the people she knew?”

“Exactly. I am having careful inquiries made on the subject in likely quarters, including the various theatrical photographers. They form quite a promising’ source of information, as they are not only able to give addresses but they can furnish us with photographs of members of the companies who would have been colleagues, and, at least, acquaintances.”

“If you come across any photographs of Mrs. Frood,” I said, “I should like to see them.”

“You shall,” he replied. “I shall certainly collect all I can get, on the chance that they may help us with the identification of the body; which may possibly present some difficulty.”

Here I was reminded of Cobbledick’s observations, and, distasteful as they were, I repeated them to Thorndyke.

“The sergeant is quite right,” said he. “This is apparently a criminal case, involving a charge of wilful murder. To sustain that charge, the prosecution will have to produce incontestable evidence as to the identity of the deceased. Clothing alone would not be sufficient to secure a conviction. The body would have to be identified. And the sergeant’s anxiety is quite justified. Have you had any experiences of bodies recovered from the water?”

“Yes,” I replied; “and I don’t like to think of them.” I shuddered as I spoke, for his question had recalled to my memory the incidents or a professional visit to Poplar Mortuary. There rose before my eyes the picture of a long black, box with a small glass window in the lid, and of a thing that appeared at that window; a huge, bloated, green and purple thing, with groups or radiating wrinkles, and in the middle a button-like object that looked like the tip of a nose. It was a frightful picture; and yet I knew that when the river that we stood by should give up its dead—

I put the thought away with a shiver and asked faintly: “About the man Frood. Don’t you think that his disappearance throws some light on the mystery?”

“It doesn’t throw much light,” replied Thorndyke, “because nothing is known about it. Obviously the coincidence in time of the disappearance, added to the known character of the man and his relations with his wife, make him an object of deep suspicion. His whereabouts will have to be traced and his time accounted for. But I have ascertained that the police know nothing about him, and my own inquiries have come to nothing, so far. He seems to have disappeared without leaving a trace. But I shall persevere. Your object—and mine—is to clear up the mystery, and if a crime has been committed, to bring the criminal to justice.”

So that was how the matter stood; and it did not appear to me that much progress had been made towards the elucidation of the mystery. As to the perpetrator or that crime, he remained a totally unknown quantity, unless the deed could be fixed on the missing man, Frood. And so matters remained for some days. Then an event occurred which seemed to promise some illumination of the darkness; a promise that it failed to fulfil.

It was about a week after Thorndyke’s visit. I had gone out after lunch to post off to him the set of photographs which had been delivered to me by the photographer with my own set. I went into the post-office to register the package, and here I found Bundy in the act of sending off a parcel. When we had transacted our business we strolled out together, and he asked: “What are you going to do now, Doctor?”

“I was going to walk down to Blue Boar Pier,” said I, “to see if anything further has been discovered.”

“Should I be in the way if I walked there with you?” he asked. “I’ve got nothing to do at the moment. But perhaps you would rather go alone. You’ve had a good deal of my society lately.”

“Not more than I wanted, Bundy,” I answered. “You are my only chum here, and you are not unappreciated, I can assure you.”

“It’s nice of you to say that,” he rejoined, with some emotion. “I’ve sometimes felt that I was rather thrusting my friendship on you.”

“Then don’t ever feel it again,” said I. “It has been a bit of luck for me to find a man here whom I could like and chum in with.”

He murmured a few words of thanks, and we walked on for a while without speaking. Presently, as we turned into the lane by the Blue Boar Inn, he said, a little hesitatingly. “Don’t you think, Doc, that it is rather a mistake to let your mind run so much on this dreadful affair? It seems to be always in your thoughts. And it isn’t good for you to think so much about it. I’ve noticed you quite a lot, and you haven’t been the same since—since it happened. You have looked worried and depressed.”

“I haven’t felt the same,” said I. “It has been a great grief to me.”

“But,” he urged, “don’t you think you should try to forget it? After all, she was little more than an acquaintance.”

“She was a great deal more than that, Bundy,” said I. “While she was alive, I would not admit even to myself that my feeling towards her was anything more than ordinary friendship. But it was; and now that she is gone, there can be no harm in recognizing the fact, or even in confessing it to you, as we are friends.”

“Do you mean, Doc,” he said in a low voice, “that you were in love with her?”

“That is what it comes to, I suppose,” I answered. “She was the only woman I had ever really cared for.”

“And did she know it?” he asked.

“Of course she didn’t,” I replied indignantly. “She was a lady and a woman of honour. Of course she never dreamed that I cared for her, or she would never have let me visit her.”

For a few moments he walked at my side in silence. Then he slipped his arm through mine, and pressing it gently with his hand, said softly and very earnestly: “I’m awfully sorry, Doc. It is frightfully hard luck for you, though it couldn’t have been much better even if—but it’s no use talking of that. I am sorry, old chap. But still, you know, you ought to try to put it away. She wouldn’t have wished you to make yourself unhappy about her.”

“I know,” said I. “But I feel that the office belongs to me, who cared most for her, to see that the mystery of her death is cleared up and that whoever wronged her is brought to justice.”

He made no reply to this but walked at my side with his arm linked in mine, meditating with an air of unwonted gravity.

When we reached the head of the pier the place was deserted excepting for one man; a sea-faring person, apparently, who was standing with his back to us, studying intently the bills that were stuck on the wall of the lookout. As we were passing, my eye caught the word “Wanted” on a new bill, and pausing to read it over the man’s shoulder, I found that it was a description of the unknown man—“with a mole on the left side of his nose”—who had pawned the opal brooch. Bundy read it, too, and as we walked away he remarked: “They are rather late in putting out those bills. I should think that gentleman will have left the locality long ago, unless he was a local person,” an opinion with which I was disposed to agree.

After a glance round the shore and at “the Ark”—which was closed but of which the chimney emitted a cheerful smoke suggestive of culinary activities on the part of “Mr. Noah “—we sauntered up past the head of the creek, along the rough path by the foundry, and out upon the upper shore.

“Well, I’m hanged!” exclaimed Bundy, glancing back at the watch-house, “that chap is still reading that bill. He must be a mighty slow reader, or he must find it more thrilling than I did. Perhaps he knows somebody with a mole on his nose.”

I looked back at the motionless figure; and at that moment another figure appeared and advanced, as we had done, to look over the reader’s shoulder.

“Why, that looks like old Cobbledick—come to admire his own literary productions. There’s vanity for you. Hallo! What’s up now?”

As Bundy spoke, the reader had turned to move away and had come face to face with the sergeant. For a moment both men had stood stock still; then there was a sudden, confused movement on both sides, with the final result that the sergeant fell, or was knocked, down and that the stranger raced off, apparently in our direction. He disappeared at once, being hidden from us by the foundry buildings, and we advanced towards the end of the fenced lane by which we had come, to intercept him, waiting by the edge of a trench or dry ditch.

“Here he comes,” said Bundy, a trifle nervously, as rapid footfalls became audible in the narrow, crooked lane. Suddenly the man appeared, running furiously, and as he caught sight of us, he whipped out a large knife, and, flourishing it with a menacing air, charged straight at us. I watched an opportunity to trip him up; but as he approached Bundy pulled me back with such energy that he and I staggered on the brink of the ditch, capsized, and rolled together to the bottom. By the time we had managed to scramble up, the man had disappeared into the wilderness of sheds, scrap-heaps, derelict boilers, and stray railway-waggons that filled the area of land between the foundry and the coal-wharves and jetties.

“Come on, Bundy,” said I, as my companion stood tenderly rubbing various projecting portions of his person; “we mustn’t lose sight of him.”

But Bundy showed no enthusiasm; and at this moment a rapid crescendo of heavy footfalls was followed by the emergence of the sergeant, purple-faced and panting, from the end of the lane.

“Which way did he go?” gasped Cobbledick.

I indicated the wilderness, briefly explaining how the fugitive had escaped us, whereupon the sergeant started forward at a lumbering trot and we followed. But it was an unfavourable hunting-ground, for the bulky litter—the heaps of coal-dust, the wagons, the cranes, the piles of condemned machinery, mingled with clumps of bushes—gave the fugitive every opportunity to disappear. And, in fact, he had disappeared without leaving a trace. Presently we came out on a wharf beside which a schooner was berthed; a trim-looking little craft with a white underbody and black top-sides, bearing a single big yard on her fore-mast and the name Anna on her counter. She was all ready for sea and was apparently waiting for high water, for her deck was all clear and a man on it was engaged in placidly coiling a rope on the battened hatch while another watched him from the door of the deckhouse. On this peaceful scene the sergeant burst suddenly and hailing the rope-coiler demanded:

“Have you seen a man run past here?”

The mariner dropped the rope, and looking up drowsily, repeated: “Have I seen a mahn?”

“Yes, a sea-faring man with a mole on his nose.”

The mariner brightened up perceptibly. “Please?” said he.

“A sailor-man with a mole on his nose.”

“Ach!” exclaimed the mariner. “Vos it tied on?”

“Tied on!” the sergeant snorted impatiently. “Of course it wasn’t. It grew there.”

Here the second mariner apparently asked some question, for our friend turned to him and replied: “Ja. Maulwurf,” on which I heard Bundy snigger softly.

“No, no,” I interposed; “not that sort of mole. A kind of wart, you know. Das Mal.”

On this the second mariner fell out of the deckhouse door, and the pair burst into yells of laughter, rolling about the deck in agonies of mirth, wiping their eyes, muttering Maulwurf, Maulwurf, and screeching like demented hyenas.

“Well,” Cobbledick demanded impatiently, “have you seen him?”

The mariner shook his head. “No,” he replied, shakily. “I have not any mahn seen.”

“Well, why couldn’t you say so at first” the sergeant growled.

“I vos zo zubbraised,” the mariner explained, glancing at his shipmate; and the pair burst out into fresh howls of laughter.

The sergant turned away with a sort of benevolent contempt and ran his eye despairingly over the wilderness. “I suppose we had better search this place,” said he, “though he is pretty certain to have got away.”

At his suggestion we separated and examined the possible hiding-places systematically, but, of course, with no result. Once only I had a momentary hope that we had not lost our quarry, when the sergeant suddenly stooped and began cautiously to stalk an abandoned boiler surrounded by a clump of bushes; but when the grinning countenance of Bundy appeared at the opposite end and that reprobate crept out stealthily and proceeded to stalk the sergeant, the last hope faded.

“I certainly thought I saw someone moving in those bushes,” said Cobbledick, with a disappointed air.

“So did Mr. Bundy,” said I “You must have seen one another.”

The sergeant glanced suspiciously at our colleague, but made no remark; and we continued our rather perfunctory search. At length we gave it up and slowly returned to the neighbourhood of the pier. By this time the tide had turned, and a few loiterers were standing about watching the procession of barges moving downstream on the ebb. Among them was a grave-looking, sandy-haired man who leaned against the watch-house, smoking reflectively as he surveyed the river. To this philosopher Cobbledick addressed himself, explaining, as he was in plain clothes:

“Good afternoon. I am a police officer and I am looking for a man who is described on that bill.” Here he indicated the poster.

The philosopher turned a pale grey, and somewhat suspicious eye on him, and having removed his pipe, expectorated thoughtfully but made no comment on the statement.

“A sea-faring man,” continued the sergeant, “with a mole on the left side of his nose.” He looked enquiringly at the philosopher, who replied impassively:

“Nhm—nhm.”

“Do you happen to have seen a man answering that description?”

“Nhm—nhm,” was the slightly ambiguous reply.

“You have seen him?” the sergeant asked, eagerly.

“Aye.”

“Do you know if he belongs to any of the craft that trade here?”

“Nhm—nhm.”

“Do you happen to know which particular vessel he belongs to?”

“Aye,” was the answer, accompanied by a grave nod.

“Can you tell me,” the sergeant asked patiently, “which vessel that is, and where she is at present?”

Our friend replaced his pipe and took a long draw at it, gazing meditatively at a schooner which was moving swiftly down the river under the power of an auxiliary motor, and setting her sails as she went. I had noticed her already, and observed that she had a white underbody and black top-sides, and that she carried a single long yard on her fore-mast. At length our friend removed his pipe, expectorated, and nodded gravely at the schooner.

“Yon,” said he, and replaced his pipe, as a precaution, I supposed, against unnecessary loquacity.

Cobbledick gazed wistfully at the receding schooner. “Pity,” said he. “I should have liked to have a look at that fellow.”

“You could get the schooner held up at Sheerness, couldn’t you?” I asked.

“Yes; I could send a ’phone message to Garrison Point Fort. But, you see, she’s a foreigner. Might make trouble. And he is probably not the man we want. After all, it’s only a matter of a mole.”

“Maulwurf,” murmured Bundy.

“Yes,” said the sergeant, with a faint grin; “those beggars were laughing at us. Well, it can’t be helped.”

We stood for a moment or two watching the schooner set one sail after another. Presently Bundy observed:

“Methinks, Sergeant, that Mr. Noah is trying to attract your attention.”

We glanced towards the Ark, the tenant of which was seated in the stern-sheets, scrubbing a length of rusty chain. As he caught the sergeant’s eye, he beckoned mysteriously, whereupon we descended the bank, and, picking our way across the muddy grass by his little causeway of stepping-stones, approached the foot of the short ladder.

“Well, Israel,” said the sergeant, resting his hands on the gunwale of the old boat as he made a rapid survey of the interior, “giving the family plate a bit of a polish, eh?”

“Plate!” exclaimed the old man, holding up the chain, which, as I now saw, had a number of double hooks linked to it, “this ain’t plate. ’Tis what we calls a creeper.”

“A creeper,” repeated the sergeant, looking at it with renewed interest. “Ha, yes, hm. A creeper, hey? Well, Israel, what’s a-doing? Have you got something to show us?”

The old man laid down the creeper and the scrubbing-brush—which had a strong suggestion of salvage in its appearance—and moved towards the door of the Ark. “Come along inside,” said he.

Cobbledick mounted the ladder and motioned me to follow, which I did, while Bundy discretely sauntered away and sat down on the bank. On entering, I observed that the Ark followed closely the constructional traditions. Like its classical prototype, it was “pitched with pitch, within and without,” and was furnished with a single small window, let into the door and hermetically sealed.

Seeing that our host looked at me with some disfavour, the tactful sergeant hastened to make us known to one another.

“This is Dr. Strangeways, Israel. He was Mrs. Frood’s doctor, and he knows all about this affair. This, Doctor, is Mr. Israel Bangs, the eminent long-shoreman, a sort of hereditary Grand Duke of the Rochester foreshore.”

I bowed ceremoniously, and the Grand Duke acknowledged the introduction with a sour grin. Then, lifting the greasy lid of a locker, he dived into it and came to the surface, as it were, with a small shoe in his hand.

“What do you say to that?” he demanded, holding the shoe under the sergeant’s nose. The sergeant said nothing, but looked at me; and I, suddenly conscious of the familiar sickening sensation, could do no more than nod in reply. Soiled, muddy and sodden as it was, the poor little relic instantly and vividly recalled the occasion when I had last seen it, then all trim and smart, peeping coyly beneath the hem of the neat brown skirt.

“Where did you find it, Israel?” asked Cobbledick.

“Ah,” said Bangs, with a sly leer, “that’s tellin’, that is. Never you mind where I found it. There’s the shoe.”

“Don’t be a fool, Israel,” said the sergeant.’ “What use do you suppose the shoe is to me if I don’t know where you found it? I’ve got to put it in evidence, you know.”

“You can put it where you like, so long as you pays for it,” the old rascal replied, doggedly. “The findin’ of it’s my business.”

There ensued a lengthy wrangle, but the sergeant, though patient and polite, was firm. Eventually Israel gave way.

“Well,” he said, “if you undertakes not to let on to Sam Hooper or any of his lot, I’ll tell you. I found it on the mud, side of the long crik betwixt Blue Boar Head and Gas-’us Point.”

The sergeant made a note of the locality, and, after having sworn not to divulge the secret to Sam Hooper or any other of the shore-rat fraternity, and having ascertained that Israel had no further information to dispose of, rose to depart; and, I noticed that, as we passed out towards the ladder, he seemed to bestow a glance of friendly recognition on the creeper.

“Well,” said Bundy, when we rejoined him, “what had Mr. Noah to say? I hope you remembered me kindly to my old friends, Shem, Ham, and Japhet.”

“He has found one of Mrs. Frood’s shoes,” answered the sergeant, producing it from his pocket and offering it for inspection. Bundy glanced at it indifferently, and then remarked: “It seems to answer the description, but, for my part, I don’t quite see the use of all this searching and prying. It only proves what we all know. There’s no doubt that she fell into the river. The question is, how did she get there? It is not likely that it was an accident, and, if it wasn’t, it must have been a crime. What we want to know is, who is the criminal?”

Cobbledick pocketed the shoe with an impatient gesture. “That’s the way they always talk,” said he. “They will always begin at the wrong end. The question, ‘Who is the murderer?’ does not arise until it is certain that there has been a murder; and it can’t be certain that there has been a murder until it is certain that the missing person is dead. And that certainty can hardly be established until the body is found. But, in the meantime, these articles are evidence enough to justify us in making other inquiries, and they may give us a hint where to look for the body. They do, in fact. They suggest that the body is probably not very far away, and more likely to be upstream than down.”

“I don’t see how they do,” said Bundy.

“I do,” retorted the sergeant, “and that’s enough for me.”

Bundy, with his customary discretion, took this as closing the discussion, and further—as I guessed—surmising that the sergeant might wish to have a few words with me alone, took his leave of us when we reached the vicinity of the office.

“That is not a bad idea of old Israel’s,” said Cobbledick, when Bundy had gone. “The creeper, I mean.”

“What about it?” I asked.

“You know what a creeper is used for, I suppose,” said he. “In the old days, the revenue boats used to trail them along over the bottom in shallow water where they suspected that the smugglers had sunk their tubs. You see they couldn’t always get a chance to land the stuff. Then they used to fill the spirits into a lot of little ankers or tubs, lash them together into a sort of raft and sink the raft close in-shore, on a dark night, in a marked place where their pals could go some other night and fish them up. Well the revenue cutters knew most of those places and used to go there and drift over them trailing creepers. Of course, if there were any tubs there, the creepers hooked on to the lashings and up they came.”

“But what do you suppose is Israel’s idea?” I asked. “Why, as the body ought to have come up long before this, and it hasn’t, he thinks it has been sunk. It might have been taken up the river in a boat, and sunk in mid-stream with a weight of some sort. Or it might have got caught by a lost anchor or on some old moorings. That would account for its not coming up and for these oddments getting detached and drifting ashore. So old Israel is going to get to work with a creeper. I expect he spends his nights creeping over the likely spots, and that is what makes him so deuced secret about the place where he found that shoe. He reckons that the body is somewhere thereabouts.”

I made no comment on this rather horrible communication. Of course, it was necessary that the body should be searched for, since its discovery was the indispensable condition of the search for the murderer. But I did not want to hear more of the dreadful details than was absolutely unavoidable.

When we reached the Guildhall, I halted and was about to take leave of the sergeant when he said, somewhat hesitatingly:

“Do you remember, Doctor, when you met me last Saturday, you had a gentleman with you?”

“I remember,” said I.

“Now, I wonder if you would think I was taking a liberty if I were to ask what that gentleman’s name was. I had an idea that I knew his face.”

“Of course it wouldn’t be a liberty,” I replied. “His name is Thorndyke; Dr. John Thorndyke.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Cobbledick, “I thought I couldn’t be mistaken. It isn’t the sort of face that one would forget. I once heard him give evidence at the Old Bailey. Wonderful evidence it was, too. Since then I’ve read reports of his investigations from time to time. He’s a marvellous man. The way he has of raking up evidence from nowhere is perfectly astonishing. Did you happen to talk to him about this case at all?”

“Well, you see, Sergeant,” I answered, rather evasively, “he had come down here for the weekend as my guest—”

“Exactly, exactly,” Cobbledick interrupted, unconsciously helping me to avoid answering his question, “he came down for a rest and a change, and wouldn’t want to be bothered with professional matters. Still, you know, I think he would be interested in this case. It is quite in his own line. It is a queer case; a very queer case in some respects.”

“In what respects?” I asked.

It was Cobbledick’s turn to be evasive. He had apparently said more than he had intended, and now drew in his horns perceptibly.

“Why,” he replied, “when you come to think of—of the—er—the character of the lady, for instance. Why should anyone want to do her any harm? And then there is the mystery as to how it happened, and the place, and—in fact, there are a number of things that are difficult to understand. But I mustn’t keep you standing here. If you should happen to see Dr. Thorndyke again, it might be as well to tell him about the case. It would be sure to interest him; and if he should, by any chance, want to know anything that you are not in a position to tell him, why, you know where I am to be found. I shouldn’t want to make any secrets with him. And he might spot something that we haven’t noticed.”

I promised to follow the sergeant’s advice, and, having bid him adieu, turned back, and walked slowly homeward. As I went I reflected profoundly on my conversation with Cobbledick; from which, as it seemed to me, two conclusions emerged. First, there were elements in this mystery that were unknown to me. I had supposed that the essence of the mystery was the mere absence of data. But it now appeared from the sergeant’s utterances, and still more from his evasions, that he saw farther into the affair than I did; either because he had more facts, or because, by reason of his greater experience, the facts meant more to him than they did to me. The second conclusion was that he was in some way in difficulties; that he was conscious of an inability to interpret satisfactorily the facts that were known to him. His evident eagerness to get into touch with Thorndyke made this pretty clear; and the two conclusions together suggested a further question. How much did Thorndyke know? Did he know all that the sergeant knew? Did he perchance know more? From the scanty data with which I had supplied him, might he possibly have drawn some illuminating inferences that had carried his understanding of the case beyond either mine or Cobbledick’s? It was quite possible. Thorndyke’s great reputation rested upon his extraordinary power of inference and constructive reasoning from apparently unilluminating facts. The facts in this case seemed unilluminating enough. But they might not be so to him. And again I recalled how both he and the sergeant seemed to look to the finding of the body as probably furnishing the solution of the mystery.

CHAPTER XII

The Prints of a Vanished Hand

Mr. Bundy’s opinion that no particular significance attached to the finding of further relics of the missing woman was one that I was myself disposed to adopt. The disappearance of poor Angelina was an undeniable fact, and there seemed to be no doubt that her body had fallen, or been cast, into the river. On these facts, the recovery of further articles belonging to her, and presumably detached from the body, shed no additional light. From the body itself, whenever it should be surrendered by the river, one hoped that something fresh might be learned. But all that anyone could say was that Angelina Frood had disappeared, that her disappearance was almost certainly connected with a crime, and that the agents of that crime and their motives for committing it were alike an impenetrable mystery, a mystery that the finding of further detached articles tended in no way to solve.

I shall, therefore, pass somewhat lightly over the incidents of the succeeding discoveries, notwithstanding the keen interest in them displayed by Sergeant Cobbledick and even by Thorndyke. On Monday, the 25th of May, the second shoe was found (to Israel Bangs’ unspeakable indignation) by Samuel Hooper of Foul Anchor Alley, who discovered it shortly after high-water, lying on the gridiron close to Gas-house Point, and brought it in triumph to the police station.

After this, there followed a long interval, occupied by a feverish contest between Israel Bangs and Samuel Hooper. But the luck fell to the experienced Israel. On Saturday, the 20th of June, that investigator, having grounded his boat below a wharf between Gas-house Point and the bridge, discovered a silver-headed hat-pin lying on the shore between two of the piles of the wharf. Its identity was unmistakable. The silver poppy-head that crowned the pin was no trade production that might have had thousands of indistinguishable fellows. It was an individual work wrought by an artist in metal, and excepting its fellow, there was probably not another like it in the world.

The discovery of this object roused a positive frenzy of search. The stretch of muddy shore between Gas-house Point and the bridge literally swarmed with human shore-rats, male and female, adult and juvenile. Every day, and all the day, excepting at high-water, Israel Bangs hovered in his oozy little basket of a boat on the extreme edge of the mud, scanning every inch of slime, and glowering fiercely at the poachers ashore who were raking over his preserves. But nothing came of it. Day after day passed. The black and odorous mud was churned up by countless feet; the pebbles were sorted out severally by innumerable filthy hands; every derelict pot, pan, box, or meat-tin was picked up again and again, and explored to its inmost recesses. But in vain. Not a single relic of any kind was brought to light by’ all those searchings and grubbings in the mud. Presently the searchers began to grow discouraged. Some of them gave up the search; others migrated to the shore beyond the bridge, and were to be seen wading in the mud below the Esplanade, the cricket-ground, or the boat-building yards. So the month of June ran out, and the third month began. And still there was no sign of the body.

Meanwhile I watched the two professional investigators, and noted a certain similarity in their outlook and methods. Both were keenly interested in the discoveries; and both, I observed, personally examined the localities of the finds. The sergeant conducted me to each spot in turn, making appropriate, but not very illuminating, comments; and I perceived that he was keeping a careful account of time and place. So, too, with Thorndyke, who had now taken to coming down regularly each weekend. He visited each spot where anything had been found, marking it carefully on his map, together with a reference number, and inquiring minutely as to the character of the object, its condition, and the state of the tide and the hour of the day when it was discovered; all of which particulars he entered in his notebook under the appropriate reference number.

Both of my friends, too, expressed increasing surprise and uneasiness at the non-appearance of the body. The sergeant was really worried, and he expressed his sentiments in a tone of complaint as if he felt that he was not being fairly treated.

“It’s getting very serious, Doctor,” he protested.

“Nearly three months gone—three summer months, mind you—and not a sign of it. I don’t like the look of things at all. This case means a lot to me. It’s my chance. It’s a detective-inspector’s job, and if I bring it off it’ll be a big feather in my cap. I want to get a conviction, and so far I haven’t got the material for a coroner’s verdict. I’ve half a mind to do a bit of creeping myself.”

Thorndyke’s observations on the case were much to the same effect. Discussing it one Saturday afternoon at the beginning of July, when I had met him at Strood Station and was walking with him into Rochester, he said:

“My feeling is that the crux of this case is going to be the question of identity—if the body ever comes to light. Of course, if it doesn’t, there is no case: it is simply an unexplained disappearance. But if the body is found and is unrecognizable excepting by clothing and other extrinsic evidence, it will be hard to get a conviction even if the unrecognizable corpse should give some clue to the circumstances of death.”

“I suppose,” said I, “the police are searching for Nicholas Frood.”

“I doubt it,” he replied. “They are not likely to be wasting efforts to find a murderer when there is no evidence that a murder has been committed. What could they do if they did find him? The woman was not in his custody or even living with him. And his previous conduct is not relevant in the absence of evidence of his wife’s death.”

“You said you were making some inquiries yourself.”

“So I am. And I am not without hopes of picking up his tracks. But that is a secondary matter. What we have to settle beyond the shadow of a doubt is the question, ‘What has become of Angelina Frood? Is she dead’ And, if she is, what was the cause and what were the circumstances of her death?’ The evidence in our possession points to the conclusion that she is dead, and that she met her death by foul means. That is the belief that the known facts produce. But we have got to turn that belief into certainty. Then it will be time to inquire as to the identity of the criminal.”

“Do you suppose the body would be unrecognizable now?”

“I feel no doubt that it would be quite unrecognizable by ordinary means if it has been in the water all this time. But it would still be identifiable in the scientific sense, if we could only obtain the necessary data. It could, for instance, be tested by the Bertillon measurements, if we had them; and it would probably yield fingerprints, clear enough to recognize, long after the disappearance of all facial character or bodily traits.”

“Would it really?” I exclaimed.

“Certainly,” he replied. “Even if the whole outer skin of the hand had come off bodily, like a glove, as it commonly does in long-submerged bodies, that glove-like cast would yield fairly clear fingerprints if property treated—with dilute formalin, for instance. And then the fingers from which the outer skin had become detached would still yield recognizable fingerprints, if similarly treated; for you must remember that the papillary ridges which form the fingerprint pattern, are in the true skin. The outer skin is merely moulded on them. But, unfortunately, the question is one of merely academic interest to us as we have no original fingerprints of Mrs. Frood’s by which to test the body. The only method of scientific identification that seems to be available is that of anthropometric measurements, as employed by Bertillon.”

“But,” I objected, “the Bertillon system is based on the existence of a record of the measurements of the person to be identified. We have no record of the measurements of Mrs. Frood.”

“True,” he agreed. “But you may remember that Dr. George Bertillon was accustomed to apply his system, not only to suspected persons who had been arrested, but also to stray garments, hat, gloves, shoes, and so forth, that came into the possession of the police. But it is clear that, if such garments can be compared with a table of recorded measurements, they can be used as standards of comparison to determine the identity of a dead body. Of course, the measurements would have to be taken, both of the garments and of the body, by someone having an expert knowledge of anthropometrical methods.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “But it seems a sound method. I must mention it to Cobbledick. He has the undoubted shoes, and I have no doubt that he could get a supply of worn garments from Mrs. Gillow.”

“Yes,” said Thorndyke. “And, speaking of Mrs. Gillow reminds me of another point that I have been intending to inquire into. You mentioned to me that Mrs. Gillow told you, at the time of the disappearance, that she had been expecting a tragedy of some kind. She must have had some grounds for that expectation.”

“She said it was nothing but a vague, general impression.”

“Still, there must have been something that gave her that impression. Don’t you think it would be well to question her a little more closely?”

“Perhaps it might,” said I, not very enthusiastically. “We are close to the house now. We can call in and see her, if you like.”

“I think we ought to leave no stone unturned,” said he; and a minute or two later, when we arrived opposite the office, he remarked, looking across attentively at the two houses: “I don’t see our friend Bundy’s face at the window.”

“No,” I replied, “he is playing tennis somewhere up at the Vines. But here is Mrs. Gillow, herself, all dressed up and evidently going out visiting.”

The landlady had appeared at the door just as we were crossing the road. Perceiving that we were bearing down on her, she paused, holding the door ajar. I ran up the steps, and having wished her “good afternoon” asked if she had time to answer one or two questions.

“Certainly,” she replied, “though I mustn’t stay long because I have promised to go to tea with my sister at Frinsbury. I usually go there on a Saturday. Perhaps we had better go into poor Mrs. Frood’s room.”

She opened the door of the sitting-room, and we all went in and sat down.

“I have been talking over this mysterious affair, Mrs. Gillow,” said I, “with my friend, Dr. Thorndyke, who is a lawyer, and he suggested that you might be able to throw some light on it. You remember that you had had some forebodings of some sort of trouble or disaster.”

“I had,” she replied, dismally, “but that was only because she always seemed so worried and depressed, poor dear. And, of course, I knew about that good-for-nothing husband of hers. That was all. Sergeant Cobbledick asked me the same question, but I had nothing to tell him.”

“Did the sergeant examine the rooms?” asked Thorndyke.

“Yes, he looked over the place, and he opened her little davenport—it isn’t locked—and read through one or two letters that he found there, but he didn’t take them away. All he took with him was a few torn-up letters that he found in the waste-paper basket.”

“If those other letters are still in the davenport,” said Thorndyke, “I think it would be well for us to look through them carefully, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Gillow.”

“I don’t see that there could be any harm in it,” she replied. “I’ve never touched anything in her rooms, myself, since she went away. I thought it better not to. I haven’t even washed up her tea-things. There they are, just as she left them, poor lamb. But if you are going to look through those letters, I will ask you to excuse me, or I shall keep my sister waiting for tea.”

“Certainly, Mrs. Gillow,” said I. “Don’t let us detain you. And, by the way,” I added, as I walked with her to the door, “it would be as well not to say anything to anybody about my having come here with my friend.”

“Very well, sir,” she replied. “I think you are right. The least said, the soonest mended,” and with this profound generalization she went out and I shut the street door after her.

* * * *

When I returned to the sitting-room, I found Thorndyke engaged in a minute examination of the tea-things, and in particular of the spoon. I proceeded at once to the davenport, and, finding it unlocked, lifted the desk-lid and peered into the interior. It contained a supply of papers and envelopes, neatly stacked, and one or two letters, which I took out. They all appeared to be from the same person—the Miss Cumbers, of whom I had heard—and a rapid glance at the contents showed that they were of no use as a source of information. I passed them to Thorndyke—who had laid down the spoon and was now looking inquisitively about the room—who scanned them rapidly and returned them to me.

“There is nothing in them,” said he. “Possibly the contents of the waste-paper basket were more illuminating. But I suspect not, as the sergeant appears to be as much in the dark as we are. Shall we have a look at the bedroom before we go?”

I saw no particular reason for doing so, but, assuming that he knew best, I made no objection. Going out into the hall, we entered the deserted bedroom, the door of which was locked, though the key had not been removed. At the threshold Thorndyke paused and stood for nearly half a minute looking about the room in the same queer, inquisitive way that I had noticed in the other room, as if he were trying to fix a mental picture of it. Meanwhile, full of the Bertillon system, I had walked across to the wardrobe to see what garments were available for measurement. I had my hand on the knob of the door when my glance fell on two objects on the dressing-table; an empty tumbler and a small water-bottle, half-full. There was nothing very remarkable about these objects, taken by themselves, but, even from where I stood, I could see that both bore a number of finger-marks which stood out conspicuously on the plain glass.

“By Jove!” I exclaimed. “Here is the very thing that you were speaking of. Do you see what it is?”

Apparently he had, for he had already taken his gloves out of his pocket and was putting them on.

“Don’t touch them, Strangeways,” said he, as I was approaching to inspect them more closely. “If these are Mrs. Frood’s fingerprints they may be invaluable. We mustn’t confuse them by adding our own.”

“Whose else could they be?” I asked.

“They might be Sergeant Cobbledick’s,” he replied. “The sergeant has been in here.” He drew a chair up to the table, and, taking a lens from his pocket, began systematically to examine the markings.

“They are a remarkably fine set,” he remarked, “and a complete set—the whole ten digits. Whoever made them held the bottle in the right hand and the tumbler in the left. And I don’t think they are the sergeant’s. They are too small and too clear and delicate.”

“No,” I agreed, “and the probabilities are against their being his. There is no reason why he should have wanted to take a drink of water during the few minutes that he spent here. It would have been different if it had been a beer bottle. But it would have been quite natural for Mrs. Frood to drink a glass of water while she was dressing or before she started out.”

“Yes,” said he. “Those are the obvious probabilities. But we must turn them into certainties if we can. Probabilities are not good data to work from. But the question is now, what are we to do? I have a small camera with me, but it would not be very convenient to take the photographs here, and it would occupy a good deal of time. On the other hand, these things would be difficult to pack without smearing the fingerprints. We want a couple of small boxes.”

“Perhaps,” said I, “we may find something that will do if we take a look round.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “we must explore the place. Meanwhile, I think I will develop up these prints for our immediate information, as we have to try to find some others to verify them.”

He went back to the sitting-room, where he had put down the two cases that he always brought with him: a small suitcase that contained his toilet necessaries and a similar-sized case covered with green canvas which had been rather a mystery to me. I had never seen it open, and had occasionally speculated on the nature of its contents. My curiosity was now to be satisfied, for, when he returned with it in his hand he explained: “This is what I call my research-case. It contains the materials and appliances for nearly every kind of medico-legal investigation, and I hardly ever travel without it.”

He placed it on a chair and opened it, when I saw that it formed a complete portable laboratory, containing, among other things a diminutive microscope, a little folding camera, and an insufflator, or powder-spray. The latter he now took from its compartment, and, lifting the tumbler with his gloved hand, stood it on a corner of the mantelpiece and blew over it with the insufflator a cloud of impalpably fine white powder, which settled evenly on the surface of the glass. He then tapped the tumbler gently once or twice with a lead pencil, when most of the powder coating either jarred off or crept down the surface. Finally, he blew at it lightly, which removed the rest of the powder, leaving the fingerprints standing out on the clear glass as if they had been painted on with Chinese white.

While he was operating in the same manner on the water-bottle—having first emptied it into the ewer—I examined the tumbler with the aid of his lens. The markings were amazingly clear and distinct. Through the lens I could see, not only the whole of the curious, complicated ridge-pattern, but even the rows of little round spots that marked the orifices of the sweat glands. For the first time, I realized what a perfect means of identification these remarkable imprints furnished.

“Now,” said Thorndyke, when he had finished with the bottle, “the two questions are, where shall we look for confirmatory fingerprints, and where are we to get the boxes that we want for packing these things? You said that Mrs. Frood had a kitchen.”

“Yes. But won’t you try the furniture here; the wardrobe door, for instance. The dark, polished mahogany ought to give good prints.”

“An excellent suggestion, Strangeways,” said he. “We might even find the sergeant’s fingerprints, as he has probably had the wardrobe open.”

He sprayed the three doors of the wardrobe, and when he had tapped them and blown away the surplus powder, there appeared near the edge of each a number of finger-marks, mostly rather indistinct, and none of them nearly so clear as those on the glass.

“This is very satisfactory,” said Thorndyke. “They are poor prints, but you can see quite plainly that there are two pairs of hands, one pair much larger than the other; and the prints of the larger hands are evidently not the same pattern as those on the glass, whereas those of the smaller ones are quite recognizable as the same, in spite of their indistinctness. As the large ones are almost certainly Cobbledick’s, the small ones are pretty certainly Mrs. Frood’s. But we mustn’t take anything for granted. Let us go down to the kitchen. We shall have a better chance there.”

The door of the basement staircase was still unlocked, as Mrs. Gillow had described it. I threw it open, and we descended together, I carrying the insufflator and he bearing the tumbler and bottle in his gloved hands. When he had put the two articles down on the kitchen table, he proceeded to powder first the kitchen door and then the side-door that gave on to the passage between the two houses. Both of them were painted a dark green and both yielded obvious finger-marks, and though these were mere oval smudges, devoid of any trace of pattern, their size and their groupings showed clearly enough that they appertained to a small hand. But we got more conclusive confirmation from a small aluminium frying-pan that had been left on the gas stove; for, on powdering the handle, Thorndyke brought into view a remarkably clear thumbprint, which was obviously identical with that on the water-bottle.

“I think,” said he, “that settles the question. If Mrs. Gillow has not touched anything in these premises—as she assures us that she has not—then we can safely assume that these are Mrs. Frood’s fingerprints.”

“Are you going to annex the frying-pan to produce in evidence?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “This verification is for our own information: to secure us against the chance of producing Cobbledick’s fingerprints to identify the body. I propose, for the present, to say nothing to anyone as to our possessing this knowledge. When the time comes we can tell what we know. Until then we shall keep our own counsel.”

Once more I found myself dimly surprised at my friend’s apparently unnecessary secrecy, but, assuming that he knew best, I made no comment, but watched with somewhat puzzled curiosity his further proceedings. His interest in the place was extraordinary. In a queer, catlike fashion he prowled about the premises, examining the most trivial objects with almost ludicrous attention. He went carefully through the cooking appliances and the glass and china; he peered into cupboards, particularly into a large, deep cupboard in which spare crockery was stored, and which was, oddly enough, provided with a Yale lock; he sorted out the meagre contents of the refuse-bin, and incidentally salved from it a couple of cardboard boxes that had originally contained groceries, and he explored the, now somewhat unsavoury, larder.

“I suppose,” he said reflectively, “the dustman must have used the side door. Do you happen to know?”

“I don’t,” said I, inwardly wondering what the deuce the dustman had to do with the case. “I understand that the door of the passage was not used.”

“But she couldn’t have had the dust-bin carried up the stairs and out at the front door,” he objected.

“I should think not,” said I. “Perhaps we could judge better if we had a look at the passage.”

He adopted the suggestion and we opened the side-door—which had a Yale night-latch—and went out into the covered passage that was common to the two houses. The door that opened on to the street was bolted on the inside, but the bolts were in good working order, as we ascertained by drawing them gently; so this gave no evidence one way or the other. Then Thorndyke carefully examined the hard gravel floor of the passage, apparently searching for dropped fragments, or the dustman’s footprints; but though there were traces suggesting that the side-doors had been used, there were no perceptible tracks leading to the street or in any way specifically suggestive of dustmen.

“Japp seems fond of Yale locks,” observed Thorndyke, indicating the second side-door, which was also fitted with one. “I wonder where he keeps his dust-bin.”

“Would it be worth while to ask him?” said I, more and more mystified by this extraordinary investigation.

“No,” he replied, very definitely. “A question often gives more information than it elicits.”

“It might easily do that in my case,” I remarked with a grin; upon which he laughed softly and led the way back into the house. There I gathered up the two boxes and the insufflator and made my way up to the bedroom, he following with the tumbler and the water-bottle. Then came the critical business of packing these two precious objects in the boxes in such a way as to protect the fingerprints from contact with the sides; which was accomplished very neatly with the aid of a number of balls or plasticine from the inexhaustible research-case.

“This is a little disappointing,” said Thorndyke, looking at the hair-brush and comb as he took off his gloves. “I had hoped to collect a useful sample of hair. But her excessive tidiness defeats us. There seems to be only one or two short hairs and one full length. However, we may as well have them. They won’t be of much use for comparison with the naked eye, but even a single hair can be used as a colour control under the microscope.”

He combed the brush until the last hair was extracted from it, and then drew the little collection from the comb and arranged it on a sheet of paper. There were six short hairs, from two to four inches long, and one long hair, which seemed to have been broken off, as it had no bulb.

“Many ladies keep a combing-bag,” he remarked, as; he bestowed the collection in a seed-envelope from the: research-case; “but I gather from your description that Mrs. Frood’s hair was luxuriant enough to render that economy unnecessary. At any rate, there doesn’t seem to be such a bag. And now I think we have finished, and we haven’t done so badly.”

“We have certainly got an excellent set of fingerprints,” said I. “But it seems rather doubtful whether there will ever be an opportunity of using them; and if there isn’t, we shan’t be much more forward for our exploration. Of course, there is the hair.”

“Yes,” said Thorndyke, “there is the hair. That may be quite valuable. And perhaps there are some other matters—but time will show.”

With this somewhat cryptic conclusion he proceeded with great care to pack the two boxes in his suitcase, wedging them with his pyjamas so that they should not get shaken in transit.

As we walked home I reflected on Thorndyke’s last remark. It seemed to contain a suggestion that the mystery of Angelina’s death was not so complete to him as it was to me. For my own part, I could see no glimmer of light in any direction. She seemed to have vanished without leaving a trace excepting those few derelict objects which had been washed ashore and which told us nothing. But was it possible that those objects bore some significance that I had overlooked? That they were charged with some message that I had failed to decipher? I recalled a certain reticence on the part of Cobbledick which had made me suspect him of concealing from me some knowledge that he held or some inferences that he had drawn; and now there was this cryptic remark of Thorndyke’s, offering the same suggestion. Might it possibly be that the profound obscurity was only in my own mind, the product of my inexperience, and that to these skilled investigators the problem presented a more intelligible aspect? It might easily be. I determined cautiously to approach the question.

“You seemed,” said I, “to imply, just now, that there are certain data for forming hypotheses as to the solution of this mystery that envelops the disappearance of Mrs. Frood. But I am not aware of any such data. Are you?”

“Your question, Strangeways,” he replied, “turns on the meaning of the word ‘aware.’ If two men, one literate and the other illiterate, look at a page of a printed book, both may be said to be aware of it; that is to say that in both it produces a retinal image which makes them conscious of it as a visible object having certain optical properties. In the case of the illiterate man the perception of the optical properties is the total effect. But the literate man has something in his consciousness already, and this something combines, as it were, with the optical perception, and makes him aware of certain secondary properties of the printed characters. To both, the page yields a visual impression; but to one only does it yield what we may call a psychical impression. Are they both aware of the page?”

“I appreciate your point,” said I, with a sour smile, “and I seem to be aware of a rather skilful evasion of my question.”

He smiled in his turn and rejoined: “Your question was a little indirect. Shall we have it in a more direct form?”

“What I wanted to know,” said I, “though I suppose I have no right to ask, is whether there appears to you to be any prospect whatever of finding any solution of the mystery of Mrs. Frood’s death.”

“The answer to that question,” he replied, “is furnished by my own proceedings. I am not a communicative man, as you may have noticed, but I will say this much: that I have taken, and am taking, a good deal of trouble with this case, and am prepared to take more, and that I do not usually waste my efforts on problems that appear to be unsolvable. I am not disposed to say more than that, excepting to refer you again to the instance of the printed page and to remind you that whatever I know I have either learned from you or from the observation, in your company, of objects equally visible to both of us.”

This reply, if not very illuminating, at least answered my question, as it conveyed to me that I was not likely to get much more information out of my secretive friend. Nevertheless, I asked: “About the man Frood: you were saying that you had some hopes of running him to earth.”

“Yes, I have made a start. I have ascertained that he did apparently set out for Brighton the day before Mrs. Frood’s disappearance, but he never arrived there. That is all I know at present. He was seen getting into the Brighton train, but he did not appear at the Brighton barrier—my informant had the curiosity to watch all the passengers go through—and he never made the visit which was the ostensible object of his journey. So he must have got out at an intermediate station. It may he difficult to trace him, but I am not without hope of succeeding eventually. Obviously, his whereabouts on the fatal day is a matter that has to be settled. At present he is the obvious suspect; but if an alibi should be proved in his case, a search would have to be initiated in some other direction.”

This conversation brought us to my house in time to relieve Mrs. Dunk’s anxieties on the subject of dinner; and as the daylight was already gone, the photographic operations were postponed until the following morning. Indeed, Thorndyke had thought of taking the objects to his chambers, where a more efficient outfit was available, but, on reflection, he decided to take the photographs in my presence so that I could, if necessary, attest their genuineness on oath. Accordingly, on the following morning, we very carefully extracted the tumbler and the bottle from their respective boxes and set them up, with a black coat of mine for a background, at the end of a table. Then Thorndyke produced his small folding camera—which pulled out to a surprising length—and, having fitted it with a short-focus objective, made the exposures, and developed the plates in a dark cupboard by the light of a little red lamp from the research case. When the plates were dry we inspected them through a lens, and found them microscopically sharp. Finally, at Thorndyke’s suggestion, I scratched my initials with a needle in the corner of each plate.

“Well,” I said, when he had finished, “you have got the evidence that you wanted, and in a very complete form. It remains to be seen now whether you will ever get an opportunity to use it.”

“Don’t be pessimistic, Strangeways,” said he. “We have had exceptional luck in getting this splendid series of fingerprints. Let us hope that Fortune will not desert us after making us these gifts.”

“What is to be done with the originals?” I asked.

“Shall I put them back where we found them?”

“I think not,” he replied. “If you have a safe or a secure lock-up cupboard, where they could be put away, out of sight, and from whence they could be produced if necessary, I will ask you to take charge of them.”

There was a cupboard with a good lock in the old bureau that I had found in my bedroom, and to this I conveyed the precious objects and locked them in. And so ended—at least, for the present—the episode of our raid on poor Angelina’s abode.

CHAPTER XIII

The Discovery in Black Boy-Lane

On a fine, sunny afternoon, about ten days after our raid on Angelina’s rooms (it was Tuesday, the 14th of July, to be exact), I was sitting in my dining-room, from which the traces of lunch had just been removed, idly glancing over the paper, and considering the advisability of taking a walk, when I heard the doorbell ring. There was a short interval; then the door was opened, and the sounds of strife and wrangling that followed this phenomenon informed me that the visitor was Mr. Bundy, between whom and Mrs. Dunk there existed a state of chronic warfare. Presently the dining-room door opened—in time for me to catch a concluding growl of defiance from Mrs. Dunk—and that lady announced gruffly: “Mr. Bundy.”

My visitor tripped in smilingly, “all teeth and monocle,” as his inveterate enemy had once expressed it, holding a Panama hat, which had temporarily superseded the velour.

“Well, John,” said he, “coming out to play?” He had lately taken to calling me John; in fact, a very close and pleasant intimacy had sprung up between us. It dated from the occasion when I had confided to him my unfortunate passion for poor Angelina. That confidence he had evidently taken as a great compliment, and the matter of it had struck a sympathetic chord in his kindly nature. From that moment there had been a sensible change in his manner towards me. Beneath his habitual flippancy there was an undertone of gentleness and sympathy, and even of affection. Nor had I been unresponsive. Like Thorndyke, I found in his sunny temperament, his invariable cheerfulness and high spirits, a communicable quality that took effect on my own state of mind. And then I had early recognized that, in spite of his apparent giddiness, Bundy was a man of excellent intelligence and considerable strength of character. So the friendship had ripened naturally enough.

I rose from my chair and, dropping the paper, stretched myself. “You are an idle young dog,” said I. “Why aren’t you at work?”

“Nothing doing at the office except some specifications. Japp is doing them. Come out and have a roll round.”

“Well, Jimmy,” said I. “Your name is Jimmy, isn’t it?”

“No, it is not,” he replied with dignity. “I am called Peter—like the Bishop of Rumtifoo, and, by a curious coincidence, for the very same reason.”

“Let me see,” said I, falling instantly into the trap, “what was that reason?”

“Why, you see,” he replied impressively, “the Bishop was called Peter because that was his name.”

“Look here, young fellow my lad,” said I, “you’ll get yourself into trouble if you come up here pulling your elder’s legs.”

“It was only a gentle tweak, old chap,” said he. “Besides, you aren’t so blooming senile, after all. You are only cutting your first crop of whiskers. Are you coming out? I saw old Cobble dick just now, turning down Blue Boar Lane and looking as miserable as a wet cat.”

“What was he looking miserable about?”

“The slump in relics, I expect. He is making no head way with his investigation. I fancy he had reckoned on getting an inspectorship out of this case, whereas, if he doesn’t reach some sort of conclusion, he is likely to get his rapples knucked, as old Miss Barman would say. I suspect he was on his way to the Ark to confer with Mr. Noah. What do you say to a stroll in the direction of Mount Ararat?”

It was a cunning suggestion on the part of Bundy, for it drew me instantly. Repulsive as old Israel’s activities were to me, the presence of those fingerprints, securely locked up in my bureau, had created in me a fresh anxiety to see the first stage of the investigation completed so that the search for the murderer could be commenced in earnest. Not that my presence would help the sergeant, but that I was eager to hear the tidings of any new discovery.

Bundy’s inference had been quite correct. We arrived at the head of the Blue Boar pier just in time to see the sergeant slowly descending the ladder, watched gloomily by Israel Bangs. As the former reached terra firma he turned round and then observed us.

“Any news, Sergeant?” I asked, as he approached across the grass.

He shook his head discontentedly. “No,” he replied, “not a sign; not a vestige. It’s a most mysterious affair. The things seemed to be coming up quite regularly until that hatpin was found. Then everything came to an end. Not a trace of anything for nigh upon a month. And what, in the name of Fortune, can have become of the body? That’s what I can’t make out. If this goes on much longer, there won’t be any body: and then we shall be done. The case will have to be dropped.”

He took off his hat (he was in plain clothes as usual) and wiped his forehead, looking blankly first at me and then at Bundy. The latter also took off his hat and whisked out his handkerchief, bringing with it a little telescope which fell to the ground and was immediately picked up by the sergeant. “Neat little glass, this,” he remarked, dusting it with his handkerchief. “It’s lucky it fell on the turf.” He took off the cap, and pulling out the tubes, peered vaguely through it up and down the river. Presently he handed it to me. “Look at those craft down below the dockyard,” said he.

I took the little instrument from him and pointed it at the group of small, cutter-rigged vessels that he had indicated, of which the telescope, small as it was, gave a brilliantly sharp picture.

“What are they?” I asked. “Oyster dredgers?”

“No,” he replied. “They are bawleys with their shrimp-trawls down. But there are plenty of oyster dredgers in the lower river and out in the estuary, and what beats me is why none of them ever brings up anything in the trawls or dredges—anything in our line, I mean.”

“What did you expect them to bring up?” Bundy asked.

“Well, there are the things that have washed ashore, and there are the other things that haven’t washed ashore yet. And then there is the body.”

“Mr. Noah would have something to say if they brought that up,” said Bundy. “By the way, what had he got to say when you called on him?”

“Old Bangs? Why he is getting a bit shirty. Wants me to pay him for all the time he has lost on creeping and searching. Of course, I can’t do that, I didn’t employ him.”

“Did he find the hat-pin that you spoke of?” Bundy asked.

“Yes; and he has been grubbing round the place where he found it ever since, as if he thought hat-pins grew there.”

“Still,” said Bundy, “it is not so unreasonable. A hatpin couldn’t have floated ashore. If the hat came off, the two hat-pins must have fallen out at pretty much the same time and place.”

“Yes,” the sergeant agreed, reflectively, “that seems to be common sense; and, if it is, the other hat-pin ought to be lying somewhere close by. I must go and have a look there myself.” He again reflected for a few moments and then asked: “Would you like to see the place where Israel found the pin?”

As I had seen the place already and had shown it to Thorndyke, I left Bundy to answer.

“Why not?” he assented, rather, I suspected, to humour the sergeant than because he felt any particular interest in the place. Thereupon Cobbledick, whose enthusiasm appeared to have been revived by Bundy’s remark, led the way briskly towards the wilderness by the coal-wharves, through that desolate region and along a cart-track that skirted the marshes until we came out into a sort of lesser wilderness to the west of Gas-House Road. Here the sergeant slipped through a large hole in a corrugated iron fence which gave access to a wharf littered with the unpresentable debris resulting from the activities of a firm of ship-knackers. Advancing to the edge of the wharf, Cobbledick stood for a while looking down wistfully at the expanse of unspeakable mud that the receding tide had uncovered.

“I suppose it is too dirty to go down,” he said in a regretful tone.

Bundy’s assent to this proposition was most emphatic and unqualified, and the sergeant had to content himself with a bird’s-eye view. But he made a very thorough inspection, walking along the edge of the wharf, scrutinizing its base, pile by pile, and giving separate attention to each pot, tin, or scrap of driftwood on the slimy surface. He even borrowed Bundy’s telescope to enable him to examine the more distant parts of the mud, until the owner of the instrument was reduced to the necessity of standing behind him, for politeness’ sake, to get a comfortable yawn.

“Well,” said Cobbledick, at long last, handing back the telescope, “I suppose we must give it up. But it’s disappointing.”

“I don’t quite see why,” said Bundy. “You have found enough to prove that the body is in the river, and no number of further relics would prove any more.”

“No, there’s some truth in that,” Cobbledick agreed. “But I don’t like the way that everything seems to have come to a stop.” He crawled dejectedly through the hole in the fence and walked on for a minute or two without speaking. Presently he halted and looked about him. “I suppose Black Boy-lane will be our best way,” he remarked.

“Which is Black Boy-lane?” I asked.

“It is the lane we came down after we left Japp and Willard that day,” Bundy explained.

“I remember,” said I, “but I didn’t know it had a name.”

“It was named after a little inn that used to stand somewhere near the top; but it was pulled down years ago. Here’s the lane.”

We entered the little, tortuous alley that wound between the high, tarred fences, and as it was too narrow for us to walk abreast, Bundy dropped behind. A little way up the lane I noticed an old hat lying on the high grass at the foot of the fence. Bundy apparently noticed it, too, for just after we had passed it I heard the sound of a kick, and the hat flew over my shoulder. At the same moment, and impelled by the same kick, a small object, which I at first thought to be a pebble, hopped swiftly along the ground in front of us, then rolled a little way, and finally came to rest, when I saw that it was a button. I should probably have passed it without further notice, having no use for stray buttons. But the more thrifty sergeant stooped and picked it up; and the instant that he looked at it he stopped dead.

“My God! Doctor,” he exclaimed, holding it out towards me. “Look at this!”

I took it from him, though I had recognized it at a glance. It was a small bronze button with a Tudor Rose embossed on it.

“This is a most amazing thing,” said Cobbledick.

“There can’t be any doubt as to what it is.”

“Not the slightest,” I agreed. “It is certainly one of the buttons from Mrs. Frood’s coat. The question is, how on earth did it get here?”

“Yes,” said the sergeant, “that is the question; and a very difficult question, too.”

“Aren’t you taking rather a lot for granted?” suggested Bundy, to whom I had passed the little object for inspection. “It doesn’t do to jump at conclusions too much. Mrs. Frood isn’t likely to have had her buttons made to order. She must have bought them somewhere. She might even have bought them in Rochester. In any case, there must be thousands of others like them.”

“I suppose there must be,” I admitted, “though I have never seen any buttons like them.”

“Neither have I,” said Cobbledick, “and I am going to stick to the obvious probabilities. The missing woman wore buttons like this, and I shall assume that this is one of her buttons unless someone can prove that it isn’t.”

“But how do you account for one of her buttons being here?” Bundy objected.

“I don’t account for it,” retorted Cobbledick. “It’s a regular puzzle. Of course, someone—a child, for instance—might have picked it up on the shore and dropped it here. But that is a mere guess, and not a very likely one. The obvious thing to do is to search this lane thoroughly and see if there are any other traces; and that is what I am going to do now. But don’t let me detain you two gentlemen if you had rather not stay.”

“I shall certainly stay and help you, Sergeant,” said I; and Bundy, assuming the virtue of enthusiasm, if he had it not, elected also to stay and join in the search.

“We had better go back to the bottom of the lane,” said Cobbledick, “and go through the grass at the foot of the fence from end to end. I will take the right hand side and you take the left.”

We retraced our steps to the bottom of the lane and began a systematic search, turning over the grass and weeds and exposing the earth inch by inch. It was a slow process and would have appeared a singular proceeding had any wayfarer passed through and observed us, but fortunately it was an unfrequented place, and no one came to spy upon us. We had traversed nearly half the lane when Bundy stood up and stretched himself. “I don’t know what your back is made of, John,” said he. “Mine feels as if it was made of broken bottles. How much more have we got to do?”

“We haven’t done half yet,” I replied, also standing up and rubbing my lumbar region; and at this moment the sergeant, who was a few yards ahead, hailed us with a triumphant shout. We both turned quickly and beheld him standing with one arm raised aloft and the hand grasping a silver-topped hat-pin.

“What do you say to that, Mr. Bundy?” he demanded as we hurried forward to examine the new “find.” ‘Shall we be jumping at conclusions if we say that this hat-pin is Mrs. Frood’s?”

“No,” Bundy admitted after a glance at the silver poppy-head. “This seems quite distinctive, and, of course, it confirms the button. But I don’t understand it in the least. How can they have come here?”

“We won’t go into that,” said the sergeant, in a tone of suppressed excitement that showed me pretty clearly that he had already gone into it. “They are here. And now the question arises, what became of the hat? It couldn’t have dropped off down at the wharf, or this hat-pin wouldn’t be here; but it must have fallen off when both hat-pins were gone. Now what can have become of it?”

“It might have been picked up and taken possession of by some woman,” I suggested. “It was a good hat, and if the body was brought here soon after the crime, as it must have been, it wouldn’t have been much damaged. But why trouble about the hat? Appearances suggest that the body was either brought up or taken down this lane. That is the new and astonishing fact that needs explaining.”

“We don’t want to do any explaining now,” said Cobbledick. “We are here to collect facts. If we can find out what became of the hat, that may help us when we come to consider the explanations.”

“Well, it obviously isn’t here,” said I.

“No,” he agreed, “and it wouldn’t have been left here. A murderer mightn’t have noticed the button, or even the hat-pin, on a dark, foggy night. But he’d have noticed the hat; and he wouldn’t have left it where it must have been seen, and probably led to inquiries. He might have taken it with him, or he might have got rid of it. I should say he would have got rid of it. What is on the other side of these fences?”

We all hitched ourselves up the respective fences far enough to look over. On the one side was a space of bare, gravelly ground with thin patches of grass and numerous heaps of cinder; on the other was an area of old waste land thickly covered with thistles, ragwort, and other weeds. The sergeant elected to begin with the latter, as the less frequented and therefore more probably undisturbed. Setting his foot on the buttress of a post, he went over the fence with surprising agility, considering his figure, and was lost to view; but we could hear him raking about among the herbage close to the fence, and from time to time I stood on the buttress and was able to witness his proceedings. First he went to the bottom of the lane and from that point returned by the fence, searching eagerly among the high weeds. I saw him thus proceed, apparently to the top of the lane in the neighbourhood of the remains of the city wall. Thence he came back, but now at a greater distance from the fence, and as he was still eagerly peering and probing amongst the weeds, it was evident that he had had no success. Suddenly, when he was but a few yards away, he uttered an exclamation and ran forward. Then I saw him stoop, and the next moment he fairly ran towards me holding the unmistakable brown straw hat with the dull green ribbon.

“That tells us what we wanted to know,” he said breathlessly, handing the hat to me as he climbed over the fence; “at least, I think it does. I’ll tell you what I mean—but not now,” he added in a lower tone, though not unheard by Bundy, as I inferred later.

“I suppose we need hardly go on with the search any further?” I suggested, having had enough of groping amongst the grass.

“Well, no,” he replied. “I shall go over it again later on, but we’ve got enough to think about for the present. By the way, Mr. Bundy, I’ve found something belonging to you. Isn’t this your property?”

He produced from his pocket a largish key, to which was attached a wooden label legibly inscribed “Japp and Bundy, High-street, Rochester.”

“By Jove!” exclaimed Bundy, “it is Japp’s precious key! Where on earth did you find it, Sergeant?”

“Right up at the top,” was the reply. “Close to the old wall.”

“Now, I wonder how the deuce it got there,” said Bundy. “Some fool must have thrown it over the fence from pure mischief. However, here it is. You know there was a reward of ten shillings for finding it, Sergeant. I had better settle up at once. You needn’t make any difficulties about it,” he added, as the sergeant seemed disposed to decline the payment. “It won’t come out of my pocket. It is the firm’s business.”

On this understanding Cobbledick pocketed the proffered note and we walked on up the lane, the sergeant slightly embarrassed, as we approached the town, by the palpably unconcealable hat. Very little was said by any of us, for these new discoveries, with the amazing inferences that they suggested, gave us all abundant material for thought. The sergeant walked with eyes bent on the ground, evidently cogitating profoundly; my mind surged with new speculations and hypotheses, while Bundy, if not similarly preoccupied, refrained from breaking in on our meditations.

When, at length, by devious ways, we reached the Highstreet in the neighbourhood of the Corn Exchange, we halted, and the sergeant looked at me as if framing a question. Bundy glanced up at the quaint old clock, and remarked:

“It is about time I got back to the office. Mustn’t leave poor old Japp to do all the work, though he never grumbles. So I will leave you here.”

I realized that this was only a polite excuse to enable the sergeant to have a few words with me alone, and I accepted it as such.

“Good-bye, then,” said I, “if you must be off, and in case I don’t see you before, I shall expect you to dinner on Saturday if you’ve got the evening free. Dr. Thorndyke is coming down for the weekend, and I know you enjoy ragging him.”

“He is pretty difficult to get a rise out of, all the same,” said Bundy, brightening up perceptibly at the invitation. “But I shall turn up with very great pleasure.” He bestowed a mock ceremonious salute on me and the sergeant, and, turning away, bustled off in the direction of the office. As soon as he was out of earshot Cobbledick opened the subject of the new discoveries.

“This is an extraordinary development of our case, Doctor,” said he. “I didn’t want to discuss it before Mr. Bundy, though he is really quite a discreet gentleman, and pretty much on the spot, too. But he isn’t a party to the case, and it is better not to talk too freely. You see the points that these fresh finds raise?”

“I see that they put a new complexion on the affair, but to me they only make the mystery deeper and more incomprehensible.”

“In a way they do,” Cobbledick agreed, “but, on the other hand, they put the case on a more satisfactory footing. For instance, we understand now why the body has never come to light. It was never in the river at all. Then as to the perpetrator; he was a local man—or, at least, there was a local man in it; a man who knew the town and the waterside neighbourhood thoroughly. No stranger would have found Black Boy-lane. Very few Rochester people know it.”

“But,” I asked, “what does the finding of these things suggest to you?”

“Well,” he replied, “it suggests several questions. Let me just put these things away in my office, and then we can talk the matter over.” He went into his office, and shortly returned relieved—very much relieved—of the conspicuous hat. We turned towards the bridge, and he resumed: “The first question and the most important one is, which way was the body travelling? It is obvious that it was carried through Black Boy-lane. But in which direction? Towards the town or towards the river? When you think of the circumstances; when you recall that it was a foggy night when she disappeared; it seems at first more probable that the crime might have been committed in, or near, the lane, and the body carried down to the river. But when you consider all the facts, that doesn’t seem possible. There is that box of tablets, picked up dry and clean on Chatham Hard. That seems to fix the locality where the crime occurred.”

“And there is the brooch,” said I.

“I don’t attach much importance to that,” he replied. “It might have been picked up anywhere. But the box of tablets couldn’t have got from Black Boy-lane to Chatham except by the river, and it hadn’t been in the river. But the hat seems to me to settle the question. You see, one hat-pin was found on the shore and the other in the lane near the hat. Now, one hat-pin might have dropped out and left the hat still fixed on the head. But when the hat came off, the pins must have come off with it. The hat came off near the top of the lane. If both the pins had been in it they would both have come out there.

“But one pin was found on the shore; therefore when the body was at the shore the hat must have been still on the head, though it had probably got loosened by all the dragging about in the boat and in landing the body. You agree to that, Doctor?”

“Yes, it seems undeniable,” I answered.

“Very well,” said he. “Then the body was being carried up the lane. The next question is: was it being carried by one person or by more than one? Well, I think you will agree with me, Doctor, that it could hardly have been done by one man. It is quite a considerable distance from the shore to the top of the lane. She was a goodsized woman, and a dead body is a mighty awkward thing to carry at the best of times. I should say there must have been at least two men.”

“It certainly does seem probable,” I admitted.

“I think so,” said he. “Then we come to another question. Was it really a dead body? Or might the woman have been merely insensible?”

“Good God, Sergeant!” I exclaimed. “You don’t think it possible that it could have been a case of forcible abduction, and that Mrs. Frood is still alive?”

“I wouldn’t say it was impossible,” he replied, “but I certainly don’t think it is the case. You see, nearly three months have passed and there is no sign of her. But in modern England you can’t hide a full-grown, able-bodied woman who has got all her wits about her. No, Doctor, I am afraid we must take the view that the woman who was carried up Black Boy-lane was a dead woman. All I want to point out is that the other view is a bare possibility, and that we mustn’t forget it.”

“But,” I urged, “don’t you think that the fact that she was being carried towards the town strongly suggests that she was alive? Why on earth should a murderer bring a body, at great risk of discovery, from the river, where it could easily have been disposed of, up into the town? It seems incredible.”

“It does,” he agreed. “It’s a regular facer. But, on the other hand, suppose she was alive. What could they have done with her? How could they have kept her out of sight all this time? And why should they have done it?”

“As to the motive,” said I, “that is incomprehensible in any case. But what do you suppose actually happened?”

“My theory of it is,” he replied, “that two men, at least, did the job. Both may have been local waterside men, or there may have been a stranger with a water-rat in his pay. I imagine the crime was committed at Chatham, somewhere near the Sun Pier, and that the body was put in a boat and brought up here. It was a densely foggy night, you remember, so there would have been no great difficulty; and there wouldn’t be many people about. The part of it that beats me is what they meant to do with the body. They seem to have brought it deliberately from Chatham right up into Rochester Town; and they have got rid of it somehow. They must have had some place ready to stow it in, but what that place can have been, I can’t form the ghost of a guess. It’s a fair knock-out.”

“You don’t suppose old Israel Bangs knows anything about it?” I suggested.

The sergeant shook his head. “I’ve no reason to suppose he does,” he replied. “And it is a bad plan to make guesses and name names.”

We walked up and down the Esplanade for nearly an hour, discussing various possibilities; but we could make nothing of the incredible thing that seemed to have happened in spite of its incredibility. At last we gave it up and returned to the Guildhall, where, as we parted, he said a little hesitatingly: “I heard you tell Mr. Bundy that Dr. Thorndyke was coming down for the weekend. It wouldn’t be amiss if you were to put the facts of the case before him. It’s quite in his line, and I think he would be interested to hear about it; and he might see something that I have missed. But, of course, it must be in strict confidence.”

I promised to try to find an opportunity to get Thorndyke’s opinion on the case, and with this we separated, the sergeant retiring to his office and I making my way homeward to prepare a report for dispatch by the last post.

CHAPTER XIV

Sergeant Cobbledick Is Enlightened

The custom which had grown upon my part of meeting Thorndyke at the station on the occasion of his visits was duly honoured on the present occasion, for the surprising discoveries in Black Boy-lane, which I had described in my report to him, made me eager to hear his comments. Unfortunately, on this occasion, he had come down by an unusually late train, and the opportunity for discussion was limited to the time occupied by the short walk from Rochester Station to my house. For it was close upon dinner time, and I rather expected to find Bundy awaiting us.

“Your report was quite a thrilling document,” he remarked, as we came out of the station approach. “These new discoveries seem to launch us on a fresh phase of the investigation.”

“Do they seem to you to offer any intelligible suggestions?” I asked.

“There is no lack of suggestions,” he replied. “To a person of ordinary powers of imagination, a number of hypotheses must present themselves. But, of course, the first thing to consider is not what might have happened, but what did happen, and what we can safely infer from those happenings. We can apparently take it as proved that the body was carried through the lane; and everything goes to show that it was carried from the river towards the town. The first clear inference is that we can completely exclude accident, pure and simple. The body—living or dead—may be assumed to have been carried by some person or persons. We can dismiss the idea that the woman walked up the lane. But if someone carried the body, someone is definitely implicated. The affair comes unquestionably into the category of crime.”

“That doesn’t carry us very far,” I said, with a sense of disappointment.

“It carries us a stage farther than our previous data did, for it excludes accident, which they did not. Then it suggests not only premeditation, but arrangement. If the body was brought up from the river, there must have been some place known to, and probably prepared by, those who brought it, in which it could be deposited; and that place must have been more secure than the river from which it was brought. But the river, itself, was a very secure hiding-place, especially if the body had been sunk with weights. Now, this is all very remarkable. If you consider the extraordinary procedure; the seizure of the victim at Chatham; the conveyance of the body from thence to this considerable distance; the landing of it at the wharf; the conveyance of it by an apparently selected route—at enormous risk of discovery, in spite of the fog to an appointed destination: I say, Strangeways, that if you consider this astounding procedure, you cannot fail to be convinced that there was some definite purpose behind it.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “that seems to be so. But what could the purpose be? It appears perfectly incomprehensible. It only makes the mystery more unsolvable than ever.”

“Not at all,” he rejoined. “There is nothing so hopeless to investigate as the perfectly obvious and commonplace. As soon as an apparently incomprehensible motive appears, we are within sight of a solution. There may be innumerable explanations of a common-place action; but an outrageously unreasonable action; pursued with definite and considered purpose, can admit of but one or two. The action, with its underlying purpose, must be adjusted to some unusual conditions. We have only to consider to what conditions it could be adjusted, and which, if any, of those conditions actually exist, and the explanation of the apparently incomprehensible action comes into view. But here we are at our destination, and there is our friend, Bundy, standing on the doorstep. By the way, I have brought one or two photographs of Mrs. Frood for you to look at.”

We arrived in time to intervene and put an end to a preliminary skirmish between the irrepressible Bundy and Mrs. Dunk, and when greetings had been exchanged, Thorndyke went up to his room to wash and deposit his luggage.

“Well, John,” said Bundy, when he had hung up his hat, “it is very pleasant to see my old friend after this long separation. Very good of him, too, to invite an insignificant outsider like me to meet his distinguished colleague. You are a benefactor to me, John.”

“Don’t talk nonsense, Peterkin,” said I. “You know we are always glad to see you. I invite you for my own pleasure and Thorndyke’s, not for yours.”

Bundy gave my arm a grateful squeeze. “Good old John,” said he. “Nothing like doing it handsomely. But here is the great man himself,” he added, as Thorndyke entered the dining-room, carrying a cardboard box, “with instruments of magic. He’s going to do a conjuring trick.”

Thorndyke opened the box and delicately picked out four photographs, all mounted and all of cabinet size, which he stood up in a row on the mantelpiece. Two of them were from the same negative, one being printed in red carbon, the other in sepia. The remaining two were ordinary silver prints of the conventional trade type.

Bundy looked at the collection with not unnatural surprise.

“Where did these, things come from?” he asked.

“They came from London,” replied Thorndyke, “where things of this kind grow. Strangeways asked me to get him some samples. How do you like them? My own preference is for the carbons, and of the two I think I like the red chalk print the better.”

I ran my eye along the row and found myself in strong agreement with Thorndyke. It was not only that the carbon prints had the advantage of the finer medium. The treatment was altogether more artistic, and the likeness seemed better, in spite of a rather over-strong top-lighting.

“Yes,” I said, “the carbons are infinitely superior to the silver prints, and of the two I think the red is the better because it emphasises the shadows less.”

“Is the likeness as good as in the silver prints?” Thorndyke asked.

“Better, I think. The expression is more natural and spontaneous. What do you say, Peter?”

As I spoke I looked at him, not for the first time, for I had already been struck by the intense concentration with which he had been examining the two carbons. And it was not only concentration. There was a curious expression of surprise, as if something in the appearance of the portraits puzzled him.

He looked up with a perplexed frown. “As to the likeness,” said he, “I don’t know that I am a particularly good judge. I only saw her once or twice. But, as far as I remember, it seems to be quite a good likeness, and there can be no question as to the superiority, in an artistic sense, of the carbons. And I agree with you that the shadows are less harsh in the red than in the sepia. Who is the photographer?”

He picked up the red print and, turning it over, looked at the back. Then, finding that the back of the card was blank, he picked up the sepia print and inspected it in the same way, but with the same result. There was no photographer’s name either on the back or front.

“I have an impression,” said Thorndyke, “that the carbons were done by a City photographer. But my man will know. He got them for me.”

Bundy set the two photographs back in their places, still, as it seemed to me, with the air of a man who is trying vainly to remember something. But, at this moment, Mrs. Dunk entered with the soup tureen, and we forthwith took our places at the table.

We had finished our soup, and I was proceeding to effect the dismemberment of an enormous sole, when Bundy, having fortified himself with a sip of Chablis, cast a malignant glance at Thorndyke.

“I have got some bad news for you, Doctor,” said he.

“Which doctor are you addressing?” Thorndyke asked. “There’s only one now,” replied Bundy. “T’other one has been degraded to the rank of John.”

“That happens to be my rank, too,” observed Thorndyke.

“Oh, but I couldn’t think of taking such a liberty,” Bundy protested, “though it is very gracious and condescending of you to suggest it. No, your rank and tine will continue to be that of doctor.”

“And what is your bad news?”

“It is a case of a lost opportunity,” said Bundy. “‘Of all the sad words of tongue or pen,’ and so on. It might have been ten shillings. But it never will now. Cobbledick has got your ten bob.”

“Do you mean that Cobbledick has found the missing key?”

“Even so, alackaday! The chance is gone for ever.”

“Where did he find it?” Thorndyke asked.

“Ah!” exclaimed Bundy. “There it is again. The tragedy of it! He wasn’t looking for it at all. He just fell over it in a field where he was searching for relics of Mrs. Frood.”

“Your description,” said Thorndyke “is deficient in geographical exactitude. Could you bring your ideas of locality to a somewhat sharper focus? There are probably several fields in the neighbourhood of Rochester.”

“So there are,” said Bundy. “Quite a lot. But this particular field lies on the right, or starboard, side of a small thoroughfare called Black Boy-lane.”

“Let me see,” said Thorndyke. “Isn’t that the lane that we went down after leaving our friends on the day of the Great Perambulation?”

“Yes,” replied Bundy, looking at him in astonishment, “but how did you know its name?” (He was, of course, not aware of my report to Thorndyke describing the discoveries and the place.)

“That,” said Thorndyke “is an irrelevant question. Now when you say ‘the right-hand side’—”

“I mean the right-hand side looking towards the town, of course. As a matter of fact, Cobbledick found the key among the thistles near to the fence, and quite close to the outside of the city wall.”

“How do you suppose it got there?” Thorndyke asked.

“I’ve no idea. Someone must have taken it out of the gate and thrown it over the fence. That is obvious. But who could have done it I can’t imagine. Of course, you suspect Cobbledick, but that is only jealousy.”

The exchange of schoolboy repartee continued without a sensible pause on either side. But yet I seemed to detect in Thorndyke’s manner a certain reflectiveness underlying the levity of his verbal conflict with Bundy; a reflectiveness that seemed to have had its origin in the “news” that the latter had communicated. Of course, I had said nothing, in my report, about the finding of the key. Why should I? Those reports referred exclusively to matters connected with the disappearance of poor Angelina. The loss and the recovery of the key were items of mere local gossip with which Thorndyke could have no concern excepting in connexion with Bundy’s facetious fiction. And yet it had seemed to me that Thorndyke showed quite a serious interest in the announcement. However, he made no further reference to the matter, and the conversation drifted to other topics.

It was almost inevitable that, sooner or later, some reference should be made to the discoveries in the lane. It was Bundy, of course, who introduced the subject; and I was amazed by the adroit way in which Thorndyke conveyed the impression of complete ignorance, without making any statement, and the patient manner in which he listened to the account of the adventure, and even elicited amplified details by judicious questions. But he eluded all Bundy’s efforts to extract an opinion on the significance of the discoveries.

“But,” the latter protested, “you said that if I would give you the facts, you would give me the explanation.”

“The explanation is obvious,” said Thorndyke. “If you found these objects in the lane, they must have been dropped there.”

“Well, of course they must,” said Bundy. “That is quite obvious.”

“Exactly,” agreed Thorndyke. “That is what I am pointing out.”

“But why was the body being carried up the lane? And where was it being carried to?”

“Ah,” protested Thorndyke, “but now you are going beyond your facts. You haven’t proved that there was any body there at all.”

“But there must have been, or the things couldn’t have dropped off it.”

“But you haven’t proved that they did drop off it. They may have, or they may not. That is a question of fact; and as I impressed on you on a previous occasion, evidence as to fact is the function of the common witness. The expert witness explains the significance of facts furnished by others. I have explained the facts that you have produced, and now you ask me to explain something that isn’t a fact at all. But that is not my function. I am an expert.”

“I see,” said Bundy; “and now I understand why judges are so down on expert witnesses. It is my belief that they are a parcel of impostors. Wasn’t Captain Bunsby an expert witness? Or was he only an oracle?”

“It is a distinction without a difference,” replied Thorndyke. “Captain Bunsby is the classical instance of oracular safety. It was impossible to dispute the correctness of his pronouncements.”

“Principally,” said I, “because no one could make head or tail of them.”

“But that was the subtlety of the method,” said Thorndyke. “A statement cannot be contested until it is understood. From which it follows that if you would deliver a judgment that cannot be disputed, you must take proper precautions against the risk of being understood.”

Bundy adjusted his eyeglass and fixed on Thorndyke a glare of counterfeit defiance. “I am going to take an early opportunity of seeing you in the witness-box,” said he. “It will be the treat of my life.”

“I must try to give you that treat,” replied Thorndyke. “I am sure you will be highly entertained, but I don’t think you will be able to dispute my evidence.”

“I don’t suppose I shall,” Bundy retorted with a grin, “if it is of the same brand as the sample that I have heard.”

Here the arrival of Mrs. Dunk with the coffee ushered in a truce between the disputants, and when I had filled the cups Thorndyke changed the subject by recalling the incidents of our perambulation with Japp and Mr. Willard; and Bundy, apparently considering that enough chaff had been cut for one evening, entered into a discussion on the conditions of life in mediaeval Rochester with a zest and earnestness that came as a refreshing change, after so much frivolity. So the evening passed pleasantly away until ten o’clock, when Bundy rose to depart.

“Shall we see him home, Thorndyke?” said I. “We can do with a walk after our pow-wow.”

“Somebody ought to see him home,” said Thorndyke. “He looks comparatively sober now, but wait till he gets out into the air.” (Bundy’s almost ascetic abstemiousness in respect of wine, I should explain, had become a mild joke between us.) “But I think I won’t join the bacchanalian procession. I have a letter to write, and I can get it done and posted by the time you come back.”

As we walked towards the office arm-in-arm—Bundy keeping up the fiction of a slight unsteadiness of gait—my guest once more expressed enjoyment of our little festivals.

“I suppose,” said he, “Dr. Thorndyke is really quite a big bug in his way.”

“Yes,” I replied; “he is in the very front rank; in fact, I should say that he is the greatest living authority on his subject.”

“Yes,” said Bundy, thoughtfully, “one feels that he is a great man, although he is so friendly and so perfectly free from side. I hope I don’t cheek him too much.”

“He doesn’t seem to resent it,” I answered, “and he certainly doesn’t object to your society. He expressly said, when he wrote last, that he hoped to see something of you.”

“That was awfully nice of him,” Bundy said with very evident gratification; and he added, after a pause: “Lord! John, what a windfall it was for me when you came down with that letter from old Turcival. It has made life a different thing for me.”

“I am glad to hear it, Peter,” said I; “but you haven’t got all the benefit. It was a bit of luck for me to strike a live bishop in my new habitat, and a Rumtifoozlish one at that. But here we are at the episcopal palace. Shall I assist your lordship up the steps?”

We carried out the farce to its foolish end, staggering together up the steps, at the top of which I propped him securely against the door and rang the bell, with the comfortable certainty that there was no one in the house to disturb.

“Good night, John, old chap,” he said cordially, as I retired.

“Good night, Peter, my child,” I responded; and so took my way homeward to my other guest.

I arrived at my house in time to meet Thorndyke returning from the adjacent pillar-box, and we went in together.

“Well,” said he, “I suppose we had better turn in, according to what is, I believe, the custom of this household, and turn out betimes in the morning, for a visit, perhaps, to Black Boy-lane.”

“Yes,” I replied, “we may as well turn in now. You are not going to leave these photographs there, are you?”

“They are your photographs,” he replied; “that is, if you care to have them. I brought them down for you.”

I thanked him very warmly for the gift, and gathered up the portraits carefully, replacing them, for the present, in their box. Then we turned out the lights and made our way up to our respective bedrooms.

At breakfast on the following morning Thorndyke opened the subject of our investigation by cross-examining me on the matter of my report, and the more detailed account that Bundy had given.

“What does Sergeant Cobbledick think of the new developments?” he asked, when I had given him all the detail that I could.

“In a way he is encouraged. He is glad to get something more definite to work on. But for the present he seems to be high and dry. He gave me quite a learned exposition of the possibilities of the case, but he had to admit when he had finished that he was still in the dark so far as any final conclusion was concerned. He even suggested that I should put the facts before you—he recognized you when we met him on the road near Blue Boar Pier—and ask if you could make any suggestion.”

“Can you recall the sergeant’s exposition of the case?”

“I think so. It made rather an impression on me at the time,” and here I repeated, as well as I could remember them, the various inferences that Cobbledick had drawn from the presence in the lane of the things that we had found. Thorndyke listened with deep attention, nodding his head approvingly as each point was made.

“A very admirable analysis, Strangeways,” he said when I had finished. “It does the sergeant great credit. So far as it goes, it is an excellent interpretation of the facts that are in his possession. There are, perhaps, one or two points that he has overlooked.”

“If there are,” said I, “it would be a great kindness to draw his attention to them. He is naturally anxious to get on with the case, and he has taken endless trouble over it.”

“I shall be very glad to give him a hint or two,” said Thorndyke. “After breakfast I should like to go over the ground with you, and then we might go along to the station and see if he is in his office.”

I agreed to this program, and as soon as we had finished our breakfast we went forth, making our way by Free School-lane and The Common to the marshes west of Gas House-road. From there we entered Black Boy-lane at the lower end, and slowly followed its windings, Thorndyke looking about him attentively, and occasionally peering over the fences, which his stature enabled him to do without climbing. At the top of the lane, where it opened into a paved thoroughfare, we observed no less a personage than Sergeant Cobbledick, standing on the pavement and looking at the few adjacent houses with an expression of profound speculation. His speculative attitude changed suddenly to one of eager interest when he saw us; and on my presenting him to Thorndyke, he stood stiffly at “attention” and raised his hat with an air that I can only describe as reverent.

“Dr. Strangeways was telling me, just now,” said Thorndyke, “of your very interesting observations on these new developments. He also said that you would like to talk the matter over with me.”

“I should, indeed, sir,” the sergeant said, earnestly; “and if I might suggest it, my office will be very quiet, being Sunday, and I could show you the things that have been found, if you would like to see them.”

“As to the things that have been found,” said Thorndyke, “I am prepared to take them as read. They have been properly identified. But we could certainly talk more conveniently in your office.”

In a few minutes we turned into a narrow street which brought us to the side of the Guildhall, and the sergeant, having shown us into his office and given some instructions to a constable, entered and locked the door.

“Now, Sergeant,” said Thorndyke, “tell us what your difficulty is.”

“I’ve got several difficulties, Sir,” replied Cobbledick. “In the first place, here is a body being carried up the lane. You agree with me, Sir, that it was going up and not down?”

“Yes; your reasons seem quite conclusive.”

“Well, then, Sir, the next question is, was this a dead body, or was the woman drugged or insensible? The fact that she was being taken from the river towards the town suggests that she was alive and being taken to some house where she could be hidden; but, of course, a dead body might be taken to a house to be destroyed by burning or to be dismembered or even buried, say under the cellar. I must say my own feeling is that it was a dead body.”

“The reasons you gave Dr. Strangeways for thinking so seem to be quite sound. Let us proceed on the assumption that it was a dead body.”

“Well, Sir,” said Cobble dick, gloomily, “there you are. That’s all. We have got a body brought up from the river. We can trace it up to near the top of the lane. But there we lose it. It seems to have vanished into smoke. It was being taken up into the town; but where? There’s nothing to show. We come out into the paved streets, and, of course, there isn’t a trace. We seem to have come to the end of our clues; and I am very much afraid that we shan’t get any more.”

“There,” said Thorndyke, “I am inclined to agree with you, Sergeant. You won’t get any more clues for the simple reason that you have got them all.”

“Got them all!” exclaimed Cobbledick, staring in amazement at Thorndyke.

“Yes,” was the calm reply; “at least, that is how it appears to me. Your business now is not to search for more clues but to extract the meaning from the facts that you possess. Come, now, Sergeant,” he continued, “let us take a bird’s-eye view of the case, as it were, reconstructing the investigation in a sort of synopsis. I will read the entries from my notebook:

“On Saturday, the 26th of April, Mrs. Frood disappeared. On the 1st of May the brooch was found at the pawn-brokers. On the 7th of May the box of tablets and the bag were found on the shore at Chatham, apparently fixing the place of the crime. On the 9th of May the scarf was found at Blue Boar Head. On the 15th of May a shoe was found in the creek between Blue Boar Head and Gas House Point. On the 25th of May the second shoe was found on the gridiron near Gas House Point. On the 20th of June a hat-pin was found on the shore a little west of the last spot; always creeping steadily up the river, you notice.”

“Yes,” said Cobbledick, “I noticed that, and I’m hanged if I can account for it in any way,”

“Never mind,” said Thorndyke. “Just note the fact. Then on the 14th of July four articles were found; near the bottom of the lane a button; near the middle of the lane a hat-pin, and, abreast of it in the field, the hat, itself. Finally, at the top of the lane, in the field, you found the missing key.”

“I don’t see what the key has got to do with it,” said the sergeant. “It don’t seem to me to be in the picture.”

“Doesn’t it?” said Thorndyke. “Just consider a moment, Sergeant. But perhaps you have forgotten the date on which the key disappeared?”

“I don’t know that I ever noticed when it was lost.”

“It wasn’t lost,” said Thorndyke. “It was taken away—probably out of the gate—and afterwards thrown over the fence. But I daresay Dr. Strangeways can give you the date.”

I reflected for a few moments. “Let me see,” said I. “It was a good while ago, and I remember that it was a Saturday, because the men who were filling the holes in the city wall had knocked off at noon for a weekend. Now when was it? I went to the wine merchant’s that day, and—.” I paused with a sudden shock of recollection. “Why!” I exclaimed. “It was the Saturday; the day Mrs. Frood disappeared!”

Cobbledick seemed to stiffen in his chair as he suddenly turned a startled look at Thorndyke.

“Yes,” agreed the latter; “the key disappeared during the morning of the 26th of April and Mrs. Frood disappeared on the evening of the same day. That is a coincidence in time. And if you consider what gate it was that this key unlocked; that it gave entrance—and also excluded entrance—to an isolated, enclosed area of waste land in which excavations and fillings-in are actually taking place; I think you will agree that there is matter for investigation.”

As Thorndyke was speaking Cobbledick’s eyes opened wider and wider, and his mouth exhibited a like change.

“Good Lord, Sir!” he exclaimed at length, “you mean to say—”

“No, I don’t,” Thorndyke interrupted with a smile. “I am merely drawing your attention to certain facts which seem to have escaped it. You said that there was no hint of a place to which the body could have been conveyed. I point out a hint which you have overlooked. That is all.”

“It is a pretty broad hint, too,” said Cobbledick, “and I am going to lose no time in acting on it. Do you happen to know, Doctor, who employed the workmen?”

“I gathered that Japp and Bundy had the contract to repair the wall. At any rate, they were supervising the work, and they will be able to tell you where to find the foreman. Probably they have a complete record of the progress of the work. You know Mr. Japp’s address on Boley Hill, I suppose, and Mr. Bundy lives over the office.”

“I’ll call on him at once,” said Cobbledick, “and see if he can give me the particulars, and I’ll get him to lend me the key. I suppose you two gentlemen wouldn’t care to come and have a look at the place with me?”

“I don’t see why not,” said Thorndyke. “But I particularly wish not to appear in connexion with the case, so I will ask you to say nothing to anyone of your having spoken to me about it, and, of course, we go to the place alone.”

“Certainly,” the sergeant agreed emphatically. “We don’t want any outsiders with us. Then if you will wait for me here I will get back as quickly as I can. I hope Mr. Bundy is at home.”

He snatched up his hat and darted out of the office, full of hope and high spirits. Thorndyke’s suggestion had rejuvenated him.

“It seems to me,” I said, when he had gone, “a rather remarkable thing that you should have remembered all the circumstances of the loss of this key.”

“It isn’t really remarkable at all,” he replied. “I heard of it after the woman had disappeared. But as soon as she had disappeared, the loss of this particular key at this particular time became a fact of possible evidential importance. It was a fact that had to be noted and remembered. The connexion of the tragedy with the river seemed to exclude it for a time; but the discoveries in the lane at once revived its importance. The fundamental rule, Strangeways, of all criminal investigation is to note everything, relevant or irrelevant, and forget nothing.”

“It is an excellent rule,” said I, “but it must be a mighty difficult one to carry out,” and for a while we sat, each immersed in his own reflections.

The sergeant returned in an incredibly short space of time, and he burst into the office with a beaming face, flourishing the key. “I found him at home,” said he, “and I’ve got all the necessary particulars, so we can take a preliminary look round.” He held the door open, and when we had passed out, he led the way down the little street at a pace that would have done credit to a sporting lamp-lighter. A very few minutes brought us to the gate, and when he had opened it and locked it behind us, he stood looking round the weed-grown enclosure as if doubtful where to begin.

“Which patch in the wall is the one they were working at when the key disappeared?” Thorndyke asked.

“The last but one to the left,” was the reply.

“Then we had better have a look at that, first,” said Thorndyke. “It was a ready-made excavation.”

We advanced towards the ragged patch in the wall, and as we drew near I looked at it with a tumult of emotions that swamped mere anxiety and expectation. I could see what Thorndyke thought, and that perception amounted almost to conviction. Meanwhile, my colleague and the sergeant stepped close up to the patch and minutely examined the rough and slovenly joints of the stonework.

“There is no trace of its having been opened,” said Thorndyke. “But there wouldn’t be. I think we had better scrape up the earth at the foot of the wall. Something might easily have been dropped and trodden in in the darkness.” He looked towards the shed, in which a couple of empty lime barrels still remained, and, perceiving there a decrepit shovel, he went and fetched it. Returning with it, he proceeded to turn up the surface of the ground at the foot of the wall, depositing each shovelful of earth on a bare spot, and spreading it out carefully. For some time there was no result, but he continued methodically, working from one end of the patch towards the other. Suddenly Cobbledick uttered an exclamation and stooped over a freshly deposited shovelful.

“By the Lord!” he ejaculated, “it is a true bill! You were quite right, sir.” He stood up, holding out between his finger and thumb a small bronze button bearing an embossed Tudor Rose. Thorndyke glanced at me as I took the button from the sergeant and examined it.

“Yes,” I said, “it is unquestionably one of her buttons.”

“Then,” said he, “we have got our answer. The solution of the mystery is contained in that patch of new rubble.”

The sergeant’s delight and gratitude were quite pathetic. Again and again he reiterated his thanks, regardless of Thorndyke’s disclaimers and commendations of the officer’s own skilful and patient investigation.

“All the same,” said Cobbledick, as he locked the gate and pocketed the key, “we haven’t solved the whole problem. We may say that we have found the body; but the problem of the crime and the criminal remains. I suppose, sir, you don’t see any glimmer of light in that direction?”

“A glimmer, perhaps,” replied Thorndyke, “but it may turn out to be but a mirage. Let us see the body. It may have a clearer message for us than we expect.”

Beyond this rather cryptic suggestion he refused to commit himself; nor, when we had parted from the sergeant, could I get anything more definite out of him.

“It is useless to speculate,” he said, by way of closing the subject. “We think that we know what is inside that wall. We may be right, but we may possibly be wrong. A few hours will settle our doubts. If the body is there, it may tell us all that we want to know.”

This last observation left me more puzzled than ever.

The condition of the body might, and probably would, reveal the cause of death and the nature of the crime; but it was difficult to see how it could point out the identity of the murderer. However, the subject was closed for the time being, and Thorndyke resolutely refused to reopen it until the fresh data were available.

CHAPTER XV

The End of the Trail

Shortly after breakfast on the following morning Sergeant Cobbledick made his appearance at my house. I found him in the consulting-room, walking about on tiptoe with his hat balanced in his hands, and evidently in a state of extreme nervous tension.

“I have got everything in train, Doctor,” said he, declining a seat. “I dug up the foreman yesterday evening and he dug up one of his mates to give him a hand, if necessary; and I have the authority to open the wall. So we are all ready to begin. The two men have gone down to the place with their tools, and Mr. Bundy has gone with them to let them in. He didn’t much want to go, but I thought it best that either he or Mr. Japp should be present. It is their wall, so to speak. I suppose you are coming to see the job done.”

“Is there any need for me to be there?” I asked. Cobbledick looked at me in surprise. He had evidently assumed that I should be eager to see what happened. “Well,” he replied, “you are the principal witness to the identity of the remains. You saw her last, you know. What is your objection, Doctor?”

I was not in a position to answer this question. I could not tell him what this last and most horrible search meant to me; and apart from my personal feelings in regard to poor Angelina, there was no objection at all, but, on the contrary, every reason why I should be present.

“It isn’t a very pleasant affair,” I replied, “seeing that I knew the lady rather well. However, if you think I had better be there, I will come down with you.”

“I certainly think your presence would be a help,” said he. “We don’t know what may turn up, and you know more about her than anybody else.”

Accordingly, I walked down with him, and when he had admitted me with his key—Bundy had presumably used the duplicate—he closed the gate and locked it from within. The actual operations had not yet commenced, but the foreman and his mate were standing by the wall, conversing affably with Bundy, who looked nervous and uncomfortable, evidently relishing his position no more than I did mine.

“This is a gruesome affair, John, isn’t it?” he said in a low voice. “I don’t see why old Cobbledick wanted to drag us into it. It will be an awful moment when they uncover her, if she is really there. I’m frightfully sorry for you, old chap.”

“I should have had to see the body in any case,” said I; “and this is less horrible than the river.”

Here my attention was attracted by the foreman, who had just drawn a long, horizontal chalk line across the patch of new rubble, a little below the middle.

“That’s about the place where we left off that Saturday, so far as I remember,” he said. “We had built up the outer case, and we filled in the hollow with loose bricks and stones, but we didn’t put any mortar to them until Monday morning. Then we mixed up a lot of mortar, quite thin, so that it would run, and poured it on top of the loose stuff.”

“Rum way of building a wall isn’t it?” observed Cobbledick.

The foreman grinned. “It ain’t what you’d call the highest class of masonry,” he admitted. “But what can you expect to do with a gang of corner-boys who’ve never done a job of real work in their lives?”

“No, that’s true,” said the Sergeant. “But you made a soft job for the grave-diggers, didn’t you? Why they’d only got to pick out the loose stuff and then dump it back on top when they’d put the body in. Then you came along on Monday morning and finished the job for them with one or two bucketsful of liquid mortar. How long would it have taken to pick out that loose stuff?”

“Lord bless yer,” was the answer, “one man who meant business could have picked the whole lot out by hand in an hour; and he could have chucked it back in less. As you say, Sergeant, it was a soft job.”

While they had been talking, the foreman’s familiar demon had been making a tentative attack on the outer casing with a great, chisel-ended steel bar and a mason’s hammer. The foreman now came to his aid with a sledge hammer, the first stroke of which caused the shoddy masonry to crack in all directions like pie-crust. Then the fractured pieces of the outer shell were prised off, revealing the “loose stuff” within. And uncommonly loose it was; so loose that the unjoined bricks and stones, with their adherent gouts of mortar, came away at the lightest touch of the great crowbar.

As soon as a breach had been made at the top of the patch, the labourer climbed up and began flinging out the separated bricks and stones. Then he attacked a fresh course of the outer shell with a pick, and so exposed a fresh layer of the loose filling.

“There’ll be a fresh job for the unemployed to build this up again,” the sergeant observed with a sardonic smile.

“Ah,” replied the foreman, “there generally is a fresh job when you take on a crowd of casuals. Wonderful provident men are casuals. Don’t they take no thought for the morrow! What O!”

At this moment the labourer stood upright on his perch and laid down his pick. “Well, I’m blowed!” he exclaimed. “This is a rum go, this is.”

“What’s a rum go?” demanded the foreman.

“Why, here’s a whole bed of dry quick-lime,” was the reply.

“Ha!” exclaimed the sergeant, knitting his brows anxiously.

The foreman scrambled up, and after a brief inspection confirmed the man’s statement. “Quick-lime it is, sure enough. Just hand me up that shovel, Sergeant.”

“Be careful,” Cobbledick admonished, as he passed the shovel up. “Don’t forget what there probably is underneath.”

The foreman took the shovel and began very cautiously to scrape away the surface, flinging the scrapings of lime out on to the ground, where they were eagerly scrutinized by the sergeant, while the labourer picked out the larger lumps and cast them down. Thus the work went on for about a quarter of an hour, without any result beyond the accumulation on the ground below of a small heap of lime. At length I noticed the foreman pause and look attentively at the lime that he had just scraped up in his shovel.

“Here’s something that I don’t fancy any of our men put in,” he said, picking the object out and handing it down to the Sergeant. The latter took it from him and held it out for me to see. It was another of Angelina’s coat buttons.

In the course of the next few minutes two more buttons came to light, and almost immediately afterwards I saw the labourer stoop suddenly and stare down at the lime with an expression that made my flesh creep, as he pointed something out to the foreman.

“Ah!” the latter exclaimed. “Here she is! But, my word! There ain’t much left of her. Look at this, Sergeant.”

Very gingerly, and with an air of shuddering distaste, he picked something out of the lime and held it up; and even at that distance I could see that it was a human ulna. Cobbledick took it from him with the same distasteful and almost fearful manner, and held it towards me for inspection. I glanced at it and looked away. “Yes,” I said. “It is a human arm bone.”

On this, Cobbledick beckoned for the labourer to come down, and, taking out his official notebook, wrote something in pencil and tore out the leaf.

“Take this down to the station and give it to Sergeant Brown. He will tell you what else to do.” He gave the paper to the man, and having let him out of the gate, came back and climbed up to the exposed surface of the excavation, where I saw him draw on a pair of gloves and then stoop and begin to pick over the lime.

“This is a horrid business, isn’t it?” said Bundy. “Why the deuce couldn’t Cobbledick carry on by himself? I don’t see that it is our affair. Do you think we need stay?”

“I don’t see why you need. You have finished your part of the business. You have seen the wall opened. I am afraid I must stay a little longer, as Cobbledick may want me to identify some of the other objects that may be found. But I shan’t stay very long. There is really no question of the identity of the body, and there is no doubt now that the body is there. Detailed identification is a matter for the coroner.”

As we were speaking, we walked slowly away from the wall among the mounds of rubbish, now beginning to be hidden under a dense growth of nettles, ragwort and thistles. It was a desolate, neglected place, sordid of aspect and contrasting unpleasantly in its modern squalor with the dignified decay of the ancient wall. We had reached the further fence and were just turning about, when the sergeant hailed me with a note of excitement in his voice. I hurried across and found him standing up with his eyes fixed on something that lay in the palm of his gloved hand.

“This seems to be the ring that you described to me, Doctor,” said he. “Will you just take a look at it?”

He reached down and I received in my hand the little trinket of deep-toned, yellow gold that I remembered so well. I turned it over in my palm, and as I looked on its mystical signs, its crude, barbaric workmanship and the initials “A. C.” scratched inside, the scene in that dimly lighted room—years ago, it seemed to me now—rose before me like a vision. I saw the gracious figure in the red glow of the lamp and heard the voice that was never again to sound in my ears, telling the story of the little bauble, and for a few moments, the dreadful present faded into the irredeemable past.

“There isn’t any doubt about it, is there, Doctor?” the sergeant asked anxiously.

“None, whatever,” I replied. “It is unquestionably Mrs. Frood’s ring.”

“That’s a mercy,” said Cobbledick; “because we shall want every atom of identification that we can get. The body isn’t going to help us much. This lime has done its work to a finish. There’s nothing left, so far as I can see, but the skeleton and the bits of metal belonging to the clothing. Would you like to come up and have a look, Doctor? There isn’t much to see yet, but I have uncovered some of the bones.”

“I don’t think I will come up, Sergeant, thank you,” said I. “When you have finished, I shall have to look over what has been found, as I shall have to give evidence at the inquest. And I think I need hardly stay any longer. There is no doubt now about the identity, so far as we are concerned, at any rate.”

“No,” he agreed. “There is no doubt in my mind, so I need not keep you any longer if you want to be off. But, before you go, there is one little matter that I should like to speak to you about.” He climbed down to the ground, and, walking away with me a little distance, continued:

“You see, Doctor, some medical man will have to examine the remains, so as to give evidence before the coroner. If it is impossible to identify them as the remains of Mrs. Frood, it will have to be given in evidence that they are the remains of a person who might have been Mrs. Frood; that they are the remains of a woman of about her size and age, I mean. Of course, the choice of the medical witness doesn’t rest with the police, but if you would care to take on the job, our recommendation would have weight with the coroner. You see, you are the most suitable person to make the examination, as you actually knew her.”

I shook my head emphatically. “For that very reason, Sergeant, I couldn’t possibly undertake the duty. Even doctors have feelings, you know. Just imagine how you would feel, yourself, pawing over the bones of a woman who had once been your friend.”

Cobbledick looked disappointed. “Yes,” he admitted, “I suppose there is something in what you say. But I didn’t think doctors troubled about such things very much; and you have got such an eye for detail—and such a memory. However, if you’d rather not, there is an end of the matter.”

He climbed back regretfully to the opening in the wall, and I rejoined Bundy. “I have finished here now,” said I. “That was a ring of hers that Cobbledick had found. Are you staying any longer?”

“Not if you are going away,” he replied. “I am not wanted now, and I can’t stick this charnel-house atmosphere; it is getting on my nerves. Let us clear out.”

We walked towards the entrance with a feeling of relief at escaping from the gruesome place, and had arrived within a few yards of it when there came a loud knocking at the gate, at which Bundy started visibly.

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed, “it’s like Macbeth. Here, take my key and let the beggars in, whoever they are.”

I unlocked the gate and threw it open, when I saw, standing in the lane, two men, bearing on their shoulders a rough, unpainted coffin, and accompanied by the labourer, who carried a large sieve. I stood aside to let them pass in, and when they had entered, Bundy and I walked out, shutting and locking the gate after us. We made our way up the lane in silence, for there was little to say but much to think about; indeed, I would sooner have been alone, but the gruesome atmosphere of the place we had come from seemed to have affected Bundy’s spirits so much that I thought it only kind to ask him to come back to lunch with me; an invitation that he accepted with avidity.

During lunch we discussed the tragic discovery, and Bundy, now that he had escaped from physical contact with the relics of mortality, showed his usual shrewd common sense.

“Well;” he said, “the mystery of poor Angelina Frood is solved at last—at least, so far as it is ever likely to be.”

“I hope not,” I replied, “for the essential point of the mystery is not solved at all. It has only just been completely propounded. We now know beyond a doubt that she was murdered, and that the murder was a deliberate crime, planned in advance. What we want to know—at least, what I want to know, and shall never rest until I do know—is, who committed this diabolical crime?”

“I am afraid you never will know, John,” said he. “There doesn’t seem to be the faintest clue.”

“What do you mean?” I demanded. “You seem to have forgotten Nicholas Frood.”

Bundy shook his head. “You are deluding yourself, John. Nicholas seems, from your account of him, to be quite capable of having murdered his wife. But is there anything to connect him with the crime? If there is, you have never told me of it. And the law demands positive evidence. You can’t charge a man with murder because he seems a likely person and you don’t know of anybody else. What have you got against him in connexion with this present affair?”

“Well, for instance, I know that he was prowling about this town, and that he was trying to find out where she lived.”

“But why not?” demanded Bundy. “She was a runaway wife, and he was her husband.”

“Then I happen to have noticed that he carried a sheath-knife.”

“But do you know that she was killed with a sheath-knife?”

“No, I don’t,” I answered savagely. “But I say again that I shall never rest until the price of her death has been paid. There must be some clue. The murder could not have been committed without a motive, and it must be possible to discover what that motive was. Somebody must have stood to benefit in some way by her death; and I am going to find that person, or those persons, if I give up the rest of my life to the search.”

“I am sorry to hear you say that, John,” he said as he rose to depart. “It sounds as if you were prepared to spend the rest of your life chasing a will-o’-the-wisp. But we are premature. The inquest may bring to light some new evidence that will put the police on the murderer’s track. You must remember that they have been engaged in tracing the body up to now. When the inquest has been held and the facts are known they will be able to begin the search for the murderers. And I wish them and you good luck.”

I was rather glad when he was gone, for his dispassionate estimate of the difficulties of the case only served to confirm my own secret hopelessness. For I could not deny that these wretches seemed to have covered up their tracks completely. In the three months that had passed no whisper of any suspicious circumstance had been heard.

From the moment when poor Angelina had faded from my sight into the fog to that of her dreadful reappearance in the old wall, no human eye seemed to have seen her. And now that she had come back, what had she to tell us of the events of that awful night? The very body, on which Thorndyke had relied for evidence, at least, of the manner of the crime, had dwindled to a mere skeleton such as might have been exhumed from some ancient tomb. The cunning of the murderer had outwitted even Thorndyke.

The thought of my friend reminded me that I had to report to him the results of the opening of the wall; results very different from what he had anticipated when he had given the sergeant the too-fruitful hint. I accordingly wrote out a detailed report, so far as my information went; but I held it back until the last post in case anything further should come to my knowledge. And it was just as well that I did; for about eight o’clock, Cobbledick called to give me the latest tidings.

“Well, Doctor,” he said, with a smile of concentrated benevolence, “I have got everything in going order. I have seen the coroner and made out a list of witnesses. You are one of them, of course; in fact, you are the star witness. You were the last person to see her alive, and you were present at the exhumation. Dr. Baines—he’s rather a scientific gentleman—is to make the post-mortem examination, and tell us the cause of death, if he can. He won’t have much to go on. The lime has eaten up everything—it would, naturally, after three months—but the bones look quite uninjured, so far as I could judge.”

“When does the inquest open?” I asked.

“The day after tomorrow. I’ve got your summons with me, and I may as well give it to you now.”

I looked at the little blue paper and put it in my pocketbook. “Do you think the coroner will get through the case in one day?” I asked.

“No, I am sure he won’t,” replied Cobbledick. “It is an important case, and there will be a lot of witnesses. There will be the evidence as to the building of the wall; then the opening of it and the description of what we found in it; then the identification of the remains—that is you, principally; and then there will be all the other evidence, the pawnbroker, Israel Bangs, Hooper, and the others. And then, of course, there will be the question as to the guilty parties. That is the most important of all.”

“I didn’t know you had any evidence on that subject,” said I.

“I haven’t much,” he replied. “From the time when she disappeared nobody saw her alive or dead, and, of course, nothing has ever been heard of any occurrence that might indicate a crime. All we have to go on—and it is mighty little—is the fact that she was hiding from her husband, and that he was trying to find her. Also that he had made one attempt on her life. That is where your evidence will come in, and that of the matron at the ‘Poor Travellers.’ I’ve had a talk with her.”

“Do you know anything of Frood’s movements about the time of the disappearance?”

“Practically nothing, excepting that he went away from his lodgings the day before. You see, we were not in a position to start tracing possible criminals. We had no real evidence of any crime. We knew that the woman had disappeared, and she appeared to have got into the river. But there was nothing to show how. It looked suspicious, but it wasn’t a case. So long as no body was forthcoming there was no evidence of death, and nobody could have been charged. Even if we had found the body in the river, unless there had been distinct traces of violence, it would have been merely a case of ‘found dead,’ or ‘found drowned.’ But now the affair is on a different footing entirely. The body has been discovered under conditions which furnish prima facie evidence of murder, whatever the cause of death may turn out to have been. There is sure to be a verdict of wilful murder—not that the police are dependent on the coroner’s verdict. So now we can get a move on and look for the murderer.”

“What chance do you think there is of finding him?” I asked.

“Well,” said Cobbledick with a benevolent smile, “we mustn’t be too cock-sure. But, leaving the husband out of the question and taking the broad facts, it doesn’t look so unpromising. This wasn’t a casual crime—fortunately. There’s nothing so hopeless as a casual crime, done for mere petty robbery. But this crime was thought out. The place of burial was selected in advance. The key of the place was obtained, so that the murderer could not only get in but could lock himself—or more probably themselves—in and work secure from chance disturbance. And the time seems to have been selected; a weekend, with two whole nights to do the job in. All this points to very definite premeditation; and that points to a very definite motive. The person who planned this crime had something considerable to gain by Mrs. Frood’s death; it may have been profit or it may have been the satisfaction of revenge.

“Well, that is a pretty good start. When we know what property she had, who comes into it at her death, if any of it is missing, and if so, what has become of it; we can judge concerning the first case. And if we find that she had any enemies besides her husband; anyone whom she had injured or who owed her a grudge; then we can judge of the second case.

“Then there is another set of facts. This murderer couldn’t have been a complete stranger to the place. He knew about the wall and what was going on there. He knew the river and he possessed, or had command of, a boat. He knew the waterside premises and he knew his way—or had someone to show him the way—across the marshes and up Black Boy-lane. One, at least, of the persons concerned in this affair was a local man who knew the place well. So you see, Doctor, we have got something to go on, after all.”

I listened to the sergeant’s exposition with deep interest and no little revival of my drooping hopes. It was a most able summary of the case, and I felt that I should have liked Thorndyke to hear it; in fact, I determined to embody it in the amplification of my report. With the facts thus fully and lucidly collated, it did really seem as though the perpetrator of this foul crime must inevitably fall into our hands. Having refreshed the sergeant with a couple of glasses of port, I shook his hand warmly and wished him the best of success in the investigation that he was conducting with so much ability.

When he had gone I wrote a full account of our interview to add to my previous report, and expressed the hope that Thorndyke would be able to be present at the inquest, when I myself should “be and appear” at the appointed place to give evidence on the day after the morrow.

CHAPTER XVI

The Inquiry and a Surprise

On the morning of the inquest I started from my house well in advance of time, and in a distinctly uncomfortable frame of mind. Perhaps it was that the formal inquiry brought home to me with extra vividness the certainty that my beloved friend was gone from me for ever, and that she had died in circumstances of tragedy and horror. Not that I had ever had any doubt, but now the realization was more intense. Again, I should have to give evidence. I should have to reconstitute for the information of strangers scenes and events that had for me a certain sacred intimacy. And then, above all, I should have to view—and that not cursorily—the decayed remains of the woman who had been so much to me. That would be naturally expected from a medical man and no one would guess at what it would cost me to bring myself to this last dreadful meeting.

Walking down the High-street thus wrapped in gloomy reflections, it was with mixed feelings that I observed Bundy advancing slowly towards me, having evidently awaited my arrival. In some respects I would sooner have been alone, and yet his kindly, sympathetic companionship was not altogether unwelcome.

“Good morning, John,” said he. “I hope I am not de trop. It is a melancholy errand for you, poor old chap, and I can’t do much to make it less so, but I thought we might walk down together. You know how sorry I am for you, John.”

“Yes, I know and appreciate, and I am always glad to see you, Peter. But why are you going there! Have you had a summons?”

“No, I have no information to give. But I am interested in the case, of course, so I am going to attend as a spectator. So is Japp, though he is really a legitimately interested party. In fact, I am rather surprised they didn’t summon him as a witness.”

“So am I. He really knows more about the poor girl than I do. But, of course, he knows nothing of the circumstances of her death.”

By this time we had arrived at the Guildhall, and here we encountered Sergeant Cobbledick, who was evidently on the lookout for me.

“I am glad you came early, Doctor,” said he. “I want you just to pop round to the mortuary. You know the way. There’s a tray by the side of the coffin with all her belongings on it. I’ll get you to take a careful look at them, so that you can tell the jury that they are really her things. And you had better run your eye over the remains. You might be able to spot something of importance. At any rate, they will expect you to have viewed the body, as you are the principal witness to its identity. I’ve told the constable on duty to let you in. And, of course, you can go in, too, Mr. Bundy, if you want to.”

“I don’t think I do, thank you,” replied Bundy. But he walked round with me to the mortuary, where the constable unlocked the door as he saw us approaching. I mentioned my name to the officer, but he knew me by sight, and now held the door open and followed me in, while Bundy halted at the threshold, and stood, rather pale and awe-stricken, looking in at the long table and its gruesome burden.

The tray of which Cobbledick had spoken was covered with a white tablecloth, and on this the various objects were arranged symmetrically like the exhibits in a museum. At the top was the hat, flanked on either side by a silver-headed hat-pin. The carefully smoothed scarf was spread across horizontally, the six coat-buttons were arranged in a straight vertical line, and the two shoes were placed at the bottom centre. At one side was the handbag, and at the other, to balance it, the handkerchief with its neatly embroidered initials; and on this were placed the Zodiac ring, the wedding ring, the box of tablets, and the brooch. On the lateral spaces the various other objects were arranged with the same meticulous care for symmetrical effect: a neat row of hair pins, a row of hooks and eyes, one or two rows of buttons from the dress and under garments, the little metal jaws of the purse, two rows of coins, silver and bronze, a pair of glove-fasteners with scorched fragments of leather adhering, a little pearl handled knife, a number of metal clasps and fastenings and other small metallic objects derived from the various garments, and a few fragments of textiles, scorched as if by fire; a couple of brown shreds, apparently from the stockings, a cindery fragment of the brown coat, and a few charred and brittle tatters of linen.

I looked over the pitiful collection while the constable stood near the door and probably watched me. There was something unspeakably pathetic in the spectacle of these poor fragments of wreckage, thus laid out, and seeming, in the almost grotesque symmetry of their disposal, to make a mute appeal for remembrance and justice. This was all that was left of her; this and what was in the coffin.

So moved was I by the fight of these relics, thus assembled and presented in a sort of tragic synopsis, that it was some time before I could summon the resolution to look upon her very self, or at least upon such vestiges of her as had survived the touch of “decay’s effacing fingers.” But the time was passing, and it had to be. At last I turned to the coffin, and, lifting the unfastened lid, looked in.

It could have been no different from what I had expected; but yet the shock of its appearance seemed to strike me a palpable blow. Someone had arranged the bones in their anatomical order; and there the skeleton lay on the bottom of the coffin, dry, dusty, whitened with the powder of lime, such a relic as might have been brought to light by the spade of some excavator in an ancient barrow or prehistoric tomb. And yet this thing was she—Angelina! That grisly skull had once been clothed by her rich, abundant hair! That grinning range of long white teeth had once sustained the sweet, pensive mouth that I remembered so well. It was incredible. It was horrible. And yet it was true.

For some moments I stood as if petrified, holding up the coffin lid and gazing at the fearful shape in a trance of horror. And then suddenly I felt, as it were, a clutching at my throat and the vision faded into a blur as my eyes filled. Hastily I clapped down the coffin lid and strode towards the door with the tears streaming down my face.

Vaguely I was aware of Bundy taking my arm and pressing it to his side, of his voice as he murmured shakily, “Poor old John!” Passively I allowed him to lead me to a quiet corner above a flight of steps leading down to the river, where I halted to wipe my eyes, faintly surprised to note that he was wiping his eyes too; and that his face was pale and troubled. But if I was surprised, I was grateful, too; and never had my heart inclined more affectionately towards him than in this moment of trial that had been lightened by his unobtrusive sympathy and perfect understanding.

We stayed for a few minutes, looking down on the river and talking of the dead woman and the sad and troubled life from which this hideous crime had snatched her; then, as the appointed time approached, we made our way to the room in which the inquiry was to be held. As we entered, a pleasant-looking, shrewd-faced man, who looked like a barrister and who had been standing by a constable, approached and accosted me.

“Dr. Strangeways? My name is Anstey. I do most of the court work in connexion with Thorndyke’s cases, and I am representing him here today. He had hoped to come down, himself, but he had to go into the country on some important business, so I have to come to keep the nest warm—to watch the proceedings and make a summary of the evidence. You mentioned to him that the case would take more than one day.”

“Yes,” I answered, “that is what I understand. Will Dr. Thorndyke be here tomorrow?”

“Yes; he has arranged definitely to attend tomorrow. And I think he expects by then to have some information of importance to communicate.”

“Indeed!” I said eagerly. “Do you happen to know the nature of it?”

Anstey laughed. “My dear Doctor,” said he, “you have met Thorndyke, and you must know by now that he is about as communicative as a Whitstable native. No one ever knows what cards he holds.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “he is extraordinarily secretive. Unnecessarily so, it has seemed to me.”

Anstey shook his head. “He is perfectly right, Doctor. He knows his own peculiar job to a finish. He is, in a way, like some highly-specialized animal, such as the three-toed sloth, for instance, which seems an abnormal sort of beast until you see it doing, with unapproachable perfection, the thing that nature intended it to do. Thorndyke is a case of perfect adaptation to a special environment.”

“Still,” I objected, “I don’t see the use of such extreme secrecy.”

“You would if you followed his cases. A secret move is a move against which the other player—if there is one—can make no provision or defence or counter-move. Thorndyke plays with a wooden face and without speaking. No one knows what his next move will be. But when it comes, he puts down his piece and says ‘check’; and you’ll find it is mate.”

“But,” I still objected, “you are talking of an adversary and of counter-moves. Is there any adversary in this case?”

“Well, isn’t there?” said he. “There has been a crime committed. Someone has committed it; and that someone is not advertising his identity. But you can take it that he has been keeping a watchful eye on his pursuers, ready, if necessary, to give them a lead in the wrong direction. But it is time for us to take our places. I see the jury have come back from viewing the body.”

We took our places at the long table, one side of which was allocated to the jury and the other to witnesses in waiting, the police officers, the press-men, and other persons interested in the case. A few minutes later, the coroner opened the proceedings by giving a very brief statement of the circumstances which had occasioned the inquiry, and then proceeded to call the witnesses.

The first witness was Sergeant Cobbledick, whose evidence took the form of a statement covering the whole history of the case, beginning with Mr. Japp’s notification of the disappearance of Mrs. Frood and ending with the opening of the wall and the discovery of the remains. The latter part of the evidence was given in minute detail and included a complete list of the objects found with the remains.

“Does any juryman wish to ask the witness any questions?” the Coroner inquired when the lengthy statement was concluded. He looked from one to the other, and when nobody answered he called the next witness. This was Dr. Baines, a somewhat dry-looking gentleman, who gave his evidence clearly, concisely, and with due scientific caution.

“You have examined the remains which form the subject of this inquiry?” the coroner asked.

“Yes. I have examined the skeleton which is now lying in the mortuary. It is that of a rather strongly-built woman, five feet seven inches in height, and about thirty years of age.”

“Were you able to form any opinion as to the cause of death?”

“No; there were no signs of any injury nor of disease.”

“Are we to understand,” asked one of the jurymen, “that you consider deceased to have died a natural death?”

“I have no means of forming any opinion on the subject.”

“But if she died from violence, wouldn’t there be some signs of it?”

“That would depend on the nature of the violence.”

“Supposing she had been shot with a revolver.”

“In that case there might be a fracture of one or more bones, but there might be no fracture at all. Of course, there would be a bullet.”

“Did you find a bullet?”

“No. I did not see the bones until they had been brought to the mortuary.”

“There has been no mention of a bullet having been found,” the coroner interposed, “and you heard Sergeant Cobbledick say that the lime had all been sifted through a fine sieve. We must take it that there was no bullet. But,” he continued, addressing the witness, “the conditions that you found would not exclude violence, I presume?”

“Not at all. Only violence that would cause injury to the bones.”

“What kinds of violence would be unaccompanied by injury to the bones?”

“Drowning, hanging, strangling, suffocation, stabbing; and, of course, poisoning usually leaves no traces on the bones.”

“Can you give us no suggestion as to the cause of death?”

“None whatever,” was the firm reply.

“You have heard the description of the missing woman, Mrs. Frood. Do these remains correspond with that description?”

“They are the remains of a woman of similar stature and age to Mrs. Frood, so far as I can judge. I can’t say more than that. The description of Mrs. Frood was only approximate; and the estimate of the stature, and especially the age, of a skeleton can only be approximate.”

This being all that could be got out of the witness, who was concerned only with the skeleton, and naturally refused to budge from that position, the coroner glanced at his list and then called my name. I rose and took my place at the top corner of the table, when I was duly sworn, and gave my name and description.

“You heard Sergeant Cobbledick’s description of the articles which have been found, and which are now lying in the mortuary?” the coroner began.

I replied “Yes,” and he continued: “Have you examined those articles, and, if so, can you tell us anything about them?”

“I have examined the articles in the mortuary, and I recognized them as things I know to have been the property of Mrs. Angelina Frood.”

Here I described the articles in detail, and stated when and where I had seen them in her possession.

“You have inspected the remains of deceased in the mortuary. Can you identify them as the remains of any particular person?”

“No. They are quite unrecognizable.”

“Have you any doubt as to whose remains they are?” asked the juryman who had spoken before.

“That question, Mr. Pilley,” said the coroner “is not quite in order. The witness has said that he was not able to identify the remains. Inferences as to the identity of deceased, drawn from the evidence, are for the jury. We must not ask witnesses to interpret the evidence. When did you last see Mrs. Frood alive, Doctor?”

“On the 26th of April,” I replied; and here I described that last interview, recalling our conversation almost verbatim. When I came to her expressions of uneasiness and foreboding, the attention of the listeners became more and more intense, and it was evident that they were deeply impressed. Particularly attentive was the foreman of the jury, a keen-faced, alert-looking man, who kept his eyes riveted on me, and, when I had finished this part of my evidence, asked: “So far as you know, Doctor, had Mrs. Frood any enemies? Was there anyone whom she had reason to be afraid of?”

This was a rather awkward question. It is one thing to entertain a suspicion privately, but quite another thing to give public expression to it. Besides, I was giving sworn evidence as to facts actually within my knowledge.

“I can’t say, positively,” I replied after some hesitation, “that I know of any enemy or anyone whom she had reason to fear.”

The coroner saw the difficulty, and interposed with a discreet question.

“What do you know of her domestic affairs, of her relations with her husband, for instance?”

This put the matter on the basis of fact, and I was able to state what I knew of her unhappy married life in Rochester and previously in London; and further questions elicited my personal observations as to the character and personality of her husband. My meeting with him at Dartford Station, the incidents in the Poor Travellers’ rest-house, the meeting with him on the bridge; all were given in full detail and devoured eagerly by the jury. And from their questions and their demeanour it became clear to me that they were in full cry after Nicholas Frood.

The conclusion of my evidence brought us to the luncheon hour. I had, of course, to take Mr. Anstey back to lunch with me, and a certain wistfulness in Bundy’s face made me feel that I ought to ask him, too. I accordingly presented them to one another and issued the invitation.

“I am delighted to meet you, Mr. Bundy,” Anstey said heartily. “I have heard of you from my friend Thorndyke, who regards you with respectful admiration.”

“Does he?” said Bundy, blushing with pleasure, but looking somewhat surprised. “I can’t imagine why. But are you an expert, too?”

“Bless you, no,” laughed Anstey. “I am a mere lawyer, and, on this occasion, what is known technically as a devil—technically, you understand. I am watching this case for Thorndyke.”

“But I didn’t know that Dr. Thorndyke was interested in the case,” said Bundy, in evident perplexity.

“He is interested in everything of a criminal and horrid nature,” replied Anstey. “He never lets a really juicy crime mystery pass without getting all the details, if possible. You see, they are his stock in trade.”

“But he never would discuss this case—not seriously,” objected Bundy.

“Probably not,” said Anstey. “Perhaps there wasn’t much to discuss. But wait till the case is finished. Then he will tell you all about it.”

“I see,” said Bundy. “He is one of those prophets who predict after the event.”

“And the proper time, too,” retorted Anstey. “It is no use being premature.”

The conversation proceeded on this plane of playful repartee until we arrived at my house, where Mrs. Dunk, having bestowed a wooden glance of curiosity at Anstey and a glare of defiance at Bundy, handed me a telegram addressed to R. Anstey, K.C., care of Dr. Strangeways. I passed it to Anstey, who opened it and glanced through it.

“What shall I say in answer?” he asked, placing it in my hand.

I read the message and was not a little puzzled by it.

“Ask Strangeways come back with you tonight. Very urgent. Reply time and place.”

“What do you suppose he wants me for?” I asked.

“I never suppose in regard to Thorndyke,” he replied.

“But if he says it is urgent, it is urgent. Can you come up with me?”

“Yes, if it is necessary.”

“It is. Then I’ll say yes. And you had better arrange to stay the night—there is a spare bedroom at his chambers—and come down with him in the morning. Can you manage that?”

“Yes,” I replied; “and you can say that we shall be at Charing Cross by seven-fifteen.”

I could see that this transaction was as surprising to Bundy as it was to me. But, of course, he asked no questions, nor could I have answered them if he had. Moreover, there was not much time for discussion as we had to be back in the court room by two o’clock, and what talk there was consisted mainly of humorous comments by Anstey on the witnesses and the jury.

Having sent off the telegram on our way down, we took our places once more, and the proceedings were resumed punctually by the calling of the foreman of the repairing gang; who deposed to the date on which the particular patch of rubble was commenced and finished and its condition when the men knocked off work on Saturday, the 26th of April. He also mentioned the loss of the key, but could give no particulars. The cross-examination elicited the facts that he had communicated to Cobbledick and me as to the state of the loose filling.

“How many men,” the coroner asked, “would it have taken to bury the body in the way in which it was buried; and how long?”

“One man could have done it easily in one night, if he could have got the body there. The stuff in the wall was all loose, and it was small stuff, easy to handle. No building had to be done. It was just a matter of shovelling the lime in and then chucking the loose stuff in on top. And the lime was handy to get at in the shed, and one of the barrels was open.”

“Can you say certainly when the body was buried?”

“It must have been buried on the night of the 26th of April or on the 27th, because on Monday morning, the 28th, we ran the mortar in, and by that evening we had got the patch finished.”

The next witness was the labourer, Thomas Evans, who had lost the key. His account of the affair was as follows:

“On the morning of Saturday, the 26th of April, the foreman gave me the key, because he had to go to the office. I took the key and opened the gate, and I left the key in the lock for him to take when he came. Then I forgot all about it, and I suppose he did, too, because he didn’t say anything about it until we had knocked off work and were going out. Then he asks me where the key was, and I said it was in the gate. Then he went and looked but it wasn’t there. So we searched about a bit in the grounds and out in the lane; but we couldn’t see nothing of it nowhere.”

“When you let yourself in, did you leave the gate open or shut it?”

“I shut the gate, but, of course, it was unlocked. The key was outside.”

“So that anyone passing up the lane could have taken it out without your noticing?”

“Yes. We was working the other side of the grounds, so we shouldn’t have heard anything if anybody had took it.”

That completed the evidence as to the key, and when Evans was dismissed the matron of the Poor Travellers was called. As she took her place, a general straightening of backs and air of expectancy on the part of the jury suggested that her evidence was looked forward to with more than common interest. And so it turned out to be. Her admirably clear and vivid presentment of the man, Nicholas Frood; his quarrelsome, emotional temperament, his shabby condition, his abnormal appearance, the evidences of his addiction to drink and drugs, his apparently destitute state, and, above all, the formidable sheath-knife that he wore under his coat; were listened to with breathless attention, and followed by a fusilade of eager, and often highly improper, questions. But the coroner was a wise and tactful man, and he unobtrusively intervened to prevent any irregularities; as, for instance, “It is not permissible,” he observed, blandly, “to ask a witness if a certain individual seemed to be a likely person to commit a crime. And a coroner’s court is not a criminal court. It is not our function to establish any person’s guilt, but to ascertain how deceased met with her death. If the evidence shows that she was murdered, we shall say so in our verdict. If the evidence points clearly to a particular person as the murderer, we shall name that person in the verdict. But we are not primarily investigating a crime; we are investigating a death. The criminal investigation is for the police.”

This reminder cooled the ardour of the criminal investigators somewhat, but there were signs of a fresh outbreak when Mrs. Gillow gave her evidence, for that lady having a somewhat more lively imagination than the matron, tended to lure enterprising jurymen on to fresh indiscretions. She certainly enjoyed herself amazingly, and occupied a most unnecessary amount of time before she at length retired, dejected but triumphant, to the manifest relief of the coroner.

This brought the day’s proceedings to a close. There were a few more witnesses on the list, and the coroner hoped to take their evidence and complete the inquiry on the following day. As soon as the court rose, Anstey and I with Bundy proceeded to a tea-shop hard by and, having refreshed ourselves with a light tea, set forth to catch our train at Strood Station. Thither Bundy accompanied us at my invitation, but though I suspected that he was bursting with curiosity as to the object of my mysterious journey, he made no reference to it, nor did I or Anstey.

At the barrier at Charing Cross we found Thorndyke awaiting us, and Anstey, having delivered me into his custody and seen us into a taxi-cab that had already been chartered, wished us success and took his leave. Then the driver, who apparently had his instructions, started and moved out of the station.

“I don’t know,” said I, “whether I may now ask what I am wanted for.”

“I should rather not go into particulars,” he replied. “I want your opinion on something that I am going to show you, and I especially want it to be an impromptu opinion. Previous consideration might create a bias which would detract from the conclusiveness of your decision. However, you have only a few minutes to wait.”

In those few minutes I could not refrain from cudgelling my brains, even at the risk of creating a bias, and was still doing so—quite unproductively—when the cab approached the hospital of St. Barnabas and gave me a hint. But it swept past the main, entrance, and, turning up a side street, slowed down and stopped opposite the entrance of the medical school. Here we got out, and, leaving the cab waiting, entered the hall, where Thorndyke inquired for a person of the name of Farrow. In a minute or two this individual made his appearance in the form of a somewhat frowsy, elderly man, whom, from the multitude of warts on his hands, I inferred to be the post-mortem porter or dissecting-room attendant. He appeared to be a taciturn man, and he, too, evidently had his instructions, for he merely looked at us and then walked away slowly, leaving us to follow. Thus silently he conducted us down a long corridor, across a quadrangle beyond which rose the conical roof of a theatre, along a curved passage which followed the wall of the circular building and down a flight of stone steps which let into a dim, cement-floored basement, lighted by sparse electric bulbs and pervaded by a faint, distinctive odour that memory associated with the science of anatomy. From the main basement room Farrow turned into a short passage, where he stopped at a door, and, having unlocked it, threw it open and switched on the light, when we entered and I looked around. It was a large, cellar-like room, lighted by a single powerful electric bulb fitted with a basin-like metal reflector and attached to a long, movable arm. The activities usually carried on in it were evident from the great tins of red lead on the shelves, from a large brass syringe fitted with a stop-cock and smeared with red paint, and from a range of oblong slate tanks or coffers furnished with massive wooden lids.

Still without uttering a word, the taciturn Farrow swung the powerful lamp over one of the coffers, and then drew off the lid. I stepped forward and looked in. The coffer was occupied by the body of a man, evidently—from the shaven head and the traces of red paint—prepared as an anatomical “subject.” I looked at it curiously, thinking how unhuman, how artificial it seemed; how like to a somewhat dingy waxwork figure. But as I looked I was dimly conscious of some sense of familiarity stealing into my mind. Some chord of memory seemed to be touched. I stooped and looked more closely; and then, suddenly, I started up.

“Good God!” I exclaimed. “It is Nicholas Frood!”

“Are you sure?” asked Thorndyke.

“Yes, quite,” I answered. “It was the shaved head that put me off: the absence of that mop of hair. I have no doubt at all. Still—let us have a look at the hands.”

Farrow lifted up the hands one after the other; and then, if there could have been any doubt, it was set at rest. The mahogany-coloured stain was still visible; but much more conclusive were the bulbous fingertips and the misshapen, nutshell-like nails. There could be no possible doubt.

“This is certainly the man I saw at Rochester,” said I. “I am fully prepared to swear to that. But oughtn’t he to have been identified by somebody who knew him better?”

“The body has been identified this afternoon by his late landlady,” replied Thorndyke, “but I wanted your confirmation, and I wanted you as a witness at the inquest. The identification is important in relation to the inquiry and the possible verdict.”

“Yes, by Jove!” I agreed, with a vivid recollection of the questions put to Mrs. Gillow. “This will come as a thunder-bolt to the jury. But how, in the name of Fortune, did he come here?”

“I’ll tell you about that presently,” replied Thorndyke.

He tendered a fee to the exhibitor, and when the latter had replaced the lid of the coffer, he conducted us back to our starting-point, and saw us into the waiting cab.

“5A, King’s Bench Walk,” Thorndyke instructed the driver, and as the cab started, he began his explanation.

“This has been a long and weary search, with a stroke of unexpected good luck at the end. We have had to go through endless records of hospitals, police-courts, poorhouses, infirmaries, and inquests. It was the records of an inquest that put us at last on the track; an inquest on an unknown man, supposed to be a tramp. Roughly, the history of the affair is this:

“Frood seems to have started for Brighton on the 25th of April, but for some unexplained reason, he broke his journey and got out at Horwell. What happened to him there is not clear. He may have over-dosed himself with cocaine; but at any rate, he was found dead in a meadow, close to a hedge, on the morning of the 26th. He was therefore dead before his wife disappeared. The body was taken to the mortuary and there carefully examined. But there was not the faintest clue to his identity. His pockets were searched, but there was not a vestige of property of any kind about him, not even the knife of which you have spoken. The probability is that he had been robbed by some tramp of everything that he had about him, either while he was insensible or after he was dead. In any case he appeared to be completely destitute, and this fact, together with his decidedly dirty and neglected condition, led naturally to the conclusion that he was a tramp. An inquest was held, but of course, no expensive and troublesome measures were taken to trace his identity. Examinations showed that he had not died from the effects of violence, so it was assumed that he had died from exposure, and a verdict to that effect was returned. He was about to be given a pauper’s funeral when Providence intervened on our behalf. It happened that the Demonstrator of Anatomy at St. Barnabas resides at Horwell; and it happened that the presence of an unclaimed body in the mortuary came to his knowledge. Thereupon he applied to the authorities, on behalf of his school, for the use of it as an anatomical subject. His application was granted and the body was conveyed to St. Barnabas, where it was at once embalmed and prepared and then put aside for use during the next winter session.”

“Was that quite in order—legally, I mean?”

“That is not for us to ask,” he replied. “It was not in any way contrary to public policy, and it has been our salvation in respect of our particular inquiry.”

“I suppose it has,” I said, not, however, quite seeing it in that light. “Of course, it disposes of the question of his guilt.”

“It does a good deal more than that as matters have turned out,” said he. “However, here we are in the precincts of the Temple. Let us dismiss Nicholas Frood from our minds for the time being, and turn our attention to the more attractive subject of dinner.”

The cab stopped opposite a tall house with a fine carved-brick portico, and, when Thorndyke had paid the driver, we ascended the steps and made our way up a couple of flights of oaken stairs to the first floor. Here, at the door of my friend’s chambers, we encountered a small, clerical-looking gentleman with an extremely wrinkly, smiling face, who reminded me somewhat of Mr. Japp. “This is Mr. Polton, Strangeways,” said Thorndyke, presenting him to me, “who relieves me of all the physical labour of laboratory work. He is a specialist in everything, including cookery, and if my nose does not mislead me—ha! Does it, Polton?”

“That depends, sir, on which way you follow it,” replied Polton, with a smile of labyrinthine wrinkliness. “But you will want to wash, and Dr. Strangeways’s room is ready for him.”

On this hint, Thorndyke conducted me to an upper floor, and to a pleasant bedroom with an outlook on plane trees and ancient, red-tiled roofs, where I washed and brushed up, and from whence I presently descended to the sitting-room, whither Thorndyke’s nose had already led him—and to good purpose, too.

“Mr. Polton has missed his vocation,” I remarked, as I attacked his productions with appreciative gusto. “He ought to have been the manager of a West End club or a high-class restaurant.”

Thorndyke regarded me severely. “I am shocked at you, Strangeways,” he said. “Do you suggest that a man who can make anything from an astronomical clock to a microscope objective, who is an expert in every branch of photographic technique, a fair analytical chemist, a microscopist, and general handicraftsman, should be degraded to the office of a mere superintendent cook? It is a dreadful thought!”

“I didn’t understand that he was a man of so many talents and accomplishments,” I said apologetically.

“He is a most remarkable man,” said Thorndyke, “and I take it as a great condescension that he is willing to prepare my meals. It is his own choice—an expression of personal devotion. He doesn’t like me to take my food at restaurants or clubs. And, of course, he does it well because he is incapable of doing anything otherwise than well. You must come up and see the laboratories and workshop after dinner.”

We went up when we had finished our meal and discovered Polton in the act of cutting transverse sections of hairs and mounting them to add to the great collection of microscopic objects that Thorndyke had accumulated. He left this occupation to show me the great standing camera for copying, enlarging, reducing and microphotography, to demonstrate the capabilities of a fine back-geared lathe and to exhibit the elaborate outfit for analysis and assay work.

“I had no idea,” said I, as we returned to the sitting room, “that medico-legal practice involved the use of all these complicated appliances.”

“The truth is,” Thorndyke replied, “that Medical Jurisprudence is not a single subject, concerned with one order of knowledge. It represents the application of every kind of knowledge to the solution of an infinite variety of legal problems. And that reminds me that I haven’t yet looked through Anstey’s abstract of the evidence at the inquest, which I saw that he had left for me. Shall we go through it now? It won’t take us very long. Then we can have a stroll round the Temple or on the Embankment before we turn in.”

“You are coming down to Rochester tomorrow?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “The facts concerning Nicholas Frood will have to be communicated to the coroner; and it is possible that some other points may arise.”

“Now that Frood is definitely out of the picture,” said I, “do you see any possibility of solving the mystery of this crime? I mean as to the identity of the guilty parties?”

He reflected awhile. “I am inclined to think,” he replied, at length, “that I may be able to offer a suggestion. But, of course, I have not yet seen the remains.”

“There isn’t much to be gleaned from them, I am afraid,” said I.

“Perhaps not,” he answered. “But we shall be able to judge better when we have read the evidence of the medical witness.”

“He wasn’t able to offer any opinion as to the cause of death,” I said.

“Then,” he replied, “we may take it that there are no obvious signs. However, it is useless to speculate. We must suspend our judgment until tomorrow,” and with this he opened Anstey’s summary, and read through it rapidly, asking me a question now and again to amplify some point. When he had finished the abstract—which appeared to be very brief and condensed—he put it in his pocket and suggested that we should start for our proposed walk; and, though I made one or two attempts to reopen the subject of the inquiry, he was not to be drawn into any further statements. Apparently there was some point that he hoped to clear up by personal observation, and meanwhile he held his judgment in suspense.

CHAPTER XVII

Thorndyke Puts Down His Piece

The journey down to Rochester would have been more agreeable and interesting under different circumstances. Thorndyke kept up a flow of lively conversation to which I should ordinarily have listened with the keenest pleasure. But he persistently avoided any reference to the object of our journey; and as this was the subject that engrossed my thoughts and from which I was unable to detach them, his conversational efforts were expended on somewhat inattentive ears. In common politeness I tried to make a show of listening and even of some sort of response; but the instant a pause occurred, my thoughts flew back to the engrossing subject and the round of fruitless speculation begun again.

What was it that Thorndyke had in his mind? He was not making this journey to inform the coroner of Frood’s death. That could have been done by letter; and, moreover, I was the actual witness to the dead man’s identity. There was some point that he expected to be able to elucidate; some evidence that had been overlooked. And that evidence seemed to be connected with that dreadful, pitiful thing that lay in the coffin—crying out, indeed, to Heaven for retribution, but crying in a voice all inarticulate. But would it be inarticulate to him? He had seemed to imply an expectation of being able to infer from the appearance of those mouldering bones the cause and manner of death, and even—so it had appeared to me—the very identity of the murderer. But how could this be possible? Dr. Baines had said that the bones showed no signs of injury. The soft structures of the body had disappeared utterly. What suggestion as to the cause of death could the bones offer? Chronic mineral poisoning might be ascertainable from examination of the skeleton, but not from a mere ocular inspection; and the question of chronic poisoning did not arise. Angelina was alive on the Saturday evening; before the Monday morning her body was in the wall. Again and again I dismissed the problem as an impenetrable mystery; and still it presented itself afresh for consideration.

A few words of explanation to the constable on duty at the mortuary secured our admission, or, rather Thorndyke’s; for I did not go in, but stood in the doorway, watching him inquisitively. He looked over the objects set out on the tray and seemed to be mentally checking them. Then he put on a pair of pince-nez and examined some of them more closely. From the tray he presently turned to the coffin, and, lifting off the lid, stood for a while, with his pince-nez in his hand, looking intently at the awful relics of the dead woman. From his face I could gather nothing. It was at all times a rather immobile face, in accordance with his calm, even temperament. Now it expressed nothing but interest and close attention. He inspected the whole skeleton methodically, as I could see by the way his eyes travelled slowly from the head to the foot of the coffin. Then, once more, he put on his reading-glasses, and stooped to examine more I closely something in the upper part of the coffin—I judged it to be the skull. At length he stood up, put away his I glasses, replaced the coffin-lid, and rejoined me.

“Has the sitting of the Court begun yet?” he asked the constable.

“They began about five minutes ago, sir,” was the reply; on which we made our way to the court-room, where Thorndyke, having secured a place at the table, beckoned to the coroner’s officer.

“Will you hand that to the coroner, please?” said he, producing from his pocket a note in an official-looking blue envelope. The officer took the note and laid it down before the coroner, who glanced at it and nodded and then looked with sudden interest at Thorndyke. The witness who was being examined at the moment was the pawnbroker’s daughter, and her account of the mysterious man with the mole on his nose was engaging the attention of the jury. While the examination was proceeding, the coroner glanced from time to time at the note. Presently he took it up and opened the envelope, and in a pause in the evidence, took out the note and turned it over to look at the signature. Then he ran his eyes over the contents, and I saw his eyebrows go up. But at that moment one of the jurymen asked a question and the note was laid down while the answer was entered in the depositions. At length the evidence of this witness was completed, and the witness dismissed, when the coroner took up the note and read it through carefully.

“Before we take the evidence of Israel Bangs, gentlemen,” said he, “we had better consider some new facts which I think you will regard as highly important. I have just received a communication from Dr. John Thorndyke, who is a very eminent authority on medico-legal evidence. He informs me that the husband of the deceased, Nicholas Frood, is dead. It appears that he died about three months ago, but his body was not identified until yesterday, when it was seen by Frood’s landlady and by Dr. Strangeways, who is here and can give evidence as to the identity. I propose that we first recall Dr. Strangeways and then ask Dr. Thorndyke, who is also present, to give us the further particulars.”

The jury agreed warmly to the suggestion, and I was at once recalled, and as I took my place at the coroner’s left hand I felt that I was fully justifying Cobbledick’s description of me as the “star witness,” for not only was I the object of eager interest on the part of the jury and the sergeant himself, but also of Bundy, whose eyes were riveted on me with devouring curiosity.

There is no need for me to repeat my evidence. It was quite short. I just briefly described the body and its situation. As to how it came to the hospital, I had no personal knowledge, but I affirmed that it was undoubtedly the body of Nicholas Frood. Of that I was quite certain.

No questions were asked. There was a good deal of whispered comment, and one indiscreet juryman remarked audibly that “this fellow seemed to have cheated the hangman.” Then the coroner deferentially requested Thorndyke to give the Court any information that was available, and my friend advanced to the head of the table, where the coroner’s officer placed a chair for him, and took the oath.

“What a perfectly awful thing this is about poor old Nicholas!” whispered Bundy, who had crept into the chair that Thorndyke had just vacated. “It makes one’s flesh creep to think of it.”

“It was rather horrible,” I agreed, noting that my description of the scene had evidently made his flesh creep, for he was as pale as a ghost. But there was no time to discuss the matter further, for Thorndyke, having been sworn, and started by a general question from the coroner, now began to give his evidence, in the form of a narrative similar to that which I had heard from him, and accompanied by the production of documents relating to the inquest and the transfer of the body of the unknown deceased to the medical school.

“There is no doubt, I suppose, as to the date of this man’s death?” the coroner asked.

“Practically none. He was seen alive on the 25th of April, and he was found dead on the morning of the 26th. I have put in a copy of the depositions at the inquest, which give the date and time of the finding of the body.”

“Then, as his death occurred before the disappearance of his wife, this inquiry is not concerned with him any further.”

Here the foreman of the jury interposed with a question. “It seems that Dr. Thorndyke took a great deal of trouble to trace this man, Frood. Was he acting for the police?”

“I don’t know that that is strictly our concern,” said the coroner, looking at Thorndyke, nevertheless, with a somewhat inquiring expression.

“I was acting,” said Thorndyke, “in pursuance of instructions from a private client to investigate the circumstances of Mrs. Frood’s disappearance, to ascertain whether a crime had been committed and, if so, to endeavour to find the guilty party or parties.”

“He never told us that,” murmured Bundy; “at least—did you know, John?”

“I did, as a matter of fact, but I was sworn to secrecy.” Bundy looked at me a little reproachfully, I thought, and I caught a queer glance from Cobbledick. But just then the coroner spoke again.

“Have you seen the evidence that was given yesterday?”

“Yes, I have a summary of it, which I have read.”

“Can you, from your investigations, tell us anything that was not disclosed by that evidence?”

“Yes. I have just examined the remains of the deceased and the articles which have been found from time to time. I think I can give some additional information concerning them.”

“From your examination of the remains,” the coroner said somewhat eagerly, “can you give any opinion as to the cause of death?”

“No,” replied Thorndyke. “My examination had reference chiefly to the identity of the remains.”

The coroner looked disappointed. “The identity of the remains,” said he, “is not in question. They have been clearly identified as those of Angelina Frood.”

“Then,” said Thorndyke, “they have been wrongly identified. I can swear positively that they are not the remains of Angelina Frood.”

At this statement a sudden hush fell on the Court, broken incongruously by an audible whistle from Sergeant Cobbledick. On me the declaration fell like a thunderbolt, and, on looking round at Bundy, I could see that he was petrified with astonishment. There was a silence of some seconds’ duration. Then the coroner said, with a distinctly puzzled air: “This is a very remarkable statement, Dr. Thorndyke. It seems to be quite at variance with all the facts: and it appears almost incredible that you should be able to speak with such certainty, having regard to the condition of the remains and in spite of the extraordinary effect of the lime.”

“It is on account of the effect of the lime that I am able to speak with so much certainty and confidence,” Thorndyke replied.

“I don’t quite follow that,” said the coroner. “Would you kindly tell us how you were able to determine that these remains are not those of Angelina Frood?”

“It is a matter of simple inference,” replied Thorndyke. “On the 26th of April last Mrs. Frood is known to have been alive. It has been assumed that on that night or the next her body was built up in the wall. If that had really happened, when the wall was opened on the 20th of July, the body would have been found intact and perfectly recognizable!”

“You are not overlooking the circumstance that it was buried in a bed of quick-lime?” said the coroner.

“No,” replied Thorndyke; “in fact that is the circumstance that makes it quite certain that these remains are not those of Angelina Frood. There is,” he continued, “a widely prevalent belief that quick-lime has the property of completely consuming and destroying organic substances such as a dead human body. But that belief is quite erroneous. Quick-lime has no such properties. On the contrary, it has a strongly preservative effect on organic matter. Putrefaction is a change in organic matter which occurs only when that matter is more or less moist. If such matter is completely dried, putrefaction is prevented or arrested, and such dried, or mummified, matter will remain undecomposed almost indefinitely, as we see in the case of Egyptian mummies. But quick-lime has the property of abstracting the water from organic substances with which it is in contact; of rendering them completely dry. It thus acts as a very efficient preservative. If Mrs. Frood’s body had been buried, when recently dead, three months ago in fresh quick-lime, it would by now have been reduced more or less to the condition of a mummy. It would not have been even partially destroyed, and it would have been easily recognizable.”

To this statement everyone present listened with profound attention and equally profound surprise; and a glance at the faces of the jurymen was sufficient to show that it had failed utterly to produce conviction. Even the coroner was evidently not satisfied, and, after a few moments’ reflection with knitted brows, he stated his objection.

“The belief in the destructive properties of lime,” he said, “can hardly be accepted as a mere popular error. In the Crippen trial, you may remember that the question was raised, and one of the expert witnesses—no less an authority than Professor Pepper—gave it as his considered opinion that quick-lime has these destructive properties, and that if a body were buried in a sufficient quantity of quick-lime, that body would be entirely destroyed. You will agree, I think, that great weight attaches to the opinion of a man of Professor Pepper’s great reputation.”

“Undoubtedly,” Thorndyke agreed. “He was one of our greatest medico-legal authorities, though, on this subject, I think, his views differed from those generally held by medical jurists. But the point is that this was an opinion, and that no undeniable facts were then available. But since that time, the matter has been put to the test of actual experiment, and the results of those experiments are definite facts. It is no longer a matter of opinion but one of incontestable fact.”

“What are the experiments that you refer to’”

“The first practical investigation was carried out by Mr. A. Lucas, the Director of the Government Analytical Laboratory and Assay Office at Cairo. He felt that the question was one of great medico-legal importance, and that it ought to be settled definitely. He accordingly carried out a number of experiments, of which he published the particulars in his treatise on ‘Forensic Chemistry.’ I produce a copy of this book, with your permission.”

“Is this evidence admissible?” the foreman asked. “The witness can’t swear to another man’s experiments.”

“It is admissible in a coroner’s court,” was the reply.

“We are not bound as rigidly by the rules of evidence as a criminal court, for instance. It is relevant to the inquiry, and I think we had better hear it.”

“I may say,” said Thorndyke, “that I have repeated and confirmed these experiments; but I suggest that, as the published cases are the recognized authority, I be allowed to quote them before describing my confirmatory experiments.”

The coroner having agreed to this course, he continued: “The tests were made with the fresh bodies of young pigeons, which were plucked but not opened, and which were buried in boxes with loosely-fitted covers, filled respectively with dry earth, slaked lime, chlorinated lime, quick-lime, and quick-lime suddenly slaked with water. These bodies were left thus buried for six months, the boxes being placed on the laboratory roof at Cairo. At the end of that period the bodies were disinterred and examined with the following results: The body which had been buried in dry earth was found to be in a very bad condition. There was a considerable smell of putrefaction and a large part of the flesh had disappeared. The body which had been buried in quick-lime was found to be in good condition; it was dry and hard, the skin was unbroken, but the body was naturally shrunken. The other three bodies do not concern us, but I may say that none of them was as completely preserved as the one that was buried in quick-lime.

“On reading the account of these experiments I decided to repeat them, partly for confirmation and partly to enable me to give direct evidence as to the effect of lime on dead bodies. I used freshly-killed rabbits from which the fur was removed by shaving, and buried them in roomy boxes in the same materials as were used in the published experiments. They were left undisturbed during the six summer months, and were then exhumed and examined. The rabbit which had been buried in dry earth was in an advanced stage of putrefaction; the one which had been buried in quick-lime was free from any odour of decomposition, the skin was intact, and the body unaltered excepting that it was dry and rather shrivelled—mummified, in fact. It was more completely preserved than any of the others.”

The conclusion of this statement was followed by a slightly uncomfortable silence. The coroner stroked his chin reflectively, and the jurymen looked at one another with obvious doubt and distrust. At length Mr. Pilley gave voice to the collective sentiments.

“It’s all very well, sir, for this learned gentleman to explain to us that the lime couldn’t have eaten up the body of the deceased. But it has. We’ve seen the bare bones with our own eyes. What’s the use of saying a thing is impossible when it has happened?”

Here Thorndyke produced from his pocket a sheet of notepaper and a fountain pen, and began to write rapidly, noting down, as I supposed, the jurymen’s objections; which, however, the coroner proceeded to answer.

“Dr. Thorndyke’s statement was that these bones are not the bones of Angelina Frood. That the body was not her body.”

“Still,” said the foreman, “it was somebody’s body, you know. And the lime seems to have eaten it up pretty clean, possible or impossible.”

“Exactly,” said the coroner. “The destruction of this particular body appears to be an undeniable fact; and we may assume that one body is very much like another—in a chemical sense, at least. What do you say, doctor?”

“My statement,” replied Thorndyke, “had reference to Angelina Frood, who is known to have been alive on a certain date. Of the condition of the unknown body that was buried in the wall, I can give no opinion.”

Again there was an uncomfortable silence, during which Thorndyke, having finished writing, folded the sheet of notepaper, tucked the end in securely, and wrote an address on the back. Then he handed it to his neighbour, who passed it on until it reached me. I was on the point of opening it when I observed with astonishment that it was addressed to Peter Bundy, Esq., to whom I immediately handed it. But my astonishment was nothing to Bundy’s. He seemed positively thunderstruck. Indeed, his aspect was so extraordinary as he sat gazing wildly at the opened note, that I forgot my manners and frankly stared at him. First he turned scarlet; then he grew deathly pale; and then he turned scarlet again. And, for the first and only time in my life, I saw him look really angry. But this was only a passing manifestation. For a few moments his eyes flashed and his mouth set hard. Then, quite suddenly, the wrath faded from his face and gave place to a whimsical smile. He tore off the fly-leaf of the note, and, scribbling a few words on it, folded it up small, addressed it to Dr. Thorndyke, and handed it to me for transmission by the return route.

When it reached Thorndyke, he opened it, and, having read the brief message, nodded gravely to Bundy, and once more turned his attention to the foreman, who was addressing the coroner at greater length.

“The jury wish to say, sir, that this evidence is not satisfactory. It can’t be reconciled with the other evidence. The facts before the jury are these: On the 26th of April Angelina Frood disappeared, and was never afterwards seen alive. On the night that she disappeared, or on the next night, a dead body was buried in the wall. Three months later that body was found in the wall, packed in quick-lime, and eaten away to a skeleton. That skeleton has been examined by an expert, and found to be that of a woman of similar size and age to Angelina Frood. With that skeleton were found articles of clothing, jewellery, and ornaments which have been proved to have been the clothing and property of Angelina Frood. Other articles of clothing have been recovered from the river; and those articles were missing from the body when it was found in the wall. On these facts, the jury feel that it is impossible to doubt that the remains found in the wall are the remains of Angelina Frood.”

As the foreman concluded the coroner turned to Thorndyke with a slightly puzzled smile. “Of course, Doctor,” said he, “you have considered those facts that the foreman has summarized so admirably. What do you say to his conclusion?”

“I must still contest it,” replied Thorndyke. “The foreman’s summary of the evidence, masterly as it was, furnishes no answer to the objection—based on established chemical facts—that the condition of the remains when found is irreconcilable with the alleged circumstances of the burial.”

The coroner raised his eyebrows and pursed up his lips.

“I appreciate your point, Doctor,” said he. “But we are on the horns of a dilemma. We are between the Devil of observed fact and the Deep Sea of scientific demonstration. Can you suggest any way out of the difficulty?”

“I think,” said Thorndyke, “that if you were to call Mr. Bundy, he might be able to help you out of your dilemma.”

“Mr. Bundy!” exclaimed the coroner. “I didn’t know he was concerned in the case. Can you give us any information, Mr. Bundy?”

“Yes,” replied Bundy, looking somewhat shy and nervous. “I think I could throw a little light on the case.”

“I wish to goodness you had said so before. However, better late than never. We will take your evidence at once.”

On this Thorndyke returned to his seat at the table and Bundy took his place, standing by the chair which Thorndyke had resigned.

“Let me see, Mr. Bundy,” said the coroner, “your Christian name is—”

“The witness has not been sworn,” interrupted Thorndyke.

The coroner smiled. “We are in the hands of the regular practitioners,” he chuckled. “We must mind our p’s and q’s. Still you are quite right, Doctor. The name is part of the evidence.”

The witness was accordingly sworn, and the coroner then proceeded, smilingly: “Now, Mr. Bundy, be very careful. You are making a sworn statement, remember. What is your Christian name?”

“Angelina,” was the astounding reply.

“Angelina!” bawled Pilley. “It can’t be. Why, it’s a woman’s name.”

“We must presume that the witness knows his own name,” said the coroner, writing it down. “Angelina Bundy.”

“No, Sir,” said the witness. “Angelina Frood.”

The coroner suddenly stiffened with the upraised pen poised in the air; and so everyone in the room, including myself, underwent an instantaneous arrest of movement as if we had been turned into stone; and I noticed that the process of petrifaction had caught us all with our mouths open. But whereas the fixed faces on which I looked, expressed amazement qualified by incredulity, my own astonishment was coupled with conviction. Astounding as the statement was, the moment that it was made I knew that it was true. In spite of the discrepancies of appearance, I realized in a flash of enlightenment, the nature of that subtle influence that had drawn me to Bundy with a tenderness hardly congruous with mere male friendship. Outwardly I had been deceived, but my subconscious self had recognized Angelina all the time.

The interval of breathless silence, during which the witness calmly surveyed the court through his—or rather her—monocle, was at length broken by the coroner, who asked gravely: “This is not a joke? You affirm seriously that you are Angelina Frood?”

“Yes; I am Angelina Frood,” was the reply.

Here Mr. Pilley recovered himself and demanded excitedly: “Do we understand this gentleman to say that he is the deceased?”

“Well,” replied the coroner, “he is obviously not deceased, and he states that he is not a gentleman. He has declared that he is a lady.”

“But,” protested Pilley, “he says that she—at least she says that he—”

“You are getting mixed, Pilley,” interrupted the foreman. “This appears to be a woman masquerading as a man and playing practical jokes on a coroner’s jury. I suggest, sir, that we ought to have evidence of identity.”

“I agree with you, emphatically,” said the coroner.

“The identification is indispensable. Is there anyone present who can swear to the identity of this-er-person! Mr. Japp, for instance?”

“I’d rather you didn’t bring Mr. Japp into it,” said Angelina, hastily. “It isn’t really necessary. If you will allow me to run home and change my clothes, Mrs. Gillow and Dr. Strangeways will be able to identify me. And I can bring some photographs to show the jury.”

“That seems quite a good suggestion,” said the coroner.

“Don’t you think so, gentlemen?”

“It is a very proper suggestion,” said the foreman, severely. “Let her go away and clothe herself decently. How long will she be gone?”

“I shall be back in less than half an hour,’” said Angelina; and on this understanding she was given permission to retire. I watched her with a tumult of mixed emotions as she took up her hat, gloves, and stick, and strolled jauntily towards the door. There she paused for an instant and shot at me a single, swift, whimsical glance through her monocle. Then she went out; and with her disappeared for ever the familiar figure of Peter Bundy.

CHAPTER XVIII

The Uncontrite Penitent

As the door closed on Angelina, a buzz of excited talk broke out. The astonished jurymen put their heads together and eagerly discussed the new turn of events, while the coroner sat with a deeply cogitative expression, evidently thinking hard and casting an occasional speculative glance in Thorndyke’s direction. Meanwhile Cobbledick edged up to my side and presented his views in a soft undertone.

“This is a facer, Doctor, isn’t it? Regular do. My word! Just think of the artfulness of that young woman, toting us round and helping us to find the things that she had just popped down for us to find. I call it a masterpiece.” He chuckled admiringly, and added in a lower tone, “I hope she hasn’t got herself into any kind of mess.”

I looked at Cobbledick with renewed appreciation. I had always liked the sergeant. He was a capable man and a kindly one; and now he was showing a largeness of soul that won my respect and my gratitude, too. A small man would have been furious with Angelina, but Cobbledick took her performances in a proper sporting spirit. He was only amused and admiring. Not for nothing had Nature imprinted on his face that benevolent smile.

Presently Mr. Pilley, who seemed to have a special gift for the expression of erroneous opinions, addressed himself to the coroner.

“Well, Mr. Chairman,” he said cheerfully, “I suppose we can consider the inquest practically over.”

“Over!” exclaimed the astonished coroner.

“Yes. We were inquiring into the death of Angelina Frood. But if Mrs. Frood is alive after all, why, there’s an end to the matter.”

“What about the body in the mortuary?” demanded the foreman.

“Oh, ah,” said Pilley. “I had forgotten about that.” He looked owlishly at the coroner and then exclaimed:

“But that is the body of Mrs. Frood!”

“It can’t be if Mrs. Frood is alive,” the coroner reminded him.

“But it must be,” persisted Pilley. “It has been identified as her, and it had her clothes and ring on. Mr. Bundy must have been pulling our legs.”

“There is certainly something very mysterious about that body,” said the coroner. “It was dressed in Mrs. Frood’s clothes, as Mr. Pilley points out, and it appears that Mrs. Frood must be in some way connected with it.”

“There’s no doubt about that,” agreed the foreman.

“She must know who that dead person is and how the body came to be in the place where it was found, and she will have to give an account of it.”

“Yes,” said the coroner. “But it is a mysterious affair. I wonder if Dr. Thorndyke could enlighten us. He seems to know more about the matter than anybody else.”

But Thorndyke was not to be drawn into any statement.

“It would be merely a conjecture on my part,” he said. “Presumably Mrs. Frood knows how the remains got into the wall, and I must leave her to give the necessary explanations.”

“I don’t see what explanations she can give,” said the foreman. “It looks like a clear case of wilful murder. And it is against her.”

To this view the coroner gave a guarded assent; and indeed it was the obvious view. There was the body, in Angelina’s clothing, and everything pointed clearly to Angelina’s complicity in the crime, if there had really been a crime committed. And what other explanation was possible?

As I reflected on the foreman’s ominous words, I was sensible of a growing alarm. What if Angelina had been, as it were, snatched from the grave only to be placed in the dock on a charge of murder? That she could possibly be guilty of a crime did not enter my mind. But there was evidently some sort of criminal entanglement from which she might find it hard to escape. The appearances were sinister in the extreme; her simulated disappearance, her disguise, her suspicious silence during the inquiry; to any eye but mine they were conclusive evidence of her guilt. And the more I thought about it, the more deadly did the sum of that evidence appear, until, as the time ran on, I became positively sick with terror.

The opening of a door and a sudden murmur of surprise caused me to turn; and there was Angelina herself. But not quite the Angelina that I remembered. Gone were the pallid complexion, the weary, dark-circled eyes, the down-cast mouth, the sad and pensive countenance, the dark, strong eyebrows. Rosy-cheeked, smiling, confident, and looking strangely tall and imposing, she stepped composedly over to the head of the table, and stood there gazing with calm self-possession, and the trace of a smile at the stupefied jurymen.

“Your name is—?” said the coroner, gazing at her in astonishment.

“Angelina Frood,” was the quiet reply; and the voice was Bundy’s voice.

Here Pilley rose, bubbling with excitement. “This isn’t the same person!” he exclaimed. “Why, he was a little man, and she’s a tall woman. And his hair was short, and just look at hers! You can’t grow a head of hair like that in twenty minutes.”

“No,” Angelina agreed, suavely. “I wish you could.”

“The objection is not relevant, Mr. Pilley,” said the coroner, suppressing a smile. “We are not concerned with the identity of Mr. Bundy but with that of Angelina Frood. Can anyone identify this lady?”

“I can,” said I. “I swear that she is Angelina Frood.”

“And Mrs. Gillow?”

Mrs. Gillow could and did identify her late lodger, and furthermore, burst into tears and filled the court-room with “yoops” of hysterical joy. When she had been pacified and gently restrained by the coroner’s officer from an attempt to embrace the witness, the coroner proceeded:

“Now, Mrs. Frood, the jury require certain explanations from you, in regard to the body of a woman which is at present lying in the mortuary and which was found buried in the city wall with certain articles of clothing and jewellery which have been identified as your property. Did you know that that body had been buried in the wall?”

“Yes,” replied Angelina.

“Do you know how it came to be in the wall?”

“Yes. I put it there.”

“You put it there!” roared Pilley, amidst a chorus of exclamations from the jurymen. The coroner held up his hand to enjoin silence and asked, as he gazed in astonishment at Angelina.

“Can you tell us who this deceased person was?”

“I’m afraid I can’t,” Angelina replied, apologetically. “I don’t think her name was known.”

“But-er-” the astounded coroner inquired, “how did she come by her death?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that either,” replied Angelina. “The fact is, I never asked.”

“You never asked!” the coroner repeated, in a tone of bewilderment. “But-er-are we to understand that in short, did you or did you not cause the death of this person by your own act? Of course,” he added hastily, “you are not bound to answer that question.”

Angelina smiled at him engagingly. “I will answer with pleasure. I did not cause the death of this person.”

“Then are we to understand that she was already dead when you found her’”

“I didn’t find her. I bought her; at a shop in Great St. Andrew-street. I gave four pounds, fourteen and three-pence for her, including two and three-pence to Carter Paterson’s. I’ve brought the bill with me.”

She produced the bill from her pocket and handed it to the coroner, who read it with a portentous frown and a perceptible twitching at the corners of his mouth.

“I will read this document to you, gentlemen,” he said in a slightly unsteady voice. “It is dated the 19th of April, and reads: ‘Bought of Oscar Hammerstein, Dealer in Human and Comparative Osteology, Great St. Andrew-street, London, W. C., one complete set superfine human osteology, disarticulated and unbleached (female), as selected by purchaser, four pounds eight shillings and sixpence. Replacing and cementing missing teeth, one shilling and sixpence. Packing case, two shillings. Carriage, two and three pence. Total, four pounds, fourteen and three-pence. Received with thanks, O. Hammerstein.’ Perhaps you would like to see the bill, yourselves, gentlemen.”

He passed it to the foreman, taking a quick glance out of the corners of his eyes at the bland and impassive Angelina, and the jury studied it in a deep silence, which was broken only by a soft, gurgling sound, from somewhere behind me, which, I discovered, on looking round, to proceed from Sergeant Cobbledick, whose crimsoned face was partly hidden by a large handkerchief and whose shoulders moved convulsively.

Presently the coroner addressed Thorndyke. “In continuation of your evidence, Doctor, does Mrs. Frood’s explanation agree with any conclusions that you had arrived at from your inspection of the remains?”

“It agrees with them completely,” Thorndyke replied with a grim smile.

The coroner entered the answer in the depositions, and then turned once more to Angelina.

“With regard to the objects that were found with the skeleton; did you put them there?”

“Yes. I put in the metal things and a few pieces of scorched rag to give a realistic effect—on account of the lime, you know.”

“And the articles that were recovered from the river, too, I suppose?”

“Yes, I put them down—with proper precautions, of course.”

“What do you mean by proper precautions?”

“Well, I couldn’t afford to waste any of the things, so I used to keep a lookout with a telescope, and then, when I saw a likely person coming along, I put one of the things down where it could be seen.”

“And were they always seen?”

“No. Some people are very unobservant. In that case I picked it up when the coast was clear and saved it for another time.”

The coroner chuckled. “It was all very ingenious and complete. But now, Mrs. Frood, we have to ask you what was the object of these extraordinary proceedings. It was not a joke, I presume?”

“Oh, not at all,” replied Angelina. “It was a perfectly serious affair. You have heard what sort of husband I had. I couldn’t possibly live with him. I made several attempts to get away and live by myself, but he always followed me and found me out. So I determined to disappear altogether.”

“You could have applied for a separation,” said the coroner.

“I shouldn’t have got it,” replied Angelina, “and even if I had, of what use would it have been? I should have been bound to him for life. I couldn’t have married anyone else. My whole life would have been spoilt. So I decided to disappear completely and for good, and start life afresh in a new place and under a new name. And in order that there should be no mistake about it, I thought I would leave the—er—the material for a coroner’s inquest and a will directing that a suitable monument should be put up over my grave. Then, if I had ever married again, there would have been no danger of a charge of bigamy. If anyone had made any such suggestion, I could have referred them to the registrar of deaths and to the tombstone of Angelina Frood in Rochester churchyard.”

“And as to a birth certificate under your new name?” the coroner asked with a twinkle of his eye.

Angelina smiled a prim little smile. “I think that could have been managed,” she said.

“Well,” said the coroner, “it was an ingenious scheme. But apparently Dr. Thorndyke knew who Mr. Bundy was. How do you suppose he discovered your identity?”

“That is just what I should like to know,” she replied.

“So should I,” said the coroner, with a broad smile; “but, of course, it isn’t my affair or that of the jury. We are concerned with this skeleton that you have planted on us. I suppose you can give us no idea as to where it came from originally?”

“The dealer said it had been found in a barrow-not a wheel-barrow, you know; an ancient burial-place. Of course, I don’t know whether he was speaking the truth.”

“What do you think, Dr. Thorndyke?” the coroner asked.

“I think it is an ancient skeleton, though very well preserved. Some of the teeth—the original ones—show more wear than one expects to find in a modern skull. But I only made a cursory inspection.”

“I think the evidence is sufficient for our purpose,” said the coroner; “and that really concludes the case, so we need not detain you any longer, Mrs. Frood. I don’t know exactly what your legal position is; whether you have committed any legal offence. If you have, it is not our business; and I think I am expressing the sentiments of the jury if I say that I hope that the authorities will not make it their business. No one has been injured, and no action seems to be called for.”

With these sentiments the jury concurred warmly, as also did Sergeant Cobbledick, who was heard, very audibly and regardless of the proprieties, to murmur “Hear, hear.” We waited to learn the nature of the verdict, and when this had been pronounced (to the effect that the skeleton was that of an unknown woman, concerning the circumstances of whose death no evidence was available), the court rose and we prepared to depart.

“You are coming back to lunch with us, Angelina?” said I.

“I should love to,” she replied, “but there is Mr. Japp. Do you think you could ask him, too?”

“Of course,” I replied, with a sudden perception of the advantage of even numbers. “We shouldn’t be complete without him.”

Japp accepted with enthusiasm, and, after a hasty farewell to Cobbledick, we went forth into the High Street, by no means unobserved of the populace. As we approached the neighbourhood of the office Angelina said:

“I must run into my rooms for a few moments just to tidy myself up a little. It was such a very hurried toilette. I won’t be more than a few minutes. You needn’t wait for me.”

“I suggest,” said Thorndyke, “that Mr. Japp and I go on and break the news to Mrs. Dunk that there is a lady guest, and that Strangeways remains behind to escort the prisoner.”

I fell in readily with this admirable suggestion, and as the two men walked on, I followed Angelina up the steps and waited while she plied her latch-key. We entered the hall together and then went into the sitting-room, where she stood for a moment, looking round with deep satisfaction.

“It’s nice to be home again,” she said, “and to feel that all that fuss is over.”

“I daresay it is,” said I. “But now that you are home, what have you got to say for yourself? You are a nice little baggage, aren’t you?”

“I am a little beast, John,” she replied. “I’ve been a perfect pig to you. But I didn’t mean to be, and I really couldn’t help it. You’ll try to forgive me, won’t you?”

“The fact is, Angelina,” I said, “I am afraid I am in love with you.”

“Oh, I hope to goodness you are, John,” she exclaimed. “If I thought you weren’t I should wish myself a skeleton again. Do you think you really are?”

She crept closer to me with such a sweet, wheedlesome air that I suddenly caught her in my arms and kissed her.

“It does seem as if you were,” she admitted with a roguish smile; and then—such unaccountable creatures are women—she laid her head on my shoulder and began to sob. But this was only a passing shower. Another kiss brought back the sunshine and then she tripped away to spread fresh entanglements for the masculine heart.

In a few minutes she returned, further adorned and looking to my eyes the very picture of womanly sweetness and grace. When I had given confirmatory evidence of my sentiments towards her, we went out, just in time to encounter Mrs. Gillow and acquaint her with the program.

“I suppose,” said Angelina, glancing furtively at a little party of women who were glancing, not at all furtively, at her, “one should be gratified at the interest shown by one’s fellow towns-people; but don’t you think the back streets would be preferable to the High-street?”

“It is no use, my dear,” I replied. “We’ve got to face it. Take no notice. Regard these bipeds that infest the footways as mere samples of the local fauna. Let them stare and ignore them. For my part, I rather like them. They impress on me the admirable bargain that I have made in swapping Peter Bundy for a beautiful lady.”

“Poor Peter,” she said, pensively. “He was a sad boy sometimes when he looked at his big, handsome John and thought that mere friendship was all that he could hope for when his poor little heart was starving for love. Your deal isn’t the only successful one, John, so you needn’t be so conceited. But here we are home—really home, this time, for this has been my real home, John, dear. And there—Oh! Moses I—there is Mrs. Dunk, waiting to receive us!”

“What used you to do to Mrs. Dunk,” I asked, “to make her so furious?”

“I only used to inquire after her health,” Angelina replied plaintively. “But mum’s the word. She’ll spot my voice as soon as I speak.”

Mrs. Dunk held the door open ceremoniously and curtsied as we entered. She was a gruff old woman, but she had a deep respect for “gentlefolk,” as is apt to be the way with old servants. Angelina acknowledged her salutation with a gracious smile and followed her meekly up the stairs to the room that Mrs. Dunk had allotted to her.

I found Thorndyke and Japp established in the library—Dr. Partridge had dispensed with a drawing-room and I followed his excellent example—and here presently Angelina joined us, sailing majestically into the room and marching up to Thorndyke with an air at once hostile and defiant.

“Serpent,” said Angelina.

“Not at all,” Thorndyke dissented with a smile. “You should be grateful to me for having rescued you from your own barbed-wire entanglements.”

“Serpent, I repeat,” persisted Angelina. “To let me sit in that court-room watching all the innocents walking into my trap one after another, and then, just as I thought they were all inside, to hand me a thing like that!” and she produced, dramatically, a small sheet of paper, which I recognized as the remainder of Thorndyke’s note. I took it from her, and read: “You see whither the evidence is leading. The deception cannot be maintained, nor is there any need, now that your husband is dead. Explanations must be given either by you or by me. For your own sake I urge you to explain everything and clear yourself. Let me know what you will do.”

“This is an extraordinary document,” I said, passing it to Japp. “How in the name of Fortune did you know that Bundy was Angelina?”

“Yes, how did you?” the latter demanded. “It is for you to give an explanation now.”

“We will have the explanations after lunch,” said he; “mutual explanations. I want to hear how far I was correct in details.”

“Very well,” agreed Angelina, “we will both explain. But you will have the first innings. You are not going to listen to my explanation and then say you knew all about it. And that reminds me, John, that you had better tell Mrs. Dunk. She is sure to recognize my voice.”

I quite agreed with Angelina and hurried away to intercept Mrs. Dunk and let her know the position. She was at first decidedly shocked, but a vivid and detailed description of the late Mr. Frood produced a complete revulsion; so complete, in fact, as to lead me to speculate on the personal characteristics of the late Mr. Dunk. But her curiosity was aroused to such an extent that, while waiting at table, she hardly removed her eyes from Angelina, until the latter, finding the scrutiny unbearable, suddenly produced the hated eyeglass, and, sticking it in her eye, directed a stern glance at the old woman, who instantly backed towards the door with a growl of alarm, and then sniggered hoarsely.

It was a festive occasion, for we were all in exuberant spirits, including Mr. Japp, who, if he said little, made up the deficiency in smiles of forty-wrinkle power, which, together with his upstanding tuft of white hair, made him look like a convivial cockatoo.

“Do you remember our last meeting at this table’” said Angelina, “when I jeered at the famous expert and pulled his reverend leg, thinking what a smart young fellow I was, and how beautifully I was bamboozling him? And all the while he knew! He knew! And ‘Not a word said the hard-boiled egg.’ Oh, serpent! serpent!”

Thorndyke chuckled. “You didn’t leave the hardboiled egg much to say,” he observed.

“No. But why were you so secret? Why didn’t you let on, just a little, to give poor Bundy a hint as to where he was plunging?”

“My dear Mrs. Frood—”

“Oh, call me Angelina,” she interrupted.

“Thank you,” said he. “Well, my dear Angelina, you are forgetting that I didn’t know what was in the wall.”

“My goodness!” she exclaimed. “I had overlooked that. Of course, it might have been—Good gracious! How awful!” She paused with her eyes fixed on Thorndyke, and then asked: “Supposing it had been?”

“I refuse to suppose anything of the kind,” he replied. “My explanations will deal with the actual, not with the hypothetical.”

There was silence for a minute or two. Like Angelina, I was speculating on what Thorndyke would have done if the remains had been real remains—and those of a man. He had evidently sympathized warmly with the hunted wife; but if her defence had taken the form of a crime, would he have exposed her? It was useless to ask him. I have often thought about it since, but have never reached a conclusion.

“You will have to answer questions better than that presently,” said Angelina; “but I won’t ask you any more now. You shall finish your lunch in peace, and then—into the witness-box you go. I am going to have satisfaction for that note.”

The little festival went on, unhurried, with an abundance of cheerful and rather frivolous talk. But at last, like all fugitive things, it came to an end. The table was cleared, and garnished with the port decanter and the coffee service, and Mrs. Dunk, with a final glower, half-defiant and half-admiring, at Angelina, took her departure.

“Now,” said Angelina, as I poured out the coffee, “the time has come to talk of many things, but especially of expert investigations into the identity of Peter Bundy. Your lead, Sir.”

CHAPTER XIX

Explanations

“The investigation of this case,” Thorndyke began, “falls naturally into two separate inquiries: that relating to the crime and that which is concerned with what we may conveniently call the personation. They make certain contacts, but they are best considered separately. Let us begin with the crime.

“Now, to a person having experience of real crime, there was, in this case, from the very beginning, something rather abnormal. A woman of good social position had disappeared. There was a suggestion that she had been murdered; and the murder had apparently been committed in some public place, that is to say, not in a house. But in such cases, normally, the first evidence of the crime is furnished by the discovery of the body. It is true that, in this case, there was a suggestion that the body had been flung into the river, and this, at first, masked the abnormality to some extent. But even then there was the discrepancy that the brooch, which was attached to the person, appeared to have been found on land, while the bag, which was not attached to the person, was picked up at the water’s edge. The bag itself, and the box which had been in it, presented several inconsistencies.

“They had apparently been lying unnoticed for eleven days on a piece of shore that was crowded with small craft and frequently by numbers of seamen and labourers, and that formed a play-ground for the waterside children. The clean state of the box when found showed that it had neither been handled nor immersed, and as the wrapping-paper was intact, the person who had taken it out of the bag must have thrown it away without opening it to see what it contained. The bag was found under some light rubbish. That rubbish had not been thrown on it by the water, or the bag would have been soaked; and no one could have thrown the rubbish on it without seeing the bag, which was an article of some value. Again, the bag had not been carried to this place by the water, as was proved by its condition.

“Therefore, either this was the place where the crime had been committed, or someone had brought the bag to this place and thrown it away. But neither supposition was reasonably probable. It was inconceivable that a person like Mrs. Frood should have been in this remote, inaccessible, disreputable place at such an hour. The bag could not have been brought here by an innocent person, for no such person would have thrown it away. It was quite a valuable bag. And a guilty person would have thrown it in the river, and probably put a stone in it to sink it. So you see that these first clues were strikingly abnormal. They prepared one to consider the possibility of false tracks. Even the brooch incident had a faint suggestion of the same kind when considered with the other clues. The man who pawned the brooch had a mole on his nose. Such an adornment can be easily produced artificially. It is highly distinctive of the person who possesses it, and it is equally distinctive—negatively—of the person who does not possess it. Then there was the character of the person who had disappeared. She was a woman who was seeking to escape from her husband; and hitherto she had not succeeded because she had not hidden herself securely enough. She was a person of a somewhat disappearing tendency. She had an understandable motive for disappearing.

“From the very beginning, therefore, the possibility of voluntary disappearance had to be borne in mind. And when it was, each new clue seemed to support it. There was the scarf, for instance. It was found under a fish-trunk; an unlikely place for it to have got by chance, but an excellent one for a ‘plant.’ The scarf was not baldly exposed, but someone was sure to turn the trunk over and find it. And at this point another peculiarity began to develop. There was a noticeable tendency for the successive ‘finds’ to creep up the river from Chatham towards Rochester Bridge. It was not yet very remarkable, but I noticed it, as I entered each find on my map. The brooch was associated with Chatham, the bag and box with the Chatham shore a little farther up, the scarf with the Rochester shore at Blue Boar Head. As I say, it attracted my attention; and when the first shoe was found above Blue Boar Head, the second shoe farther up still, and the hat-pin yet farther up towards the bridge, it became impossible to ignore it. There was no natural explanation. Whether the body were floating or stationary, the constancy of direction was inexplicable; for the tide sweeps up and down twice daily, and objects detached from the body would be carried up or down stream, according to the direction of the tide when they became detached. This regular order was a most suspicious circumstance. Later, when the objects were found in Black Boy-lane, it became absurd. It was a mere paper-chase. Just look at my map.”

He exhibited the large-scale map, on which each “find” was marked by a small circle. The series of circles, joined by a connecting line, proceeded directly from near Sun Pier, Chatham, along the shore, and up Black Boy-lane to the gate of the waste ground, and across it to the wall.

Angelina giggled. “You can’t say I didn’t make it as easy as I could for poor old Cobbledick,” she said. “Of course, I never reckoned on anyone bringing up the heavy guns. By the way, I wonder who your private client was. Do you know, John’” she added, with a sudden glance of suspicion; and, as I grinned sheepishly, she exclaimed: “Well! I wouldn’t have believed it. It was a regular conspiracy. But I am interrupting the expert. Proceed, my lord.”

“Well,” Thorndyke resumed, “we have considered the aspect of the crime problem taken by itself, as it appeared to an experienced investigator. From the first there was a suspicion that the clues were counterfeit, and with each new clue this suspicion deepened. And you will notice an important corollary. If the case was a fraud, that fraud was being worked by someone on the spot. Keep that point in mind, for it has a most significant bearing on the other problem, that of the personation, to which we will now turn our attention. But before we go into details, there are certain general considerations that we ought to note, in order that we may understand more clearly how the deception became possible.

“The subject of personation and disguise is often misunderstood. It is apt to be supposed that a disguise effects a complete transformation resulting in a complete resemblance to the individual personated—or, as in this case, a complete disappearance of the identity of the disguised person. But no such transformation is possible. All disguise is a form of bluff. It acts by suggestion. And the suggestion is effected by a set of misleading circumstances which produce in the dupe a state of mind in which a very imperfect disguise serves to produce conviction. That is the psychology of personation, and I can only express my admiration of the way in which Angelina had grasped it. Her conduct of this delicate deception was really masterly. Let us consider it in more detail.

“Mr. Bundy was ostensibly a man. But if he had been put in a room with a dozen moderately intelligent persons, and those persons had been asked, ‘Is this individual a man? or is he a woman with short hair and dressed in man’s clothing?’ they would probably have decided unanimously that he was a woman. But the question never was asked. The issue was never raised. He was Mr. Bundy. One doesn’t look at young men to see if they are women in disguise.

“Then consider the position of Strangeways—the chosen victim. He comes to a strange town to transact business with a firm of land agents. He goes into the office, and finds the partners—whose names are on the plate outside, and to whom he has been sent by his London agent-engaged in their normal avocations. He transacts his business with them in a normal way, and Mr. Bundy seems to be an ordinary, capable young man. He goes back later and interviews Mr. Bundy, who is just on the point of taking him to introduce him to Mrs. Frood, when he is called away. Then, within a few minutes, he is taken to Mrs. Frood’s house, where he finds that lady calmly engaged in needlework. Supposing Mrs. Frood had been extremely like Bundy, could it possibly have entered Strangeways’s head that they might be one and the same person? Remember that he had left Bundy in another place only a few minutes before; and here was Mrs. Frood in her own apartments, with the appearance of having been there for hours. Obviously no such thought could have occurred to any man. There was nothing to suggest it.

“But, in fact, Angelina was not perceptibly like Bundy on cursory inspection. They were markedly different in size. A woman always looks bigger than a man of the same height. Bundy was a little man and looked smaller than he was by reason of his very low heels; Angelina was a biggish woman and looked taller than she was by reason of her high heels and her hair. Disregarding her hair, she was fully two inches taller than Bundy.

“Then the facial resemblance must have been slight. Angelina had a mass of hair and wore it low down on her brows and temples; Bundy’s hair was short and was brushed back from his forehead. Angelina had strong, black eyebrows; Bundy’s eyebrows were thin, or rather, cut off short. Angelina was pale, careworn, dark under the eyes, with drooping mouth, melancholy expression and depressed in manner; Bundy was fresh-coloured, smiling, gay and sprightly in manner and he wore an eyeglass—which has a surprising effect on facial expression. Their voices and intonation were strikingly different. Finally, Strangeways never saw Angelina excepting in a very subdued light in which any small resemblances in features would be unnoticeable.

“And now observe another effect of suggestion. Strangeways had made the acquaintance of Mr. Bundy. Then he had made the acquaintance of Mrs. Frood. They were two separate persons; they were practically strangers to one another; they belonged to different sets of surroundings. He would never think of them in connexion with one another. They were two of his friends, mutually unacquainted. In this condition of separateness they would become established in his mind, and the conception of them as different persons would become confirmed by habit. It would be a permanent suggestion that would offer an obstacle to any future suggestion that they were the same. That was the advantage of introducing Bundy first, for if he had appeared only after Angelina had disappeared, there would have been no such opposing suggestion. The resemblances might have been noticed, and he might have been detected.

“In passing I may remark upon the tact and judgment that were shown in the disguise. The troublesome makeup, the wig, the false eyebrows, the grease-paint, the false voice, all were concentrated on the temporary Mrs. Frood, who was to disappear. Bundy was not disguised at all, excepting for the eyeglass. He was simply Angelina with her hair cut short and dressed as a man. He hadn’t even an assumed voice; for as Angelina is a contralto, and habitually speaks in the lower register, her voice would pass quite well as a light tenor, so long as she kept off the ‘head notes.’

“So much for the general aspects of the case. And now as to my own position. As I had never seen Angelina, I naturally should not perceive any resemblance to her in Bundy; but, equally with Strangeways, I was subject to the suggestion that Bundy was a man. The personal equation, however, was different. It is my professional habit to reject all mental suggestion so far as is possible; to sift out the facts and consider them with an open mind regardless of what they appear to suggest. And then you are to remember that when I first met Mr. Bundy, there was already in my mind a faint suspicion that this was not a genuine crime; that things were not quite what they appeared; and that if this were the case, the clues were being manipulated by somebody on the spot.

“When I met Mr. Bundy, I looked him over as I look over every person whom I meet for the first time; and that inspection yielded one or two rather remarkable facts. I noticed that he wore exceptionally low heels and that he had several physical characteristics that were distinctively feminine. The very low heels puzzled me somewhat. If they had been exceptionally high there would have been nothing in it. But why should a noticeably short man wear almost abnormally low heels? I could think of no reason, unless he wore them for greater comfort, but I noted the fact and reserved it for further consideration.

“Of his physical peculiarities, the first that attracted my attention was the shape of his hands. They were quite of the feminine type. Of course, hands vary, but still it was a fact to be noted, and the observation caused me to look him over a little more critically; and then I discovered a number of other feminine characteristics.

“Perhaps it may be useful to consider briefly the less obvious differences between the sexes—the more obvious ones would, of course, be provided for by the disguise. There are two principal groups of such differences; the one has reference to the distribution of bulk, the other to the direction of certain lines. Let us take the distribution of bulk. This exhibits opposite tendencies in the two sexes. In the female, the great mass is central—the hip region; and from this the form diminishes in both directions. The whole figure, including the arms, is contained in an elongated ellipse. And the tendency affects the individual members. The limbs are bulky where they join the trunk, they taper pretty regularly towards the extremities, and they terminate in relatively small hands and feet. The hands themselves taper as a whole, and the individual fingers taper markedly from a comparatively thick base to a pointed tip.

“In the male figure the opposite condition prevails; it tends to be acromegalous. The central mass is relatively small, the peripheral masses is relatively large. The hip region is narrow, and there is a great widening towards the shoulders. The limbs taper much less towards the extremities, and they terminate in relatively large hands and feet. So, too, with the hands; they tend to be square in shape, and the individual fingers—excepting the index finger—are nearly as broad at the tips as at the base.

“Of the second group of differences we need consider only one or two instances. The general rule is that certain contour lines tend in the male to be vertical or horizontal in direction and in the female to be oblique. A man’s neck, at the back, is nearly straight and vertical; a woman’s shows a sweeping oblique curve. The angle of a man’s lower jaw is nearly a right angle; there is a vertical and a horizontal ramus. A woman’s lower jaw has an open angle and its contour forms an oblique line from the ear to the chin. But the most distinctive difference is in the ear itself. A man’s ear has its long diameter vertical; a woman’s has the long diameter oblique; and the obliquity is usually very marked.

“Bearing these differences in mind, and remembering that they are subject to variation in individual cases, let us now return to Mr. Bundy. His hands, as I have said, had the feminine character. His feet were small even for a small man; his ears were set obliquely and the line of his jaw was oblique with an open angle. His shoulders had evidently been made up by the tailor, and he seemed rather wide across the hips for a man. In short, all those bodily characteristics which were not concealed or disguised by the clothing were feminine. It was a rather remarkable fact; so much so that I began to ask myself if it were possible that he might actually be a woman in disguise.

“I watched him narrowly. There was nothing distinctive in his walk, but there was in the movements of the arms. He flourished his stick jauntily enough, but he had not that ‘nice conduct of a clouded cane’ that is as much a social cachet in our day as it was in the days of good Queen Anne. It needs a skill born of years of practice to manage a stick properly, as one realizes when one sees the working man taking his Malacca for its Sunday morning walk. Mr. Bundy had not that skill. His stick was a thing consciously carried; it was not a part of himself. Then the movement of the free arm was feminine. When a woman swings her arm she swings it through a large arc, especially in the backward direction—probably to avoid her hip—and the palm of the hand tends to be turned backward. A man’s free arm either hangs motionless or swings slightly, unless he is walking very fast; it swings principally forward, and the palm of his hand inclines inwards. These are small matters, but their cumulative significance is great.

“Further, there was the mental habit. Bundy was jocose and playfully ironic. But a gentleman of twenty-five doesn’t ‘pull the leg’ of a gentleman of fifty whom he knows but slightly; whereas a lady of twenty-five does. And very properly,” he added, seeing that Angelina had turned rather pink. “That is a compliment in a young lady which would be an impertinence in a young man. No doubt, when the equality of the sexes is an accomplished fact, things will be different.”

“It will never be an accomplished fact;” said Angelina. “The equality of the sexes is like the equality of the classes. The people who roar for social equality are the under-dogs; and the women who shout for sex equality are the under-cats. Normal women are satisfied with things as they are.”

“Hearken unto the wisdom of Angelina,” said Thorndyke, with a smile. “But perhaps she is right. It may be that the women who are so eager to compete with men are those who can’t compete with women. I can’t say. I have never been a woman: whereas Angelina has the advantage of being able to view the question from both sides.

“The prima facie evidence, then, suggested that Mr. Bundy was a woman. But as this was a prima facie improbability, the matter had to be gone into further. On Mr. Bundy’s cheeks and chin was a faint blue colouration, suggestive of such a growth of whiskers and beard as would be appropriate to his age. Now if those whiskers and that beard were genuine, the other signs were fallacious. Mr. Bundy must be a man. But his cheeks looked perfectly smooth and clean; and it was about seven o’clock in the evening. My own cheeks and Strangeways’ were by this time visibly prickly; and as he had been with us all day, Mr. Bundy could not have shaved since the morning. I tried vainly to get a closer view, and was considering how it could be managed when Providence intervened.”

“I know,” said Angelina; “It was that beastly mosquito.”

“Yes,” agreed Thorndyke. “But even then I could not get a chance to look at the skin closely. But when we got Mr. Bundy into the surgery, and examined the bite through a lens, the murder was out.”

“You could see there were no whiskers?” said Angelina.

“It wasn’t that,” replied Thorndyke. “It was something much more conclusive. You may know that the whole of the human body excepting the palms of the hands, the soles of the feet, and the eyelids, is covered with a fine down, technically called the lanugo. It consists of minute, nearly colourless hairs set quite closely together, and may be seen as a sort of halo on the face of a woman or child when the edge of the contour is against the light. On the face of a clean-shaved man it is, of course, absent, as it is shaved off with the whiskers. Now on Mr. Bundy’s face the lanugo was intact all over the blue area. It followed that he had never been shaved. It further followed that the blue colouration was an artificial stain. But this made it practically a certainty that Mr. Bundy was a woman.

“The question now was: If Mr. Bundy was a woman, what woman was he? The obvious answer seemed to be, Angelina Frood. She was missing; but if the disappearance was an imposture, someone on the spot was planting the clues. That someone would most probably be Mrs. Frood, herself. But if she were lurking in the neighbourhood, she must be disguised; and here was a disguised woman. Nevertheless, obvious as the suggestion was, the thing suggested seemed to be impossible. Strangeways knew both Angelina and Bundy and he had not recognized the latter; and I had a vague impression that he had seen them together, which, of course, would absolutely exclude their identity. A little judicious conversation with him, however, showed that neither objection had any weight. He had never seen them both at one time; and his description of Mrs. Frood made it clear that she had appeared to him totally unlike Bundy.

“The next thing was to ascertain definitely if this woman really was Mrs. Frood, and fortunately I had the means of making a very simple test. Strangeways had given me a photograph of Angelina bearing the address of a theatrical photographer, and from him I obtained seven different photographs in various poses. Then I received from Strangeways the group-photograph that was taken of us by the city wall, which contained an excellent portrait of Mr. Bundy. Out of this photograph I cut a small square containing Bundy’s head, soaked it in oil of bergamot, and mounted it in Canada balsam on a glass plate. This made the paper quite transparent, so I now had a transparent positive. I selected from the photographs of Angelina one that was in a pose exactly similar to the portrait, of Bundy—practically full face—and treated it in the same way. Then I handed the two transparencies to my assistant, and he, by means of our big copying camera, produced two life-sized negatives, exactly alike in dimensions. With prints from these negatives we were able to perform some experiments. From Angelina’s portrait I carefully cut out the face, leaving the hair and neck, and slipped Bundy’s portrait behind it, so that his face appeared through the hole. We could now see how Bundy looked with Angelina’s hair, and, on putting it beside an untouched portrait of Angelina, it was obvious, in spite of the eyeglass, that it was the same face. For you must remember that the Angelina that we had was the real person, not the made-up Angelina whom Strangeways had seen.

“This success encouraged us to take a little more trouble. My man, Polton, made some black paper masks, with the aid of which he produced two composite photographs, one of which had Bundy’s face and Angelina’s hair, neck, and bust, while the other had Angelina’s face and Bundy’s hair, forehead, neck, and bust. The eyeglass was the disturbing factor, though it showed very little, and Bundy managed it so skilfully that it hardly affected the shape of the eye and the set of the brow. Still, it was necessary to eliminate it, and as painting was out of our province, we invoked the aid of Mrs. Anstey, who is a very talented portrait painter and miniaturist. She touched out the joins in the composites, painted out the eyeglass in the one and painted an eyeglass into the other. And now the identity was complete. The Bundy-Angelina portrait was identical with the photographer’s portrait, and the Angelina-Bundy photograph was Mr. Bundy to the life.

“However, we made a final test. Polton reduced the Bundy-Angelina portrait to cabinet size, and made a couple of carbon prints, which I brought down here and exhibited; and as Strangeways accepted them as portraits of Angelina, I considered the proof complete.”

Here Angelina interrupted: “But what about that brooch? I never had a brooch like that.”

Thorndyke smiled a grim smile. “I asked Mrs. Anstey to paint in a brooch of a characteristic design.”

“What for?” asked Angelina.

“Ah!” said Thorndyke, “thereby hangs a tale.”

“Oh! a serpent’s tail, I suppose,” said Angelina.

“You will be able to judge presently,” he replied. “The brooch had its uses. Well, to continue: The identity of Mr. Bundy was now established as a moral certainty. But it was not certain enough for legal purposes. I wanted conclusive evidence; and I wanted to ascertain exactly how the transformation effects were worked. I had noted that Bundy and Angelina occupied adjoining houses which were virtually the two moieties of a double house with a common covered passageway. I assumed that the two houses communicated, but it was necessary to ascertain if they really did. The only way to establish the facts was to inspect the house in which Angelina had lived, and this I determined to do, in the very faint hope that I might be able, at the same time, to get one or more of Angelina’s fingerprints. I made a pretext for visiting the house with Strangeways, and we had the extraordinary good luck to find Mrs. Gillow just going out, so we had the house to ourselves. But this was not the only piece of luck, for we found that Angelina had taken a drink from the bedroom tumbler and water-bottle before going out, and had left on them a complete set of beautiful fingerprints, of which I secured a number of admirable photographs.

“Examination of the basement showed that I was right as to the communication. Both houses had a side door opening into the passage-way, and both doors were fitted with Yale latches which looked as if they were opened with the same key. The passage was little used, but the gravel between the two doors was a good deal trodden, and there were numerous fingerprints on Angelina’s side-door. In the kitchen was a large cupboard fitted with a Yale lock on the door and pegs inside. I assumed that when Angelina was at home that cupboard contained a suit of Mr. Bundy’s clothes, and that when Mr. Bundy was in the office it contained a wig and a dress and a pair of lady’s shoes.

“Well, that made the evidence fairly complete with one exception. We had to get a set of Bundy’s fingerprints to compare with Angelina’s. That was where the brooch came in. I knew that when Mr. Bundy saw a portrait of his former self with a brooch that he had never possessed, his curiosity would be aroused, and he would examine that portrait closely. And so he did. And on my asking him to compare the two prints, he took the opportunity to pick them both up, one in each hand, to scrutinize them more minutely, and find out who the photographer was. When he put them down, they bore a complete, though invisible, set of his fingerprints. Later, Mr. Bundy went home, escorted by Strangeways. As soon as they were gone, I took the photographs up to my room, developed up the fingerprints with powder, and compared them minutely, line by line, with the photographs of those on the tumbler and bottle. They were identical. The fingerprints of Bundy were the fingerprints of Angelina Frood.

“That completed the case; and if I had known what Angelina’s intentions were I should have notified Bundy that ‘the game was up.’ But I was in the dark. I could do nothing until I knew whether she was going to produce a body, and if so, whose body it would be. The City wall was in my mind as a possibility, since I had noted the curious disappearance of the gate-key on that significant date and I had heard of the story of Bill the bargee and knew that Bundy had heard it, and apparently taken it seriously. But one can’t act on conjecture. I could only watch Angelina play her game and try to follow the moves. When the paper-chase turned up Black Boy-lane, I knew that the wall-burial was intended to be discovered. But I didn’t know what was in the wall, and I may say that I was rather alarmed. For if Angelina had taken the story of Bill as a reliable precedent and had buried a real body in quicklime, there was going to be a catastrophe. It was an immense relief to me when I got Strangeways’ report that only a skeleton had been found; for I knew then that only a skeleton had been buried and that no crime had been committed. That is all I have to tell; and now it is Angelina’s turn to enter the confessional.”

“You haven’t left me much to tell,” said Angelina. “I feel as if I had been doing the thimble and pea trick with glass thimbles. However, I will fill in a few details. This scheme first occurred to me when I came down here to take over the property that had been left to me. I put it confidentially to Uncle Japp, but he was so shocked that he has never been able to get his hair to lie down since. He wouldn’t hear of it. So I asked him to lunch with poor Nicholas; and after that he was ready to agree to anything. Accordingly I made my preparations. I got a theatrical wig-maker to cut off my hair and make it into a wig (I told him I had a man’s part and it was expected to be a long run), got a suit made by a theatrical costumier, and down I came as Mr. Bundy. Uncle J. had already had the new plate put up. The next door offices and basement were empty, so we got them furnished for Angelina, and as soon as the wig was ready, down she came and took possession.

“Up to this time the third act was a bit sketchy. I had arranged the disappearance, and the recovery of the clues from the river, and I had a plan of buying a mummy, dressing it in my clothes, and burying it in the marshes close to the shore, where I could discover it when it had matured sufficiently. But I didn’t much like the plan. I didn’t know enough about mummies, and some other people might know too much. It looked as if I should have to do without a body, and leave my death to mere rumour; which would be unsatisfactory. I did want a tombstone.

“About this time an angel of the name of Turcival—he lives in Adam and Eve-street, Adelphi, bless him!—sent a Dr. Strangeways down here. He was a regular windfall—a new doctor—and I gave him my entire attention. I took him to his own proposed premises, and kept him in conversation, to let my personality soak well in. That evening I interviewed him in the office, and let him suppose that I was going to take him to Mrs. Frood’s house and introduce him to her. Then, when I suddenly remembered an engagement elsewhere, I went out, and as soon as the office door was shut, down I darted into our basement, out at the side door, in at the other side door, and into Mrs. Frood’s kitchen. There I did a lightning change; slipped on my dress and wig, stuck on my eyebrows, and made up my complexion; flew up the stairs, lighted the lamp in the sitting-room, and spread myself out with my needle-work. But I hadn’t been settled more than two or three minutes when Uncle Japp arrived, leading the lamb to the slaughter.

“Then it turned out that I had struck a bit of luck that I hadn’t bargained for. John had attended me in London and knew something of my affairs; so I appointed him my physician in ordinary on the spot. It was rare sport. The concern poor old John showed for my grease-paint was quite touching. I sat there squeaking complaints to him and receiving his sympathy until I was ready to screech with laughter. But I felt rather a pig all the same, for John was so sweet, and he was such a man and such a gentleman. However, I had to go on when once I had begun.

“But it was a troublesome business, worse than any stage job I ever had, to keep these two people going. I had to rush through from the office into the kitchen and cook things that I didn’t want, just to make a noise and a smell of cooking, and listen to Mrs. Gillow so that I could pop up the stairs at the psychological moment and remind her that I lived there; and then to fly down and change and dart through into the office, so that people could see that I was occupied there. It was frightfully hard work, and anxious, too. I can tell you, it was a relief when I heard from Miss Cumbers that Nicholas was starting for Brighton, and that I could disappear without implicating him. However, there is no need for me to go into any more details. Your imaginations can fill those in.”

“The man with the mole, I take it,” said Thorndyke, “was—”

“Yes. I got a suit of slops in the Minories. The mole, of course, was built up, with toupee-paste.”

“By the way,” said Thorndyke, “was there any necessity for Bundy at all?”

“Well, I had to be somebody, you know, and I had to stay on the spot to work the clues and keep an eye on the developments. I couldn’t be a woman because that would have required a heavy make-up that would almost certainly have been spotted, and would have been an intolerable bore; whereas Bundy, as you have pointed out, was not a disguise at all. When once I had got my hair cut and had provided myself with the clothes and eyeglass, there was no further trouble. I could have lived comfortably as Bundy for the rest of my life.

“So that is my story,” Angelina concluded; “and,” she added, with a sudden change of manner, “I am your grateful debtor for ever. You have done far more for me even than you know. Only this morning, poor Peter Bundy was a forlorn little wretch, miserably anxious about the present and looking to a future that had nothing but empty freedom to offer. And now I am the happiest of women—for I should be a hypocrite if I pretended to have any regrets for poor Nicholas. I will say good-bye to him in his coffin and give him a decent funeral, and try to think of him as he was before he sank into the depths. But I am frankly glad that he is gone out of his own miserable life and out of mine. And his going, which would never have been known but for the wisdom of the benevolent serpent, has left me free, With a promise of a happiness that even he does not guess.”

“I am not so sure of that,” said Thorndyke, with a sly smile.

“Well, neither am I, now you come to mention it,” said she, smiling at him in return. “He is an inquiring and observant serpent, with a way of nosing out all sorts of things that he is not supposed to be aware of. And, after all, perhaps he has a right to know. It is proper that the giver should have the satisfaction of realizing the preciousness of that which he has given.”

Here endeth the Mystery of Angelina Frood. And yet it is not quite the end. Indeed, the end is not yet; for the blessed consequences still continue to develop like the growth of a fair tree. The story has dwindled to a legend, whose harmless whispers call but a mischievous smile to that face that, like the dial in our garden, acknowledges only the sunshine. Mrs. Dunk, it is true, still wages public war, but it is tempered by private adoration; and almost daily baskets of flowers, and even tomatoes and summer cabbages, arrive at our house accompanied by the beaming smile and portly person of Inspector Cobbledick.

THE SHADOW OF THE WOLF (1925) [Part 1]

CHAPTER I

In which Two Men go forth and One Arrives

About half-past eight on a fine, sunny June morning a small yacht crept out of Sennen Cove, near the Land’s End, and headed for the open sea. On the shelving beach of the Cove two women and a man, evidently visitors (or “foreigners,” to use the local term), stood watching her departure with valedictory waving of cap or handkerchief; and the boatman who had put the crew on board, aided by two of his comrades, was hauling his boat up above the tide-mark.

A light northerly breeze filled the yacht’s sails and drew her gradually seaward. The figures of her crew dwindled to the size of a doll’s, shrank with the increasing distance to the magnitude of insects, and at last, losing all individuality, became mere specks merged in the form of the fabric that bore them. At this point the visitors turned their faces inland and walked away up the beach, and the boatman, having opined that “she be fetchin’ a tidy offing,” dismissed the yacht from his mind and reverted to the consideration of a heap of netting and some invalid lobster-pots.

On board the receding craft two men sat in the little cockpit. They formed the entire crew, for the Sandhopper was only a ship’s lifeboat, timber and decked, of light draught, and, in the matter of spars and canvas, what the art critics would call “reticent.”

Both men, despite the fineness of the weather, wore yellow oilskins and sou’westers, and that was about all they had in common. In other respects they made a curious contrast: the one small, slender, sharp-featured, dark almost to swarthiness, and restless and quick in his movements; the other large, massive, red-faced, blue-eyed, with the rounded outlines suggestive of ponderous strength—a great ox of a man, heavy, stolid, but much less unwieldy than he looked.

The conversation incidental to getting the yacht under way had ceased, and silence had fallen on the occupants of the cockpit. The big man grasped the tiller and looked sulky, which was probably his usual aspect, and the small man watched him furtively. The land was nearly two miles distant when the latter broke the silence with a remark very similar to that of the boatman on the beach.

“You’re not going to take the shore on board, Purcell. Where are we supposed to be going to?”

“I am going outside the Longships,” was the stolid answer.

“So I see,” rejoined the other. “It’s hardly the shortest course for Penzance, though.”

“I like to keep an offing on this coast,” said Purcell; and once more the conversation languished.

Presently the smaller man spoke again, this time in a more cheerful and friendly tone.

“Joan Haygarth has come on wonderfully the last few months; getting quite a fine-looking girl. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes,” answered Purcell, “and so does Phil Rodney.”

“You’re right,” agreed the other. “But she isn’t a patch on her sister, though, and never will be. I was looking at Maggie as we came down the beach this morning and thinking what a handsome girl she is. Don’t you agree with me?”

Purcell stooped to look under the boom, and answered without turning his head:

“Yes, she’s all right.”

“All right!” exclaimed the other. “Is that the way—”

“Look here, Varney,” interrupted Purcell, “I don’t want to discuss my wife’s looks with you or any other man. She’ll do for me, or I shouldn’t have married her.”

A deep coppery flush stole into Varney’s cheeks. But he had brought the rather brutal snub on himself, and apparently had the fairness to recognize the fact, for he mumbled an apology and relapsed into silence.

When he next spoke he did so with a manner diffident and uneasy, as though approaching a disagreeable or difficult subject.

“There’s a little matter, Dan, that I’ve been wanting to speak to you about when we got a chance of a private talk.” He glanced a little anxiously at his stolid companion, who grunted, and then, without removing his gaze from the horizon ahead, replied: “You’ve a pretty fair chance now, seeing that we shall be bottled up together for another five or six hours. And it’s private enough, unless you bawl loud enough to be heard at the Longships.”

It was not a gracious invitation. But that Varney had hardly expected; and if he resented the rebuff he showed no signs of annoyance, for reasons which appeared when he opened his subject.

“What I wanted to say,” he resumed, “was this. We’re both doing pretty well now on the square. You must be positively piling up the shekels, and I can earn a decent living, which is all I want. Why shouldn’t we drop this flash note business?”

Purcell kept his blue eye fixed on the horizon, and appeared to ignore the question; but after an interval, and without moving a muscle, he said gruffly, “Go on,” and Varney continued:

“The lay isn’t what it was, you know. At first it was all plain sailing. The notes were first-class copies, and not a soul suspected anything until they were presented at the bank. Then the murder was out, and the next little trip that I made was a very different affair. Two or three of the notes were suspected quite soon after I had changed them, and I had to be precious fly, I can tell you, to avoid complications. And now that the second batch has come into the bank, the planting of fresh specimens is no sinecure. There isn’t a money changer on the Continent of Europe that isn’t keeping his weather eyeball peeled, to say nothing of the detectives that the bank people have sent abroad.”

He paused and looked appealingly at his companion. But Purcell, still minding his helm, only growled: “Well?”

“Well, I want to chuck it, Dan. When you’ve had a run of luck and pocketed your winnings is the time to stop play.”

“You’ve come into some money then, I take it,” said Purcell.

“No, I haven’t. But I can make a living now by safe and respectable means, and I’m sick of all this scheming and dodging with the gaol everlastingly under my lee.”

“The reason I asked,” said Purcell, “is that there is a trifle outstanding. You hadn’t forgotten that, I suppose?”

“No, I hadn’t forgotten it, but I thought that perhaps you might be willing to let me down a bit easily.”

The other man pursed up his thick lips, but continued to gaze stonily over the bow.

“Oh, that’s what you thought, hey?” he said; and then, after a pause, he continued: “I fancy you must have lost sight of some of the facts when you thought that. Let me just remind you how the case stands. To begin with, you start your career with a little playful forgery and embezzlement; you blue the proceeds, and you are mug enough to be found out. Then I come in. I compound the affair with old Marston for a couple of thousand, and practically clean myself out of every penny I possess, and he consents to regard your temporary absence in the light of a holiday.

“Now why do I do this? Am I a philanthropist? Devil a bit. I’m a man of business. Before I ladle out that two thousand, I make a business contract with you. I happen to possess the means of making and the skill to make a passable imitation of the Bank of England paper; you are a skilled engraver and a plausible scamp. I am to supply you with paper blanks; you are to engrave plates, print the notes, and get them changed. I am to take two-thirds of the proceeds, and, although I have done the most difficult part of the work, I agree to regard my share of the profits as constituting repayment of the loan. Our contract amounts to this: I lend you two thousand without security—with an infernal amount of insecurity, in fact—you ‘promise, covenant, and agree,’ as the lawyers say, to hand me back ten thousand in instalments, being the products of our joint industry. It is a verbal contract which I have no means of enforcing; but I trust you to keep your word, and up to the present you have kept it. You have paid me a little over four thousand. Now you want to cry off and leave the balance unpaid. Isn’t that the position?”

“Not exactly,” said Varney. “I’m not crying off the debt; I only want time. Look here, Dan: I’m making about five-fifty a year now. That isn’t much, but I’ll manage to let you have a hundred a year out of it. What do you say to that?”

Purcell laughed scornfully. “A hundred a year to pay off six thousand! That’ll take just sixty years, and as I’m now forty-three, I shall be exactly a hundred and three years of age when the last instalment is paid. I think, Varney, you’ll admit that a man of a hundred and three is getting a bit past his prime.”

“Well, I’ll pay you something down to start. I’ve saved about eighteen hundred pounds out of the note business. You can have that now, and I’ll pay off as much as I can at a time until I’m clear. Remember that if I should happen to get clapped in chokee for twenty years or so you won’t get anything. And, I tell you, it’s getting a risky business.”

“I’m willing to take the risk,” said Purcell.

“I dare say you are!” Varney retorted passionately, “because it’s my risk. If I am grabbed, it’s my racket. You sit out. It’s I who passed the notes, and I’m known to be a skilled engraver. That’ll be good enough for them. They won’t trouble about who made the paper.”

“I hope not,” said Purcell.

“Of course they wouldn’t, and you know I shouldn’t give you away.”

“Naturally. Why should you? Wouldn’t do you any good.”

“Well, give me a chance, Dan,” Varney pleaded. “This business is getting on my nerves. I want to be quit of it. You’ve had four thousand; that’s a hundred per cent. You haven’t done so badly.”

“I didn’t expect to do badly. I took a big risk. I gambled two thousand for ten.”

“Yes, and you got me out of the way while you put the screw on to poor old Haygarth to make his daughter marry you.”

It was an indiscreet thing to say, but Purcell’s stolid indifference to his danger and distress had ruffled Varney’s temper somewhat.

Purcell, however, was unmoved. “I don’t know,” he said, “what you mean by getting you out of the way. You were never in the way. You were always hankering after Maggie, but I could never see that she wanted you.”

“Well, she certainly didn’t want you,” Varney retorted, “and, for that matter, I don’t much think she wants you now.”

For the first time Purcell withdrew his eye from the horizon to turn it on his companion. And an evil eye it was, set in the great sensual face, now purple with anger.

“What the devil do you mean?” he exclaimed furiously, “you infernal sallow-faced little whipper snapper! If you mention my wife’s name again I’ll knock you on the head and pitch you over board.”

Varney’s face flushed darkly, and for a moment he was inclined to try the wager of battle. But the odds were impossible, and if Varney was not a coward, neither was he a fool. But the discussion was at an end. Nothing was to be hoped for now. Those indiscreet words of provocation had rendered further pleading impossible; and as Varney relapsed into sullen silence, it was with the knowledge that, for weary years to come, he was doomed, at best, to tread the perilous path of crime, or, more probably, to waste the brightest years of his life in a convict prison. For it is a strange fact, and a curious commentary on our current ethical notions, that neither of these rascals even contemplated as a possibility the breach of a merely verbal covenant. A promise had been given. That was enough. Without a specific release, the terms of that promise must be fulfilled to the letter. How many righteous men—prim lawyers or strait-laced, church-going men of business—would have looked at the matter in the same way?

The silence that settled down on the yacht and the aloofness that encompassed the two men were conducive to reflection. Each of the men ignored the presence of the other. When the course was altered southerly, Purcell slacked out the sheets with his own hand as he put up the helm. He might have been sailing single-handed. And Varney watched him askance, but made no move, sitting hunched up on the locker, nursing a slowly matured hatred and thinking his thoughts.

Very queer thoughts they were, rambling, but yet connected and very vivid. He was following out the train of events that might have happened, pursuing them to their possible consequences. Supposing Purcell had carried out his threat? Well, there would have been a pretty tough struggle, for Varney was no weakling. But a struggle with that solid fifteen stone of flesh could end only in one way. He glanced at the great purple, shiny hand that grasped the knob of the tiller. Not the sort of hand that you would want at your throat! No, there was no doubt; he would have gone overboard.

And what then? Would Purcell have gone back to Sennen Cove, or sailed alone into Penzance? In either case, he would have had to make up some sort of story, and no one could have contradicted him, whether the story was believed or not. But it would have been awkward for Purcell.

Then there was the body: That would have washed up sooner or later, as much of it as the lobsters had left. Well, lobsters don’t eat clothes or bones, and a dent in the skull might take some accounting for. Very awkward, this, for Purcell. He would probably have had to clear out—to make a bolt for it, in short.

The mental picture of this great bully fleeing in terror from the vengeance of the law gave Varney appreciable pleasure. Most of his life he had been borne down by the moral and physical weight of this domineering brute. At school Purcell had fagged him; he had even bullied him up at Cambridge; and now he had fastened on for ever like the Old Man of the Sea. And Purcell always got the best of it. When he, Varney, had come back from Italy after that unfortunate little affair, behold! the girl whom they had both wanted (and who had wanted neither of them) had changed from Maggie Haygarth into Maggie Purcell. And so it was even unto this day. Purcell, once a book-keeper in a paper-mill, now a prosperous “financier”—a money-lender, as Varney more than suspected—spent a part of his secret leisure making, in absolute safety, those paper blanks, which he, Varney, must risk his liberty to change into money. Yes, it was quite pleasant to think of Purcell sneaking from town to town, from country to country, with the police at his heels.

But in these days of telegraphs and extradition there isn’t much chance for a fugitive. Purcell would have been caught to a certainty, and he would have been hanged; no doubt of it. And, passing lightly over less attractive details, Varney considered luxuriously the circumstances of the execution. What a figure he would have made, that great human ox, turning round and round at the end of a taut rope, like a baron of beef on a colossal roasting-jack! Varney looked gloatingly at his companion, considered his large sullen face, and thought how it would swell and grow purple as the rope tightened round the thick crimson neck.

A disagreeable picture, perhaps, but not to Varney, who saw it through the distorting medium of years of accumulated dislike. Then, too, there was the consideration that in the very moment that those brawny limbs had ceased to twitch Maggie would have been free—would have been a widow. Not that that would have concerned him, Varney: he would have been in some Cornish churchyard, with a dent in his skull. Still, it was a pleasant reflection.

The imagined picture of the execution gave him quite a lengthy entertainment. Then his errant thoughts began to spread out in search of other possibilities. For, after all, it was not an absolute certainty that Purcell could have got him overboard. There was just the chance that he might have gone overboard himself. That would have been a very different affair.

Varney settled himself composedly to consider the new and interesting train of consequences that would thus have been set going. They were more agreeable to contemplate than the others, because they did not include his own demise. The execution scene made no appearance in this version. The salient fact was that his oppressor would have vanished; that the intolerable burden of his servitude would have been lifted for ever; that he would have been free.

The thought of his regained freedom set him dreaming of the future—the future that might have been if he could have been rid of this monstrous parasite; the future that might even have held a place for Maggie—for she would have been free, too. It was all very pleasant to think about, though rather tantalizing. He almost wished he had let Purcell try to put him over.

Of course, some explanation would have to be given, some sort of story told, and people might not have believed him. Well, they could have pleased themselves about that. To be sure, there would have been the body; but if there were no marks of violence, what of it? Besides, it really need never have washed ashore: that could easily have been prevented, and if the body had never been found, who was to say that the man had gone overboard at all?

This, again, was a new view of the case, and it set his thoughts revolving afresh. He found himself roughly sketching out the conditions under which the body might have vanished for ever. It was mere idle speculation to while away a dull hour with an uncongenial companion, and he let his thoughts ramble at large. Now he was away in the imagined future, a future of peace and prosperity and honourable effort; and now his thoughts came back unbidden to fill in some forgotten detail. One moment he was dreamily wondering whether Maggie would ever have listened to him, ever have come to care for him; the next, he was back in the yacht’s cabin, where hung from a hook on the bulkhead the revolver that the Rodneys used to practise at floating bottles. It was usually loaded, he knew, but if not, there was a canvas bag full of cartridges in the starboard locker. Again he found himself dreaming of the home that he would have had, a home very different from the cheerless lodgings in which he moped at present; and then his thoughts had flitted back to the yacht’s hold, and were busying them selves with the row, of half-hundredweights that rested on the on either side of the kelson.

It was a curious mental state, rambling, seemingly incoherent, yet quite purposeful, the attention oscillating between the great general idea and its various component details. He was like a painter roughing the preliminary sketch of a picture, at first carelessly smearing in the general effect, then pausing from time to time to sharpen an edge, to touch in a crisp light, to define the shape of a shadow, but never losing sight of the central motive. And as in the sketch definable shapes begin to grow out of the formless expanse, and a vague suggestion crystallizes into an intelligible composition, so in Varney’s mind a process of gradual integration turned a vague and general idea into a clear picture, sharp, vivid, complete.

When Varney had thus brought his mental picture, so to speak, to a finish, its completeness surprised him. It was so simple, so secure. He had actually planned out the scheme of a murder; and behold! there was nothing in it. Anyone could have done it, and no one could have been any the wiser. Here he found himself wondering whether many murders passed undetected. They well might if murders were as easy and as safe as this. A dangerous reflection for an injured and angry man. And at this critical point his meditations were broken in on by Purcell, continuing the conversation as if there had been no pause.

“So you can take it from me, Varney, that I expect you to stick to your bargain. I paid down my money, and I’m going to have my pound of flesh.”

“You won’t agree to any sort of compromise?”

“No. There are six thousand pounds owing. If you’ve got the money you can hand it over. If you haven’t, you’ll have to go on the lay and get it. That’s all I’ve got to say. So now you know.”

It was a brutal thing to say, and it was brutally said. But more than that: it was inopportune—or opportune, as you will. For it came as a sort of infernal doxology to the devil’s anthem that had been, all unknown, ringing in Varney’s soul.

Purcell had spoken without looking round. That was his unpleasant habit. Had he looked at his companion, he might have been startled. A change in Varney’s face might have given him pause: a warm flush, a sparkle of the eye, a look of elation, of settled purpose, deadly, inexorable. The look of a man who has made a fateful resolution. But he never looked, and the warning of the uplifted axe passed him by.

It was so simple, so secure! That was the burden of the song that echoed in Varney’s brain. So safe! And there abroad were the watchful money-changers waiting for the clever forger to come once too often. There were the detectives lurking in ambush for him. No safety there! Rather the certainty of swift disaster, with the sequel of judge and jury, the clang of an iron door, and thereafter the dreary prison eating up the years of his life.

He glanced over the sea. They had opened the South Coast now, and he could see, afar off, a fleet of black-sailed luggers heading east. They wouldn’t be in his way. Nor would the big four-master that was creeping away to the west, for she was hull down already; and other ships there were none. There was one hindrance, though. Dead ahead the Wolf Rock lighthouse rose from the blue water, its red-and-white-ringed tower looking like some gaudily painted toy. The keepers of lonely light houses have a natural habit of watching the passing shipping through their glasses, and it was possible that one of their telescopes might be pointed at the yacht at this very moment. That was a complication.

Suddenly there came down the wind a sharp report like the firing of a gun, quickly followed by a second. Both men recognized the duplicate report and both looked round. It was the explosive signal from the Longships lighthouse; but when they looked there was no lighthouse to be seen, and the dark blue heaving water faded away at the foot of an advancing wall of vapour.

Purcell cursed volubly. A pretty place, this, to be caught in a fog! And then, as his eye lighted on his companion, he demanded angrily: “What the devil are you grinning at?” For Varney, drunk with suppressed excitement, snapped his fingers at rocks and shoals; he was thinking only of the light-keeper’s telescope and of the revolver that hung on the bulkhead. He must make some excuse presently to go below and secure that revolver.

But no excuse was necessary. The opportunity came of itself. After a hasty glance at the vanishing land and another at the compass, Purcell put up the helm to jibe the yacht round on to an easterly course. As she came round, the single headsail that she carried in place of jib and foresail shivered for a few seconds and then filled suddenly on the opposite tack. And at this moment the halyard parted with a loud snap, the end of the rope flew through the blocks, and, in an instant, the sail was down and its upper half trailing in the water alongside.

Purcell swore furiously, but kept an eye to business. “Run below, Varney,” said he, “and fetch up that coil of new rope out of the starboard locker while I haul the sail on board. And look alive. We don’t want to drift down on to the Wolf.”

Varney obeyed with silent alacrity and a curious feeling of elation. It was going to be even easier and safer than he had thought. He slipped through the hatch into the cabin, and, as he heard Purcell scrambling along the side-deck overhead, he quietly took the revolver from its hook and examined the chambers. Finding them all loaded, he cocked the hammer and slipped the weapon carefully into the inside breast-pocket of his oilskin coat. Then he took the coil of rope from the locker and went on deck.

As he emerged from the hatch he perceived that the yacht was already enveloped in fog, which drifted past in steamy clouds and swirling streamers, and that she had come up head to wind. Purcell was kneeling on the forecastle, tugging at the sail, which had caught under the forefoot, and punctuating his efforts with deep-voiced curses.

Varney stole silently along the deck, steadying himself by mast and shroud, softly laid down the coil of rope, and approached. Purcell was quite engrossed with his task; his back was towards Varney, his face over the side, intent on the entangled sail. It was a chance in a thousand.

With scarcely a moment’s hesitation Varney stooped forward, steadying himself with a hand on the little windlass, and, softly drawing forth the revolver, pointed it at the back of Purcell’s head, at the spot where the back seam of his sou’wester met the brim. The report rang out, but weak and flat in that open space, and a cloud of smoke mingled with the fog; but it blew away immediately, and showed Purcell almost unchanged in posture, crouching on the sail with his chin resting on the little rim of bulwark, while behind him his murderer, as if turned into bronze, still stood stooping forward, one hand grasping the windlass, the other still pointing the revolver.

Thus the two figures remained for some seconds motionless like some horrible waxworks, until the little yacht, lifting to the swell, gave a more than usually lively curvet, when Purcell rolled over on to his back, and Varney relaxed the rigidity of his posture like a golf player who has watched his ball drop. He bent over the prostrate figure with no emotion but curiosity. Looked into the wide-open, clear blue eyes, noted how the great red face had faded to a pallid mauve, against which the blood on lips and chin stood out like the painted patches on a clown’s face; but he felt not a single twinge of compunction.

Purcell was dead. That was the salient fact. The head wagged to and fro as the yacht pitched and rolled, the limp arms and legs seemed to twitch, the limp body to writhe uneasily. But Varney was not disturbed. Lifeless things will move on an unsteady deck. He was only interested to notice how the passive movements produced the illusion of life. But it was only illusion. Purcell was dead. There was no doubt of that.

The double report from the Longships came down the wind, and then, as if in answer, a prolonged deep bellow. That was the fog-horn of the lighthouse on the Wolf Rock, and it sounded surprisingly near. But, of course, these signals were meant to be heard at a distance. Then a stream of hot sunshine, pouring down on deck, startled him and made him hurry. The body must be got overboard before the fog lifted. With an uneasy glance at the clear sky over head, he hastily cast off the broken halyard from its cleat and cut off a couple of fathoms. Then he hurried below and, lifting the trap in the cabin floor, hoisted out one of the iron half-hundredweights with which the yacht was ballasted. As he stepped on deck with the weight in his hand the sun was shining overhead; but the fog was still thick below, and the horn sounded once more from the Wolf. And again it struck him as surprisingly near. He passed the length of rope that he had cut off twice round Purcell’s body, hauled it tight, and secured it with a knot. Then he made the ends fast to the handle of the iron weight.

Not much fear of Purcell drifting ashore now! That weight would hold him as long as there was anything to hold. But it had taken some time to do, and the warning bellow from the Wolf seemed to draw nearer and nearer. He was about to heave the body over when his eye fell on the dead man’s sou’ wester, which had fallen off when the body rolled over. That hat must be got rid of, for Purcell’s name was worked in silk on the lining, and there was an unmistakable bullet-hole through the back. It must be destroyed, or, which would be simpler and quicker, lashed securely on the dead man’s head.

Hurriedly, Varney ran aft and descended to the cabin. He had noticed a new ball of spun-yarn in the locker when he had fetched the rope. This would be the very thing.

He was back again in a few moments with the ball in his hand, unwinding it as he came, and without wasting time he knelt down by the body and fell to work. There was a curious absence of repugnance in his manner, horrible as his task would have seemed. He had to raise the dead man’s head to fit on the hat, and in so doing covered his left hand with blood. But he appeared to mind no more than if he had been handling a seal that he had shot or a large and dirty fish. Quite composedly, and with that deftness in the handling of cordage that marks the sailor-man, whether amateur or professional, he proceeded with his task, intent only on making the lashing secure and getting it done quickly.

And every half minute the deep-voiced growl of the Wolf came to him out of the fog, and each time it sounded nearer and yet nearer.

By the time he had made the sou’wester secure, the dead man’s face and chin were encaged in a web of spun-yarn that made him look like some old-time, grotesque-vizored Samurai warrior. But the hat was now immovable. Long after that burly corpse had dwindled to a mere skeleton it would hold, would still cling to the dead head when the face that looked through the lacing of cords was the face of a bare and grinning skull.

Varney rose to his feet. But his task was not finished yet. There was Purcell’s suitcase. That must be sunk, too; and there was something in it that had figured in the detailed picture that his imagination had drawn. He ran to the cockpit, where the suitcase lay, and having tried its fastenings and found it unlocked, he opened it and took out with his right hand—the clean one—a letter that lay on top of the other contents. This he tossed through the hatch into the cabin. Then his eye caught Purcell’s fountain-pen, slipped neatly through a loop in the lid. It was filled, he knew, with the peculiar black ink that Purcell always used. The thought passed swiftly through his mind that perchance it might be of use to him. In a moment he had drawn it from its loop and slipped it into his pocket. Then, having closed and fastened the suit case, he carried it forward and made it fast to the iron weight with a half-dozen turns of spun-yarn.

That was really all, and, indeed, it was time. As he rose, once more, to his feet, the growl of the fog horn burst out, as it seemed, right over the stern of the yacht, and she was drifting stern foremost, who could say how fast? Now, too, he caught a more ominous sound, which he might have heard sooner had he listened—the wash of water, the boom of breakers bursting on a rock.

A revulsion came over him. He burst into a wild sardonic laugh. And had it come to this, after all? Had he schemed and laboured only to leave himself alone on an unmanageable craft drifting down to shipwreck and certain death? Had he taken all this thought and care to secure Purcell’s body, when his own might be resting beside it on the sea bottom within an hour?

But his reverie was brief. Suddenly from the white void over his very head, as it seemed, there issued a stunning, thunderous roar that shook the very deck-under his feet. The water around him boiled into a foamy chaos, the din of bursting waves was in his ears, the yacht plunged and wallowed amidst clouds of spray, and, for an instant, a dim; gigantic shadow loomed through the fog and was gone.

In that moment his nerve had come back. Holding on, with one hand, to the windlass, he dragged the body to the edge of the forecastle, hoisted the weight out-board, and then, taking advantage of a heavy lurch, gave the corpse a vigorous shove. There was a rattle and a hollow splash, and corpse and weight and suitcase had vanished into the seething water.

He clung to the swinging mast and waited. Breathlessly he told out the allotted seconds until, once again, the invisible Titan belched forth his thunderous warning. But this time the roar came over the yacht’s bow. She had drifted past the Rock, then. The danger was over, and Purcell would have to go down to Davy Jones’s Locker companionless after all.

Very soon the water around ceased to boil and tumble, and as the yacht’s wild plunging settled down once more into the normal rise and fall on the long swell, Varney turned his attention to the refitting of the halyard. But what was this on the creamy duck sail? A pool of blood and a gory imprint of his own hand! That wouldn’t do at all. He would have to clear that away before he could hoist the sail, which was annoying, as the yacht was helpless without her head-sail and was evidently drifting out to sea.

He fetched a bucket, a swab, and a scrubbing brush, and set to work. The bulk of the large blood stain cleared off pretty completely after he had drenched the sail with a bucketful or two and given it a good scrubbing. But the edge of the stain, where the heat of the deck had dried it, remained like the painted boundary on a map; and the hand-print, which had also dried, though it faded to a pale buff, continued clearly visible.

Varney began to grow uneasy. If those stains would not come out, especially the hand-print, it would be very awkward; they would take such a deal of explaining. He decided to try the effect of marine soap, and fetched a cake from the cabin; but even this did not obliterate the stains completely, though it turned them a faint greenish brown, very unlike the colour of blood. Still he scrubbed on, until at last the hand-print faded away entirely and the large stain was reduced to a faint green wavy line, and that was the best he could do; and quite good enough, for if that faint line should ever be noticed, no one would ever suspect its origin.

He put away the bucket and proceeded with the refitting. The sea had disengaged the sail from the forefoot, and he hauled it on board without difficulty. Then there was the reeving of the new halyard—a troublesome business, involving the necessity of his going aloft, where his weight, small man as he was, made the yacht roll most infernally, and set him swinging to and fro like the bob of a metronome. But he was a smart yachtsman and active, though not powerful, and a few minutes’ strenuous exertion ended in his sliding down the shrouds with the new halyard running fairly through the upper block. A vigorous haul or two at the new hairy rope sent the head of the dripping sail aloft, and the yacht was once more under control.

The rig of the Sandhopper was not smart, but it was handy. She carried a short bowsprit to accommodate the single head-sail and a relatively large mizzen, of which the advantage was that by judicious management of the mizzen-sheet the yacht would sail with very little attention to the helm. Of this advantage Varney was keenly appreciative just now, for he had several things to do before entering port. The excitement of the last hour and the bodily exertions had left him shaky and faint. He wanted refreshment, he wanted a wash, and the various traces of recent events had to be removed. Also, there was that letter to be attended to. So that it was convenient to be able to leave the helm in charge of a lashing for a minute now and again.

When he had washed he put the kettle on the spirit-stove, and, while it was heating, busied himself in cleaning the revolver, flinging the empty cartridge-case overboard, and replacing it with a cartridge from the bag in the locker. Then he picked up the letter that he had taken from Purcell’s suitcase and examined it. It was addressed to “Joseph Penfield, Esq., George Yard, Lombard Street,” and was unstamped, though the envelope was fastened up. He affixed a stamp from his pocket-book, and, when the kettle began to boil, he held the envelope in the steam that issued from spout. Very soon the flap of the envelope loosened and curled back, when he laid it aside to mix himself a mug of hot grog, which, together with the letter and a biscuit-tin, he took out into the cockpit. The fog was still dense, and the hoot of a steamer’s whistle from somewhere to the westward caused him to reach the fog-horn out of the locker and blow a long blast on it. As if in answer to his treble squeak came the deep bass note from the Wolf, and, unconsciously, he looked round. He turned automatically, as one does towards a sudden noise, not expecting to see anything but fog, and what he did see startled him not a little.

For there was the lighthouse—or half of it, rather—standing up above the fogbank, clear, distinct, and hardly a mile away. The gilded vane, the sparkling lantern, the gallery, and the upper half of the red-and-white-ringed tower, stood sharp against the pallid sky, but the lower half was invisible. It was a strange apparition—like half a lighthouse suspended in mid-air—and uncommonly disturbing, too. It raised a very awkward question. If he could see the lantern the light-keepers could see him. But how long had the lantern been clear of the fog? That was the question, and the answer to it might come in a highly disagreeable form.

Thus he meditated as, with one hand on the tiller, he munched his biscuit and sipped his grog. Presently he picked up the stamped envelope and drew from it a letter, which he tore into fragments and dropped overboard. Then, from his pocket-book, he took a similar but unaddressed envelope, from which he drew out its contents, and very curious those contents were. There was a letter, brief and laconic, which he read thoughtfully. “These,” it ran, “are all I have by me, but they will do for the present, and when you have planted them I will let you have a fresh supply.” There was no date and no signature, but the rather peculiar handwriting, in jet-black ink, was similar to that on the envelope addressed to Joseph Penfield, Esq.

The other contents consisted of a dozen sheets of blank paper, each of the size of a Bank of England note. But they were not quite blank, for each bore an elaborate water-mark, identical with that of a twenty-pound banknote. They were, in fact, the “paper blanks” of which Purcell had spoken. The envelope with its contents had been slipped into his hand by Purcell, without remark, only three days ago.

Varney refolded the “blanks,” enclosed them within the letter, and slipped letter and “blanks” together into the stamped envelope, the flap of which he licked and reclosed.

“I should like to see old Penfield’s face when he opens that envelope,” was his reflection as, with a grim smile, he put it away in his pocket-book “And I wonder what he will do,” he added mentally; “however, I shall see before many days are over.”

Varney looked at his watch. He was to meet Jack Rodney on Penzance Pier at a quarter to three. He would never do it at this rate, for when he opened Mount’s Bay, Penzance would be right in the wind’s eye. That would mean a long beat to windward. Then Rodney would be there first, waiting for him. Deuced awkward, this. He would have to account for his being alone on board, would have to invent some lie about having put Purcell ashore at Mousehole or Newlyn. But a lie is a very pernicious thing. Its effects are cumulative. You never know when you have done with it. Apart from moral considerations, lies should be avoided at all cost of present inconvenience; that is, unless they are absolutely unavoidable, and then they should be as probable as can be managed, and not calculated to provoke inquiry. Now, if he had reached Penzance before Rodney, he need have said nothing about Purcell—for the present, at any rate, and that would have been so much safer.

When the yacht was about abreast of Lamorna Cove, though some seven miles to the south, the breeze began to draw ahead, and the fog cleared off quite suddenly. The change of wind was unfavourable for the moment, but when it veered round yet a little more until it blew from east-north-east, Varney brightened up considerably. There was still a chance of reaching Penzance before Rodney arrived; for now, as soon as he had fairly opened Mount’s Bay, he could head straight for his destination and make it on a single board.

Between two and three hours later the Sandhopper entered Penzance Harbour, and, threading her way among an assemblage of luggers and small coasters, brought up alongside the Albert Pier, at the foot of a vacant ladder.

Having made the yacht fast to a couple of rings, Varney divested himself of his oilskins, locked the cabin scuttle, and climbed the ladder. The change of wind had saved him after all, and as he strode away along the pier he glanced complacently at his watch. He still had nearly half an hour to the good.

He seemed to know the place well and to have a definite objective, for he struck out briskly from the foot of the pier into Market Jew Street, and from thence, by a somewhat zigzag route, to a road which eventually brought him out about the middle of the esplanade. Continuing westward, he entered the Newlyn Road, along which he walked rapidly for about a third of a mile, when he drew up opposite a small letter-box, which was let into a wall. Here he stopped to read the tablet, on which was printed the hours of collection, and then, having glanced at his watch, he walked on again, but at a less rapid pace.

When he reached the outskirts of Newlyn, he turned and began slowly to retrace his steps, looking at his watch from time to time with a certain air of impatience. Presently a quick step behind him caused him to look round. The newcomer was a postman, striding along, bag on shoulder, with the noisy tread of a heavily shod man and evidently collecting letters. Varney let him pass, watched him halt at the little letter-box, unlock the door, gather up the letters, and stow them in his bag, heard the clang of the iron door, and finally saw the man set forth again on his pilgrimage. Then he brought forth his pocket-book, and drawing from it the letter addressed to Joseph Penfield, Esq., stepped up to the letter-box. The tablet now announced that the next collection would be at 8.30 P.M. Varney read the announcement with a faint smile, glanced again at his watch, which stood at two minutes past four, and dropped the letter into the box.

As he walked up the pier with a large paper bag under his arm, he became aware of a tall man who was doing sentry-go before a Gladstone bag that stood on the coping opposite the ladder, and who, observing his approach, came forward to meet him.

“Here you are, then, Rodney,” was Varney’ s rather unoriginal greeting.

“Yes,” replied Rodney, “and here I’ve been for nearly half an hour. Purcell gone?”

“Bless you! yes, long ago,” answered Varney.

“I didn’t see him at the station. What train was he going by?”

“I don’t know. He said something about taking Falmouth on the way; had some business or other there. But I expect he’s gone to have a feed at one of the hotels. We got hung up in a fog; that’s why I’m so late. I’ve been up to buy some grog.”

“Well,” said Rodney, “bring it on board. It’s time we were under way. As soon as we are outside I’ll take charge, and you can go below and stoke up at your ease.”

The two men descended the ladder and proceeded at once to hoist the sails and cast off the shore ropes. A few strokes of an oar sent them clear of the lee of the pier, and in a few minutes the yacht Sandhopper was once more outside, heading south with a steady breeze from east-north-east.

CHAPTER II

In which Margaret Purcell receives a Letter

Daylight dies hard in the month of June, and Night comes but tardily into her scanty reversion. The clock on the mantelpiece stood at half-past nine, and candles twinkled on the supper table, but even now the slaty-grey band of twilight was only just stealing up behind the horizon to veil the fading glories of the western sky.

Varney sat at the old-fashioned, oval, gate-legged table with an air of placid contentment, listening to and joining in the rather disconnected talk (for hungry people are poor conversationalists) with quiet geniality but with a certain remoteness and abstraction. From where he sat he could see out through the open window the great ocean stretching away to the south and west, the glittering horizon, and the gorgeous evening sky. With quiet pleasure he had watched the changing scene—the crimson disc of the setting sun, the flaming gold softening down into the sober tints of the afterglow—and now, as the grey herald of the night spread upwards, his eye dwelt steadily on one spot away in the south-west. At first faintly visible, then waxing as the daylight waned, a momentary spark flashed in the heart of the twilight grey, now white like the sparkle of a diamond, now crimson like the flash of a ruby. It was the light on the Wolf Rock.

He watched it thoughtfully as he talked: white—red, white—red, diamond—ruby, so it would go on every fifteen seconds through the short summer night—to mariners a warning and a guide; to him, a message of release; for another, a memorial.

As he looked at the changing light, he thought of his enemy lying out there in the chilly depths on the bed of the sea. It was strange how often he thought of Purcell. For the man was dead; had gone out of his life utterly. And yet, in the two days that had passed, every trivial incident had seemed to connect itself and him with the man who was gone. And so it was now. All roads seemed to lead to Purcell. If he looked out seaward, there was the lighthouse flashing its secret message, as if it should say, “We know, you and I; he is down here.” If he looked around the table, still everything spoke of the dead man. There was Philip Rodney—Purcell and he had talked of him on the yacht. There was Jack Rodney, who had waited on the pier for the man who had not come. There, at the hostess’s right hand, was the quiet, keen-faced stranger whom Purcell, for some reason, had not wished to meet; and there, at the head of the table, was Margaret herself, the determining cause of it all. Even the very lobsters on the table (lobsters are plentiful at the Land’s End) set him thinking of dark crawling shapes down in that dim underworld, groping around a larger shape tethered to an iron weight.

He turned his face resolutely away from the sea. He would think no more of Purcell. The fellow had dogged him through life, but now he was gone. Enough of Purcell. Let him think of something more pleasant.

The most agreeable object of contemplation within his field of vision was the woman who sat at the head of the table, his hostess. And, in fact, Margaret Purcell was very pleasant to look upon, not only for her comeliness—though she was undoubtedly a pretty, almost a beautiful, woman—but because she was sweet-faced and gracious, and what men compliment the sex by calling “womanly.” She was evidently under thirty, though she carried a certain matronly sedateness and an air of being older than she either looked or was, which was accentuated by the fashion in which she wore her hair, primly parted in the middle; a rather big woman, quiet and reposeful, as big women often are.

Varney looked at her with a kind of wonder. He had always thought her lovely, and now she seemed lovelier than ever. And she was a widow, little as she suspected it, little as anyone but he suspected it. But it was a fact. She was free to marry, if she only knew it.

He hugged himself at the thought and listened dreamily to the mellow tones of her voice. She was talking to her guest and the elder Rodney, but he had only a dim idea of what she was saying; he was enjoying the music of her speech rather than attending to the matter. Suddenly she turned to him and asked:

“Don’t you agree with me, Mr. Varney?”

He pulled himself together, and, after a momentarily vacant look, answered:

“I always agree with you, Mrs. Purcell.”

“And so,” said Jack Rodney, “as the greater includes the less, he agrees with you now. I am admiring your self-possession, Varney; you haven’t the least idea what we were talking about.”

Varney laughed and reddened, and Margaret looked at him with playful reproach.

“Haven’t you?” she asked. “But how deceitful of you to answer so readily! I was remarking that lawyers have a way of making a solemn parade of exactness and secrecy when there is no occasion. That was my statement.”

“And it is perfectly correct,” said Varney. “You know it is, Rodney. You’re always doing it. I’ve noticed it constantly.”

“Oh, this is mere vindictiveness, because he unmasked your deceit. I wasn’t alluding to Mr. Rodney or anyone in particular. I was just speaking generally.”

“But,” said Varney, “something must have suggested the reflection.”

“Certainly. Something did: a letter that I have just received from Mr. Penfield; a most portentous document, and all about nothing.”

At the mention of the lawyer’s name Varney’s attention came to a sharp focus.

“It seems,” Margaret continued, “that Dan, when he wrote to Mr. Penfield the other day, put the wrong letter in the envelope—a silly thing to do, but we all do silly things sometimes.”

“I don’t,” said Rodney.

“Well, ordinary persons, I mean. Then Mr. Penfield, instead of simply stating the fact and returning the letter, becomes mysterious and alarming. He informs me that the envelope was addressed in Dan’s handwriting, that the letter was posted at Penzance at eight-thirty P.M., that it was opened by him in person, and that the contents, which have been seen by no one but himself, are at present reposing in his private safe, of which he alone has the key. What he does not tell us is what the contents of the envelope were, which is the only thing that matters. It is most extraordinary. From the tone of his letter one would think that the envelope had contained something dreadful and incriminating.”

“Perhaps it did,” said Varney. “Dan’s political views are distinctly revolutionary, and he is as secret as a whole barrel of oysters. That letter may have contained particulars of some sort of Guy Fawkes conspiracy, enclosing samples of suitable explosives. Who knows?”

Margaret was about to reply, when her glance happened to light on Jack Rodney, and something in that gentleman’s expressive and handsome face gave her pause. Had she been chattering indiscreetly? And might Mr. Penfield have meant something after all? There were some curious points about his letter. She smilingly accepted the Guy Fawkes theory and then adroitly changed the subject.

“Speaking of Penzance, Mr. Varney, reminds me that you haven’t told us what sort of voyage you had. There was quite a thick fog wasn’t there?”

“Yes. It delayed us a lot. Purcell would steer right out to sea for fear of going ashore. Then the breeze failed for a time, and then it veered round easterly and headed us, and, as a wind up to the chapter of accidents, the jib-halyards carried away and we had to reeve a new one. Nice crazy gear you keep on your craft, Rodney.”

“I suspected that rope,” said Rodney—” in fact, I had meant to fit a new halyard before I went up to town. But I should have liked to see Purcell shinning up aloft.”

“So should I—from the shore,” said Varney. “He’d have carried away the mast or capsized the yacht. No, my friend; I left him below as a counterpoise and went aloft myself.”

“Did Dan go straight off to the station?” Margaret asked.

“I should say not,” replied Varney. “He was in a mighty hurry to be off—said he had some things to see to; I fancy one of them was a grilled steak and a bottle of Bass. We were both pretty ravenous.”

“But why didn’t you go with him if you were ravenous too?”

“I had to snug up the yacht and he wouldn’t wait. He was up the ladder like a lamplighter almost before we had made fast. I can see him now, with that great suitcase in his hand, going up as light as a feather. He is wonderfully active for his size.”

“Isn’t he?” said Rodney. “But these big men often are. Look at the way those great lumping pilots will drop down into a boat: as light as cats.”

“He is a big fellow, too,” said Varney. “I was looking at him as he stopped at the top of the ladder to sing out ‘So long.’ He looked quite gigantic in his oilskins.”

“He actually went up into town in his oilskins, did he?” exclaimed Margaret. “He must have been impatient for his meal! Oh, how silly of me! I never sewed on that button that had come off the collar of his oilskin coat. I hope you didn’t have a wet passage.”

“You need not reproach yourself, Mrs. Purcell,” interposed Philip Rodney. “Your neglect was made good by my providence. I sewed on that button when I borrowed the coat on Friday evening to go to my diggings in.”

“You told me you hadn’t a spare oilskin button,” said Margaret.

“I hadn’t, but I made one—out of a cork.”

“A cork?” Margaret exclaimed, with an incredulous laugh.

“Not a common cork, you know,” Philip explained. “It was a flat circular cork from one of my collecting jars, waterproofed with paraffin wax; a most superior affair, with a beautiful round label—also waterproofed by the wax—on which was typed ‘Marine Worms.’ The label was very decorative. It’s my own invention, and I’m rather proud of it.”

“You may well be. And I suppose you sewed it on with rope-yarn and a sail-needle?” Margaret suggested.

“Not at all. It was secured with catgut, the fag end of an E string that I happened to have in my pocket. You see, I had no needle or thread, so I made two holes in the cork with the marlin-spike in my pocket-knife, two similar holes in the coat, poked the ends of the fiddlestring through, tied a reef-knot inside, and there it was, tight as wax—paraffin wax.”

“It was very ingenious and resourceful of you,” Varney commented, “but the product wasn’t very happily disposed of on Dan’s coat—I mean as to your decorative label. I take it that Dan’s interest in marine worms is limited to their use as bait. Now if you could have fitted out Dr. Thorndyke with a set there would have been some appropriateness in it, since marine worms are the objects of his devotion—at least, so I understand,” and he looked interrogatively at Margaret’s guest.

Dr. Thorndyke smiled. “You are draping me in the mantle of my friend, Professor D’Arcy,” he said. “He is the real devotee. I have merely come down for a few days to stay with him and be an interested spectator of the chase. It is he who should have the buttons.”

“Still,” said Varney, “you aid and abet him. I suppose you help him to dig them up.”

Philip laughed scornfully. “Why, you are as bad as Dan, Varney. You are thinking in terms of bait. Do you imagine Dr. Thorndyke and the professor go a-worming with a bully-beef tin and a garden fork as you do when you are getting ready for a fishing jaunt?”

“Well, how was I to know?” retorted Varney. “I am not a naturalist. What do they do? Set traps for ’em with bits of cheese inside?”

“Of course they don’t,” laughed Margaret. “How absurd you are, Mr. Varney! They go out with a boat and a dredge, and very interesting it must be to bring up all those curious creatures from the bottom of the sea.”

She spoke rather absently, for her thoughts had gone back to Mr. Penfield’s letter. There was certainly something a little cryptic in its tone, which she had taken for mere professional pedantry, but which she now recalled with vague uneasiness. Could the old lawyer have stumbled on something discreditable and written this ambiguously worded letter as a warning? Her husband was not a communicative man, and she could not pretend to herself that she had an exalted opinion of his moral character. It was all very disquieting.

The housekeeper, who had been retained with the furnished house, brought in the coffee, and as Margaret poured it out she continued her reflections, watching Varney with unconscious curiosity as he rolled a cigarette. The ring-finger of his left hand had a stiff joint, the result of an old injury, and was permanently bent at a sharp angle. It gave his hand an appearance of awkwardness, but she noted that he rolled his cigarette as quickly and neatly as if all his fingers were sound. The stiff finger had become normal to him. And she also noted that Dr. Thorndyke appeared quite interested in the contrast between the appearance of awkwardness and the actual efficiency of the maimed finger.

From Varney her attention—or inattention—wandered to her guest. Absently she dwelt on his powerful, intellectual face, his bold, clean-cut features, his shapely mouth, firm almost to severity; and all the time she was thinking of Mr. Penfield’s letter.

“Have we all finished?” she asked at length; “and if so, where are we going to smoke our pipes and cigars?”

“I propose that we go into the garden,” said Philip. “It is a lovely evening, and we can look at the moonlight on the sea while we smoke.”

“Yes,” Margaret agreed, “it will be more pleasant out there. Don’t wait for me. I will join you in a few minutes, but I want first to have a few words with Mr. Rodney.”

Philip, who, like the others, understood that this was a consultation on the subject of Mr. Penfield’s letter, rose and playfully shepherded Varney out of the door which his brother held invitingly open. “Now then, Varney, out you go. No lagging behind and eavesdropping. The pronouncements of the oracle are not for the likes of you and me.”

Varney took his dismissal with a smile and followed Dr. Thorndyke out, though, as he looked at the barrister’s commanding figure and handsome face, he could not repress a twinge of jealousy. Why could not Maggie have consulted him? He was an old friend, and he knew more about old Penfield’s letter than Rodney did. But, of course, she had no idea of that.

As soon as they were alone, Margaret and Rodney resumed their seats, and the former opened the subject without preamble.

“What do you really think of Mr. Penfield’s letter?” she asked.

“Could you give me, in general terms, the substance of what he says?” Rodney answered cautiously.

“I had better show you the letter itself,” said Margaret.

She rose and left the room, returning almost immediately with an official-looking envelope, which she handed to Rodney. The letter, which he extracted from it and spread out on the table, was not remarkably legible; an elderly solicitor’s autograph letters seldom are. But barristers, like old-fashioned druggists, are usually expert decipherers, and Rodney read the letter without difficulty. It ran thus:

“George Yard,

“Lombard Street, E.C.

“2 June, 1911.

“Dear Mrs. Purcell,

“I have just received from your husband a letter with certain enclosures, which have caused me some surprise. The envelope is addressed to me in his handwriting, and the letter, which is unsigned, is also in his hand; but neither the letter nor the other contents could possibly have been intended for me, and it is manifest that they have been placed in the wrong envelope.

“The postmark shows that the letter was posted at Penzance at 8.30 P.M. on the 23rd instant. It was opened by me, and the contents, which have been seen by no one but me, have been deposited in my private safe, of which I alone have the key.

“Will you very kindly acquaint your husband with these facts and request him to call on me at his early convenience?

“I am,

“Dear Mrs. Purcell,

“Yours sincerely,

“Joseph Penfield.

“Mrs. Daniel Purcell,

Sennen,

“Cornwall.”

Rodney read the solicitor’s letter through twice, refolded it, replaced it in its envelope, and returned it to Margaret.

“Well, what do you think of it?” the latter asked.

Rodney reflected for some moments.

“It’s a very careful letter,” he replied at length.

“Yes, I know; and that is a very careful answer, but not very helpful. Now do drop the lawyer and tell me just what you think like a good friend.”

Rodney looked at her quickly with a faint smile and yet very earnestly. He found it strangely pleasant to be called a good friend by Margaret Purcell.

“I gather,” he said slowly, “from the tone of Mr. Penfield’s letter, that he found something in that envelope that your husband would not have wished him to see—something that he had reasons for wishing no one to see but the person for whom it was meant.”

“Do you mean something discreditable or compromising?”

“We mustn’t jump at conclusions. Mr. Penfield is very reticent, so, presumably, he has some reasons for reticence, otherwise he would have said plainly what the envelope contained. But why does he write to you? Doesn’t he know your husband’s address?”

“No, but he could have got it from Dan’s office. I have been wondering myself why he wrote to me.”

“Has your husband arrived at Oulton yet?”

“Heavens! Yes. It doesn’t take two days and a half to get to Norfolk.”

“Oh, then he wasn’t staying at Falmouth?”

Margaret stared at him. “Falmouth!” she exclaimed. “What do you mean?”

“I understood Varney to say that he was going to call at Falmouth.”

“No, certainly not. He was going straight to London and so on to Oulton the same night. I wonder what Mr. Varney can have meant.”

“We must find out presently. Have you heard from your husband since he left?”

“No. Oddly enough, he hasn’t written, which is unlike him. He generally sends me a line as soon as he arrives anywhere.”

“You had better send him a telegram in the morning to make sure of his whereabouts, and then let him have a copy of Mr. Penfield’s letter at once. And I think I wouldn’t refer to the subject before any of our friends if I were you.”

“No. I oughtn’t to have said what I did. But, of course, I didn’t dream that Mr. Penfield really meant anything. Shall we go out into the garden?”

Rodney opened the door for her, and they passed out to where their three companions sat in deck-chairs facing the sea. Two chairs had been placed for them, and, as they seated themselves, Varney remarked:

“I take it that the oracle has spoken, and I hope he was more explicit than oracles are usually.”

“He was explicit and discreet—especially discreet,” Margaret replied.

“Oh, they are always that,” said Varney; “discretion is the oracular speciality. The explicitness is exceptional.”

“I believe it is,” replied Margaret, “and I am glad you set so much value on it because I am coming to you now for information. Mr. Rodney tells me that Dan said something to you about Falmouth. What was it?”

“He said he was going to call in there—at least, so I understood.”

“But he wasn’t, you know. He was going direct to London and straight on to Oulton the same night. You must have misunderstood him.”

“I may have done, but I don’t think I did. Still, he only mentioned the matter casually, and I wasn’t paying particular attention.”

Margaret made no rejoinder, and the party became somewhat silent. Philip, realizing Margaret’s uneasy preoccupation, engaged Dr. Thorndyke in an animated conversation respecting the natural history of the Cornish coast and the pleasures of dredging.

The other three became profoundly thoughtful. To each the solicitor’s letter had its special message, though to one only was that message clearly intelligible. Rodney was puzzled and deeply suspicious. To him the letter had read like that of a man washing his hands of a disagreeable responsibility. The curious reticence as to the nature of the enclosures and the reference to the private safe sounded ominous. He knew little of Purcell—he had been a friend of the Haygarths’—and had no great opinion of him. Purcell was a financier, and financiers sometimes did queer things. At any rate, Penfield’s excessive caution suggested something fishy—possibly something illicit. In fact, to speak colloquially, Rodney smelt a rat.

Margaret also was puzzled and suspicious, but, womanlike, she allowed her suspicions to take a more special form. She, too, smelt a rat, but it was a feminine rat. The lawyer’s silence as to the contents of that mysterious envelope seemed to admit of no other interpretation. It was so pointed. Of course he could not tell her, though he was an old friend and her trustee, so he had said nothing.

She reflected on the matter with lukewarm displeasure. Her relations with her husband were not such as to admit of jealousy in the ordinary sense; but still, she was married to him, and any affair on his part with another woman would be very disagreeable and humiliating to her. It might lead to a scandal, too, and from that her ingrained delicacy revolted.

Varney, meanwhile, sat with his head thrown back wrapped in thought of a more dreamy quality. He knew all about the letter, and his mind was occupying itself with speculation as to its effects. Rodney’s view of it he gauged pretty accurately, but what did she think of it? Was she anxious—worried at the prospect of some unpleasant disclosure? He hoped not. At any rate, it could not be helped. And she was free, if she only knew it.

He had smoked out his cigarette, and now, as he abstractedly filled his pipe, his eye insensibly sought the spot where the diamond and ruby flashed out alternately from the bosom of the night. A cloud had crept over the moon, and the transitory golden and crimson gleam shone out bright and clear amidst the encompassing darkness, white—red, white—red, diamond—ruby, a message in a secret code from the tall, unseen sentinel on that solitary, wave-washed rock, bidding him be of good cheer, reminding him again and again of the freedom that was his—and hers, made everlastingly secure by a friendly iron sinker.

The cloud turned silvery at the edge and the moon sailed out into the open. Margaret looked up at it thoughtfully.

“I wonder where Dan is tonight,” she said; and in the pause that followed a crimson spark from the dim horizon seemed to Varney to signal, “Here,” and instantly fade into discreet darkness.

“Perhaps,” suggested Philip, “he is having a moonlight sail on the Broad, or, more probably, taking a whisky-and-soda with Bradford in the inn parlour where the stuffed pike is. You remember that stuffed pike, Jack?”

His brother nodded. “Can I ever forget it, or the landlord’s interminable story of its capture? I wonder why people become so intolerably boresome about their fishing exploits. The angler is nearly as bad as the golfer.”

“Still,” said Varney, “he has more excuse. It is more of an achievement to catch a pike or a salmon than merely to whack a ball with a stick.”

“Isn’t that rather a crude description of the game?” asked Margaret. “It is to be hoped that Dr. Thorndyke is not an enthusiast.”

“I am not,” he assured her—“in fact, I was admiring Mr. Varney’s simplification. His definition of the game is worthy of Dr. Johnson. But I must tear myself away. My host is an early bird, and I expect you are, too. Good-night, Mrs. Purcell. It has been very delightful to meet you again. I am only sorry that I should have missed your husband.”

“So am I,” said Margaret, shaking his hand warmly, “but I think it most kind of you to have remembered me after all these years.”

As Dr. Thorndyke rose, the other three men stood up. “It is time for us to go, too,” said Rodney, “so we will see you to the end of the road, Thorndyke. Good-night, Mrs. Purcell.”

“Good-night, gentlemen all,” she replied. “Eight o’clock breakfast, remember.”

The four men went into the house to fetch their hats and took their departure, walking together as far as the cross-roads, where Thorndyke wished the other three “good-night” and left them to pursue their way to the village.

The lodging accommodation in this neighbourhood was not sumptuous, but our three friends were not soft or fastidious. Besides, they only slept at their “diggings,” taking their meals and making their home at the house which Purcell had hired, furnished, for the holiday. It was a somewhat unconventional arrangement, now that Purcell had gone, and spoke eloquently of his confidence in the discretion of his attractive wife.

The three men were not in the same lodgings. Varney was “putting up” at the “First and Last” inn in the adjoining village—or “church-town,” to give it its local title—of Sennen, while the Rodneys shared a room at the “Ship” down in Sennen Cove, more than a mile away. They proceeded together as far as Varney’s hostel, when, having wished him “good-night,” the two brothers strode away along, the moonlit road towards the Cove.

For a while neither spoke, though the thoughts of both were occupied by the same subject, the solicitor’s letter. Philip had fully taken in the situation, although he had made no remark on it, and the fact that his brother had been consulted quasi-professionally on the subject made him hesitate to refer to it. For in spite of his gay, almost frivolous, manner, Philip Rodney was a responsible medical practitioner, and really a man of sound judgment and discretion.

Presently his scruples yielded to the consideration that his brother was not likely to divulge any confidence, and he remarked:

“I hope Purcell hasn’t been doing anything shady. It sounded to me as if there was a touch of Pontius Pilate in the tone of Penfield’ s letter.”

“Yes, a very guarded tone, with a certain note of preparation for unpleasant possibilities. So it struck me. I do sincerely hope there isn’t anything in it.”

“So do I, by Jove! but I shouldn’t be so very astonished. Of course we don’t know anything against Purcell—at least, I don’t—but somehow he doesn’t strike me as a very scrupulous man. His outlook on life jars a bit; don’t you feel that some times?”

“The commercial standard isn’t quite the same as the professional, you know,” Jack Rodney answered evasively, “and financial circles are not exactly of the higher morality. But I know of nothing to Purcell’s discredit.”

“No, of course not. But he isn’t the same class as his wife; she’s a lot too good for a coarse, bucolic fellow like that. I wonder why the deuce she married him. I used to think she rather liked you.”

“A woman can’t marry every man she rather likes, you know, Phil, unless she happens to live in Ladak; and even there I believe there are limits. But to come back to Purcell, we may be worrying ourselves about nothing. Tomorrow we shall get into touch with him by telegraph, and then we may hear something from him.”

Here the consideration of Purcell and his affairs dropped so far as conversation went; but in the elder man’s mind certain memories had been revived by his brother’s remark and occupied it during the remainder of the walk. For he, too, had once thought that Maggie Haygarth rather liked him, and he now recalled the shock of disagreeable surprise with which he had heard of her marriage. But that was over and done with long ago, and the question now was, how was the Sandhopper, at present moored in Whitesand Bay, to be got from the Land’s End to her moorings above Westminster Bridge?—a problem that engaged the attention of the two brothers until they turned into their respective beds and the laggard, according to immemorial custom, blew out the light.

In spite of Mrs. Purcell’s admonition they were some minutes late on the following morning. Their two friends were already seated at the breakfast table, and it needed no extraordinary powers of observation to see that something had happened. Their hostess was pale and looked worried and some what frightened, and Varney was preternaturally grave. A telegram lay open on the table by Margaret’s place, and as Rodney advanced to shake hands, she held it out to him without a word. He took the paper and read the brief but ominous message that confirmed but too plainly his misgivings of the previous night.

“Where is Dan? Expected him here Tuesday night. Hope nothing wrong. —BRADFORD, Angler’s Hotel, Oulton.”

Rodney laid down the telegram and looked at Margaret. “This is a queer business,” said he. “Have you done anything?”

“No,” she replied. “What can we do?” Rodney took a slip of paper and a pencil from his pocket. “If you will write down the name of the partner or clerk who is attending at the office and address, and that of the caretaker of your flat, I will go and send off reply-paid telegrams to them asking for information as to your husband’s whereabouts, and I will also reply to Mr. Bradford. It is just possible that Purcell may have gone home after all.”

“It’s very unlikely,” said Margaret. “The flat is shut up, and he would surely have written. Still, we may as well make sure, if you will be so kind. But won’t you have your breakfast first?”

“We’d better waste no time,” he answered, and, pocketing the paper, strode away on his errand.

Little was said until he returned, and even then the breakfast proceeded in a gloomy silence that contrasted strangely with the usual vivacity of the gatherings around that hospitable table. A feeling of tense expectation pervaded the party and a vivid sense of impending disaster. Dreary efforts were made to keep some kind of conversation going, but the talk was colourless and disjointed with long and awkward pauses.

Varney especially was wrapped in deep meditation. Outwardly he preserved an appearance of sympathetic anxiety, but inwardly he was conscious of a strange, rather agreeable excitement, almost of elation. When he looked at Margaret’s troubled face he felt a pang of regret, of contrition; but principally he was sensible of a feeling of power, of knowledge. He sat apart, as it were, Godlike, omniscient. He knew all the facts that were hidden from the others. The past lay clear before him to the smallest detail; the involved present was as an open book which he read with ease, and he could even peer confidently into the future.

And these men and the woman before him, and those others afar off—the men at the office, the caretaker, Penfield the lawyer, and Bradford at his inn in Norfolk—what were they but so many puppets, moving feverishly hither and thither as he, the unseen master-spirit, directed them by a pull at the strings? It was he who had wound them up and set them going; and here he sat, motionless and quiet, watching them do his bidding. He was reminded of an occasion when he had been permitted for a short time to steer a five-thousand-ton steamer. What a sense of power it had given him to watch the stupendous consequences of his own trifling movements! A touch of the little wheel, the movement of a spoke or two to right or left, and what a commotion followed! How the steam gear had clanked with furious haste to obey, and the great ship had presently swerved round, responsive to the pressure of his fingers! What a wonderful thing it had been! There was that colossal structure with its enormous burden of merchandise, its teeming population sweating in the stokehold or sleeping in the dark forecastle, its unconscious passengers chatting on the decks, reading, writing, or playing cards in saloon or smoking-room; and he had had it all in the grasp of one hand, had moved it and turned it about with the mere touch of a finger.

And so it was now. The magical pressure of his finger on the trigger, a few turns of a rope, the hoisting of an iron weight, and behold! the whole course of a human life—probably of several human lives—was changed utterly.

It was a tremendous thought.

In a little over an hour the replies to Rodney’s discreetly worded inquiries had come in. Mr. Purcell had not been home nor had he been heard of at the office. Mr. Penfield had been inquiring as to his whereabouts and so had Mr. Bradford. That was all. And what it amounted to was that Daniel Purcell had disappeared.

“Can’t you remember exactly what Dan said about going to Falmouth, Mr. Varney?” Margaret asked.

“I am sorry to say I can’t,” replied Varney. “You see, he just threw the remark off casually, and I didn’t ask any questions. He isn’t very fond of being questioned, you know.”

“I wonder what he could have been going to Falmouth for,” she mused. In reality she did not wonder at all. She felt pretty certain that she knew. But pride would not allow her publicly to adopt that explanation until it was forced on her. “It seems to me that there is only one course,” she continued. “I must go up to town and see Mr. Penfield. Don’t you think so, Mr. Rodney?”

“Certainly. He is the only one who knows anything and is able to advise.” He hesitated a moment, and then added: “Hadn’t we better come up with you?”

“Yes,” said Varney eagerly; “let us all go up.”

Margaret considered for a few moments. “It is excessively kind and sympathetic of you all, and I am glad you offered, because it makes me feel that I have good loyal friends, which is a great deal to know just now. But, really, there would be no use in breaking up your holidays. What could you do? We can’t make a search in person. Why not take over the house and stay on here?”

“We don’t want the house if you’re not in it,” said Philip.

“No,” agreed Jack Rodney; “if we can’t be of use to you we shall get afloat and begin to crawl round the coast homewards.”

“I think I shall run over to Falmouth and see if I can pick up any news,” said Varney.

“Thank you,” said Margaret. “I think that would be really useful,” and Rodney agreed heartily, adding: “Why not come round in the yacht, Varney? We shall probably get there tomorrow night.”

Varney reflected. And suddenly it was borne in upon him that he felt an unspeakable repugnance to the idea of going on board the yacht, and especially to making the voyage from Sennen to Penzance. The feeling came to him as an utter surprise, but there was no doubt of its reality.

“I think I’ll go over by train,” he said. “It will save a day, you know.”

“Then we will meet you there,” said Rodney; “and, Mrs. Purcell, will you send us a letter to the Green Banks Hotel, Falmouth, and let us know what Mr. Penfield says, and if you would like us to come up to town to help you?”

“Thank you, yes, I will,” Margaret replied heartily. “And I promise that, if I want your help, I will ask for it.”

“That is a solemn promise, mind,” said Rodney.

“Yes, I mean it—a solemn promise.”

So the matter was arranged. By twelve o’clock, the weather being calm, the yacht was got under way for Penzance. And even as on that other occasion, she headed seaward with her crew of two, watched from the shore by a woman and a man.

CHAPTER III

In which Margaret Purcell consults Mr. Penfield

Mr. Joseph Penfield was undeniably in a rather awkward dilemma. For he had hooked the wrong fish. His letter to Maggie Purcell had been designed to put him immediately in touch with Purcell himself, whereas it had evoked an urgent telegram from Maggie announcing her intention of calling on him “on important business” and entreating him to arrange an interview.

It was really most unfortunate. There was no one in the world whom he had less desire to see, at the present moment, than Margaret Purcell. And yet there was no possible escape; for not only was he her solicitor and her trustee, but he was an old family friend, and not a little attached to her in his dry way. But he didn’t want her just now. He wanted Purcell, and he wanted him very badly.

For a solicitor of irreproachable character and spotless reputation his position was highly unpleasant. As soon as he had opened the letter from Penzance he had recognised the nature of the enclosures, and had instantly connected them with the forgeries of Bank of England notes of which he had heard. The intricate water-marks on the “blanks” were unmistakable. But so was the handwriting of the accompanying letter. It was Daniel Purcell’s beyond a doubt, and the peculiar, intensely black ink was equally characteristic. And, short as the note was, it made perfectly clear its connection with the incriminating enclosures. It wrote down Daniel Purcell a banknote forger.

Now Mr. Penfield was, as we have said, a man of irreproachable character. But he was a very secretive and rather casuistical old gentleman; and his regard for Margaret had led him to apply his casuistry to the present case, pretending to himself that his discovery of the illicit blanks came within the category of “clients’ secrets,” which he need not divulge. But in his heart he knew that he was conniving at a felony, that he ought to give information to the police or to the Bank, and that he wasn’t going to. His plan was to get hold of Purcell, make him destroy the blanks in his presence, and deliver such a warning as would put a stop to the forgeries.

But if he did not propose to give Purcell away, neither did he intend to give himself away. He would share his compromising secret with no one—especially with a lady. And this consideration raised the difficult question, What on earth was he to say to Margaret Purcell when she arrived? A question which he was still debating, with her telegram spread out before him and his silver snuff-box in his hand, when a clerk entered his private office to announce the unwelcome visitor.

Fortifying himself with a pinch of snuff, he rose and advanced towards the door to receive her, and as she entered he made a quick mental note of her anxious and troubled expression.

“How do you do, Mrs. Purcell?” said he, with a ceremonious bow. “You have had a long journey and rather an early one. How very unfortunate that this business, to which you refer in your telegram, should have arisen while you were on holiday so far away!”

“You have guessed what the business is, I suppose?” said Margaret.

Mr. Penfield smiled deprecatingly. “We lawyers,” said he, “are not much addicted to guessing, especially when definite information is available. Pray be seated. And now,” he continued, as Margaret subsided into the clients’ chair and he resumed his own, resting his elbows on the arms and placing his fingertips together, “let us hear what this new and important business is.”

“It is about that mysterious letter that you had from my husband,” said Margaret.

“Dear, dear!” said Mr. Penfield. “What a pity that you should have taken this long journey for such a trifling affair! And I thought I gave you all the particulars.”

“You didn’t mention whom the letter was from.”

“For several excellent reasons,” replied Mr. Penfield, checking them off on his fingers. “First, I don’t know; second, it is not my business; third, your husband, whose business it is, does know. My object in writing to you was to get into touch with him so that I could hand back to him this letter, which should never have come into my possession. Shall I take down his address now?”

“I haven’t it myself,” Margaret replied with a faint flush. “I have no idea where he is at present. He left Sennen on the 2nd to go to Oulton via Penzance. But he never arrived at Oulton. He has not been home, he has not been to the office, and he has not written. It is rather alarming, especially in connection with your mysterious letter.”

“Was my letter mysterious?” said Mr. Penfield, rapidly considering this new but not very surprising development. “I hardly think so. It was not intended to be. What was there mysterious about it?”

“Everything,” she replied, producing the letter from her bag and glancing at it as she spoke. “You emphasise that Dan’s letter and the other contents have been seen by no eye but yours, and that they are in a receptacle to which no one has access but yourself. There is a strong hint of something secret and compromising in the nature of Dan’s letter and enclosures.”

“I would rather say ‘confidential,’” murmured Mr. Penfield.

“And,” Margaret continued, “you must see that there is an evident connection between this misdirected letter and Dan’s disappearance.”

Mr. Penfield saw the connection very plainly, but he was admitting nothing. He did, indeed, allow that “it was a coincidence,” but would not agree to ‘a necessary connection.’ “Probably you will hear from your husband in a day or two, and then the letter can be returned.”

“Is there any reason why you should not show me Dan’s letter?” Margaret demanded. “Surely I am entitled, as his wife, to see it.”

Mr. Penfield pursed up his lips and took a deliberate pinch of snuff.

“We must not confuse,” said he, “the theological relations of married people with their legal relations. Theologically they are one; legally they are separate persons subject to a mutual contract. As to this letter, it is not mine, and consequently I can show it to no one; and I must assume that if your husband had desired you to see it he would have shown it to you himself.”

“But,” Margaret protested impatiently, “are not my husband’s secrets my secrets?”

“That,” replied the lawyer, “is a delicate question which we need not consider. There is the question of the secrets of a third party. If I had the felicity to be a married man, which unfortunately I have not, you would hardly expect me to communicate your private, and perhaps secret, affairs to my wife. Now would you?”

Margaret had to admit that she would not. But she instantly countered the lawyer by inquiring:

“Then I was apparently right in inferring that this letter and the enclosures contained matter of a secret and compromising character?”

“I have said nothing to that effect,” replied Mr. Penfield uncomfortably; and then, seeing that he had no choice between a downright lie and a flat refusal to answer any questions, he continued “The fact is that it is not admissible for me to make any statement. This letter came to me by an error, and my position must be as if I had not seen it.”

“But it can’t be,” Margaret persisted, “because you have seen it. I want to know if Dan’s letter was addressed to anyone whom I know. You could tell me that, surely?”

“Unfortunately, I cannot,” replied the lawyer, glad to be able to tell the literal truth for once. “The letter was without any formal opening. There was nothing to indicate the identity or even the sex of the person to whom it was addressed.”

Margaret noted this curious fact and then asked:

“With regard to the enclosures. Did they consist of money?”

“They did not,” was the reply, “nor cheques.” A brief silence followed, during which Margaret reflected rapidly on what she had learned and what she had not learned. At length she looked up with a somewhat wry smile and said: “Well, Mr. Penfield, I suppose that is all I shall get out of you?”

“I am afraid it is,” he replied. “The necessity of so much reservation is most distasteful, I assure you; but it is the plain duty of a lawyer to keep not only his own counsel but other people’s.”

“Yes, of course, I quite understand that. And now, as we have finished with the letter, there is the writer to consider. What had I better do about Dan?”

“Why do anything? It is only four days since he left Sennen.”

“Yes, but something has evidently happened. He may have met with an accident and be in some hospital. Do you think that I ought to notify the police that he is missing?”

“No; certainly not,” Mr. Penfield replied emphatically, for, in his mind, Purcell’s disappearance was quite simply explained. He had discovered the mistake of the transposed letter, and knew that Penfield held the means of convicting him of a felony, and he had gone into hiding until he should discover what the lawyer meant to do. To put the police on his track would be to convince him of his danger and drive him hopelessly out of reach. But Mr. Penfield could not explain this to Margaret, and to cover his emphatic rejection of police assistance he continued: “You see, he can hardly be said to be missing; he may merely have altered his plans and neglected to write. Have patience for a day or two, and if you still hear no tidings of him, send me a line, and I will take what measures seem advisable for trying to get into touch with him.”

“Thank you,” said Margaret, not very enthusiastically, rising to take her departure. She was in the act of shaking Mr. Penfield’s hand when, with a sudden afterthought, she asked: “By the way, was there anything in Dan’s letter that might account for his disappearance in this fashion?”

This was rather a facer for Mr. Penfield, who, like many casuists, hated telling a direct lie. For the answer was clearly “Yes,” whereas the sense that he was compelled to convey was “No.”

“You are forgetting that the letter was not addressed to me,” he said. “And that reminds me that there must have been another letter—the one that was addressed to me and that must have been put into the other person’s envelope. May I ask if that letter has been returned?”

“No, it has not,” replied Margaret.

“Ha!” said Mr. Penfield. “But it probably will be in the course of a day or two. Then we shall know what he was writing to me about and who is the other correspondent. Good-day, good-day, Mrs. Purcell.”

He shook her hand warmly, and hastened to open the door for her in the hope, justified by the result, that she would not realize until she had left that her very significant question had not been answered.

Indeed, she did not realize how adroitly the old solicitor had evaded that question until she was too far away to return and put it afresh, even if that had seemed worth while; for her attention was occupied by the other issue that he had so artfully raised. She had overlooked the presumable existence of the second transposed letter, the one that should have been in Mr. Penfield’s envelope. It ought to have been returned at once. Possibly it was even now waiting at Sennen to be forwarded. If it arrived, it would probably disclose the identity of the mysterious correspondent. On the other hand, it might not; and if it were not returned at all, that would confirm the suspicion that there was something gravely wrong. And it was at this point that Margaret became conscious of Mr. Penfield’s last evasion.

Its effect was to confirm the generally disagreeable impression that she had received from the interview. She was a little resentful of the lawyer’s elaborate reticence, which, coupled with the strange precautionary terms of his letter to her, convinced her that her husband had embarked on some questionable transaction, and that Mr. Penfield knew it and knew the nature of that transaction. His instant rejection of the suggestion that an accident might have occurred and that the police should be notified seemed to imply that he had some inkling of Purcell’s proceedings, and his final evasion of her question strongly suggested that the letter, or the enclosures, or both, contained some clue to the disappearance.

Thus, as she took her way home, Margaret turned over again and again the puzzling elements of the mystery, and at each reshuffling of the scanty facts the same conclusion emerged: her husband had absconded, and he had not absconded alone. The secret that Mr. Penfield was guarding was such a secret as might, if divulged, have pointed the way to the divorce court. And with this conclusion and a frown of disgust, she turned into the entry of her flat and ascended the stairs.

As she let herself in, the maid met her in the hakl. “Mr. Varney is in the drawing-room, ma’am,” she said. “He came about ten minutes ago. I am getting tea for him.”

“Thank you, Nellie,” said Margaret, “and you might get me some, too.”

She passed on to her bedroom for a hasty wash and change, and then joined her visitor in time to pour out the tea.

“How good of you, Mr. Varney,” she said warmly, as they shook hands, “to come to me so quickly! You must have only just arrived.”

“Yes,” he replied, “I came straight on from the station. I thought you would be anxious to know if I had heard anything.”

“And have you?”

“Well,” Varney replied, hesitatingly, “I’m rather afraid not. I seem to have drawn a blank.”

Margaret looked at him critically. There was something in his manner suggestive of doubt and reservation.

“Do you mean an absolute blank? Did you find out nothing at all?”

Again Varney seemed to hesitate, and Margaret’s attention sharpened.

“There isn’t much use in making guesses,” said he. “I found no definite traces of Dan. He hadn’t been at the ‘Ship,’ where I put up and where he used to stay when he went to Falmouth, and of course I couldn’t go round the other hotels making inquiries. But I went down the quay-side and asked a few discreet questions about the craft that had left the port since Monday, especially the odd craft, bound for small ports. I felt that if Dan had any reason for slipping off quietly he wouldn’t go by a passenger boat to a regular passenger port. He would go on a cargo boat bound to some out-of-the-way place. So I found out what I could about the cargo boats that had put out of Falmouth; but I didn’t have much luck.”

Again he paused irresolutely, and Margaret asked, with a shade of impatience:

“Did you find out anything at all?”

“Well, no; I can’t say that I did,” Varney replied, in the same slow, inconclusive manner. “It’s disappointing in a way, especially as I really thought at one time that I had got on his track. But that turned out a mistake after all.”

“You are sure it was a mistake,” said Margaret eagerly. “Tell me about it.”

“I picked up the clue when I was asking about a Swedish steamer that had put out on Tuesday morning. She had a lading of china clay and was bound for Malmo, but she was calling at Ipswich to pick up some other cargo. I learned that she took one or two passengers on board, and one of them was described to me as a big red-faced man of about forty, who looked like a pilot or a ship’s officer. That sounded rather like Dan, and when I heard that he was carrying a biggish suitcase and had a yellow oilskin coat on his arm, I made pretty sure that it was.”

“And how do you know that it was not Dan?”

“Why,” replied Varney, “it turned out that this man had a woman with him.”

“I see,” said Margaret hastily, flushing scarlet and turning her head away. For a while she could think of nothing further to say. To her, of course, the alleged disproof of the passenger’s identity was “confirmation strong as Holy Writ.” But her pride would not allow her to confess this—at any rate to Varney—and she was in difficulties as to how to pursue the inquiry without making the admission. At length she ventured: “Do you think that is quite conclusive? I mean, is it certain that the woman belonged to the man? There is the possibility that she may have been merely a fellow-passenger whom he had casually accompanied to the ship. Or did you ascertain that they were actually—er—companions?”

“No, by Jove!” exclaimed Varney. “I never thought of any other possibilities. I heard that the man went on board with a woman, and at once decided that he couldn’t be Dan. But you are quite right. They may have just met at the hotel or elsewhere and walked down to the ship together. I wonder if it’s worth while to make any further inquiries about the ship—I mean at Ipswich, or, if necessary, at Malmo.”

“Do you remember the ship’s name?”

“Yes; the Hedwig of Hernosand. She left Falmouth early on Tuesday morning, so she will probably have got to Ipswich some time yesterday. She may be there now, or, of course, she may have picked up her stuff and gone to sea the same day. Would you like me to run down to Ipswich and see if I can find out anything?”

Margaret turned on him with a look that set his heart thumping and his pulses throbbing.

“Mr. Varney,” she said, in a low, unsteady voice, “you make me ashamed and proud—proud to have such a loyal, devoted friend, and ashamed to be such a tax on him.”

Not at all,” he replied. “After all”—here his voice, too, became a little unsteady—“Dan was my pal, is my pal still,” he added huskily. He paused for a moment, and then concluded: “I’ll go down tonight and try to pick up the scent while it is fresh.”

“It is good of you!” she exclaimed; and as she spoke her eyes filled, but she still looked at him frankly as she continued: “Your faithful friendship is no little compensation for “—she was going to say “his unfaithfulness,” but altered the words to “the worry and anxiety of this horrid mystery. But I am ashamed to let you take so much trouble, though I must confess that it would be an immense relief to me to get some news of Dan. I don’t hope for good news, but it is terrible to be so completely in the dark.”

“Yes, that is the worst part of it,” Varney agreed; and then, setting his cup on the table, he rose. “I had better be getting along now,” he said, “so that I can catch the earliest possible train. Good-bye, Mrs. Purcell, and good luck to us both.”

The leave-taking almost shattered Varney’s self possession, for Margaret, in the excess of her gratitude, impulsively grasped both his hands and pressed them warmly as she poured out her thanks. Her touch made him tingle to the finger-ends. Heavens! how beautiful she looked, this lovely, unconscious young widow! And to think that she might in time be his own! A wild impulse surged through him to clasp her in his arms, to tell her that she was free and that he worshipped her. Of course, that was a mere impulse that interfered not at all with his decorous, deferential manner. And yet a sudden, almost insensible change in her made him suspect that his eyes had told her more than he had meant to disclose. Nevertheless, she followed him to the lobby to speed him on his errand, and when he looked back from the foot of the stairs, she was standing at the open door, smiling down on him.

The thoughts of these two persons, when each was alone, were strangely different. In Margaret’s mind there was no doubt that the man on the steamer was her unworthy husband. But what did Varney think? That a man of the world should have failed to perceive that an unexplained disappearance was most probably an elopement seemed to her incredible. Varney could not be such an innocent as that. The only alternative was that he, like Mr. Penfield, was trying to shield Dan; to hush up the disreputable elements of the escapade. But whereas the lawyer’s obstinate reticence had aroused some slight resentment, she felt no resentment towards Varney. For he was Dan’s friend first of all, and it was proper that he should try to shield his “pal.” And he was really serving husband and wife equally. To hush things up would be the best for both. She wanted no scandal. Loyal and faithful wife as she had been, her feelings towards her husband were of that some what tepid quality that would have allowed her to receive him back without reproaches, and to accept the lamest explanations without question or comment. Varney’ s assumed policy was as much to her interest as to Dan’s, and he was certainly playing the part of a devoted friend to them both.

One thing did, indeed, rather puzzle her. Her marriage had been, on her husband’s side, undoubtedly a love-match. It was for no mercenary reasons that he had forced the marriage on her and her father, and up to the last he had seemed to be, in his rather brutal way, genuinely in love with her. Why, then, had he suddenly gone off with another woman? To her constant, faithful nature the thing was inexplicable.

Varney’s reflections were more complex. A vague consciousness of the cumulative effects of actions was beginning to steal into his mind, a faint perception that he was being borne along on the current of circumstance. He had gone to Falmouth with the express purpose of losing Purcell. But it seemed necessary to pick up some trace of the imaginary fugitive; for the one essential to Varney’s safety was that Purcell’s disappearance must appear to date from the landing at Penzance. That landing must be taken as an established fact. There must be no inquiry into or discussion of the incidents of that tragic voyage. But to that end it was necessary that Purcell should make some reappearance on shore, must leave some traces for possible pursuers to follow. So Varney had gone to Falmouth to find such traces—and to lose them. That was to have been the end of the business so far as he was concerned.

But it was not the end; and as he noted this, he noted, too, with a curious interest unmixed with any uneasiness, how one event generates others. He had invented Purcell’s proposed visit to Falmouth to give a plausible colour to the disappearance and to carry the field of inquiry beyond the landing at Penzance. Then the Falmouth story had seemed to commit him to a visit to Falmouth to confirm it. That visit had committed him to the fabrication of the required confirmatory traces, which were to be found and then lost. But he had not quite succeeded in losing them. Margaret’s question had seemed to commit him to tracing them further, and now he had got to find and lose Purcell at Ipswich. That, however, would be the end. From Ipswich Purcell would have to disappear for good.

The account that he had given Margaret was founded on facts. The ship that he had described was a real ship, which had sailed when he had said that she sailed and for the ports that he had named. Moreover, she had carried one or two passengers. But the red-faced man with the suitcase and his female companion were creatures of Varney’s imagination.

Thus we see Varney already treading the well-worn trail left by multitudes of wrong-doers; weaving around him a defensive web of illusory appearances, laying down false tracks that lead always away from himself, never suspecting that the web may at last become as the fowler’s snare, that the false tracks may point the way to the hounds of destiny. It is true that, as he fared on his way to Ipswich, he was conscious that the tide of circumstance was bearing him farther than he had meant to travel; but not yet did he recognize in this hardly perceived compulsion the abiding menace of accumulating consequences that encompasses the murderer.

CHAPTER IV

In which Margaret confers with Dr. Thorndyke

The sun was shining pleasantly on the trees of King’s Bench Walk, Inner Temple, when Margaret approached the handsome brick portico of No. 5A and read upon the jamb of the doorway the name of Dr. John Thorndyke under the explanatory heading “First Pair.” She was a little nervous of the coming interview, partly because she had met the famous criminal lawyer only twice before, but more especially by reason of a vague fear that her uneasy suspicions of her husband might presently be turned into something more definite and disagreeable. Her nervousness on the first score was soon dispelled, for her gentle summons on the little brass knocker of the inner door—the “oak” was open—was answered by Dr. Thorndyke himself, who greeted her as an old friend and led her into the sitting-room, where tea-things were set out on a small table between two armchairs. The homely informality of the reception, so different from the official stiffness of Mr. Penfield, instantly put her at her ease; and when the teapot arrived in the custody of a small gentleman of archidiaconal aspect and surprising crinkliness of feature, she felt as if she were merely paying some rather unusual kind of afternoon call.

Dr. Thorndyke had what would, in his medical capacity, have been called a fine bedside manner—pleasant, genial, sympathetic, but never losing touch with the business on hand. Insensibly a conversation of pleasing generality slipped into a consultation, and Margaret found herself stating her case, apparently of her own initiative. Having described her interview with Mr. Penfield and commented on the old lawyer’s very unhelpful attitude, she continued:

“It was Mr. Rodney who advised me to consult you. As a civil lawyer with no experience of criminal practice, he felt hardly competent to deal with the case. That was what he said. It sounds rather ominous—as if he thought there might be some criminal element in the affair.”

“Not necessarily,” said Thorndyke. “But your husband is missing, and a missing man is certainly more in my province than in Rodney’s. What did he suggest that you should ask me to do?”

“I should wish, of course,” replied Margaret, “to get into communication with my husband. But if that is not possible, I should at least like to know what has become of him. Matters can’t be left in their present uncertain state. There is the future to think of.”

“Precisely,” agreed Thorndyke, “and as the future must be based upon the present and the past, we had better begin by setting out what we actually know and can prove. First, I understand that on the 23rd of June your husband left Sennen, and was seen by several persons to leave, on a yacht in company with Mr. Varney, and that there was no one else on board. The yacht reached Penzance at about half-past two in the afternoon, and your husband went ashore at once. He was seen by Mr. Varney to land on the pier and go towards the town. Did anyone besides Mr. Varney see him go ashore?”

“No—at least, I have not heard of anyone. Of course, he may have been seen by some fishermen or strangers on the pier. But does it matter? Mr. Varney saw him land, and he certainly was not on the yacht when Mr. Rodney arrived half an hour later. There can’t be any possible doubt that he did land at Penzance.”

“No,” Thorndyke agreed; “but as that is the last time that he was certainly seen alive, and as the fact that he landed may have to be proved in a court of law, additional evidence would be worth securing.”

“But that was not the last time that he was seen alive,” said Margaret; and here she gave him an account of Varney’s expedition to Falmouth, explaining why he went and giving full particulars respecting the steamer, all of which Thorndyke noted down on the note-block which lay by his side on the table.

“This is very important,” said he, when she had finished. “But you see that it is on a different plane of certainty. It is hearsay at the best, and there is no real identification. What luck did Mr. Varney have at Ipswich?”

“He went down there on the evening of the 27th, the day after his visit to Falmouth. He went straight to the quay-side and made inquiries about the steamer Hedwig, which he learned had left about noon, having come in about nine o’clock on the previous night. He talked to various quay-loafers, and from one of them ascertained that a single passenger had landed—a big man, carrying a large bag or portmanteau in his hand and a coat of some kind on his arm. The passenger landed alone. Nothing was seen of any woman.”

“Did Mr. Varney take the name and address of his informant at Ipswich or the one at Falmouth?”

“I am afraid not. He said nothing about it.”

“That is unfortunate,” said Thorndyke, “because these witnesses may be wanted, as they might be able to identify a photograph of your husband. We must find out from Mr. Varney what he did in the matter.”

Margaret looked at Dr. Thorndyke with a slightly puzzled expression. “You speak of witnesses and evidence,” said she, “as if you had something definite in your mind. Some legal proceedings, I mean.”

“I have,” he replied. “If your husband makes no sign and if he does not presently appear, certain legal proceedings will become inevitable.” He paused for a few moments and then continued:

“You must understand, Mrs. Purcell, that when a man of any position—and especially a married man—disappears from ‘his usual places of resort,’ as the phrase goes, he upsets all the social adjustments that connect him with his surroundings, and, sooner or later, those adjustments have to be made good. If he disappears completely, it becomes uncertain whether he is alive or dead, and this uncertainty communicates itself to his property and to his dependents and relatives. If he is alive, his property is vested in himself; if he is dead, it is vested in his executors or in his heirs or next of kin. Should he be named as a beneficiary in a will, and the person who has made that will die after his disappearance, the question immediately arises whether he was dead or alive at the time of the testator’s death—a vitally important question, since it affects not only himself and his heirs, but also the other persons who benefit under the will. And then there is the status of the wife, if the missing man is married: the question whether she is a married woman or a widow has, in justice to her, to be settled if and when possible. So you see that the disappearance of a man like your husband sets going a process that generates all sorts of legal problems. You cannot simply write him off and treat him as non existent. His life must be properly wound up so that his estate may be disposed of, and this will involve the necessity of presuming his death; and presumption of death may raise difficult questions of survivorship, although these may arise at any moment.”

“What is meant by a question of survivorship?” Margaret asked.

“It is a question which arises in respect of two persons, both of whom are dead and concerning one or both of whom the exact date of death is unknown. One of them must have died before the other, unless they both died at the same instant. The question is, Which survived the other? Which of them died first? It is a question on which may turn the succession to an estate, a title, or even a kingdom.”

“Well,” said Margaret, “it is not likely to arise in respect of Dan.”

“On the contrary,” Thorndyke dissented, “it may arise tomorrow. If some person who has left him a legacy should die today, that person’s will could not be administered until it had been decided whether your husband was or was not alive at the time the testator died; that is, whether or not he survived the testator. But, as matters stand, we can give no answer to that question. We can prove that he was alive at half-past two on the 2 of June. Thenceforward we have no knowledge of him.”

“Excepting what Mr. Varney has told us.”

“Mr. Varney’ s information is legally worthless unless he can produce the witnesses, and unless they can identify a photograph or otherwise prove that the man whom they saw was actually Mr. Purcell. You must ask Mr. Varney about it. However, at the moment you are more concerned to find out what has become of your husband. I suppose I may ask a few necessary questions?”

“Oh, certainly,” she replied. “Pray don’t have any scruples of delicacy. Ask anything you want to know.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Purcell,” said Thorndyke. “And to begin with the inevitable question: Do you know of, or suspect, any kind of entanglement with any woman?”

The direct, straightforward question came rather as a relief to Margaret, and she answered without embarrassment:

“Naturally, I suspect, because I can think of no other reason for his leaving me in this way. But to be honest, I have never had the slightest grounds of complaint in regard to his behaviour with other women. He married me because he fell in love with me, and he has never seemed to change. Whatever he has been to other people, to me he has always appeared, in his rough, taciturn way, as devoted as his nature allowed him to be. This affair is an utter surprise to me.”

Thorndyke made no comment on this, but, following the hint that Margaret had dropped, asked:

“As to his character in general, what sort of a man is he? Is he popular, for instance?”

“No,” replied Margaret, “he is not very much liked—in fact, with the exception of Mr. Varney he has no really intimate friends, and I have often wondered how poor Mr. Varney put up with the way he treated him. The truth is that Dan is rather a bully; he is strong, big, and pugnacious, and used to having his own way and somewhat brutal, at times, in his manner of getting it. He is a very self-contained, taciturn, rather secretive man, and—well, perhaps he is not very scrupulous. I am not painting a very flattering picture, I am afraid.”

“It sounds like a good portrait, though,” said Thorndyke. “When you say that he is not very scrupulous, are you referring to his business transactions?”

“Well, yes, and to his dealings with people generally.”

“By the way,” asked Thorndyke, “what is his occupation?”

Margaret uttered a little apologetic laugh. “It sounds absurd, but I really don’t quite know what his business is. He is so very uncommunicative. I have always understood that he is a financier, what ever that may be. I believe he negotiates loans and buys and sells stocks and shares, but he is not on the Stock Exchange. He has an office in Coleman Street, in the premises of a firm of outside brokers, and he keeps a clerk, a man named Levy. It seems to be quite a small establishment, though it appears to yield a fair income. That is all I can tell you, but I dare say Mr. Levy could give you other particulars if you wanted them.”

“I will make a note of the address, at any rate,” said Thorndyke; and having done so, he asked:

“As to your husband’s banking account: do you happen to know if any considerable sum has been drawn out quite lately, or if any cheques have been presented since he disappeared?”

“His current account is intact,” she replied. “I have an account at the same bank, and I saw the manager a couple of days ago. Of course, he was not very expansive, but he did tell me that no unusual amounts had been withdrawn, and that no cheque has been presented since the 21st of June, when Dan drew a cheque for me. It is really rather odd, especially as the balance is somewhat above the average. Don’t you think so?”

“I do,” he answered. “It suggests that your husband’s disappearance was unpremeditated, and that extreme precautions are being taken to conceal his present whereabouts. But the mystery is what he is living on if he took no considerable sum with him and has drawn no cheques since. However, we had better finish with the general questions. You don’t appear to know much about your husband’s present affairs: what do you know of his past?”

“Not a great deal, and I can think of nothing that throws any light on his extraordinary conduct in taking himself off as he has done. I met him at Maidstone about six years ago. He was then employed in the office of a large paper mill—Whichboy’s mill, I think it was—as a clerk or accountant. He had then recently come down from Cambridge, and seemed in rather low water. After a time, he left Whichboy’s and went to London, and very shortly his circumstances began to improve in a remarkable way. It was then that he began his present business, which I know included the making of loans, because he lent my father money—in fact, it was through these transactions and his visits on business to my father that the intimacy grew which resulted finally in our marriage. He then seemed, as he always has, to be a keen business man, very attentive to the main chance, not at all sentimental in his dealings, and, as I have said, not over-scrupulous as to his methods.”

Thorndyke nodded gravely but made no comment. The association of loans to the father with marriage with an evidently not infatuated daughter seemed to throw a sufficiently suggestive light on Daniel Purcell’s methods.

“And as to his personal habits and tastes?” he asked.

“He has always been reasonably temperate, though he likes good living and has a robust appetite; and he really has no vices beyond a rather unpleasant temper and excessive keenness on money. His principal interest is in boating, yachting, and fishing; he does not bet or gamble, and his relations with women have always seemed to be perfectly correct.”

“You spoke of his exceptional intimacy with Mr. Varney. Is the friendship of long standing?”

“Yes, quite. They were schoolfellows, they were at Cambridge together, and they both came down about the same time and for a similar reason. Both their fathers got suddenly into financial difficulties. Dan’s father was a stockbroker, and he failed suddenly, either through some unlucky speculations or through the default of a client. Mr. Varney’s father was a clergyman, and he, too, lost all his money, and at about the same time. I have always suspected that there was some connection between the two failures, but I have never heard that there actually was. Dan is as close as an oyster, and, of course, Mr. Varney has never referred to the affair.”

“Mr. Varney is not associated with your husband in business?”

“No. He is an artist, principally an etcher, and a very clever one, too. I think he is doing quite well now, but he had a hard struggle when he first came down from Cambridge. For a couple of years he worked for an engraver doing ordinary copperplate work for the trade, and I understand that he is remarkably skilful at engraving. But now he does nothing but etchings and mezzotints.”

“Then his activities are entirely concerned with art?”

“I believe so—now, at any rate. After he left the engraver he went to a merchant in the City as a clerk. But he was only there quite a short time, and I fancy he left on account of some sort of unpleasantness, but I know nothing about it. After that he went abroad and travelled about for a time, making sketches and drawings of the towns to do his etchings from—in fact, he only came back from Belgium a couple of months ago. But I am afraid I am wasting your time with a lot of irrelevant gossip.”

“It is my fault if you are,” said Thorndyke, “since I put the questions. But the fact is that nothing is irrelevant. Your husband has vanished into space in a perfectly unaccountable manner, and we have to find, if we can, something in his known circumstances which may give us a clue to the motive and the manner of his disappearance and his probable whereabouts at present. Has he any favourite haunts abroad or at home?”

“He is very partial to the Eastern Counties, especially the Broads and rivers of Norfolk. You remember he was on his way to Oulton Broad when he disappeared?”

“Yes; and one must admit that the waterways of Norfolk and Suffolk, with all their endless communications, would form an admirable hiding-place. In a small yacht or covered boat a man might lose himself in that network of rivers and lakes and lie hidden for months, creeping from end to end of the county without leaving a trace. We must bear that possibility in mind. By the way, have you brought me a copy of that very cautious letter of Mr. Penfield’s?”

“I have brought the letter itself,” she replied, producing it and laying it on the table.

“Thank you,” said Thorndyke. “I will make a copy of it and let you have the original back. And there is another question. Has the letter which Mr. Penfield ought to have received been returned to you?”

“No,” replied Margaret.

“Ha!” said Thorndyke, “that is important, because it is undoubtedly a remarkable circumstance and rather significant. A letter in the wrong envelope practically always implies another letter in another wrong envelope. Now a letter was almost certainly written to Mr. Penfield and almost certainly sent. It was presumably a business letter and of some importance. It ought certainly to have been returned to the sender, and under ordinary circumstances would have been. Why has it not been returned? The person to whom it was sent was the person to whom the mysterious communication that Mr. Penfield received was addressed. That communication, we judge from Mr. Penfield’s letter, contained some highly confidential matter. But that implies some person who was in highly confidential relations with your husband. The suggestion seems to be that your husband discovered his mistake after he had posted the letter or letters, and that he went at once to this other person and informed him of what had happened.”

“Informed her,” Margaret corrected.

“I must admit,” said Thorndyke, “that the circumstances give colour to your inference, but we must remember that they would apply equally to a man. They certainly point to an associate of some kind. The character of that associate and the nature of the association are questions that turn on the contents of that letter that Mr. Penfield received.”

“Do you think,” asked Margaret, “that Mr. Penfield would be more confidential with you than he was with me?”

“I doubt it,” was the reply. “If the contents of that letter were of a secret nature, he will keep them to himself; and quite right, too. But I shall give him a trial all the same, and you had better let him know that you have consulted me.”

This brought the conference to an end, and shortly afterwards Margaret went on her way, now more than ever convinced that the inevitable woman was at the bottom of the mystery. For some time after she had gone Thorndyke sat with his notes before him, wrapped in profound thought and deeply interested in the problem that he was called upon to solve. He did not share Margaret’s suspicions, though he had not strongly contested them. To his experienced eye, the whole group of circumstances, with certain points which he had not thought fit to enlarge on, suggested something more sinister than a mere elopement.

There was Purcell’s behaviour, for instance. It had all the appearances of an unpremeditated flight. No preparations seemed to have been made, no attempt to wind up his affairs. His banking account was left intact, though no one but he could touch it during his lifetime. He had left or sent no letter of farewell, explanation, or apology to his wife; and now that he was gone, he was maintaining a secrecy as to his whereabouts so profound that, apparently, he did not even dare to draw a cheque.

But even more significant was the conduct of Mr. Penfield. Taking from its envelope the mysterious letter that had come to Sennen and exploded the mine, Thorndyke spread it out and slowly read it though; and his interpretation of it now was the same as on the occasion when he heard Margaret’s epitome of it at Sennen. It was a message to Purcell through his wife, telling him that something which had been discovered was not going to be divulged. What could that something be? The answer, in general terms, seemed to be given by Penfield’s subsequent conduct. He had been absolutely uncommunicative to Margaret. Yet Margaret, as the missing man’s wife, was a proper person to receive any information that could be given. Apparently, then, the information that Penfield possessed was of a kind that could not be imparted to anyone. Even its very nature could not be hinted at.

Now what kind of information could that be? The obvious inference was that the letter which had come to Penfield contained incriminating matter. That would explain everything. For if Penfield had thus stumbled on evidence of a crime, either committed or contemplated, he would have to choose between denouncing the criminal or keeping the matter to himself. But he was not entitled to keep it to himself; for, other considerations apart, this was not properly a client’s secret. It had not been communicated to him: he had discovered it by accident. He was therefore not bound to secrecy, and he could not, consequently, claim a lawyer’s privilege. In short, if he had discovered a crime and chose to suppress his discovery, he was, in effect, an accessory, before or after the fact, as the case might be; and he would necessarily keep the secret because he would not dare to divulge it.

This view was strongly supported by Purcell’s conduct. The disappearance of the latter coincided exactly with the delivery of the mysterious letter to Penfield. The inference was that Purcell, having discovered his fatal mistake, and assuming that Penfield would immediately denounce him to the police, had fled instantly and was now in hiding. Purcell’s and Penfield’s conduct were both in complete agreement with this theory.

But there was a further consideration. If the contents of that letter were incriminating, they incriminated someone besides Purcell. The person for whom the letter was intended must have been a party to any unlawful proceedings referred to in it. He—or she—must, in fact, have been a confederate. Now, who could that confederate be? Someone, apparently, who was unknown to Margaret, unless it might be the somewhat shadowy Mr. Levy. And that raised yet a further question: What was Purcell? How did he get his living? His wife evidently did not know, which was a striking and rather suspicious fact. He had been described as a financier. But that meant nothing. The word “financier” covered a multitude of sins; the question was, What sins did it cover in the present instance? And the answer to that question seemed to involve a visit of exploration to Coleman Street.

As Thorndyke collected his notes to form the nucleus of a dossier of the Purcell Case, he foresaw that his investigations might well unearth some very unlovely skeletons. But that was no fault of his, nor need the disclosures be unnecessarily paraded. But Margaret Purcell’s position must be secured and made regular. Her missing husband must either be found and brought back, or he must be written off and disposed of in a proper and legal fashion.

CHAPTER V

In which Thorndyke makes a Few Inquiries

If Mr. Penfield had been reluctant to arrange an interview with Margaret Purcell, he was yet more unwilling to accept one with Dr. John Thorndyke. It is true that, as a lawyer of the old school, he regarded Thorndyke with a certain indulgent contempt, as a dabbler in law, an amateur, a mere doctor masquerading as a lawyer. But coupled with this contempt was an unacknowledged fear. For it was not unknown to him that this medico-legal hermaphrodite had strange and disconcerting methods; that he had a habit of driving his chariot through well-established legal conventions, and of using his eyes and ears in a fashion not recognized by orthodox legal precedents.

Accordingly, when he received a note from Thorndyke announcing the intention of the writer to call on him, he would have liked to decline the encounter. A less courageous man would have absented himself. But Mr. Penfield was a sportsman to the backbone, and having got himself into difficulties by that very quality, elected to “face the music” like a man; and so it happened that when Thorndyke arrived in the clerks’ office, he was informed that Mr. Penfield was at liberty, and was duly announced and ushered into the sanctum.

The old solicitor received him with a sort of stiff cordiality, helped himself to a pinch of snuff, and awaited the opening of the offensive.

“You have heard from Mrs. Purcell, I presume,” said Thorndyke.

“Yes. I understand that you are commissioned by her to ascertain the whereabouts of her husband—a very desirable thing to do, and I wish you every success.”

“I am sure you do,” said Thorndyke, “and it is with that conviction that I have called on you to enable you to give effect to your good wishes.”

Mr. Penfield paused, with his snuff-box open and an infinitesimal particle between his finger and thumb, to steal a quick glance at Thorndyke.

“In what way?” he asked.

“You received a certain communication, concerning which you wrote to Mrs. Purcell at—”

“I beg your pardon,” interrupted Penfield, “but I received no communication. A communication was no doubt dispatched by Mr. Purcell, but it never reached me.”

“I am referring to a letter which did reach you—a letter with certain enclosures, apparently put into the wrong envelope.”

“And which,” said Penfield, “is consequently no concern of mine, or, if you will pardon my saying so, of yours.”

“Of that,” said Thorndyke, “you are doubtless a better judge than I am, since you have read the letter and I have not. But I am instructed to investigate the disappearance of Mr. Purcell, and as this letter appears to be connected with this disappearance, it naturally becomes an object of interest to me.”

“Why do you assume that it is connected with the disappearance?” Penfield demanded.

“Because of the striking coincidence of the time of its arrival and the time of the disappearance,” replied Thorndyke.

“That seems a very insufficient reason,” said Penfield.

“Not, I think,” rejoined Thorndyke, “if taken in conjunction with the terms of your own letter to Mrs. Purcell. But do I understand you to say that there was no connection?”

“I did not say that. What I say is that I have inadvertently seen a letter which was not addressed to me and which I was not intended to see. You will agree with me that it would be entirely inadmissible for me to divulge or discuss its contents.”

“I am not sure that I do agree with you, seeing that the writer of the letter is the husband of our client and the consignee is a person unknown to us both. But you will naturally act on your own convictions. Would it be admissible for you to indicate the nature of the enclosures?”

“It would be entirely inadmissible,” replied Mr. Penfield.

There was a short silence, during which Mr. Penfield refreshed himself with a pinch of snuff and Thorndyke rapidly turned over the situation. Obviously, the old solicitor did not intend to give any information whatever, possibly for very good reasons. At any rate, his decision had to be accepted and this Thorndyke proceeded to acknowledge.

“Well, Mr. Penfield,” he said, “I mustn’t urge you to act against your professional conscience. I am sure you would help me if you could. By the way, I assume that there would be no objection to my inspecting the envelope in which that letter was contained?”

“The envelope!” exclaimed Penfield, considerably startled. “Why, what information could you possibly gather from the envelope?”

“That is impossible to say until I have seen it,” was the reply.

“However,” said Penfield, “I am afraid that the same objection applies, sorry as I am to refuse.”

“But,” persisted Thorndyke, “why should you refuse? The letter, as you say, was not addressed to you, but the envelope was. It is your own envelope, and is entirely at your disposal.”

Mr. Penfield was cornered, and he had the wisdom to recognize the fact. Reluctant as he was to let Thorndyke examine even the envelope in which those incriminating blanks were enclosed, he saw that a refusal might arouse suspicion, and suspicion was what he must avoid at all costs. Nevertheless, he made a last effort to temporize.

“Was there any point on which I could enlighten you—in respect of the envelope? Can I give you any information?” he asked.

“I am afraid not,” replied Thorndyke. “My experience has taught me always to examine the envelope of letters closely. By doing so one often picks up unexpected crumbs of evidence; but, naturally, one cannot tell in advance what there may be to observe.”

“No,” agreed Penfield. “Quite so. It is like cross-examination. Well, I am afraid you won’t pick up much this time, but if you really wish to inspect the envelope, I suppose, as you say, I need not scruple to place it in your hands.”

With this he rose and walked over to the safe, opened it, opened an inner drawer, and, keeping his back towards Thorndyke, took out the envelope, which he carefully emptied of its contents. Thorndyke sat motionless, not looking at the lawyer’s back but listening intently. Not a sound, however, reached his ears until the iron drawer slid back into its case, when Penfield turned and, without a word, laid the empty envelope on the table before him.

For a few moments Thorndyke looked at the envelope as it lay, noting that, although empty, it retained the bulge caused by its late contents, and that those contents must have been somewhat bulky. Then he picked it up and inspected it methodically, committing his observations to memory, since written notes seemed unadvisable under the circumstances. It was an oblong, “commercial” envelope, about six inches long by three and three-quarters wide. The address was written with a pen of medium width and unusually black ink in a rather small, fluent, legible hand, with elegant capitals of a distinctly uncial type. The post-mark was that of Penzance, dated the 23rd of June, 8.30 P.M. But of more interest to Thorndyke than the date, which he already knew, was an impression which the postmark stamp had made by striking the corner of the enclosure and thus defining its position in the envelope. From this he was able to judge that the object enclosed was oblong in shape, about five inches long or a little more, and somewhat less than three inches wide, and that it consisted of some soft material, presumably folded paper, since the blow of the metal stamp had left but a blunt impression of the corner. He next examined the edge of the flap, first with the naked eye and then with his pocket lens, and finally, turning back the flap from the place where the envelope had been neatly cut open, he closely scrutinized its inner surface.

“Have you examined this envelope, Mr. Penfield?” he asked.

“Not in that exhaustive and minute manner,” replied the solicitor, who had been watching the process with profound disfavour. “Why do you ask?”

“Because there appears to me a suggestion of its having been opened by moistening the flap and then reclosed. Just look at it through the glass, especially at the inside, where the gum seems to have spread more than one would expect from a single closing, and where there is a slight cockling of the paper.”

He handed the envelope and the lens to Penfield, who seemed to find some difficulty in managing the latter, and after a brief inspection returned both the articles to Thorndyke.

“I have not your experience and skill,” he said. You may be right, but all the probabilities are against your suggestion. If Purcell had reopened the letter, it would surely have been to correct an error rather than to make one. And the letter certainly belonged to the enclosures.”

“On the other hand,” said Thorndyke, “when an envelope has been steamed or damped open, it will be laid down flap uppermost, with the addressed side hidden, and a mistake might occur in that way. However, there is probably nothing in it. That, I gather, is your opinion?”

Unfortunately it was. Very glad would Penfield have been to believe that the envelope had been opened and the blanks put in by another hand. But he had read Purcell’s letter, and knew its connection with the enclosures.

“May I ask if you were expecting a letter from Purcell?” Thorndyke asked.

“Yes. I had written to him, and was expecting a reply.”

“And would that letter have contained enclosures of about the same size as those which were sent?”

“I have no reason to suppose that it would have contained any enclosures,” Penfield replied. “None were asked for.”

Thorndyke made a mental note of this reply and of the fact that Penfield did not seem to perceive its bearing, and rose to depart.

“I am sorry to have had to be so reticent,” said Penfield, as they shook hands, “but I hope your visit has not been entirely unfruitful, and I speed you on your quest with hearty good wishes.”

Thorndyke replied in similarly polite terms and went on his way, leaving Mr. Penfield in a state of profound relief at having got rid of him, not entirely unmingled with twinges of apprehension lest some incriminating fact should have leaked out unnoticed by him. Meanwhile Thorndyke, as soon as he emerged into Lombard Street, halted and made a detailed memorandum in his pocket-book of the few facts that he had gleaned.

Having thus disposed of Mr. Penfield, he turned his steps in the direction of Coleman Street with the purpose of calling on Mr. Levy, not, indeed, with the expectation of extracting much information from him, but rather to ascertain, if possible, how Purcell got his living. Arrived at the number that Margaret had given him, he read through the list of occupants in the hall, but without finding among then the name of Purcell. There was, however, on the second floor a firm entitled Honeyball Brothers, who were described as “financial agents,” and as this description was the only one that seemed to meet the case, he ascended the stairs and entered a small, well-furnished office bearing on its door the Honeyball superscription. The only occupant was a spectacled youth, who was busily directing envelopes.

“Is Mr. Levy in?” Thorndyke inquired.

“I’ll see,” was the cautious reply. “What name?”

Thorndyke gave his name, and the youth crossed to a door marked “Private,” which he opened, and having passed through closed it behind him. His investigations in the sanctum resulted in the discovery that Mr. Levy was there, a fact which he announced when he reappeared, holding the door open and inviting Thorndyke to enter. The latter accordingly walked through into the private office, when the door immediately closed behind him, and a smartly dressed, middle-aged man rose from a writing-chair and received him with an outstretched hand.

“You are Mr. Levy?” inquired Thorndyke.

“I am Mr. Levy,” was the answer, accompanied by an almost affectionate handshake and a smile of the most intense benevolence; “at your entire service, Dr. Thorndyke. Won’t you sit down? This is the more comfortable chair and is nearer to my desk, and so more convenient for conversation. Ahem. We are always delighted to meet members of your profession, Doctor. We do business with quite a number of them, and I may say that we find them peculiarly appreciative of the delicacy with which our transactions are conducted. Ahem. Now, in what way can I have the pleasure of being of service to you?”

“The fact is,” replied Thorndyke, “I have just called to make one or two inquiries.”

“Quite so,” interrupted Mr. Levy. “You are perfectly right. The wisdom of our ancestors, Dr. Thorndyke, expresses itself admirably in the old adage ‘Look before you leap.’ Don’t be diffident, sir. The more inquiries you make the better we shall be pleased. Now, what is the first point?”

“Well,” Thorndyke replied, “I suppose the first point to dispose of is whether I have or have not come to the right office. My business is concerned with Mr. Daniel Purcell.”

“Then,” said Mr. Levy, “I should say that you have come to the right office. Mr. Purcell is not here at the moment, but that is of no consequence. I am his authorized deputy. What is the nature of your business, Doctor?”

“I am acting for Mrs. Purcell, who has asked me to ascertain her husband’s whereabouts, if possible.”

“I see,” said Levy. “Family doctor, hey? Well, I hope you’ll find out where he is, because then you can tell me. But isn’t Mr. Penfield looking into the matter?”

“Possibly. But Mr. Penfield is not very communicative, and it is not clear that he is taking any steps to locate Purcell. May I take it that you are willing to help us, so far as you can?”

“Certainly,” replied Levy; “I’m willing enough. But if you want information you are in the same position as myself. All I know is that I haven’t got his present address, but I have no doubt I shall hear from him in due course. He is away on holiday, you must remember.”

“You know of no reason for supposing that he has gone away for good?”

“Lord bless you, no,” replied Levy. “The first I heard of anything unusual was when old Penfield came round to ask if he had been to the office. Of course he hadn’t, but I gave Penfield his address at Oulton and I wrote to Oulton myself. Then it turned out that he hadn’t gone to Oulton after all. I admit that it is queer he hasn’t written, seeing how methodical he usually is; but there is nothing to make a fuss about. Purcell isn’t the sort of man to go off on a jaunt that would involve his dropping money; I can tell you that.”

“And meanwhile his absence is not causing any embarrassment in a business sense?”

Mr. Levy rose with a somewhat foxy smile. “Do I look embarrassed?” he asked. “Try me. I should like to do a bit of business with you. No? Well, then, I will wish you good-morning and good luck; and don’t worry too much about the lost sheep. He is very well able to take care of himself.”

He shook hands once more with undiminished cordiality, and personally escorted Thorndyke out on to the landing.

There was one other matter that had to be looked into. Mr. Varney’s rather vague report of the voyage from Falmouth to Ipswich required to be brought into the region of ascertained fact. Accordingly, from Purcell’s office Thorndyke took his way to Lloyd’s, where a brief investigation put him in possession of the name and address of the owner of the steamship Hedwig of Hernosand. With this in his notebook he turned homewards to the Temple with the immediate purpose of writing to the owner and the captain of the ship asking for a list of the passengers from Falmouth and of those who disembarked at Ipswich, and further giving a description of Purcell in case he should have travelled, as was highly probable, under an assumed name.

With these particulars it would be possible at least to attempt to trace the missing man, while if it should turn out that Varney had been misinformed, the trouble and expense of a search in the wrong place would be avoided.

CHAPTER VI

In which Mr. Varney prepares a Deception

Varney’s domestic arrangements were of the simplest. Unlike the majority of those who engage in dishonest transactions, he was frugal, thrifty, and content with little. Of what he earned, honestly or otherwise, he saved as much as he could; and now that he was free of the parasite who had clung to him for so long and had a future to look forward to, he was more than ever encouraged to live providently well within his modest means. For residence he occupied a couple of furnished rooms in Ampthil Square, Camden Town; but he spent little of his time in them, for he had a little studio in a quiet turning off the High Street, which he held on lease, and which contained his few household gods and formed his actual home. Thither he usually repaired as soon as he had breakfasted, buying a newspaper on the way and sitting in the Windsor armchair by the gas fire—alight or not, according to the season—to smoke his morning pipe and glance over the news before beginning work.

Following his usual custom, on a bright, sunny morning near the end of October, he arrived at the studio with a copy of The Times under his arm, and, letting himself in with his latch-key, laid the paper on the work-bench, hung up his hat, and put a match to the gas fire. Then, having drawn a chair up to the fire, he drew forth his pipe and pouch and sauntered over to the bench, where he stood, filling his pipe and gazing absently at the bench whereon the paper lay, while his thoughts travelled along a well-worn if somewhat vague track into a pleasant and tranquil future. Not for him alone was that future pleasant and tranquil. It held another figure—a sweet and gracious figure that lived in all his countless daydreams. She should be happy, too, freed, like himself, from that bloated parasite who had fastened upon her. Indeed, she was free now, if only she could be made to know it.

Again, for the thousandth time, he wondered, did she care for him? It was impossible to guess. She seemed always pleased to see him; she was warmly appreciative of his attentiveness and his efforts to help her, and her manner towards him was cordial and friendly. There was no doubt that she liked him, and what more could he ask until such time as the veil should be lifted and her freedom revealed to her? For Maggie Purcell was not only a pure-minded and innocent woman: she was the very soul of loyalty, even to the surly brute who had intruded unbidden into her life. And for this Varney loved her the more. But it left his question unanswered and unanswerable. For while her husband lived, in her belief, no thought of love for any other could be consciously admitted to that loyal heart.

He had filled his pipe, and taken a matchbox from his pocket, and was in the act of striking a match when, in an instant, his movement was arrested, and he stood, rigid and still, with the match poised in his hand and his eyes fixed on the newspaper. But no longer absently, for his wandering glance, travelling unheedingly over the printed page, had lighted by chance upon the name Purcell, printed in small capitals. For a few moments he stood with his eyes riveted on the familiar name; then he picked up the paper and read eagerly.

It was an advertisement in the “Personal” column, and read thus: “PURCELL (D.) is requested to communicate at once with Mr. J. Penfield, who has important information to impart to him in re Catford, deceased. The matter is urgent, as the will has been proved and must now be administered.”

Varney read the advertisement through twice, and as he read it he smiled grimly, not, however, without a certain vague discomfort. There was nothing in the paragraph which affected him, but yet he found it, in some indefinable way, disquieting. And the more he reflected on the matter the more disturbing did it appear. Confound Purcell! The fellow was dead, and there was an end of it—at least, that was what he had intended and what he wished. But it seemed that it was not the end of it. Ever since that tragic voyage, when he had boldly cut the Gordian knot of his entanglements, Purcell had continued to reappear in one way or another, still, as ever, seeming to dominate his life. From his unknown and unsuspected grave, fathoms deep in the ocean, mysterious and disturbing influences seemed to issue, as though, even in death, his malice was still active. When would it be possible to shake him off for good?

Varney laid down the paper, and, flinging himself into the chair, set himself to consider the bearings of this new incident. How did it affect him? At the first glance it appeared not to affect him at all. Penfield would get no reply, and after one or two more trials he would have to give it up. That was all. The affair was no concern of his.

But was that all? And was it no concern of his? Reflection did not by any means confirm these assumption. Varney knew little about the law, but he realized that a will which had been proved was a thing that had to be dealt with in some conclusive manner. When Penfield failed to get into touch with Purcell, what would he do? The matter, as he had said, was urgent. Something would have to be done. Quite probably Penfield would set some inquiries on foot. He would learn from Maggie, if he did not already know, of Purcell’s supposed visit to Falmouth and the mythical voyage to Ipswich. Supposing he followed up those false tracks systematically? That might lead to complications. Those inventions had been improvised rather hastily, principally for Maggie’s benefit. They might not stand such investigation as a lawyer might bring to bear on them. There was the ship, for instance. It would be possible to ascertain definitely what passengers she carried from Falmouth. And when it became certain that Purcell was not one of them, at the best the inquiry would draw a blank, at the worst there might be some suspicion of a fabrication of evidence on his part. In any case, the inquiry would be brought back to Penzance.

That would not do at all. Inquiries must be kept away from Penzance. He was the only witness of that mythical landing on the pier, and hitherto no one had thought of questioning his testimony. He believed that his own arrival on the pier had been unnoticed. But who could say? A vessel entering a harbour is always an object of interest to every nautical eye that beholds her. Who could say that some unseen watcher had not observed the yacht’s arrival and noted that she was worked single-handed, and that one man only had gone ashore? It was quite possible, though he had seen no such watcher, and the risk was too great to be thought of. At all costs the inquiry must be kept away from Penzance.

How was that to be managed? The obvious way was to fabricate some sort of reply to the advertisement purporting to come from Purcell—a telegram, for instance, from France or Belgium, or even from some place in the Eastern Counties. The former was hardly possible, however. He could not afford the time or expense of a journey abroad, and, more over, his absence from England would be known, and its coincidence with the arrival of the telegram might easily be noticed. Coincidences of that kind were much better avoided.

On reflection, the telegram did not commend itself. Penfield would naturally ask himself: “Why a telegram when a letter would have been equally safe and so much more efficient?” For both would reveal, approximately, the whereabouts of the sender. No, a telegram would not answer the purpose. It would not be quite safe, for telegrams, like typewritten letters, are always open to suspicion as to their genuineness. Such suspicions may lead to inquiries at the telegraph office. On the other hand, a letter, if it could be properly managed, would have quite the contrary effect. It would be accepted as convincing evidence, not only of the existence of the writer, but of his whereabouts at the time of writing—if only it could be properly managed. But could it be?

He struck a match and lit his pipe—to little purpose, for it went out and was forgotten in the course of a minute. Could he produce a letter from Purcell—a practicable letter which would pass with out suspicion the scrutiny, not only of Penfield himself, who was familiar with Purcell’s handwriting, but also of Maggie, to whom it would almost certainly be shown? It was a serious question, and he gave it very serious consideration, balancing the chances of detection against the chances of success, and especially dwelling upon the improbability of any question arising as to its authenticity.

Now, Varney was endowed in a remarkable degree with the dangerous gift of imitating handwriting; indeed, it was this gift, and its untimely exercise, that had been the cause of all his troubles. And the natural facility in this respect had been reinforced by the steadiness of hand and perfect control of line that had come from his years of practice as a copperplate engraver. In that craft his work had largely consisted of minute and accurate imitation of writing and other linear forms, and he was now capable of reproducing his “copy” with microscopic precision and fidelity. Reflecting on this, and, further, that he was in possession of Purcell’s own fountain pen with its distinctive ink, he decided confidently that he could produce a letter which would not merely pass muster but would even defy critical examination, to which it was not likely to be subjected.

Having decided that the letter could be produced, the next question was that of ways and means. It would have been best for it to be sent from some place abroad, but that could not very well be managed. However, it would answer quite well if it could be sent from one of the towns or villages of East Anglia—in fact, that would perhaps be the best plan, as it would tend to confirm the Falmouth and Ipswich stories and be, in its turn, supported by them. But there was the problem of getting the letter posted. That would involve a journey down to Suffolk or Norfolk, and to this there were several objections. In the first place, he could ill spare the time, for he had a good deal of work on hand: he had an engagement with a dealer on the present evening, he had to arrange about an exhibition on the following day, and in the evening he was to dine with Maggie and Philip Rodney. None of these engagements, but especially the last, was he willing to cancel; and yet, if the letter was to be sent, there ought not to be much delay. But the most serious objection was the one that had occurred to him in relation to the telegram. His absence from town would probably be known and he might even be seen, either at his East Anglian destination or on his way thither or returning, and the coincidence of those movements with the arrival of the letter could hardly fail to be noticed. Indeed, if he were seen in the locality from whence the letter came, or going or returning, that would be a perilously striking coincidence.

What, then, was the alternative? He reflected awhile, and presently he had an idea. How would it answer if he should not post the letter at all, but simply drop it into Penfield’s letter-box? There was something to be said for that. It would go to prove that Purcell must be lurking somewhere in London—not an unlikely thing in itself, for London is so large that it is hardly a locality at all, and it is admittedly one of the safest of hiding-places. But, for that matter, why not post the letter, say, in Limehouse or Ratcliff, and thus suggest a lurking-place in the squalid and nautical east? That did not seem a bad idea. But still his preferences leaned towards the Eastern Counties—somewhere in the neighbourhood of Ipswich, which would give consistency to the account of the voyage from Falmouth. It was something of a dilemma, and he turned over the alternative plans for some time without coming to any conclusion.

As he sat thus meditating, his eye roamed idly about the bare but homely studio, and presently it encountered an object that started a new and interesting train of thought. Pushed away in a corner was a small lithographic press, now mostly disused, for the little “auto-lithographs” that he used to produce had ceased to be profitable now that there was a fair demand for his etchings and mezzotints. But the press was in going order, and he was a moderately expert lithographer—quite expert enough to produce a perfectly convincing post-mark on a forged letter, especially if that post-mark were carefully indented after printing, to disguise the process by which it had been produced.

It was a brilliant idea. In his pleased excitement he started up from his chair and began rapidly to pace up and down the studio. A most admirable plan! For it not only disposed of all the difficulties but actually turned them into advantages. He would get the letter prepared; he would keep his engagement with Maggie; then, after leaving her, he would make his way to George Yard and there drop the letter into Penfield’s letter-box. It would be found on the following morning, and would appear to have been posted the previous evening and delivered by the first post. He would actually be present in Maggie’s flat at the very moment when the letter was (apparently) being posted in Suffolk. A most excellent scheme!

Chuckling with satisfaction, he set himself forth with to carry it out. The means and appliances were in a cupboard that filled a recess—just a plain wall cupboard, but fitted with a Chubb lock of the highest class. Unlocking this, he cast his eye over the orderly shelves. Here, standing upright in an empty ink-bottle, was the thick-barrelled fountain pen that had once been Purcell’s. Varney took out the pen in its container and stood it on the table. Next, from the back of the cupboard, he reached out an expanding letter-file, and, opening it, took from the compartment marked “P” a small bundle of letters docketed “Purcell,” which he also laid on the table. They were all harmless unimportant letters (saved for that very reason), and if one should have asked why Varney had kept them, the answer, applicable to most of the other contents of the file, would have been that they had been preserved in obedience to the forger’s instinct to keep a few originals in stock on the chance that they might come in handy one day.

He drew a chair up to the table and began methodically to look through the letters, underlining with a lead pencil the words that he would probably want to copy. In the third letter that he read he had an unexpected stroke of luck, for it contained a reference to Mr. Penfield, to whom some enclosed document was to be sent, and it actually gave his full name and address. This was a windfall indeed! As he encircled the address with a pencil mark, Varney smiled complacently, and felt that Fortune was backing him up handsomely.

Having secured the “copy” for the handwriting, the next thing was to get the post-mark drawn and printed. The letters in the file had no envelopes, but he had in his pocket a letter that he had received that morning from an innkeeper at Tenterden, to whom he had written for particulars as to accommodation. It was probably a typical country letter, and its post-mark would serve as well as any other. He took it from his pocket, and, laying it on a small drawing board, pinned a piece of tracing paper over it and made a very careful tracing of the post-mark. Then he drew away the letter, and slipped in its place a small piece of lithographic transfer paper with a piece of black lead transfer paper over it, and went over the tracing carefully with a hard pencil. He now had a complete tracing of the post-mark on the lithographic paper, including the name “Tenterden” and the date and time, which he had included to give the dimensions and style of the lettering. But he now partially erased them, excepting the year date, and replaced them, in the same style and size, with the inscription “Woodbridge, Oct. 28, 4.30 P.M.,” drawn firmly with a rather soft pencil.

He now fetched his lithographic ink and pens from the cupboard, and, with the original before him, inked in the tracing, being careful to imitate all the accidental characters of the actual post mark, such as the unequal thickness of the lines due to the uneven pressure of the marking stamp. When he had finished, he turned the envelope over and repeated the procedure with the London post mark, only here he made an exact facsimile excepting as to the date and time, which he altered to

“Oct. 29, 11.20 P.M.”

The next proceeding was to transfer the inked tracings to a lithographic stone. He used a smallish stone, placing the two post-marks a convenient distance apart, so that they could be printed separately. When the transfer and the subsequent “etching” processes were completed and the stone was ready for printing, he inked up and took a trial proof of the two post-marks on a sheet of paper. The result was perfectly convincing. Ridiculously so. As he held the paper in his hand and looked at those absurd post-marks, he chuckled aloud. With a little ingenuity, how easy it was to sprinkle salt on the forensic tail of the inscrutable Penfield! He was disposed to linger and picture to himself the probable proceedings of that astute gentleman when he received the letter. But there was a good deal to do yet, and he must not waste time. There was the problem of printing the Woodbridge post-mark fairly on the stamp, and then there was the addressing and writing of the letter.

The first problem he solved by tracing the outline of an envelope on the sheet that he had printed, with the post-mark in the correct place for the stamp, cutting this piece out and using it to make register marks on the stone. Then he affixed a stamp exactly to the correct spot on the envelope, inked up the stone, laid the envelope against the register marks, and passed the stone under the roller. When he picked up the envelope, the stamp bore the Woodbridge post-mark with just that slight inaccuracy of imposition that made it perfectly convincing. The London post-mark presented no difficulty, as it did not matter to half an inch where it was placed. Another ink-up and another turn of the crank-handle, and the envelope was ready for the penmanship.

Although Varney was so expert a copyist, he decided to take no unnecessary risks. Accordingly, he made a careful tracing of Penfield’ s name and address from the original letter and transferred this in black lead to the envelope. Then with Purcell’s pen, charged with its special black ink, and with the original before him, he inked in the tracing with a free and steady hand and quickly enough to avoid any tell-tale wavering or tremor of the line. It was certainly a masterly performance, and when it was done it would have puzzled a much greater expert than Penfield to distinguish between the copy and the original.

Varney regarded it with deep satisfaction. He was about to put it aside to dry, before he should rub out the tracing marks, when it occurred to him that Purcell would almost certainly have marked it “confidential” or “personal.” It was, in fact, rather desirable that this missive should be opened by Penfield himself. The fewer hands it passed through the better; and then, of course, it was not worthwhile to let any of the clerks into the secret of Purcell’s disappearance. Accordingly, with the original letter still before him, he wrote at the top of the envelope, in bold and rather large characters, the word “personal.” That ought to make it safe.

He put the envelope aside and began to think out the text of the letter that he was going to write. As he did so, his eyes rested gloatingly on the work that he had done, and done to such a perfect finish. It was really a masterpiece of deception. Even a post-office sorter would have been taken in by it. He took it up and again regarded it admiringly. Then he began to consider whether “confidential” would not have been better than personal.” It was certainly most desirable that this letter should not be opened even by the chief clerk, for it would let the cat out of the bag rather completely. He held the envelope irresolutely for a full minute, turning the question over. Finally, he picked up the pen, and, laying the envelope before him, turned the full stop into an “and” and followed this with the word “confidential.” There was not as much space as he would have liked, and in his anxiety to preserve the character of the handwriting while compressing the letters, the tail of the final L strayed on to the edge of the stamp, which to his critical eye looked a little untidy; but that was of no consequence—in fact, it was rather an additional realistic touch.

He now set to work upon the letter itself. It was to be but a short letter, and it took him only a few minutes to draft out the matter in pencil. Then, spreading Purcell’s letter before him, he studied it word by word and letter by letter. When he had got the character of the writing well into his mind, he took a sheet of notepaper, and with a well-sharpened H pencil made a very careful copy of his draft, constantly referring to Purcell’s original and even making tracings of important words and of the signature. Having compared the lightly pencilled copy with Purcell’s letter and made one or two corrections, he picked up the pen and traced over the pencil writing with the sureness and steadiness that his training as an engraver made possible.

The letter being finished with a perfect facsimile of the signature, he made a final comparison of the handwriting with Purcell’s, and, finding it beyond criticism, read through the letter again, speculating on Mr. Penfield’s probable proceedings when he received it. The text of the letter ran thus:

“DEAR MR. PENFIELD,

“I have just seen your advertisement in The Times, and am writing to let you know that circumstances render it impossible for me to call on you, and for the same reason I am unable to give you my present address. If there is anything connected with the Catford business that you wish me to know, perhaps you could put it briefly in another advertisement, to which I could reply if necessary. Sorry to give you this trouble.

“Yours sincerely,

“DANIEL PURCELL.”

Laying down the letter, Varney once more turned to the envelope. First, with a piece of artist’s soft rubber he removed the pencil marks of the tracing. Then, placing the envelope on a sheet of blotting-paper, he carefully traced over the post-marks with an agate tracing-style, following the two concentric circles of each with their enclosed letters and figures with minute accuracy and pressing somewhat firmly. The result was that each of the two post-marks was visibly indented, as if made by a sharply-struck marking stamp. It only remained to erase the pencil marks from the letter, to place it in the envelope, and close the latter; and when this was done, Varney rose and, having once more lit his pipe, began to replace the materials in the cupboard, where also he bestowed the letter for the present.

He was in the act of closing the cupboard door, when his glance fell on a small deed-box on the top shelf. He looked at it thoughtfully for a few moments, then lifted it down, placed it on the table, and unlocked it. The contents were three paper packets, each sealed with his ring-seal. He broke the seals of all three and opened the packets. Two of them contained engraved copper plates, of a twenty-pound and a five-pound note respectively. The third contained a sheaf of paper blanks. Varney took out the latter and counted them, holding each one up to the light to examine the water-mark. There were twelve of them, all five-pound notes. He laid them down and cogitated profoundly; and unconsciously his eyes turned to the etching press at the end of the bench. A few minutes’ work, a smear of ink, and a turn of the press, would convert those blanks into actual notes, so good that they could be passed with perfect safety. Twelve fives—sixty pounds. It was handsome pay for half an hour’s work, and five-pound notes were so easy to get rid of.

It was a severe temptation to a comparatively poor man whose ethical standards were none of the highest. Prosperous as he now thought himself with the growing demand for his etchings, sixty pounds represented the product of nearly two months’ legitimate work. It was a great temptation. There were the blanks, all ready for the magic change. It seemed a pity to waste them. There were only a dozen, and there would be no more. This would really be the end of the lay. After this he could go straight and live a perfectly reputable life.

The gambler’s lure, the attraction of easily won wealth, was beginning to take effect. He had actually picked up the five-pound plate, and was moving towards the bench, when something in his mind brought him suddenly to a stop. In that moment there had risen before his mental vision the sweet and gracious figure of Margaret Purcell. Instantly his feelings underwent a revulsion. That which, but a minute ago, had seemed natural and reasonable now looked unspeakably sordid and base. No compulsion now urged him on unwillingly to crime. It would be his own choice—the choice of mere greed. Was it for this that he had set her and himself free? Could he stand in her presence and cherish thoughts of honourable love with this mean crime, committed of his own free-will, on his conscience? Assuredly not. The very corpse of Purcell cried out from its dark tomb beneath the Wolf on this voluntary resumption of the chains which he had broken at the cost of murder.

Once more he turned towards the bench, but now with a different purpose. Hurriedly, as if fearful of another backsliding, he caught up a large graver and drove its point across the plate from corner to corner, ploughing up the copper in a deep score. That finished the matter. Never again could that plate be printed from. But he did not leave it at that. With a shaving scraper he pared off the surface of the plate until the engraving on it was totally obliterated. He fetched the other plate and treated it in a similar manner. Then he flung both plates into a porcelain dish and filled it with strong nitric acid mordant. Finally, as the malodorous red fumes began to rise from the dish, he took up the sheaf of blanks and held them in the flame of the gas-stove. When the last blackened fragments had fallen to the hearth, he drew a deep breath. Now at last he was free. Really free. Free even from the peril of his own weakness.

His labours had consumed the best part of the morning, but, in any case, he was in no mood for his ordinary work. Opening the window a little wider to let the fumes escape, he took his hat from the peg and went forth, turning his steps in the direction of Regent’s Park.

CHAPTER VII

The Flash Note Factory

To the lover of quiet and the admirer of urban comeliness, the ever-increasing noise and turmoil of London and its ever-decreasing architectural interest and charm give daily an added value to the Inns of Court, in whose peaceful precincts quiet and comeliness yet survive. And of the Inns of Court, if we except Old Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn, the Temple with its cloisters, its fountain, and its ancient church, makes the strongest appeal to the affections of that almost extinct creature the Londoner; of which class the last surviving genuine specimens are to be found in its obsolete chambers, living on amidst the amenities of a bygone age.

But it was neither the quiet nor the architectural charm of the old domestic buildings that had caused Mr. Superintendent Miller, of the Criminal Investigation Department, to take the Temple on his way from Scotland Yard to Fleet Street (though it was as short a way as any); nor was it a desire to contemplate the houses attributed to Wren that made him slow down when he reached King’s Bench Walk and glance hesitatingly up and down that pleasant thoroughfare—if a thoroughfare it can be called. The fact is that Mr. Miller was engaged in certain investigations, which had led him, as investigations sometimes do, into a blind alley; and it was in his mind to see if the keen vision of Dr. John Thorndyke could detect a way out. But he did not want a formal consultation. Rather, he desired to let the matter arise, as it were, by chance, and he did not quite see how to manage it.

Here, as he stood hesitating opposite Thorndyke’s chambers, Providence came to his aid; for at this moment a tall figure emerged from the shadow of the covered passage from Mitre Court and came with an easy, long-legged swing down the tree-shaded footway. Instantly the Superintendent strode forward to intercept the newcomer, and the two met halfway up the Walk.

“You were not coming to see me, by any chance?” Thorndyke asked, when the preliminary greetings had been exchanged.

“No,” replied Miller, “though I had half a mind to look in on you, just to pass the time of day. I am on my way to Clifford’s Inn to look into a rather queer discovery that has been made there.”

Here the Superintendent paused with an attentive eye on Thorndyke’s face, though experience should have told him that he might as well study the expression of a wigmaker’s block. As Thorndyke showed no sign of rising to the bait, he continued:

“A remarkably queer affair. Mysterious, in fact. Our people are rather stuck, so I am going to have a look round the chambers to see if I can pick up any traces.”

“That is always a useful thing to do,” said Thorndyke. “Rooms, like clothes, tend to take certain impressions from those who live in them. Careful inspection, eked out by some imagination, will usually yield something of interest.”

“Precisely,” agreed Miller. “I realized that long ago from watching your own methods. You were always rather fond of poking about in empty houses and abandoned premises. By the way,” he added, forced into the open by Thorndyke’s impassiveness, “I wonder if you would care to stroll up with me and have a look at these chambers?”

“Are the facts of the case available?” asked Thorndyke.

“Certainly,” replied Miller, “to you—so far as they are known. If you care to walk up with me, I’ll tell you about the case as we go along.”

Thereupon Thorndyke (to whom the insoluble mystery and especially the untenanted chambers were as a hot scent to an eager fox-hound) turned and retraced his steps in company with the Supertendent.

“The history of the affair,” the latter began, “is this: At No. 92, Clifford’s Inn a man named Bromeswell had chambers on the second floor. He had been there several years, and was an excellent tenant, paying his rent and other liabilities with clock work regularity on, or immediately after, quarter day. He had never been known to be even a week in arrear with rent, gas, or anything else. But at Midsummer he failed to pay up in his usual prompt manner, and, after a fortnight had passed, a polite reminder was dropped into his letter-box. But still nothing was done beyond dropping in another reminder. Once or twice the porter went to the door of the chambers but he always found the “oak” shut, and when he hammered on it with a stick, he got no answer.

“Well, the time ran on, and the porter began to think that things looked a bit queer, but still nothing was done. Then one day the postman brought a batch of letters, or, rather, circulars, to the lodge addressed to Bromeswell. He had tried to get them into Bromeswell’s letter-box, but couldn’t get them in, as the box was choke-full. Now this made it pretty clear that Bromeswell had not been in his chambers for some considerable time, unless he was dead and his body shut up in them, so the porter acquainted the treasurer with the state of affairs and consulted with him as to what was to be done. There were no means of getting into the chambers without breaking in, for the tenant had at some time fixed a new patent lock on the outer door, and the porter had no duplicate key. But the chambers couldn’t be left indefinitely, especially at there was possibly a dead man inside, so the treasurer decided to send a man up a ladder to break a window and let himself in. As a matter of fact, the porter went up himself, and as soon as he got into the chambers and had a look round, he began to smell a rat.

“The appearance of the place, and especially the even coating of dust that covered everything, showed that no one had been in those rooms for two or three months at least; but what particularly attracted the attention of the porter, who is a retired police sergeant, was a rather queer-looking set of apparatus that suggested to him the outfit of a maker of flash notes. On this he began to make some inquiries, and then it transpired that nobody knew anything about Bromeswell. Mr. Duskin, the late porter, must have known him, since he must have let him the chambers; but Duskin left the Inn some years ago, and the present porter has never met this tenant. It seems an incredible thing, but it appears to be a fact that no one even knows Bromeswell by sight.”

“That does really seem incredible,” said Thorndyke, “in the case of a man living in a place like Clifford’s Inn.”

“Ah, but he wasn’t really living there. That was known, because no milk or bread was ever left there and no laundress ever called for washing. There are no resident chambers in No. 92. The porter had an idea that Bromeswell was a press artist or something of that kind, and used the premises to work in. But of course it wasn’t any concern of his.”

“How was the rent paid?”

“By post, in notes and cash. And the gas was paid in the same way; never by cheque. But to go on with the history: The porter’s suspicions were aroused, and he communicated them to the treasurer, who agreed with him that the police ought to be informed. Accordingly, they sent us a note, and we instructed Inspector Monk, who is a first-class expert on flash notes, to go to Clifford’s Inn and investigate, but to leave things undisturbed as far as possible. So Monk went to the chambers and had a look at the apparatus, and what he saw made him pretty certain that the porter was right. The apparatus was a complete paper-maker’s plant in miniature, all except the moulds. There were no moulds to be seen, and until they were found it was impossible to say that the paper was not being made for some lawful purpose, though the size of the pressing plates—eighteen inches by seven—gave a pretty broad hint. However, there was an iron safe in the room, one of Wilkins’ make, and Monk decided that the moulds were probably locked up in it. He also guessed what the moulds were like. You may have heard of a long series of most excellent forgeries of Bank of England notes.”

“I have,” said Thorndyke. “They were five-pound and twenty-pound notes, mostly passed in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Holland.”

“That’s the lot,” said Miller, “and first-class forgeries they were; and for a very good reason. They were made with the genuine moulds. Some six years ago two moulds were lost or stolen from the works at Maidstone, where the Bank of England makes its paper. They were the moulds for five-pound and twenty-pound notes respectively, and each mould would make a sheet that would cut into two notes—a long narrow sheet sixteen and three-quarter inches by five and five thirty-seconds in the case of a five-pound note. Well, we have been on the lookout for those forgers for years, but, naturally, they were difficult to trace, for the forgeries were so good that no one could tell them from the real thing but the experts at the Bank. You see, it is the paper that the forger usually comes a cropper over. The engraving is much easier to imitate. But this paper was not only made in the proper moulds with all the proper water-marks, but it seemed to be made by a man who knew his job. So you can reckon that Monk was as keen as mustard on getting those moulds.

“And get them he did. On our authority Wilkins made him a duplicate key—as we didn’t want to blow the safe open—and sure enough, as soon as he opened the door, there were the two moulds. So that’s that. There is an end of those forgeries. But the question is, Who and where the devil is this fellow Bromeswell? And there is another question. This only accounts for the paper. The engraving and printing were done somewhere else and by some other artist. We should like to find out who he is. But, for the present, he is a bird in the bush. Bromeswell is our immediate quarry.”

“He seems to be pretty much in the bush, too,” remarked Thorndyke. “Is there no trace of him at all? What about his agreement and his references?”

“Gone,” replied Miller. “When the Inn was sold most of the old papers were destroyed. They were of no use.”

“It is astonishing,” said Thorndyke, “that a man should have been in occupation of those chambers for years and remain completely unknown. And yet one sees how it can have happened with the change of porters. Duskin was the only link that we have with Bromeswell, and Duskin is gone. As to his not being known by sight, he probably came to the chambers only occasionally to make a batch of paper, and if there were no residents in his block, no one would be likely to notice him.”

“No,” Miller agreed; “Londoners are not inquisitive about their neighbours, especially in a business quarter. This is the place, and those are his rooms on the second floor.”

As he paused by an ancient lamp-post near the postern gate that opens on Fetter Lane, the Superintendent indicated a small, dark entry, and then nodded at a range of dull windows at the top of the old house. Then he crossed a tiny courtyard, plunged into the dark entry, and led the way up the narrow stairs, groping with his hands along the unseen handrail, and closely followed by Thorndyke.

At the first floor they emerged for a moment into modified daylight, and then ascended another flight of dark and narrow stairs, which opened on a grimy landing, whose only ornaments were an iron dust-bin and a gas-meter, and which displayed a single iron-bound door, above which appeared in faded white lettering the inscription “Mr. Bromeswell.”

The Superintendent unlocked the massive outer door, which opened with a rusty creak, revealing an inner door fitted with a knocker. This Miller pushed open, and the two men entered the outer room of the “set” of chambers, halting just inside the door to make a general survey of the room, of which the most striking feature was its bareness. And this was really a remarkable feature when the duration of the tenancy was considered. In the course of some years of occupation the mysterious tenant had accumulated no more furniture than a small kitchen table, a Windsor chair, a canvas seated camp armchair, a military camp bedstead with a sleeping-bag, and a couple of rugs and a small iron safe.

“It is obvious,” said Thorndyke, “that Bromeswell never lived here. Apparently he visited the place only at intervals, but when he came he stayed until he had finished what he had come to do. Probably he brought a supply of food, and never went out between his arrival and departure.”

He strolled into the tiny kitchen, where a gas ring, a teapot, a cup and saucer, one or two plates, a tin of milk-powder, one of sugar, another of tea, and a biscuit-tin containing an unrecognizable mildewy mass, bore out his suggestion. With a glance at the loaded letter-box, he crossed the room, and, opening the door, entered what was intended to be the bedroom, but had been made into a workshop. And very complete it was, being fitted with a roomy sink and tap, a small boiler—apparently a dentist’s vulcanizer—and a mixer or beater worked by a little electric motor, driven by a bichromate battery, there being no electric light in the premises. By the window was a strong bench, on which was a powerful office press, a stack of long, narrow copper plates, and a pile of pieces of felt of a similar shape but somewhat larger. Close to the bench was a trough made from a stout wooden box, lined with zinc and mounted on four legs, in which was a folded newspaper containing a number of neat coils of cow-hair cord, each coil having an eye-splice at either end, evidently to fit on the hooks which had been fixed in the walls.

“Those cords,” Miller explained, as Thorndyke took them from the paper to examine them, “were used as drying lines to hang the damp sheets of paper on. They are always made of cow hair, because that is the only material that doesn’t mark the paper. But I expect you know all about that. Is there anything that catches your eye in particular? You seem interested in those cords.”

“I was looking at these two,” said Thorndyke, holding out two cords which he had uncoiled. “This one, you see, was too long; it had been cut the wrong length, or, more probably, was the remainder of a long piece. But instead of cutting off the excess, our friend has thriftily shortened this rather expensive cord by working a sheep-shank on it. Now it isn’t everyone who knows how to make a sheep-shank, and the persons who do are not usually papermakers.”

“That’s perfectly true, Doctor,” assented Miller. “I’m one of the people who don’t know how to make that particular kind of knot. What is the other point?”

“This other cord,” replied Thorndyke, “which looks new, has an eye-splice at one end only, but it is, as you see, about five inches longer than the other; just about the amount that would be taken up by working the eye-splice. That looks as if Bromeswell had worked the splices himself, and if you consider the matter you will see that is probably the case. The length of these cords is roughly the width of this room. They have been cut to a particular measure, but the cord was most probably bought in a single length, as this extra long piece suggests.”

“Yes,” agreed Miller. “They wouldn’t have been sold with the eye-splices worked on them, and, in fact, I don’t see what he wanted with the eye-splices at all. A simple knotted loop would have answered the purpose quite as well.”

“Exactly,” said Thorndyke. “They were not necessary. They were a luxury, a refinement; and that emphasizes the point that they suggest, which is that Bromeswell is a man who has some technical knowledge of cordage, is probably a sailor, or in some way connected with the sea. As you say, a common knotted loop, such as a bowline knot, would have answered the purpose perfectly. But that is true of most of the cases in which a sailor uses an eye-splice. Then why does he take the trouble to work the splice? Principally for the sake of neatness of appearance, because, to an expert eye, a tied loop with its projecting end looks slovenly.

Now this man will have had quite a lot of time on his hands. He will have had to wait about for hours while the pulp was boiling and while it was being beaten up. A sailor would very naturally spend a part of his idle time in tidying up the cordage.”

The Superintendent nodded reflectively. “Yes,” he said, “I think you are right, Doctor, and it is an important point. This fellow was a fairly expert papermaker. He wasn’t a mere amateur, like most of the note forgers. If he was some kind of sailor man as well, that would make him a lot easier to identify if we should get on his track. But that is just what we can’t do. There is nothing to start from. He is a mere name, and pretty certainly a false name at that.”

As he spoke, Miller looked about him discontentedly, running his eye over the bench and its contents. Suddenly he stepped over to the press, and, diving into the shadowed space between it and the wall, brought up his hand grasping a silver-mounted briar pipe.

“Now, Doctor,” he said with a grin, handing it to Thorndyke when he had inspected it, “here is something in your line. Just run your eye over that pipe and tell me what the man is like.”

Thorndyke laughed as he took the pipe in his hand. “You are thinking of the mythical anatomist and the fossil bone,” said he. “I am afraid this relic will not tell us much. It is a good pipe; it must have cost half a guinea, which would have meant more if its owner had been honest. The maker’s name tells us that it was bought in Cheapside, near the Bank, its weight and the marks on the mouthpiece tell us that the owner has a strong jaw and a good set of teeth; its good condition suggests a careful, orderly man, and its presence here makes it likely that the owner was Mr. Bromeswell. That isn’t much, but it confirms the other appearances.”

“What other appearances?” demanded Miller.

“Those of the bed, the chair, the bench, the hooks, and the trough. They all point to a big, heavy man. The bedstead is about six feet six inches long, but the heel-marks are near the foot and the pillow is right at the head. This bench and the trough have been put up for this man’s use—they were apparently knocked up by himself—and they are both of a suitable height for you or me. A short man couldn’t work at either. The hooks are over seven feet from the floor. The canvas seat of the chair is deeply sagged, although the woodwork looks in nearly new condition, and the canvas of the bed is in the same condition. Add this massive, hard-bitten pipe to those indications, and you have the picture of a tall, burly, powerful man. We must have a look at his pillow and rugs to see if we can pick up a stray hair or two and get an idea of his complexion. What did he make the pulp from? I don’t see any traces of rags.”

“He didn’t use rags. He used Whatman’s water-colour paper, which is a pure linen paper. Apparently he tore it up into tiny fragments and boiled it in soda lye until it was ready to go into the beater. Monk found a supply of the paper in a cupboard and some half-cooked stuff in the boiler.” As he spoke, Miller unscrewed and raised the lid of the boiler, which was then seen to be half filled with a clear liquid, at the bottom of which was a mass of sodden fragments of shredded paper. From the boiler he turned to a small cupboard and opened the door. “That seems to be his stock of material,” he said, indicating a large roll of thick white paper. He took out a sheet and handed it to Thorndyke, who held it up to the light and read the name “Whatman,” which formed the water-mark.

“Yes,” said Thorndyke, as he returned the sheet. “His method of work seems clear enough, but that is not of much interest, as you have the moulds. What we want is the man himself. You have no description of him, I suppose?”

“Not if your description of him is correct,” replied Miller. “The suspected person, according to the Belgian police, is a smallish, slight, dark man. They may be on the wrong track, or there may be a confederate. There must have been a confederate, perhaps more than one. But Bromeswell only made the paper. Someone else must have done the engraving and printing. As to planting the notes, that may have been done by some other parties, or by either or both of these two artists. I should think they probably kept the game to themselves, judging by what we have seen here. This seems to be a one man show, and it looks as if even the engraver didn’t know where the paper was made, or the moulds wouldn’t have been left in this way. Shall we go and look for those hairs that you spoke of?”

They returned to the outer room, where they both subjected the little pillow of the camp bed to a searching scrutiny. But though they examined both sides and even took off the dusty pillow-case, not a single hair was to be found. Then they turned their attention to the rugs, which had been folded neatly and placed on the canvas—there was no mattress—unfolding them carefully and going over them inch by inch. Here, too, they seemed to have drawn a blank, for they had almost completed their examination, when the Superintendent uttered an exclamation, and delicately picked a small object from near the edge of the rug.

“This seems to be a hair, Doctor,” said he, holding it up between his finger and thumb. “Looks like a moustache hair, but it’s a mighty short one.”

Thorndyke produced his pocket lens and a sheet of notepaper, and holding the latter while Miller cautiously dropped the hair on it, he inspected the find through his lens.

“Yes,” he said, “it is a moustache hair, about half an inch long, decidedly thick, cleanly cut, and of a lightish red-brown colour. Somehow it seems to fit the other characters. A closely-cropped, bristly, sandy moustache appears to go appropriately with the stature and weight of the man and that massive pipe. There is a tendency for racial characters to go together, and the blond races run to height and weight. Well, we have a fairly complete picture of the man, unless we have made some erroneous inferences, and we seem to have finished our inspection. Have you been through the stuff in the letter-box?”

“Monk went through it, but we may as well have a look at it to make sure that he hasn’t missed anything. I’ll hand the things out if you will put them on the table and check them.”

As Miller took out the letters in handfuls, Thorndyke received them from him and laid them out on the table. Then he and Miller examined the collection systematically.

“You see, Doctor,” said the latter, “they are all circulars; not a private letter among them excepting the two notes from the treasurer about the rent. And they are quite a miscellaneous lot. None of these people knew anything about Bromeswell, apparently; they just copied the address out of the directory. Here’s one from a money-lender. Bromeswell could have given him a tip or two. The earliest post-mark is the eleventh of June, so we may take it that he wasn’t here after the tenth or the morning of the eleventh.”

“There is a slight suggestion that he left at night,” said Thorndyke, as he made a note of the date. “The place where you found the pipe would be in deep shadow by gaslight, but not by daylight. Certainly the blind was up, but he would probably have drawn it up after he had turned the gas out, as its being down during the day might attract attention.”

“Yes,” said Miller, “you are probably right about the time; and that reminds me that Monk found a small piece of paper under the bench—I’ve got it in my pocket—which seems to bear out your suggestion.” He took from his pocket a bulky letter-case, from an inner recess of which he extracted a little scrap of Whatman paper. “Here it is,” he said, handing it to Thorndyke. “He seems to have just jotted down the times of two trains, and, as you say, they were probably night trains.”

Thorndyke looked with deep attention at the fragment, on which was written, hastily but legibly in very black ink, “8.15 and 11.15,” and remarked:

“Quite a valuable find in its way. The writing is very characteristic, and so is the ink. Probably it would be more so when seen through the microscope. Magnification brings out shades of colour that are invisible to the naked eye.

“Well, Doctor,” said Miller, “if you can spare the time to have a look at it through the microscope, I wish you would, and let us know if you discover anything worth noting. And perhaps you wouldn’t mind taking a glance at the hair, too, to settle the colour more exactly.”

He transferred the latter, which he had carefully folded in paper and put in his pocket-book, to Thorndyke, who deposited it, with the scrap of paper, in his letter-case, after pencilling on the wrapper a note of the nature and source of the object.

“And that,” said the Superintendent, “seems to be the lot. We haven’t done so badly, after all. If you are right—and I expect you are—we have got quite a serviceable description of the man Bromeswell. But it is a most mysterious affair. I can’t imagine what the deuce can have happened. It is pretty clear that he came here about the tenth of June, and probably made a batch of paper, which we shall hear of later. But what can have happened to the man? Something out of the common, evidently. He would never have stayed away voluntarily with the certainty that the premises would be entered, his precious moulds found, and the whole thing blown upon. If he had intended to clear out he would certainly have taken the moulds with him, or at least destroyed them if he thought that the game was up. What do you think, Doctor?”

“It seems to me,” replied Thorndyke, “that there are three possibilities. He may be dead, and if so he probably died suddenly, before he was able to make any arrangements; he may be in prison on some other charge; or he may have got a scare that we know nothing of and had to keep out of sight. You said that the Belgian police were taking some action.”

“Yes, they have got an officer over here, by agreement with us, who is making inquiries about the man who planted the notes in Belgium. But he isn’t after Bromeswell. He is looking for quite a different man, as I told you. But he doesn’t pretend that he could recognize him.”

“It doesn’t follow that Bromeswell knows that. If the confederate has discovered that inquiries are being made, he may have given his friend a hint and the pair of them may have absconded. But that is a mere speculation. As you say, something extraordinary must have happened, and it must have been something sudden and unforeseen. And that is all that we can say at present.”

By the time that this conclusion was reached, they had emerged from Clifford’s Inn Passage into Fleet Street; and here they parted, the Superintendent setting a course westward and Thorndyke crossing the road to the gateway of Inner Temple Lane.

CHAPTER VIII

In which Thorndyke tries over the Moves

It was in a deeply meditative frame of mind that Thorndyke pursued his way towards his chambers after parting with the Superintendent. For the inspection which he had just made had developed points of interest other than those which he had discussed with the detective officer. To his acute mind, habituated to rapid inference, the case of the mysterious Mr. Bromeswell had inevitably presented a parallelism with that of Daniel Purcell. Bromeswell had disappeared without leaving a trace. If he had absconded, he had done so without premeditation or preparation, apparently under the compulsion of some unforeseen but imperative necessity. But that was precisely Purcell’s case; and the instant the mere comparison was made, other points of agreement began to appear and multiply in the most startling manner.

The physical resemblance between Purcell and the hypothetical Bromeswell was striking but not conclusive. Both were big, heavy men; but such men are not uncommon, and the resemblance in the matter of the moustache had to be verified—or disproved. But the other points of agreement were very impressive—impressive alike by their completeness and by their number. Both men were connected with the making of paper and of the same kind—handmade paper. The banknote moulds had been stolen or lost at Maidstone about six years ago. But at that very time Purcell was at. Maidstone, and was then engaged in the paper industry. Bromeswell appeared to have a sailor’s knowledge and skill in respect of cordage. But Purcell was a yachtsman and had such knowledge and skill. Then the dates of the two disappearances coincided very strikingly. Bromeswell disappeared from London about the tenth of June; Purcell disappeared from Penzance on the twenty-third of June. Even in trivial circumstances there was curious agreement. For instance, it was a noticeable coincidence that Bromeswell’s pipe should have been bought at a shop within a minute’s walk of Purcell’s office.

But there was another coincidence that Thorndyke had noted even while he was examining the premises at Clifford’s Inn. Those premises were concerned exclusively with the making of the paper blanks on which the notes would later be printed. Of the engraving and printing activities there was no trace. Bromeswell was a papermaker pure and simple; but somewhere in the background there must have been a confederate, who was an engraver and a printer, to whom Bromeswell supplied the paper blanks and who engraved the plates and printed the notes. But Purcell had one intimate friend; and that friend was a skilful engraver, who was able to print from engraved plates. Moreover, the rather vague description given by the Belgian police of the man who uttered the forged notes, while it obviously could not apply to Purcell, agreed very completely with Purcell’s intimate friend.

And there was yet another agreement, perhaps more striking than any. If it were assumed that Bromeswell and Purcell were one and the same person, the whole of the mystery connected with Mr. Penfield’s letter was resolved. Every thing became consistent and intelligible—up to a certain point. If the mysterious “enclosures,” were a batch of paper blanks with the Bank of England water-mark on them, it was easy to understand Mr. Penfield’s reticence; for he had made himself an accessory to a felony, to say nothing of the offence that he was committing by having these things in his possession. It would also account completely for Purcell’s sudden flight and his silence as to his whereabouts; for he would, naturally, assume that no lawyer would be such an imbecile as to accept the position of an accessory to a crime that he had no connection with. He would take it for granted that Penfield would forthwith hand the letter and the enclosures to the police.

But there were one or two difficulties. In the first place, the theory implied an incredible lack of caution on the part of Penfield, who was a lawyer of experience, and would fully appreciate the risk he was running. Then it assumed an equally amazing lack of care and caution in the case of Purcell—a carelessness quite at variance with the scrupulous caution and well-maintained secrecy of the establishment at Clifford’s Inn. But the most serious discrepancy was the presence of the paper blanks in a letter. The letter into which they ought to have been put would be addressed to the confederate, and that confederate was assumed to be Varney. But why should they have been sent in a letter to Varney? On the very day on which the letter was posted, Varney and Purcell had been alone together for some hours on the yacht. The blanks could have been handed to Varney then, and naturally would have been. The discrepancy seemed to render the hypothesis untenable, or at any rate to rule out Varney as the possible confederate.

But it was impossible to dismiss the hypothesis as untenable. The agreement with the observed facts were too numerous; and as soon as the inquiry was transferred to a new field, a fresh set of agreements came into view. Very methodically Thorndyke considered the theory of the identity of Purcell with Bromeswell in connection with his interviews with Mr. Penfield and Mr. Levy.

Taking the latter first, what had it disclosed? It had shown that Purcell was a common money lender; not an incriminating fact, for the business of a money-lender is not in itself unlawful. But it is a vocation to which little credit attaches, and its practice is frequently associated with very unethical conduct. It is rather on the outside edge of lawful industry.

But what of Levy? Apparently he was not a mere employee. He appeared to be able to get on quite well without Purcell, and seemed to have the status of a partner. Was it possible that he was a partner in the other concern, too? It was not impossible. A money-lender has excellent opportunities for getting rid of good flash notes. His customers usually want notes in preference to cheques, and he could even get batches of notes from the Bank and number his forgeries to correspond, thus protecting himself in case of discovery. But even if Levy were a confederate he would not exclude Varney, for there was no reason to suppose that he was an engraver, whereas Varney was both an engraver and an old and constant associate of Purcell’s. In short, Levy was not very obviously in the picture at all, and, for the time being, Thorndyke dismissed him and passed on to the other case. Taking now the interview with Penfield, there were the facts elicited by the examination of the envelope. That envelope had contained a rather bulky mass, apparently of folded paper, about five inches long or a little more, and somewhat less than three inches wide. Thorndyke rose, and, taking from the bookshelves a manuscript book labelled “Dimensions,” found in the index the entry Banknotes” and turned to the page indicated. Here the dimensions of a five-pound note were given as eight inches and three-eighths long by five inches and five thirty-seconds wide. Folded lengthwise into three, it would thus be five inches and five thirty-seconds, or say five and an eighth long by two and three-quarters wide, if folded quite accurately, or a fraction more if folded less exactly. The enclosure in Penfield’s envelope was therefore exactly the size of a small batch of notes folded into three. It did not follow that the enclosures actually were banknotes. They might have been papers of some other kind but of similar size. But the observed facts were in complete agreement with the supposition that they were banknotes, and taken in conjunction with Penfield’s extraordinary secrecy and the wording of his letter to Margaret Purcell, they strongly supported that supposition.

Then there was the suggestion that the envelope had been steamed open and reclosed. It was only a suggestion, not a certainty. The appearances might be misleading. But to Thorndyke’s expert eye the suggestion had been very strong. The gum had smeared upwards on the inside, which seemed impossible if the envelope had been closed once for all; and the paper showed traces of cockling, as if it had been damped. Mr. Penfield had rejected the suggestion, partly for the excellent reasons that he had given, but also, perhaps, because Purcell’s flight implied that he had discovered the mistake, and that therefore the mistake was presumably his own.

But there was one important point that Penfield seemed to have overlooked. The letter that he expected to receive would (presumably) have contained no enclosures. The letter that he did receive contained a bulky enclosure which bulged the envelope. The two letters must therefore have been very different in appearance. Now, ordinarily, when two letters are put each into the envelope of the other, when once the envelopes are closed the mistake is covered up. There is nothing in their exterior to suggest that any mistake has occurred. But in the present case the error was blatantly advertised by the appearance of the closed letters. Penfield’s envelope, which should have been flat, bulged with its contents. The other envelope—if there was one, as there almost certainly must have been—which should have bulged, was conspicuously flat. Of course, Penfield may have been wrong in assuming that no enclosures were to be sent to him. Both letters may have held enclosures. But taking the evidence as it was presented, it was to the effect that there were enclosures in only one of the letters. And if that were the case, the mistake appeared incredible. It became impossible to understand how Purcell could have handled the two letters and finally put them into the post without seeing that the enclosures were in the wrong envelope.

What was the significance of the point? Well, it raised the question whether Purcell could possibly have posted this letter himself; and this question involved the further question whether the envelope had been opened and reclosed. For if it had, the transposition of the contents must have taken place after the letters left Purcell’s hands. Against this was the fact of Purcell’s flight, which made it practically certain that he had become aware of the transposition. But it was not conclusive, and having noted the objection, Thorndyke proceeded to follow out the alternative theory. Accepting, for the moment, the hypothesis that the letter had been opened and the transposition made intentionally, certain other questions arose. First, who had the opportunity? Second, what could have been the purpose of the act? And, third, who could have had such a purpose? Thorndyke considered these questions in the same methodical fashion, taking them one by one and in the order stated.

Who had the opportunity? That depended, among other things, on the time at which the letter was posted. Penfield had stated that the letter had been posted at 8.30 P.M. If that were true, it put Varney out of the problem, for he had left Penzance some hours before that time. But it was not true. The time shown by the post-mark was not the time at which the letter was posted, but that at which it was sorted at the post office. It might have been posted at a pillar-box some hours previously. It was therefore not impossible that it might have been posted by Varney. And if it was physically possible, it at once became the most probable assumption, since there was no reasonable alternative. It was inconceivable that Purcell should have handed the letters to a stranger to post; and if he had, it was inconceivable that that stranger should have opened the letters and transposed their contents. There was, indeed, the possibility that Purcell had met a confederate at Penzance and had handed him the letters—one of which would be addressed to himself—to post, and that this confederate might have made the transposition. But this was pure speculation, without a particle of evidence to support it; whereas Varney, as an intimate friend, even if not a confederate, might conceivably have had the letters handed to him to post, though this was profoundly improbable, seeing that Purcell was going ashore and Varney was in charge of the yacht. In effect, there was no positive evidence that anybody had had the opportunity to make the transposition; but if it had not been done by Purcell, himself, then Varney appeared to be the only possible agent.

From this vague and unsatisfactory conclusion Thorndyke proceeded to the second question:

Assuming the transposition to have been made intentionally, what could have been the purpose of the act? To this question, so far as the immediate purpose was concerned, the answer was obvious enough, since only one was possible. The blanks must have been put into Mr. Penfield’s envelope for the express purpose of notifying the solicitor that Purcell was a banknote forger—in short, for the purpose of exposing Purcell. This led at once to the third question: Who could have had such a purpose? But to this also the answer was obvious. The only person who could have had such a purpose would be a confederate, for no one else would have been in possession of the knowledge that would make such a purpose possible. The transposition could have been made only by someone who knew what the contents of the envelope were.

But why should any confederate have done this? The exposure of Purcell involved at least a risk of the exposure of his confederate; and it could be assumed that if Purcell suspected that he had been betrayed, he would certainly denounce his betrayer. The object, therefore, could not have been to secure the arrest of Purcell—a conclusion that was confirmed by the fact that Purcell had become aware of the transposition, and, if he had not done it himself, must apparently have been informed in time to allow of his escaping.

But what other object could there be? Was it possible that the confederate wished to get rid of Purcell, and made this exposure with the express purpose of compelling him to disappear? That raised the question: When did Purcell become aware that the transposition had been made? And the answer was somewhat perplexing. He could not have become aware of it immediately, or he would have telegraphed to Penfield and stopped the letter; and yet he seemed to have absconded at once, before the letter could have been delivered to Penfield. He was due at Oulton the following day, and he never arrived there. He was stated to have gone from Penzance to Falmouth. That might or might not be true, but the voyage to Ipswich was evidently a myth. The answer that he had received from the owners of the Hedwig, enclosing a report from the captain of the ship, showed that the only passengers who embarked at Falmouth were three distressed Swedish sailors, who travelled with the ship to Malmo, and that no one went ashore at Ipswich. It followed that Varney had either been misinformed or had invented the incidents; but when it was considered that he must, if he was telling the truth, have been misinformed in the same manner on both separate occasions, it seemed more probable that the story of the voyage was a fabrication. In that case the journey to Falmouth, of which no one but Varney had heard, was probably a fabrication, too. This left Penzance as the apparent starting-point of the flight. Purcell had certainly landed at Penzance and had forthwith disappeared from view. What became of him thereafter it was impossible to guess. He seemed to have vanished into thin air.

Arrived at this point, Thorndyke’s quietly reflective attitude suddenly gave place to one of intense attention. For a new and somewhat startling question had presented itself. With an expression of deep concentration he set himself to consider it.

Hitherto he had accepted Purcell’s landing at Penzance as an undeniable fact, from which a secure departure could be taken. But was it an undeniable fact? The only witness of that landing was Varney, and Varney had shown himself a very unreliable witness. Apparently he had lied about the Ipswich voyage, probably, too, about the visit to Falmouth. What if the landing at Penzance were a fabrication, too? It seemed a wild suggestion, but it was a possibility; and Thorndyke proceeded carefully to develop the consequences that would follow if it were true.

Suppose that Purcell had never landed at Penzance at all. Then several circumstances hither to incomprehensible became understandable. The fables of Purcell’s appearance at Falmouth and Ipswich, which had seemed to be motiveless falsehoods, now showed a clear purpose; which was to create a certainty that Purcell had landed from the yacht as stated and to shift the search for the missing man from Penzance to Ipswich. Again, if Purcell had never landed at Penzance, the letter could not have been posted by him, and it became practically certain that it must have been posted there by Varney and the transposition made by him. And this made the transposition understandable by developing a very evident purpose. When Penfield opened the letter, and when, later, he heard of Purcell’s disappearance, he would at once assume that Purcell had absconded to avoid being arrested. The purpose of the transposition, then, was to furnish a reasonable explanation of a disappearance that had already occurred.

But what had become of Purcell? If he had not landed at Penzance he certainly had not landed anywhere else, for there had not been time for the yacht to touch at any other port. Nor could it be supposed that he had trans-shipped on to another vessel during the voyage. There was no reason why he should. The letter had not been posted, and until it had been posted there was no reason for flight. The only reasonable inference from the facts, including Varney’s false statements, was that something had happened during the voyage from Sennen; that Purcell had disappeared, presumably overboard; and that Varney had reasons for concealing the circumstances of his disappearance. In short, that Purcell was dead, and that Varney was responsible for his death.

It was an appalling theory. Thorndyke hardly dared even to propound it to himself. But there was no denying that it fitted the facts with the most surprising completeness. Once assume it to be true, and all the perplexing features of the case became consistent and understandable. Not only did it explain Varney’s otherwise inexplicable anxiety to prove that Purcell had been seen alive at a date subsequent to that of the alleged landing at Penzance; it accounted for the facts that Purcell had taken no measures to provide himself with a stock of cash before disappearing, and that he had made no communication of any sort to his wife since his departure, though he could have done so with perfect safety. It was in perfect agreement with all the known facts and in disagreement with none. It was a complete solution of the mystery; and there was no other.

When Thorndyke reached this conclusion, he roused himself from his reverie, and, filling his pipe, took an impartial survey of the scheme of circumstantial evidence that he had been engaged in constructing. It was all very complete and consistent. There were, so far, no discrepancies or contradictions. All the evidence pointed in the one direction. The assumed actions of Varney were in complete agreement with the circumstances that were known and the others that were inferred, as well as with the assumed motives. But it was largely hypothetical, and might turn out to be entirely illusory. If only one of the assumed facts should prove to be untrue, the whole structure of inference would come tumbling down. He took out of his pocket-book the folded paper containing the single moustache hair that the Superintendent had found in the Clifford’s Inn rooms. Laying it on a sheet of white paper, he once more examined it, first through his lens, then under the microscope, noting the length, thickness, and colour, and mentally visualizing the kind of moustache from which it had come. Here was an indispensable link in the chain of evidence. If Purcell had had such a moustache, that would not prove that he and Bromeswell were one and the same person, but it would be consistent with their identity. But if Purcell had no such moustache, then it was probable—indeed, nearly certain—that he and Bromeswell were different persons. And if they were, the whole hypothetical scheme that he had been working out collapsed. Both Purcell and Varney ceased to have any connection with the forged notes, the mysterious “enclosures” could not be of the nature that he had assumed, and all the deductions from those assumed facts ceased to be valid. It was necessary without delay to test this essential link, to ascertain whether this derelict hair could have been derived from Daniel Purcell.

Enclosed with it was the slip of paper with the notes of the trains, which he had, for the moment, forgotten. He now examined it minutely, and was once more struck by the intense blackness of the ink; and he recalled that a similar intensity of blackness had been noticeable in the address on Mr. Penfield’s envelope. It had appeared almost like the black of a carbon ink, but he had decided that it was not. So it was with the present specimen, but now he had the means of deciding definitely. Fetching the microscope, he laid the paper on the stage and examined it, first by reflected, then by transmitted, light. The examination made it clear that this was an iron-tannin ink of unusual concentration, with a “provisional” blue pigment, probably methyl blue. There was only one letter, P, and this he tried to compare with the P on Mr. Penfield’s envelope, so far as he could remember it; but he could not get beyond a belief that there was a resemblance—a belief that would have to be tested by a specimen of Purcell’s handwriting.

Having finished with the paper he returned to the hair. He decided to write to Margaret, asking for a description of her missing husband, and had just reached out to the stationery case, when an elaborate and formal tattoo on the small brass knocker of the inner door arrested him. Rising, he crossed the room and threw the door open, thereby disclosing the dorsal aspect of a small elderly gentleman. As the door opened the visitor turned about, and Thorndyke immediately, not without surprise, recognized him. It was Mr. Penfield.

THE SHADOW OF THE WOLF (1925) [Part 2]

CHAPTER IX

In which Mr. Penfield receives a Shock

Mr. Penfield greeted Thorndyke with a little stiff bow, and bestowed upon the extended hand a formal and somewhat rheumatic shake. “I must apologize,” he said, as his host ushered him into the room, “for disturbing you by this visit, but I had a little matter to communicate to you, and thought it better to make that communication personally rather than by correspondence.”

“You are not disturbing me at all,” Thorndyke replied. “On the contrary, I expect that your visit will save me the necessity of writing a letter.”

“To me?” asked Penfield.

“No; to Mrs. Purcell. I was on the point of writing to her to ask for a description of her husband. As I have never met him I thought it as well that I should get from her such details of his appearance as might be necessary for purposes of identification.”

“Quite so,” said Mr. Penfield. “Very desirable indeed. Well, I think I can tell you all you want to know, unless you want very minute details. And it happens that your inquiry comes rather opportunely in respect of the matter that I have to communicate. Shall we dispose of your question first?”

“If you please,” replied Thorndyke. He took from a drawer a pad of ruled paper, and, uncapping his fountain pen, looked at Mr. Penfield, whom he had inducted into an easy chair. “May I offer you a cigar, Mr. Penfield?” he asked.

“I thank you,” was the reply, “but I am not a smoker. “Perhaps—” Here he held out his snuff-box tentatively. “No? Well, it is an obsolete vice, but I am a survivor from an obsolete age.” He refreshed himself with a substantial pinch, and continued: “With regard to Purcell: his person is easy to describe and should be easy to identify. He is a big lump of a man, about six feet or a fraction over. Massive, heavy, but not fat; just elephantine. Rather slow in his movements, but strong, active, and not at all clumsy. As to his face, I would call it beefy—a full red face with thick, bright-red, crinkly ears and full lips. Eyes, pale blue; hair, yellowish or light brown, cropped short. No beard or whiskers, but a little, bristly, pale-reddish moustache, cut short like a sandy toothbrush. Expression, surly; manner, short, brusque, taciturn, and rather morose. Big, thick, purple hands that look, in spite of their size, capable, neat, and useful hands. In fact, the hands are an epitome of Purcell: a combination of massive strength and weight with remarkable bodily efficiency. How will that do for you?”

“Admirably,” replied Thorndyke, inwardly some what surprised at the old solicitor’s powers of observation. “It is a very distinctive picture, and quite enough for what we may call prima facie identification. I take it that you know him pretty well?”

“I have seen a good deal of him since his marriage, when his wife introduced him to me, and I have managed his legal business for some years. But I know very little of his private affairs. Very few people do, I imagine. I never met a less communicative man. And now, if we have done with his appearance, let us come to the question of his present whereabouts. Have you any information on the subject?”

“There is a vague report that he was seen some months ago at Ipswich. It is quite unconfirmed, and I attach no importance to it.”

“It is probably correct, though,” said Penfield. “I have just had a letter from him, and the post mark shows that it came from that very locality.”

“There is no address on the letter, then?”

“No; and I am invited to reply by advertisement. The occasion of the letter was this: a client of mine, a Mrs. Catford, who is a relative of Mrs. Purcell’s, had recently died, leaving a will of which I am the executor and residuary legatee. By the terms of that will Mrs. Purcell and her husband each benefits to the extent of a thousand pounds. Now, as Mrs. Catford’s death occurred subsequently to Purcell’s disappearance, it became necessary to establish his survival of the testatrix or the contrary—in order that the will might be administered. As his whereabouts were unknown, the only method that I could think of was to put an advertisement in the ‘Personal’ column of The Times, on the bare chance that he might see it, asking him to communicate with me. By a lucky chance he did see it and did communicate with me. But he gave no address, and any further communication from me will have to be by advertisement, as he suggests. That, however, is of no importance to me. His letter tells me all I want to know; that he is alive at a date subsequent to the death of the testatrix, and that the bequest in his favour can consequently take effect. I am not concerned with his exact whereabouts. That matter is in your province.”

As he concluded, punctuating his conclusion with a pinch of snuff, the old lawyer looked at Thorndyke with a sly and slightly ironical smile.

Thorndyke reflected rapidly on Mr. Penfield’s statement. The appearance of this letter was very remarkable, and the more so coming as it did on top of the confirmatory evidence respecting the moustache hair. It was now highly probable—almost certain—that Bromeswell and Purcell were one and the same person. But if that were so, all the probabilities went to show that Purcell must be dead. And yet here was a letter from him, not to a stranger, but to one who knew his handwriting well. It was very remarkable.

Again, the report of Purcell’s voyage from Falmouth to Ipswich was certainly untrue. But if it was untrue there was no reason for supposing that Purcell had ever been at Ipswich at all. Yet here was a letter sent by Purcell from that very locality. That was very remarkable, too. Clearly, the matter called for further investigation, and that involved, in the first place, an examination of this letter that had come so mysteriously to confirm a report that was certainly untrue. He returned Mr. Penfield’s smile, and then asked:

“You accept this letter, then, as evidence of survival?”

Mr. Penfield looked astonished. “But, my dear sir, what else could I do? I may be insufficiently critical, and I have not your great special knowledge of this subject, but to my untrained intelligence it would appear that the circumstance of a man’s having written a letter affords good presumptive evidence that he was alive at the date when it was written. That is my own view, and I propose to administer the will in accordance with it. Do I understand that you dissent from it?”

Thorndyke smiled blandly. He was beginning rather to like Mr. Penfield.

“As you state the problem,” said he, “you are probably right. At any rate, the administration of the will is your concern and not mine. As you were good enough to remark, my concern is with the person and the whereabouts of Mr. Purcell and not with his affairs. Were you proposing to allow me to inspect the envelope of this letter?”

“It was for that very purpose that I came,” replied Penfield, with a smile and a twinkle of mischief in his eyes; “but I will not restrict you to the envelope this time. You shall inspect the letter as well, if a mere letter will not be superfluous when the envelope has given up its secrets.”

He produced a wallet from his pocket and, opening it, took out a letter, which he gravely handed to Thorndyke. The latter took it from him, and as he glanced at the jet-black writing of the address said, “I take it that you are satisfied that the hand writing is Purcell’s?”

“Certainly,” was the reply. “But whose else should it be? The question does not seem to arise. However, I may assure you that it is undoubtedly Purcell’s writing and also Purcell’s ink, though that is less conclusive. Still, it is a peculiar ink. I have never seen any quite like it. My impression is that he prepares it himself.”

As Penfield was speaking, Thorndyke examined the envelope narrowly. Presently he rose, and, taking a reading-glass from the mantelshelf, went over to the window, where, with the aid of the glass, he scrutinized the envelope inch by inch on both sides. Then, laying down the reading-glass, he took from his pocket a powerful doublet lens, through which he examined certain parts of the envelope, particularly the stamp and the London postmark. Finally, he took out the letter, opened the envelope, and carefully examined its interior, and then inspected the letter itself before unfolding it, holding it so that the light fell on it obliquely and scrutinizing each of the four corners in succession. At length he opened the letter, read it through, again examined the corners, and compared some portions of the writing with that on the envelope.

These proceedings were closely observed by Mr. Penfield, who watched them with an indulgent smile. He was better able than on the last occasion to appreciate the humour of Thorndyke’s methods. There was nothing about this letter that he had need to conceal. He could afford to let the expert find out what he could this time; and Mr. Penfield, from a large and unfavourable experience of expert witnesses, suspected that the discovery would probably take the form of a mare’s nest.

“Well,” he said, as Thorndyke returned to his chair with the letter in his hand, “has the oracle spoken? Have we made any startling discoveries?”

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘discoveries,’” replied Thorndyke, “which seems to imply facts definitely ascertained, but there are certain appearances which suggest a rather startling inference.”

“Indeed!” said Mr. Penfield, taking snuff with great enjoyment. “I somehow expected that they would when I decided to show you the letter. What is the inference that is suggested?”

“The inference is,” replied Thorndyke, “that this letter has never been through the post.”

Mr. Penfield paused with his hand uplifted, holding a minute pinch of snuff, and regarded Thorndyke in silent astonishment.

“That,” he said, at length, “is certainly a startling inference, and it would be still more startling if there were any possibility that it could be true. Unfortunately, the letter bears a postmark showing that it was posted at Woodbridge, and another showing that it was sorted at the London office. But no doubt you have observed and allowed for those facts.”

“The appearances,” said Thorndyke, “suggest that when the post-marks were made the envelope was empty and probably unaddressed.”

“But, my dear sir,” protested Penfield, “that is a manifest impossibility. You must see that for yourself. How could such a thing possibly have happened?”

“That is a separate question,” replied Thorndyke. “I am now dealing only with the appearances. Let me point them out to you. First, you will notice that the words ‘personal and confidential’ have been written at the top of the envelope. Apparently the word ‘personal’ was first written alone and the words ‘and confidential’ added as an after thought. That is suggested by the change in the writing and the increasingly condensed form of the letters towards the end, due to the want of space. But in spite of the squeezing up of the letters the tail of the final L has been forced on to the stamp, and actually touches the circle of the post-mark; and if you examine it through this lens you can see plainly that the written line is on top of the post mark. Therefore the post-mark was already there when that word was written.”

He handed the envelope and the lens to Mr. Penfield, who, after some ineffectual struggles, rejected the lens and had recourse to his spectacles.

“It has somewhat the appearance that you suggest,” he said at length; “but I have not your expert eye, and therefore not your confidence. I should suppose it to be impossible to say with certainty whether one written mark was on top of or underneath another.”

“Very well,” said Thorndyke; “then we will proceed to the next point. You will notice that both of the post-marks are deeply indented; unusually so. As a matter of fact, post-marks are usually not visibly indented at all, and it is a noticeable coincidence that this envelope should bear two different post-marks, each unusually indented.”

“Still,” said Penfield, “that might easily have happened. The laws of chance are not applicable to individual cases.”

“Quite so,” Thorndyke agreed. “But now observe another point. These post-marks are so deeply indented that, in both cases, the impression is clearly visible on the opposite side of the envelope, especially inside. That is rather remarkable, seeing that, if the letter was inside, the impression must have penetrated four thicknesses of paper.”

“Still,” said Penfield, “it is not impossible.”

“Perhaps not,” Thorndyke admitted. “But what does seem impossible is that it should have done so without leaving any trace on the letter itself. But that is what has happened. If you will examine the letter you will see that there is not a vestige of an indentation on any part of it. From which you must agree with me that the only reasonable inference is that when the indentations were made the letter was not in the envelope.”

Mr. Penfield took the letter and the envelope and compared them carefully. There was no denying the obvious facts. There was the envelope with the deeply indented post-marks showing plainly on the reverse sides, and there was the letter with never a sign of any mark at all. It was certainly very odd. Mr. Penfield was a good deal puzzled and slightly annoyed. To his orthodox legal mind this prying into concrete facts and physical properties was rather distasteful. He was accustomed to sworn testimony, which might be true or might he untrue (but that was the witnesses’ lookout), but which could be accepted as admitted evidence. He could not deny that the facts were apparently as Thorndyke had stated. But that unwilling admission produced no conviction. He was a lawyer, not a scientific observer.

“Yes,” he agreed reluctantly, “the appearances are as you say. But they must be in some way illusory. Perhaps some difference in the properties of the paper may be the explanation. At any rate, I cannot accept your inference, for the simple reason that it predicates an impossibility. It assumes that this man, or some other, posted a blank, empty envelope, got it back, put a letter in it, addressed it, and then delivered it by hand, having travelled up from Woodbridge to do so. That would be an impossibility, unless the person were a post office official; and then, what on earth could be the object of such an insane proceeding? Have you asked yourself that question?”

As a matter of fact, Thorndyke had, and he had deduced a completely sufficient answer. But he did not feel called upon to explain this. It was not his concern to convince Mr. Penfield. That gentleman’s beliefs were a matter of perfect indifference to him. He had considered it fair to draw Mr. Penfield’s attention to the observed facts and even to point out the inferences that they suggested. But if Mr. Penfield chose to shut his eyes to the facts, or to reject the obvious inferences, that was his affair.

“At the moment,” he replied, “I am concerned with the appearances and the immediate inferences from them. When I am sure of my facts I shall go on to consider their bearing—those questions of motive, for instance, to which you have referred. That would be premature until I have verified the facts by a more searching examination. Would it be convenient for you to leave this letter with me for a few hours, that I might examine it more completely?”

Mr. Penfield would have liked to refuse. But there was no pretext for such refusal. He therefore made a virtue of necessity, and replied graciously: “Certainly, certainly. By all means. I will just take a copy, and then you can do as you please with the original, short of destroying it. But don’t, pray don’t let it lead you astray.”

“In what respect?”

“Well,” said Mr. Penfield, taking a deprecating pinch of snuff, “it has sometimes seemed to me that the specialist has a tendency—just a tendency, mark you—to mislead himself. He looks for a certain thing, which might be there, and—well, he finds it. I cannot but remark your own unexpected successes in your search for the—ha—the unusual, shall we say. On two occasions I have shown you an envelope. On both occasions you have made most surprising discoveries, involving the strangest aberrations of conduct on the part of Purcell and others. Today you have found unheard-of anomalies in the post-marks, from which you infer that Purcell or another has exerted immense ingenuity and overcome insuperable obstacles in order to behave like a fool. On the previous occasion you discovered that Purcell had been at the trouble of ungumming the envelope, which he had undoubtedly addressed with his own hand, for the express purpose of taking out the right contents, which were already in it, and putting in the wrong ones. Perhaps you made some other discoveries which you did not mention,” Mr. Penfield added, after a slight pause; and as Thorndyke only bowed slightly, which was not very explicit, he further added: “Would it be indiscreet or impertinent to inquire whether you did, in fact, make any further discoveries? Whether, for instance, you arrived at any opinion as to the nature of the enclosures, which were, I think, the objects of your investigations?”

Thorndyke hesitated. For a moment he was disposed to take the old solicitor into his confidence. But experience had taught him, as it teaches most of us, that when the making or withholding of confidences are alternatives, he chooses the better part who keeps his own counsel. Nevertheless, he gave Penfield a cautionary hint.

“Those enclosures,” said he, “have ceased to interest me. Any opinions that I formed as to their nature had better be left unstated. I seek no verification of them. Opinions held but not disclosed commit the holder to nothing, whereas actual knowledge has its responsibilities. I do not know what those enclosures were and I do not want to know.”

For some moments after Thorndyke finished speaking there was a slightly uncomfortable silence. Mr. Penfield’s dry facetiousness evaporated rather suddenly, and he found himself reading a somewhat alarming significance into Thorndyke’s ambiguous and even cryptic reply. “He did not know and he did not want to know.” Now, Mr. Penfield did know, and would have given a good deal to be without that knowledge, for to possess the knowledge was to be an accessory. Was that what Thorndyke meant? Mr. Penfield had a dark suspicion that it was.

“Probably you are right,” he said presently. “You know what opinions you formed and I do not. But there is one point that I should like to have made clear. We are both acting in Mrs. Purcell’s interest, but her husband is also my client. Is there any conflict in our purposes with regard to him?”

“I think not,” replied Thorndyke. “At any rate, I will say this much: that I should under no circumstances take any action that might be prejudicial to him without your concurrence, or at least without placing you in possession of all the facts. But I feel confident that no such necessity will arise. We are dealing with separate aspects of the case, but it would be foolish for us to get at cross-purposes.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Penfield. “That is my own feeling. And with regard to this letter: if it should yield any further suggestions and you should consider them as being of any interest to me, perhaps you would be so good as to inform me of them.”

“I will, certainly,” Thorndyke replied; “and, by the way, what are you going to do? Shall you issue any further advertisement?”

“I had not intended to,” said Mr. Penfield; “but perhaps it would be well to try to elicit a further reply. I might ask Purcell to send a receipt for the legacy, which I shall pay into his bank. He knows the amount, so that I need not state it.”

“I think that would be advisable,” said Thorndyke, “but my impression is that there will be no reply.”

“Well, we shall see,” said Penfield, rising and drawing on his gloves. “If an answer comes, you shall see it; and if there is no answer, I will advise you to that effect. You will agree with me that we keep our own counsel about the matters that we have discussed,” and as Thorndyke assented, he added: “of course the actual receipt of the letter is no secret.”

With this and a stiff handshake Mr. Penfield took his departure, cogitating profoundly as he wended his way eastward, wondering how much Thorndyke really knew about those unfortunate enclosures and how he came by his knowledge.

Meanwhile Thorndyke, as soon as he was alone, resumed his examination of the letter, calling in now the aid of more exact methods. Placing on the table a microscope specially constructed for examining documents, he laid the envelope on the stage and inspected the post-mark at the point where the tail of the L touched it. The higher magnification at once resolved any possible uncertainty. The written line was on top of the post mark beyond all doubt. But it also brought another anomaly into view. It was now evident that the indentation of the post-mark did not coincide exactly with the whole width of the printed line. The indented line was somewhat narrower. It consisted of a furrow, deepest in the middle, which followed the printed line but did not completely occupy, it, and in one or two places strayed slightly outside it. On turning the envelope over and testing the other post-mark, the same peculiarity was observable. The indentation was a thing separate from the printed mark, and had been produced by a separate operation, apparently with a bluntly pointed tool, which would account for its excessive depth.

It was an important discovery in two respects. First, it confirmed the other evidence that the letter had never been posted; and, secondly, it threw some light on the means by which the postmark had been produced. What was the object of the indentation? Evidently to imitate the impression of metal types and disguise the method that had actually been used.

What was that method? It was not photography, for the marks were in printers’ ink. It was not copperplate, for the engraved plate throws up a line in relief, whereas these lines were flat, like the lines of a lithograph. In fact, lithography appeared to be the only alternative; and with this view the appearances agreed completely, particularly the thick black ink, quite different from the rather fluid ink used by the post office.

From the post-marks Thorndyke now transferred his attention to the writing. He had been struck by the exact resemblance of the name “Penfield” on the envelope to the same name in the letter. Each was a perfect facsimile of the other. Placing them together, he could not see a single point of difference or variation between them. With a delicate caliper gauge he measured the two words, taking the total length, the height of each letter, and the distance between various points. In all cases the measurements were practically identical. Now such perfect repetition as this does not happen in natural writing. It is virtually diagnostic of forgery—of a forgery by means of a careful tracing from an original. And Thorndyke had no doubt that this was such a forgery.

Confirmation was soon forthcoming. An exploration with the microscope of the surfaces of the envelope and the letter showed in both a number of minute spindle-shaped fragments of rubber. Something had been rubbed out. Then, on examining the words by transmitted light powerful enough to turn the jet-black writing into a deep purple, there could be seen through the ink a broken grey line, the remains of a pencil line, which the ink had partly protected from the rubber. Similar remains of a pencil tracing were to be seen in other parts of the letter, especially in the signature. In short, there was no possible doubt that the whole production, letter and post-marks alike, was a forgery.

The next question was, Who was the forger? But the answer to that seemed to be contained in the further question, What was the purpose of the forgery? For the evident purpose of this letter was to furnish evidence that Purcell was still alive, and as such it had been accepted by Mr. Penfield. That distinctly pointed to Varney, who had already made two false, or at least incorrect, statements, apparently with the same object. The skill with which the forgery had been executed also pointed to him, for an engraver must needs be a skilful copyist. There was only one doubtful point. Whoever had prepared this letter was a lithographer; not a mere draughtsman, but a printer as well. Now was Varney a lithographer? It was extremely probable. Many etchers and mezzotinters work also on the stone. But until it had been ascertained that he was, the authorship of the letter must be left in suspense. But assuming the letter to be Varney’s work, it was evident that Mr. Penfield’s visit had added materially to the body of circumstantial evidence. It had established that Purcell had worn a moustache apparently identical in character with that of the missing Bromeswell, which, taken in conjunction with all the other known facts, made it nearly a certainty that Bromeswell and Purcell were one and the same person. But that assumption had been seen to lead to the inference that Purcell was dead, and that Varney was responsible for, or implicated in, the circumstances of his death.

Then there was this letter. It was a forged letter, and its purpose was to prove that Purcell was alive. But the fact that it was necessary to forge a letter to prove that he was alive was in itself presumptive evidence that he was not alive. Subject to proof that Varney was a lithographer and therefore capable of producing this forgery, the evidence that Mr. Penfield had brought furnished striking confirmation of the hypothesis that Thorndyke had formed as to what had become of Daniel Purcell.

CHAPTER X

In which Thorndyke sees a New Light

“We shall only be three at dinner, after all,” said Margaret. “Mr. Rodney will be detained somewhere, but he is coming in for a chat later in the evening.”

Varney received the news without emotion. He could do without Rodney. He would not have been desolated if the other guest had been a defaulter, too. At any rate, he hoped that he would not be needlessly punctual, and thus shorten unduly the tete-à-tete with Margaret which he, Varney, had secured by exercising the privilege of an old friend to arrive considerably before his time.

“You have only met Dr. Thorndyke once before, I think?” said Margaret.

“Yes; at Sennen, you know, the day that queer letter came from Mr. Penfield, and I didn’t see much of him then. I remember that I was a little mystified about him; couldn’t quite make out whether he was a lawyer, a doctor, or a man of science.”

“As a matter of fact, he is all three. He is what is called a medical jurist—a sort of lawyer who deals with legal cases that involve medical questions. I understand that he is a great authority on medical evidence.”

“What legal cases do involve medical questions?”

“I don’t know much about it,” replied Margaret, “but I believe they include questions of survivor-ship and cases of presumption of death.”

“Presumption of death!” repeated Varney. “What on earth does that mean?”

“I am not very clear about it myself,” she replied, “but from what I am told I gather that it is a sort of legal proceeding that takes place when a person disappears permanently and there is uncertainty as to whether he or she is dead or alive. An application is made to the court for permission to presume that the person is dead, and if the court gives the permission the person is then legally presumed to be dead, and his will can be administered and his affairs wound up. That is an instance of the kind of case that Dr. Thorndyke undertakes. He must have had quite a lot of experience of persons who have disappeared, and for that reason Mr. Rodney advised me to consult him about Dan.”

“Do you mean with a view to presuming his death?” asked Varney, inwardly anathematizing Dan for thus making his inevitable appearance in the conversation, but keenly interested nevertheless.

“No,” replied Margaret. “I consulted him quite soon after Dan went away. What I asked him to do was to find out, if possible, what had become of him, and if he could discover his whereabouts to get into touch with him.”

“Well,” said Varney, “he doesn’t seem to have had much luck up to the present. He hasn’t been able to trace Dan, has he?”

“No,” she replied—“at least, I suppose not. But we know where the lost sheep is now. Had you heard about the letter?”

“The letter?”

“Yes. From Dan. He wrote to Mr. Penfield a few days ago.”

“Did he, though?” said Varney, with well-simulated surprise. “From somewhere abroad, I suppose?”

“No. The post-mark was Woodbridge—there was no address,” and here Margaret briefly explained the circumstances.

“It sounds rather as if he were afloat,” said Varney. “That is an ideal coast for lurking about in a smallish yacht. There is endless cover in the rivers and the creeks off the Come, the Roach, the Crouch, and the Blackwater. But it looks as if he had made more preparation for the flitting than we thought at the time. He hasn’t written to you?”

Margaret shook her head. The affront was too gross for comment.

“It was beastly of him,” said Varney. “He might have sent you just a line. However, Dr. Thorndyke will have something to go on now. He will know whereabouts to look for him.”

“As far as I am concerned,” Margaret said coldly, “the affair is finished. This insult was the last straw. I have no further interest in him, and I hope I may never see him again. But,” she added earnestly, after a brief pause, “I should like to be rid of him completely. I want my freedom.”

As she spoke—with unusual emphasis and energy—she looked, for a moment, straight into Varney’s eyes. Then suddenly she flushed scarlet and turned her head away.

Varney was literally overwhelmed. He felt the blood rush to his head and tingle in the tips of his fingers. After one swift glance he, too, turned away his head. He did not dare to look at her. Nor, for some seconds, did he dare to trust his voice. At last it had come! In the twinkling of an eye his dim hopes, more than half distrusted, had changed into realities. For there could be no doubt. That look into his eyes, that sudden blush, what could they be but an unpremeditated, unintended confession? She wanted her freedom. That unguarded glance told him why; and then her mantling cheeks, while they rebuked the glance, but served to interpret its significance.

With an effort he regained his normal manner. His natural delicacy told him that he must not be too discerning. He must take no cognizance of this confidence that was never intended. She must still think that her secret was locked up in her own breast, secure from every eye, even from his.

And yet what a pitiful game of cross-purposes they were playing! She wanted her freedom! And behold! she was free, and he knew it and could not tell her. What a tangle it was! And how was it ever going to be straightened out? In life, Purcell had stood between him and liberty; and now the ghost—nay, less than the ghost, the mere unsubstantial name—of Purcell stood between him and a lifelong happiness that Fortune was actually holding out to him.

It was clear that, sooner or later, the ghost of Purcell would have to be laid. But how? And here it began to dawn upon him that the ingenious letter, on which he had been congratulating himself, had been a tactical mistake. He had not known about Dr. Thorndyke, and he had never heard before of the possibility of presuming a person’s death. He had been busying himself to produce convincing evidence that Purcell was alive, whereas it was possible that Thorndyke had been considering the chances of being able to presume his death. It was rather a pity, for Purcell had got to be disposed of before he could openly declare himself to Maggie; and this method of legal presumption of death appeared to be the very one that suited the conditions. He wished he had known about it before.

These reflections flashed through his mind in the silence that had followed Margaret’s unguarded utterance. For the moment Varney had been too overcome to reply. And Margaret suddenly fell silent with an air of some confusion. Recovering himself, Varney now replied in a tone of conventional sympathy: “Of course you do. The bargain is off on the one side, and it is not reasonable that it should hold on the other. You don’t want to be shackled for ever to a man who has gone out of your life. But I don’t quite see what is to be done.”

“Neither do I,” said Margaret. “Perhaps the lawyers will be able to make some suggestion—and I think I hear one of them arriving.”

A moment or two later the door opened and the housemaid announced “Dr. Thorndyke.” Varney stood up, and as the guest was ushered in he looked with deep curiosity, not entirely unmingled with awe, at this tall, imposing man, who held in his mind so much recondite knowledge and doubtless so many strange secrets.

“I think you know Mr. Varney,” said Margaret, as she shook hands, “though you hadn’t much opportunity to improve his acquaintance at Sennen.”

“No,” Thorndyke agreed. “Mr. Penfield’s bombshell rather distracted our attention from the social aspects of that gathering. However, we are free from his malign influence this evening.”

“I am not sure that we are,” said Varney. “Mrs. Purcell tells me that he has just produced another mysterious letter.”

“I shouldn’t call it ‘mysterious,’” said Thorndyke. “On the contrary, it resolves the mystery. We now know, approximately, where Mr. Purcell is.”

“Yes, it ought to be easy to get on his track now. That, I understand, is what you have been trying to do. Do you propose to locate him more exactly?”

“I see no reason for doing so,” replied Thorndyke. “His letter answers Mr. Penfield’s purpose, which was to produce evidence that he is alive. But his letter does raise certain questions that will have to be considered. We shall hear what Mr. Rodney has to say on the subject. He is coming tonight, isn’t he?”

“He is not coming to dinner,” said Margaret, “but he is going to drop in later. There goes the gong. Shall we go into the dining-room?”

Thorndyke held the door open, and they crossed the corridor to the pleasant little room beyond. As soon as they had taken their places at the table, Margaret led off the conversation with a rather definite change of subject.

“Have you brought any of your work to show us, Mr. Varney?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied; “I have brought one or two etchings that I don’t think you have seen and a couple of aquatints.”

“Aquatints,” said Margaret. “Isn’t that a new departure?”

“No. It is only a revival. I used to do a good deal of aquatint work, but I have not done any for quite a long time until I attacked these two. I like a change of method now and again. But I always come back to etchings.”

“Do you work much with the dry point?” asked Thorndyke.

“Not the pure dry point,” was the reply. “Of course, I use it to do finishing work on my etchings, but that is a different thing. I have done very few dry points proper. I like the bitten line.”

“I suppose,” said Thorndyke, “an etcher rather looks down on lithography?”

“I don’t think so,” replied Varney. “I don’t certainly. It is a fine process and an autograph process, like etching and mezzotint. The finished print is the artist’s own work, every bit of it, as much as an oil painting.”

“Doesn’t the printer take some of the credit?” Thorndyke asked.

“I am assuming that the artist does his own printing. If he doesn’t, I should not call him a lithographer. He is only a lithographic draughtsman. When I used to work at lithography I always did my own printing. It is more than half the fun. I have the little press still.”

“Then perhaps you will revive that process, too, one day?”

“I don’t think so,” Varney replied. “The flat surface of a lithograph is rather unsatisfying after the rich raised lines of an etching. I shall never go back to lithography, except, perhaps, for some odd jobs;” and here a spirit of mischievous defiance impelled him to add: “I did a little lithograph only the other day, but I didn’t keep it. It was a crude little thing.”

Thorndyke noted the statement with a certain grim appreciation. In spite of himself, he could not but like Varney; and this playful, sporting attitude in respect of a capital crime appealed to him as a new experience. It established him and Varney as opposing players in a sort of grim and tragic game, and it confirmed him in certain opinions that he had formed as to the antecedents and motives of the crime. For as to the reality of the crime he now had no doubt. The statement that Varney had just made in all the insolence of his fancied security had set the keystone on the edifice that Thorndyke had built up. Circumstantial evidence has a cumulative quality. It advances by a sort of geometrical progression, in which each new fact multiplies the weight of all the others. The theory that Varney had made away with Purcell involved the assumption that Varney was a lithographer who was able to print. It was now established that Varney was a lithographer and that he owned a press. Thus the train of circumstantial evidence was complete.

It was a most singular situation. In the long pauses which tend to occur when good appetites coincide with a good dinner, the two men, confronting one another across the table, sat, each busy with his thoughts behind the closed shutters of his mind, each covertly observant of the other, and each the object of the other’s meditations. To Varney had come once more that queer feeling of power that he had experienced at Sennen when Mr. Penfield’s letter had arrived; the sense of an almost godlike superiority and omniscience. Here were these simple mortals, full of wonder, perplexity, and speculation as to the vanished Purcell. And they were all wrong. But he knew everything. And he was the motive power behind all their ineffectual movements. It was he who, by the pressure of a finger, had set this puppet-show in motion, and he had but to tweak a string in his quiet studio and they were all set dancing again. Every one of them was obedient to his touch: Maggie, Penfield, Rodney, even this strong-faced, inscrutable man whose eye he had just met—all of them were the puppets whose movements, joint or separate, were directed by his guiding hand.

Thorndyke’s reflections were more complex. From time to time he glanced at Varney—he was too good an observer to need to stare—profoundly interested in his appearance. No man could look less like a murderer than this typical artist with his refined face, dreamy yet vivacious, and his suave, gentle manners. Yet that, apparently, was what he was. Moreover, he was a forger of bank notes—perhaps of other things, too, as suggested by the very expert production of this letter—and had almost certainly uttered the forged notes. That was, so to speak, the debit side of his moral account, and there was no denying that it was a pretty heavy one.

On the other hand, he was evidently making a serious effort to earn an honest living. His steady industry was clear proof of that. It was totally unlike a genuine criminal to work hard and with enthusiasm for a modest income. Yet that was what he was evidently, doing. It was a very singular contradiction. His present mode of life, which was evidently adapted to his temperament, seemed totally irreconcilable with his lurid past. There seemed to be two Varneys: the criminal Varney, practising felonies and not stopping short of murder, and the industrious, artistic Varney, absorbed in his art and content with the modest returns that it yielded.

Which of them was the real Varney? As he debated this question, Thorndyke turned to the consideration of the other partner in the criminal firm. And this seemed to throw an appreciable light on the question. Purcell had clearly been the senior partner. The initiative must have been his. The starting-point of the banknote adventure must have been the theft of the note-moulds at Maidstone. That had been Purcell’s exploit, probably a lucky chance of which he had taken instant advantage. But the moulds were of no use to him without an engraver, so he had enlisted Varney’s help. Now, to what extent had that help been willingly given?

It was, of course, impossible to say. But it was possible to form a reasonable opinion by considering the characters of the two men. On the one hand, Varney, a gentle, amiable, probably pliable man. On the other, Purcell, a strong, masterful bully, brutal, selfish, unscrupulous, ready to trample ruthlessly on any rights or interests that conflicted with his own desires. That was, in effect, the picture of him that his wife had painted—the wife whom he had married, apparently against her inclination, by putting pressure on her father, who was his debtor. Purcell was a money-lender, a usurer; and even at that a hard case, as Mr. Levy’s observations seemed to hint. Now, a usurer has certain affinities with a blackmailer. Their methods are somewhat similar. Both tend to fasten on their victim and bleed him continuously. Both act by getting a hold on the victim and putting on the screw when necessary, and both are characterized by a remorseless egoism.

Now, Purcell was clearly of the stuff of which blackmailers are made. Was it possible that there was an element of blackmail in his relations with Varney? The appearances strongly suggested it. Here were two men jointly engaged in habitual crime. Suddenly one of them is eliminated by the act of the other, and forthwith the survivor rids himself of the means of repeating the crime and settles down to a life of lawful industry. That was what had happened. The instant Varney had got rid of Purcell he had proceeded to get rid of the paper blanks by sending them to Mr. Penfield instead of printing them and turning them into money; and by thus denouncing the firm had made it impossible, in any case, to continue the frauds. Then he had settled down to regular work in his studio. That seemed to be the course of events.

It was extremely suggestive. Purcell’s disappearance coincided with the end of the criminal adventure and the beginning of a reputable mode of life. That seemed to supply the motive for the murder—if it had been a murder. It suggested that no escape from the life of crime had been possible so long as Purcell was alive, that Purcell had obtained some kind of hold on Varney which enabled him to compel the latter to continue in the criminal partnership; and that Varney had taken the only means that were possible to rid himself of his parasite. That was what it looked like.

Of course, this was mere guesswork. No proof was possible. But it agreed with all the facts, and it made Varney’s apparent dual personality understandable. The real and essential Varney appeared to be the artist, not the criminal. He appeared to be a normal man, who had committed a murder under exceptional circumstances. With the bank-note business Thorndyke was not concerned, and he had no knowledge of its circumstances. But the murder was his concern, and he set himself to consider it.

The hypothesis was that Purcell had been, in effect, a blackmailer, and that Varney had been his victim. Now, it must be admitted that Thorndyke held somewhat unconventional views on the subject of blackmail. He considered that a blackmailer acts entirely at his own risk, and that the victim (since the law can afford him but a very imperfect protection) is entitled to take any available measures for his own defence, including the elimination of the blackmailer. But if the blackmailer acts at his own risk, so does the victim who elects to make away with him. Morally, the killing of a blackmailer may be justifiable homicide, but it has no such legal status. In law self-defence means defence against bodily injury; it does not include defence against moral injury. Whoever elects to rid himself of a blackmailer by killing him accepts the risk of a conviction on a charge of murder. But that appeared to be Varney’s position. He had accepted the risk. It was for him to avoid the consequences if he could. As to Thorndyke himself, though he might, like the Clerk of Arraigns at the Old Bailey, wish the offender “a good deliverance,” his part was to lay bare the hidden facts. He and Varney were players on opposite sides. He would play impersonally, without malice and with a certain good will to his opponent. But he must play his own hand and leave his opponent to do the same.

These reflections passed swiftly through his mind in the intervals of a very desultory conversation. As he reached his conclusion, he once more looked up at Varney. And then he received something like a shock. At the moment no one was speaking, and Varney was sitting with his eyes somewhat furtively fixed on Margaret’s downcast face. Now, to an experienced observer there is something perfectly unmistakable in the expression with which a man looks at a woman with whom he is deeply in love. And such was the expression that Thorndyke surprised on Varney’s face. It was one of concentrated passion, of adoration.

Thorndyke was completely taken aback. This was an entirely new situation, calling for a considerable revision of his conclusions and also of his sympathies. An eliminated blackmailer is one thing; Uriah’s wife is another and a very different one. Thorndyke was rather puzzled, for though the previous hypothesis hung fairly together, it was now weakened by the possibility that the murder had been committed merely to remove a superfluous husband. Not that it made any practical difference. He was concerned with the fact of Purcell’s murder. The motives were no affair of his.

His reflections were interrupted by a question from Margaret.

“You haven’t been down to Cornwall, I suppose, since you came to see us at Sennen in the summer?”

“No, I have not; but Professor D’Arcy has, and he is starting for another trip at the end of next month.”

“Is he still in search of worms? It was worms that you were going to look for, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, marine worms. But he is not fanatical on the subject. All marine animals are fish that come to his net.”

“You are using the word ‘net’ in a metaphorical sense, I presume,” said Varney. “Or does he actually use a net?”

“Sometimes,” replied Thorndyke. “A good many specimens can be picked up by searching the shore at low tide, but the most productive work is done with the dredge. Many species are found only below low-water mark.”

“Is there anything particularly interesting about marine worms?” Margaret asked. “There always seems something rather disgusting about a worm, but I suppose that is only vulgar prejudice.”

“It is principally unacquaintance with worms,” replied Thorndyke. “They are a highly interesting group of animals, both in regard to structure and habits. You ought to read Darwin’s fascinating book on earthworms and learn what an important part they play in the fashioning of the earth’s surface. But the marine worms are not only interesting, some of them are extraordinarily beautiful creatures.”

“That was what Philip Rodney used to say,” said Margaret, “but we didn’t believe him, and he never showed us any specimens.”

“I don’t know that he ever got any,” said Varney. “He made great preparations in the way of bottles and jars, and then he spent most of his time sailing his yacht or line-fishing from a lugger. The only tangible result of his preparations was that remarkable jury button that he fixed on Dan’s oil-skin coat. You remember that button, Mrs. Purcell?”

“I remember something about a button, but I have forgotten the details. What was it?”

“Why, Dan lost the top button from his oiler and never got it replaced. One day he lent the coat to Philip to go home in the wet, and as Phil was going out line-fishing the next day and his own oilers were on the yacht, he thought he would take Dan’s. So he proceeded to fix on a temporary button, and a most remarkable job he made of it. It seems that he hadn’t got either a button or a needle and thread, so he extemporized. He took the cork out of one of his little collecting bottles—it was a flat cork, waterproofed with paraffin wax and it had a round label inscribed ‘Marine Worms.’ Well, as he hadn’t a needle or thread he bored two holes through the cork with the little marlinspike in his pocket-knife, passed through them the remains of a fiddle-string that he had in his pocket, made two holes in the oilskin, threaded the catgut through them, and tied a reef-knot on the inside.”

“And did it answer?” asked Margaret. “It sounds rather clumsy.”

“It answered perfectly. So well that it never got changed. It was on the coat when Dan went up the ladder at Penzance, and it is probably on it still. Dan seemed quite satisfied with it.”

There was a brief silence, during which Thorndyke looked down thoughtfully at his plate. Presently he asked: “Was the label over the wax or under it?”

Varney looked at him in surprise, as also did Margaret. What on earth could it matter whether the label were over or under the wax?

“The label was under the wax,” the former replied. “I remember Philip mentioning the fact that the label was waterproofed as well as the cork. He made quite a point of it, though I didn’t see why. Do you?”

“If he regarded the label as a decorative adjunct,” replied Thorndyke, “he would naturally make a point of the impossibility of its getting washed off, which was the object of the waxing.”

“I suppose he would,” Varney agreed in an absent tone, and still looking curiously at Thorndyke. He had a feeling that the latter’s mildly facetious reply was not quite “in key” with the very definite question. Why had that question been asked? Had Thorndyke anything in his mind? Probably not. What could he have? At any rate, it was of no consequence to him, Varney.

In which he was, perhaps, mistaken. Thorndyke had been deeply interested in the history of the button. Here was one of those queer, incalculable trivialities which so often crop up in the course of a criminal trial. By this time, no doubt, that quaint button was detached and drifting about in the sea, or lying unnoticed on some lonely beach among the high-water jetsam. The mere cork would be hardly recognizable, but if the label had been protected by the wax it would be identifiable with absolute certainty. And if ever it should be identified, its testimony would go to prove the improbability that Daniel Purcell ever went ashore at Penzance.

CHAPTER XI

In which Varney has an Inspiration

The adjournment to the drawing-room was the signal for Varney to fetch his portfolio and exhibit his little collection, which he did with a frank interest and pleasure in his works that was yet entirely free from any appearance of vanity. Thorndyke examined the proofs with a curiosity that was not wholly artistic. Varney interested him profoundly. There was about him a certain reminiscence of Benvenuto Cellini: a combination of the thoroughgoing rascal with the sincere and enthusiastic artist. But Thorndyke could not make up his mind how close the parallel was. From Cellini’s grossness Varney appeared to be free; but how about the other vices? Had Varney been forced into wrongdoing by the pressure of circumstances on a weak will? Or was he a criminal by choice and temperament? That was what Thorndyke could not decide.

An artist’s work may show only one side of his character, but it shows that truthfully and unmistakably. A glance through Varney’s works made it clear that he was an artist of no mean talent. There was not only skill, which Thorndyke had looked for, but a vein of poetry, which he noted with appreciation and almost with regret.

“You don’t seem to value your aquatints,” he said, “but I find them very charming. This sea cape with the fleet of luggers half hidden in the mist, and the lighthouse peeping over the top of the fogbank, is really wonderful. You couldn’t have done that with the point.”

“No,” Varney agreed; “every process has its powers and its limitations.”

“The lighthouse, I suppose, is no lighthouse in particular?”

“Well, no; but I had the Wolf in my mind when I planned this plate. As a matter of fact, I saw a scene very like this when I was sailing round with Purcell to Penzance the day he vanished. The lighthouse looked awfully ghostly with its head out of the fog and its body invisible.”

“Wasn’t that the time you had to climb up the mast?” asked Margaret.

“Yes; when the jib halyard parted and the jib went overboard. It was rather a thrilling experience, for the yacht was out of control for the moment and the Wolf rock was close under our lee. Dan angled for the sail while I went aloft.”

Thorndyke looked thoughtfully at the little picture, and Varney watched him with outward unconcern but with secret amusement and a sort of elfish mischief.

And again he was conscious of a sense of power, of omniscience. Here was this learned, acute lawyer and scientist looking in all innocence at the very scene on which he, Varney, had looked as he was washing the stain of Purcell’s blood from the sail. Little did he dream of the event which this aquatint commemorated! For all his learning and his acuteness, he, Varney, held him in the hollow of his hand.

To Thorndyke the state of mind revealed by this picture was as surprising as it was illuminating. This was, in effect, a souvenir of that mysterious and tragic voyage. Whatever had happened on that voyage was clearly the occasion of no remorse. There was no shrinking from the memory of that day, but rather evidence that it was recalled with a certain satisfaction. In that there seemed a most singular callousness. But what did that callous indifference, or even satisfaction, suggest? A man who had made away with a friend with the express purpose of getting possession of that friend’s wife would surely look back on the transaction with some discomfort; indeed, would avoid looking back on it at all. Whereas one who had secured his liberty by eliminating his oppressor could hardly be expected to feel either remorse or regrets. It looked as if the blackmail theory were the true one, after all.

“That will be Mr. Rodney,” Margaret said, looking expectantly at the door.

“I didn’t hear the bell,” said Varney. Neither had Thorndyke heard it; but he had not been listening, whereas Margaret apparently had, which perhaps accounted for the slightly preoccupied yet attentive air that he had noticed once or twice when he had looked at her.

A few moments later John Rodney entered the room unannounced, and Margaret went forward quickly to welcome him. And for the second time that evening Thorndyke found himself looking, all unsuspected, into the secret chamber of a human heart.

As Margaret had advanced towards the door, he and Varney stood up. They were thus both behind her when Rodney entered the room. But on the wall by the door was a small mirror, and in this Thorndyke had caught an instantaneous glimpse of her face as she met Rodney. That glimpse had told him what, perhaps, she had hardly guessed herself; but the face which appeared for a moment in the mirror and was gone was a face transfigured. Not, indeed, with the expression of passionate adoration that he had seen on Varney’s face. That meant passion consciously recognized and accepted. What Thorndyke saw on Margaret’s face was a softening, a tender, joyful welcome such as a mother might bestow on a beloved child. It spoke of affection rather than passion. But it was unmistakable. Margaret Purcell loved John Rodney. Nor, so far as Thorndyke could judge, was the affection only on one side. Rodney, facing the room, naturally made no demonstration; but still, his greeting had in it something beyond mere cordiality.

It was an extraordinarily complex situation, and there was in it a bitter irony such as De Maupassant would have loved. Thorndyke glanced at Varney, from whom Margaret’s face had been hidden, with a new interest. Here was a man who had made away with an unwanted husband, perhaps with the sole purpose of securing the reversion of the wife; and behold! he had only created a vacancy for another man.

“This is a great pleasure, Thorndyke,” said Rodney, shaking hands heartily. “Quite an interesting experience, too, to see you in evening clothes, looking almost human. I am sorry I couldn’t get here to dinner. I should like to have seen you taking food like an ordinary mortal.”

“You shall see him take some coffee presently,” said Margaret. “But doesn’t Dr. Thorndyke usually look human?”

“Well,” replied Rodney, “I won’t say that there isn’t a certain specious resemblance to a human being. But it is illusory. He is really a sort of legal abstraction like John Doe or Richard Roe. Apart from the practice of the law there is no such person.”

“That sounds to me like a libel,” said Margaret.

“Yes,” agreed Varney. “You’ve done it now, Rodney. It must be actionable to brand a man as a mere hallucination. There will be wigs on the green—barrister’s wigs—when Dr. Thorndyke begins to deal out writs.”

“Then I shall plead justification,” said Rodney, “and I shall cite the present instance. For what do these pretences of customary raiment and food consumption amount to? They are mere camouflage, designed to cover a legal inquiry into the disappearances from his usual places of resort of one Daniel Purcell.”

“Now you are only making it worse,” said Margaret, “for you are implicating me. You are implying that my little dinner party is nothing more than a camouflaged legal inquisition.”

And you are implicating me, too,” interposed Varney, “as an accessory before, during, and after the fact. You had better be careful, Rodney. It will be a joint action, and Dr. Thorndyke will produce scientific witnesses who will prove anything he tells them to.”

“I call this intimidation,” said Rodney. “The circumstances seem to call for the aid of tobacco—I see that permission has been given to smoke.”

“And perhaps a cup of coffee might help,” said Margaret, as the maid entered with the tray.

“Yes, that will clear my brain for the consideration of my defence. But still, I must maintain that this is essentially a legal inquisition. We have assembled primarily to consider the position which is created by this letter that Penfield has received.”

“Nothing of the kind,” said Margaret. “I asked you primarily that I might enjoy the pleasure of your society, and, secondly, that you might enjoy the pleasure of one another’s.”

“And yours.”

“Thank you. But as to the letter, I don’t see that there is anything to discuss. We now know where Dan is, but that doesn’t seem to alter the situation.”

“I don’t agree with you in either respect,” said Rodney. “There seems to me a good deal to discuss; and our knowledge as to Dan’s whereabouts alters the situation to this extent: that we can get into touch with him if we want to—or at least Dr. Thorndyke can, I presume.”

“I am not so sure of that,” said Thorndyke. “But we could consider the possibility if the necessity should arise. Had you anything in your mind that would suggest such a necessity?”

“What I have in my mind,” replied Rodney, “is this. Purcell has left his wife for reasons known only to himself. He has never sent a word of excuse, apology, or regret. Until this letter arrived it was possible to suppose that he might be dead, or have lost his memory, or in some other way be incapable of communicating with his friends. Now we know that he is alive, that he has all his faculties—except the faculty of behaving like a decent and responsible man—and that he has gone away and is staying away of his own free will and choice. If there was ever any question as to his coming back, there is none now; and if there could ever have been any excuse or extenuation of his conduct, there is now none. We see that although he has never sent a message of any kind to his wife, yet, when the question of a sum of money arises, he writes to his solicitor with the greatest promptitude. That letter is a gross and callous insult to his wife.”

Thorndyke nodded. “That seems to be a fair statement of the position,” said he. “And I gather that you consider it possible to take some action?”

“My position is this,” said Rodney. “Purcell has deserted his wife. He has shaken off all his responsibilities as a husband. But he has left her with all the responsibilities and disabilities of a wife. He has taken to himself the privileges of a bachelor, but she remains a married woman. That is an in tolerable position. My contention is that, since he has gone for good, the tow-rope ought to be cut. He should be set adrift finally and completely and she should be liberated.”

“I agree with you entirely and emphatically,” said Thorndyke. “A woman whose husband has left her should, if she wishes it, revert to the status of a spinster.”

“And she does wish it,” interposed Margaret.

“Naturally,” said Thorndyke. “The difficulty is in respect of ways and means. Have you considered the question of procedure, Rodney?”

“It seems to me,” was the reply. “that the ways and means are provided by the letter itself. I suggest that the terms of that letter and the circumstances in which it was written afford evidence of desertion, or at least good grounds of action.”

“You may be right,” said Thorndyke, “but I doubt if it would be accepted as evidence of an intention not to return. It seems to me that a court would require something more definite. I suppose an action for restitution, as a preliminary, would not be practicable?”

Rodney shook his head emphatically, and Margaret pronounced a most decided refusal.

“I don’t want restitution,” she exclaimed, “and I would not agree to it. I would not receive him back on any terms.”

“He wouldn’t be likely to come back,” said Thorndyke, “and if he did not, his failure to comply with the order of the court would furnish definite grounds for further action.”

“But he might come back, at least temporarily,” objected Margaret, “if only by way of retaliation.”

“Yes,” agreed Rodney, “it is perfectly possible; in fact, it is rather the sort of thing that Purcell would do—come back, make himself unpleasant, and then go off again. No; I am afraid that cat won’t jump.”

“Then,” said Thorndyke, “we are in difficulties. We want the marriage dissolved, but we haven’t as much evidence as the court would require.”

“Probably more evidence could be obtained,” suggested Rodney, “and of a different kind. Didn’t Penfield say something about an associate or companion? Well, that is where our knowledge of Purcell’s whereabouts should help us. If it were possible to locate him exactly and keep him under observation, evidence of the existence of that companion might be forthcoming, and then the case would be all plain sailing.”

Thorndyke had been expecting this suggestion and considering how he should deal with it. He could not undertake to search the Eastern Counties for a man who was not there, nor could he give his reasons for not undertaking that search. Until his case against Varney was complete he would make no confidences to anybody. And as he reflected he watched Varney (who had been a keenly interested listener to the discussion), wondering what he was thinking about it all, and noting idly how neatly and quickly he rolled his cigarettes and how little he was inconvenienced by his contracted finger, the third finger of his left hand.

“I think, Rodney,” he said, “that you overestimate the ease with which we could locate Purcell. The Eastern Counties offer a large area in which to search for a man—who may not be there, after all. The post-mark on the letter tells us nothing of his permanent abiding-place, if he has one. Varney suggests that he may be afloat, and if he is, he will be very mobile and difficult to trace. And it would be possible for him to change his appearance—by growing a beard, for instance, to make a circulated description useless.”

Rodney listened to these objections with hardly veiled impatience. He had supposed that Thorndyke’s special practice involved the capacity to trace missing persons, yet as soon as a case calling for this special knowledge arose, he raised difficulties. That was always the way with these confounded experts. Now, to him—though, to be sure, it was out of his line—the thing presented no difficulties at all. To no man does a difficult thing look so easy as to one who is totally unable to do it.

Meanwhile Thorndyke continued to observe Varney, who was evidently reflecting profoundly on the impasse that had arisen. He, of course, could see the futility of Rodney’s scheme. He, moreover, since he was in love with Margaret, would be at least as keen on the dissolution of this marriage as Rodney. Thorndyke, watching his eager face, began to hope that he might make some useful suggestion. Nor was he disappointed. Suddenly Varney looked up, and, addressing himself to Rodney, said:

“I’ve got an idea. You may think it bosh, but it is really worth considering. It is this. There is no doubt that Dan has cleared out for good, and it is rather probable that he has made some domestic arrangements of a temporary kind. You know what I mean. And he might be willing to have the chance of making them permanent, because he is not free in that respect any more than his wife is. Now what I propose is that we put in an advertisement asking him to write to his wife, or to Penfield, stating what his intentions are. It is quite possible that he might, in his own interests, send a letter that would enable you to get a divorce without any other evidence. It is really worth trying.”

Rodney laughed scornfully. “You’ve missed your vocation, Varney,” said he. “You oughtn’t to be tinkering about with etchings. You ought to be in the Law. But I’m afraid the mackerel wouldn’t rise to your sprat.”

Thorndyke could have laughed aloud. But he did not. On the contrary, he made a show of giving earnest consideration to Varney’s suggestion, and finally said:

“I am not sure that I agree with you, Rodney. It doesn’t seem such a bad plan.”

In this he spoke quite sincerely. But then he knew, which Rodney did not, that if the advertisement were issued there would certainly be a reply from Purcell; and, moreover, that the reply would be of precisely the kind that would be most suitable for their purpose.

“Well,” said Rodney, “it seems to me rather a wild-cat scheme. You are proposing to ask Purcell to give himself away completely. If you knew him as well as I do you would know that no man could be less likely to comply. Purcell is one of the most secretive men I have ever known, and you can see for yourself that he has been pretty secret over this business.”

“Still,” Thorndyke persisted, “it is possible, as Varney suggests, that it might suit him to have the tow-rope cut, as you express it. What do you think, Mrs. Purcell?”

“I am afraid I agree with Mr. Rodney. Dan is as secret as an oyster, and he hasn’t shown himself at all well disposed. He wouldn’t make a statement for my benefit. As to the question of another woman, I have no doubt that there is one, but my feeling is that Dan would prefer to have a pretext for not marrying her.”

“That is exactly my view,” said Rodney. “Purcell is the sort of man who will get as much as he can and give as little in exchange.”

“I don’t deny that,” said Varney, “but I still think that it would be worth trying. If nothing came of it we should be no worse off.”

“Exactly,” agreed Thorndyke. “It is quite a simple proceeding. It commits us to nothing and it is very little trouble, and if by any chance it succeeded, see how it would simplify matters. In place of a crowd of witnesses collected at immense trouble and cost you would have a letter which could be put in evidence, and which would settle the whole case in a few minutes.”

Rodney shrugged his shoulders and secretly marvelled how Thorndyke had got his great reputation.

“There is no answering a determined optimist,” said he. “Of course, Purcell may rise to your bait. He may even volunteer to go into the witness-box and make a full confession and offer to pay our costs. But I don’t think he will.”

“Neither do I,” said Thorndyke. “But it is bad practice to reject a plan because you think it probably will not succeed when it is possible and easy to give it a trial. Have you any objection to our carrying out Mr. Varney’s suggestion?”

“I have no objection to your carrying it out,” replied Rodney, “and I don’t suppose Mrs. Purcell has, but I don’t feel inclined to act on it my self.”

Thorndyke looked interrogatively at Margaret. “What do you say, Mrs. Purcell?” he asked.

“I am entirely in your hands,” she replied. “It is very good of you to take so much trouble, but I fear you will have your trouble for nothing.”

“We shan’t lose much on the transaction even then,” Thorndyke rejoined, “so we will leave it that I insert the advertisement in the most alluring terms that I can devise. If anything comes of it you will hear before I shall.”

This brought the discussion to an end. If Rodney had any further ideas on the subject he reserved them for the benefit of Margaret or Mr. Penfield, having reached the conclusion that Thorndyke was a pure specialist—and probably overrated at that—whose opinions and judgment on general law were not worth having. The conversation thus drifted into other channels, but with no great vivacity, for each of the four persons was occupied inwardly with the subject that had been outwardly dismissed.

Presently Varney, who had been showing signs of restlessness, began to collect his etchings in preparation for departure. Thereupon Thorndyke also rose to make his farewell.

“I have had a most enjoyable evening, Mrs. Purcell,” he said, as he shook his hostess’s hand. And he spoke quite sincerely. He had had an extremely enjoyable evening, and he hoped that the entertainment was even now not quite at an end. “May we hope that our plottings and schemings will not be entirely unfruitful?”

“You can hope as much as you like,” said Rodney, “if hopefulness is your speciality, but if anything comes of this plan of Varney’s, I shall be the most surprised man in London.”

“And I hope you will give the author of the plan all the credit he deserves,” said Thorndyke.

“He has got that now,” Rodney replied with a grin.

“I doubt if he has,” retorted Thorndyke. “But we shall see. Are we walking the same way, Varney?”

“I think so,” replied Varney, who had already decided, for his own special reasons, that they were; in which he was in complete, though unconscious, agreement with Thorndyke.

“Rodney seems a bit cocksure,” the former remarked, as they made their way towards the Brompton Road, “but it is no use taking things for granted. I think it quite possible that Purcell may be willing to cut his cable. At any rate, it is reasonable to give him the chance.”

“Undoubtedly,” agreed Thorndyke. “There is no greater folly than to take failure for granted and reject an opportunity. Now, if this plan of yours should by any chance succeed, Mrs. Purcell’s emancipation is as good as accomplished.”

“Is it really?” Varney exclaimed eagerly.

“Certainly,” replied Thorndyke. “That is, if Purcell should send a letter the contents of which should disclose a state of affairs which would entitle his wife to a divorce. But that is too much to hope for unless Purcell also would like to have the marriage dissolved.”

“I think it quite possible that he would, you know,” said Varney. “He must have had strong reasons for going off in this way, and we know what those strong reasons usually amount to. But would a simple letter, without any witnesses, be sufficient to satisfy the court?”

“Undoubtedly,” replied Thorndyke. “A properly attested letter is good evidence enough. It is just a question of what it contains. Let us suppose that we have a suitable letter. Then our procedure is perfectly simple. We produce it in court, and it is read and put in evidence. We say to the judge: ‘Here is a letter from the respondent to the petitioner, or her solicitor, as the case may be. It is in answer to an advertisement, also read and put in evidence; the handwriting has been examined by the petitioner, by her solicitor, and by the respondent’s banker, and each of them swears that the writing and the signature are those of the respondent. In that letter the respondent clearly and definitely states that, he has left his wife for good; that under no circumstances will he ever return to her; that he refuses hereafter to contribute to her support; and that he has transferred his affections to another woman, who is now living with him as his wife.’ On that evidence I think we should have no difficulty in obtaining a decree.”

Varney listened eagerly. He would have liked to make a few notes, but that would hardly do, though Thorndyke seemed to be a singularly simple-minded and confiding man. And he was amazingly easy to pump.

“I don’t suppose Purcell would give himself away to that extent,” he remarked, “unless he was really keen on a divorce.”

“It is extremely unlikely in any case,” Thorndyke agreed. “But we have to bear in mind that if he writes at all it will be with the object of stating his intentions as to the future and making his position clear. I shall draft the advertisement in such a way as to elicit this information, if possible. If he is not prepared to furnish the information he will not reply. If he replies it will be because, for his own purposes, he is willing to furnish the information.”

“Yes, that is true. So that he may really give more information than one might expect. I wonder if he will write. What do you think?”

“It is mere speculation,” replied Thorndyke. “But if I hadn’t some hopes of his writing I shouldn’t be at the trouble of putting in the advertisement. But perhaps Rodney is right: I may be unreasonably optimistic.”

At Piccadilly Circus they parted and went their respective ways, each greatly pleased with the other and both highly amused. As soon as Thorndyke was out of sight, Varney whipped out his notebook, and by the light of a street lamp made a careful note of the necessary points of the required letter. That letter also occupied Thorndyke’s mind, and he only hoped that the corresponding agent of Daniel Purcell, deceased, would not allow his enthusiasm to carry him to the extent of producing a letter the contents of which would stamp the case as one of rank collusion. For in this letter Thorndyke saw a way, and the only way, out for Margaret Purcell. He knew, or at least was fully convinced, that her husband was dead. But he had no evidence that he could take into court, nor did he expect that he ever would have. It would be years before it would be possible to apply to presume Purcell’s death, and throughout those years Margaret’s life would be spoiled. This letter was a fiction. The erring husband was a fiction. But it would be better that Margaret should be liberated by a fiction than that she should drag out a ruined life shackled to a husband who was himself a fiction.

CHAPTER XII

In which Varney once more Pulls the Strings

For the second time, in connection with the death of Daniel Purcell, Mr. Varney found it necessary to give an attentive eye to the movements of the postman. He had ascertained from the post office the times at which letters were delivered in the neighbourhood of Margaret’s flat; and now, in the gloom of a December evening, he lurked in the vicinity until he saw the postman approaching down the street and delivering letters at the other flats on his way. Then he entered the now familiar portals, and made his way quietly up the stairs until he reached Margaret’s outer door. Here he paused for a few moments, standing quite still and listening intently. If he had been discovered he would have simply come to pay a call. But he was not, and the silence from within suggested that there was nobody in the hall. With a furtive look round, he drew a letter from his pocket and silently slipped it into the letter-box, catching the flap on his finger as it fell to prevent it from making any sound. Then he turned and softly stole down the stairs; and as he reached the ground floor the postman walked into the entry.

It was not without reluctance that he came away. For she was behind that door, almost certainly—she, his darling, for whose freedom from the imaginary shackles that she wore he was carrying out this particular deception. But his own guilty conscience made it seem to him that he had better not be present when the fabricated letter arrived. So he tore himself from the beloved precincts and went his way, thinking his thoughts and dreaming his dreams.

Varney’s surmise was correct. Margaret was within. But it was perhaps as well that he had refrained from paying a call, for she was not alone, and his visit would not have been entirely welcome. About half an hour before his arrival Jack Rodney had ascended those stairs, and had been admitted in time to join Margaret at a somewhat belated tea.

“My excuse for coming to see you,” said Rodney, “is in my pocket—the front page of The Times.”

“I don’t know what you mean by an excuse,” Margaret replied. “You know perfectly well that I am always delighted to see you. But perhaps you mean an excuse to yourself for wasting your time in gossiping with me.”

“Indeed, I don’t,” said he. “I count no time so profitably employed as that which I spend here.”

“I don’t quite see what profit you get,” she rejoined, “unless it is the moral benefit of doing a kindness to a lonely woman.”

“I should like to take that view if I honestly could. But the fact is that I come here for the very great pleasure of seeing you and talking to you, and the profit that I get is that very great pleasure. I only wish the proprieties allowed me to come oftener.”

“So do I,” she said frankly. “But you know that, too. And now tell me what there is in the front page of The Times that gave you this sorely needed excuse.”

Rodney laughed in a boisterous, schoolboy fashion as he drew from his pocket a folded leaf of the newspaper. “It’s the great advertisement,” said he. “The Thorndyke-Varney or Varney-Thorndyke advertisement. It came out yesterday morning. Compose yourself to listen, and I’ll read it out to you.”

He opened the paper out, refolded it into a convenient size, and with a portentous preliminary “Ahem!” read aloud in a solemn sing-song:

“PURCELL, D., is earnestly requested to communicate to M. or her solicitor his intentions with regard to the future. If his present arrangements are permanent, she would be grateful if he would notify her to that effect, in order that she may make the necessary modifications in her own.’

As he finished, he looked up at her and laughed contemptuously.

“Well, Maggie,” said he, “what do you think of it?”

She laughed merrily, and looked at him with hardly disguised fondness and admiration. “What a schoolboy you are, John!” she exclaimed. “How annoyed Dr. Thorndyke would be if he could hear you! But it is rather funny. I can imagine Dan’s face when he reads it—if he ever does read it.”

“So can I,” chuckled Rodney. “I can see him pulling down his lower lip and saying, ‘Gur!’ in that pleasant way that he has. But isn’t it a perfectly preposterous exhibition? Just imagine a man of Thorndyke’s position doing a thing like this! Why, it is beneath the dignity of a country attorney’s office-boy. I can’t conceive how he got his reputation. He seems to be an absolute greenhorn.”

“Probably he is quite good at his own speciality,” suggested Margaret.

“But this is his own speciality. The truth is that the ordinary lawyer’s prejudice against experts is to a great extent justified. They are really humbugs and pretenders. You saw what his attitude was when I suggested that he should get Dan under observation. Of course, it was the obvious thing to do, and one would suppose that it would be quite in his line. Yet as soon as I made the suggestion he raised all sorts of difficulties; whereas a common private inquiry agent would have made no difficulty about it at all.”

“Do you think not?” Margaret asked, a little eagerly. “Perhaps it might be worth while to employ one. It would be such a blessed thing to get rid of Dan for good.”

“It would, indeed,” Rodney agreed heartily. “But perhaps we had better see if, Thorndyke gets a bite. If he fails we can try the other plan.”

Margaret was slightly disappointed. She wanted to see some progress made, and was a little impatient of the law’s delays. But the truth is that Rodney had been speaking rather at random. When he came to consider what information he had to give to a private detective, the affair did not look quite such plain sailing.

“Perhaps,” said Margaret, “Dr. Thorndyke was right in giving Mr. Varney’s plan a trial. We are no worse off if it fails; and if it were by any chance to succeed, oh, what a relief it would be! Not that there is the slightest chance that it will.”

“Not a dog’s chance,” agreed Rodney, “and Thorndyke was an ass to have anything to do with the advertisement. He should have let Varney put it in. No one expects an artist to show any particular legal acumen.”

“Poor Mr. Varney!” murmured Margaret with a faint smile; and at this moment the housemaid entered the room with a couple of letters on a salver. Margaret took the letters, and, having thanked the maid, laid them on the table by her side.

“Won’t you read your letters?” said Rodney. “You are not going to make a stranger of me, I hope.”

“Thank you,” she replied. “If you will excuse me I will just see whom they are from.”

She took up the top letter, opened it, glanced through it, and laid it down. Then she picked up the second letter, and as her glance fell on the address she uttered a little cry of amazement.

“What is it?” asked Rodney.

She held the envelope out for him to see. “It’s from Dan!” she exclaimed; and forthwith she tore it open and eagerly took out the letter.

As she read it, Rodney watched her with mingled amusement, vexation, and astonishment. The utterly inconceivable thing had happened. Thorndyke had taken odds of a million to one against and it had come off. That was just a piece of pure luck. It reflected no particular credit on Thorndyke’s judgment; but still, Rodney rather wished he had been less dogmatic.

When she had quickly read through the letter, Margaret handed it to him without comment. He took it from her and rapidly ran through the contents.

“DEAR MAGGIE” (it ran),

“I have just seen your quaint advertisement, and send you a few lines, as requested. I don’t know what you mean by ‘modifying your arrangements,’ but I can guess. However, that is no concern of mine, and whatever your plans may be, I don’t want to stand in your way. So I will give you a plain statement, and you can do what you like.

“My present arrangements are quite permanent. You have seen the last of yours truly. I have no intention of ever coming back—and I don’t suppose you particularly want me. It may interest you to know that I have made fresh domestic arrangements—necessarily a little unorthodox, but also quite permanent.

“With regard to financial questions, I am afraid I can’t contribute to your ‘arrangements,’ what ever they may be. You have enough to live on, and I have new responsibilities; but if you can get anything out of Levy you are welcome to it. You will be the first person who ever has. You can also try Penfield, and I wish you the best of luck. And that is all I have got to say on the subject.

“With best wishes,

“Yours sincerely,

“DANIEL PURCELL.”

Rodney returned the letter with an expression of disgust. “It is a brutal, hoggish letter,” said he, “typical of the writer. Where does he write from?”

“The post-mark is Wivenhoe. It was posted last night at seven-thirty.”

“That looks as if Varney were right and he were afloat; but it is a queer time of year for yachting on the East Coast. Well, I suppose you are not much afflicted by the tone of that letter?”

“Not at all. The more brutal the better. I shall have no qualms now. But the question is, will the letter do? What do you think?”

“It ought to do well enough—if it isn’t a little too good to be true.”

“I don’t quite understand. You don’t doubt the truth of what he says, do you?”

“Not at all. What I mean is this: Divorce judges are pretty wary customers. They have to be. The law doesn’t allow married people, who are tired of one another and would like to try a fresh throw of the dice, to make nice little mutual arrangements to get their marriage dissolved. That is called collusion. And then there is a mischievous devil called the King’s Proctor, whose function is to ‘prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings’ and to trip up poor wretches who have got a decree and think they have escaped, and to send them back to cat-and-dog matrimony until death do them part. Now, the only pitfall about this letter of Dan’s is that it is so very complete. He makes things so remarkably easy for us. He leaves us nothing to prove. He admits everything in advance, and covers the whole of our case in our favour. That letter might have been dictated by a lawyer in our interest.”

Margaret looked deeply disappointed. “You don’t mean to say that we shan’t be able to act on it!” she exclaimed in dismay.

“I don’t say that,” he replied, “and I certainly think it will be worth trying. But I do wish that we could produce evidence that he is living with some woman, as he appears to state. That would be so much more convincing. However, I will get an opinion from a counsel who has had extensive experience of divorce practice—a man like Barnby, for instance. I could show him a copy of the letter and hear what he thinks.”

“Why not Dr. Thorndyke?” said Margaret. “He was really right, after all, and we shall have to show him the letter.”

“Yes, and he must see the original. But as to taking his opinion—well, we shall have to do that as a matter of courtesy, but I don’t set much value on his judgment. You see, he chose to go double Nap on this letter, and he happened to win. Events prove that he was right to take the chance, but it was primitive strategy. It doesn’t impress me.”

Margaret made no immediate rejoinder. She was not a lawyer, and to her the fact that the plan had succeeded was evidence that it was a good plan. Accordingly, her waning faith in Thorndyke was strongly revived.

“I can’t help hoping,” she said presently, “that this letter will secure a decision in our favour. It really ought to. You see, there is no question of arrangement or collusion on my side. Our relations were perfectly normal and pleasant up to the moment of Dan’s disappearance. There were no quarrels, no differences, nothing to hint at any desire for a change in our relations; and I have waited six months for him to come back, and have taken no action until he made it clear that he had gone for good. Don’t you think that I have a fair chance of getting my freedom?”

“Perhaps you are right, Maggie,” he replied. ‘I may be looking out for snags that aren’t there. Of course, you could call me and Philip and Varney to prove that all was normal up to the last, and Penfield and Thorndyke to give evidence of your efforts to trace Dan. Yes, perhaps it is a better case than I thought. But all the same, I will show the letter to Barnby when Thorndyke has seen it and get his opinion without prejudice.”

He paused and reflected profoundly for a while. Suddenly he looked up at Margaret, and in his eyes there was a new light.

“Supposing, Maggie,” he said in a low, earnest voice, “you were to get this marriage dissolved. Then you would be free—free to marry. You know that years ago, when you were free, I loved you. You know that, because I told you; and I thought, and I still think, that you cared for me then. The fates were against us at that time, but in the years that have passed there has been no change in me. You are the only woman I have ever wanted, Of course, I have kept my feelings to myself. That had to be. But if we can win back your freedom, I shall ask you to be my wife, unless you forbid me. What shall you say to me, Maggie?”

Margaret sat with downcast eyes as Rodney was speaking. For a few moments she had appeared pale and agitated, but she was now quite composed, and nothing but a heightened colour hinted at any confusion. At the final question she raised her head and looked Rodney frankly in the face.

“At present, John,” she said quietly, “I am the wife of Daniel Purcell, and as such have no right to contemplate any other marriage. But I will be honest with you. There is no reason why I should not be. You are quite right, John. I loved you in those days that you speak of, and if I never told you, you know why. You know how I came to marry Dan. It seemed to me then that I had no choice. Perhaps I was wrong, but I did what I thought was my duty to my father.

“In the years that have passed since then—the long, grey years—I have kept my covenant with Dan loyally in every respect. If I have ever looked back with regret, it has been in secret. But through those years you have been a faithful friend to me, and of all my friends the best beloved. And so you are now. That is all I can say, John.”

“It is enough, Maggie,” he said, “and I thank you from my heart for saying so much. Whatever your answer might have been, I would have done everything in my power to set you free. But now I shall venture to have a hope that I hold a stake in your freedom.”

She made no answer to this, and for some time both sat silently engrossed with their own thoughts, and each thinking much the same thoughts as the other. The silence was at length broken by Rodney.

“It was an awful blow to me when I came home from my travels and found you married. Of course, I guessed what had happened, though I never actually knew. I assumed that Dan had put the screw on your father in some way.”

“Yes. He had lent my father money, and the bills could not be met.”

“What a Juggernaut the fellow is!” exclaimed Rodney. “An absolutely ruthless egoist. By the way, was he in the habit of lending money? I notice that he refers in this letter to a person named Levy. Who is Levy? And what does Dan do for a livelihood? He is out of the paper trade, isn’t he?”

“I think so. The truth is, I have never known what his occupation is. I have suspected that he is principally a money-lender. As to Mr. Levy, I have always thought he was a clerk or manager, but it rather looks as if he were a partner.”

“We must find out,” said Rodney. “And there is another thing that we must look into—that mysterious letter that Penfield received from Dan. Did you ever learn what was in it?”

“Never. Mr. Penfield refused to divulge the slightest hint of its contents. But I feel convinced that it was in some way connected with Dan’s disappearance. You remember it arrived on the very day that Dan went away. I think Dr. Thorndyke called on Mr. Penfield to see if he could glean any information, but I assume that he didn’t succeed.”

“We can take that for granted,” said Rodney. “I don’t think Thorndyke would get much out of a wary old bird like Penfield. But we must find out what was in that letter. Penfield will have to produce it if we put him in the witness-box, though he will be a mighty slippery witness. However, I will see Thorndyke and ask him about it when I have consulted Barnby. Perhaps I had better take charge of the letter.”

Margaret handed him the letter, which he put securely in his wallet, and the plan of action being now settled, he stayed only for a little further gossip, and then took his leave.

On the following afternoon he called by appointment on Thorndyke, who, having admitted him, closed the “oak” and connected the bell with the laboratory upstairs, where his assistant, Polton, was at work.

“So,” he said, “our fish has risen to the tin minnow, as I gather from your note.”

“Yes. You have had better luck than I expected.”

“Or than I deserved, you might have added if you had been less polite. Well, I don’t know that I should agree. I consider it bad practice to treat an improbability as an impossibility. But what does he say?”

“All that we could wish—and perhaps a little more. That is the only difficulty. He makes things a little too easy for us—at least, that is my feeling. But you had better see the letter.”

He took it from his wallet and passed it to Thorndyke, who glanced at the post-mark, and when he had taken out the letter looked quickly into the interior of the envelope.

“Wivenhoe,” he remarked. “Some distance from Woodbridge, but in the same district.”

He read carefully through the text, noting at the same time the peculiarities that he had observed in the former letter. In this case, too, the postmarks had been made when the envelope was empty—a curious oversight on the part of Varney in view of the care and ingenuity otherwise displayed. Indeed, as he read through the letter, Thorndyke’s opinion of that cunning artificer rose considerably. It was a most skilful and tactful production. It did certainly make things almost suspiciously easy, but then that was its function. The whole case for the petition rested on it. But the brutal attitude of the imaginary truant was admirably rendered, and, so far as he could judge, the personality of the missing man convincingly represented.

“It is not a courteous epistle,” he remarked tentatively.

“No,” agreed Rodney, “but it is exactly the sort of letter that one would expect from Purcell. It gives you his character in a nutshell.”

This was highly satisfactory and very creditable to Varney.

“You mentioned in your note that you were going to take Barnby’s opinion on it. Have you seen him?”

“Yes, and he thinks the same as I do: that it would be a little risky to base a petition on this letter alone. The judge might smell a rat. He considers that if we could produce evidence that Purcell is actually living with another woman, this letter would be good evidence of desertion. He suggested putting a private inquiry agent on Purcell’s tracks. What do you say to that?”

“In the abstract it is an excellent suggestion. But how are you going to carry it out? You speak of putting the agent on Purcell’s tracks. But there are no tracks. There is no place in which he is known to have been staying; there is no person known to us who has seen him since he landed at Penzance. You would start your sleuth without a scent to wander about Essex and Suffolk looking for a man whom he had never seen and would probably not recognize if he met him, and who is possibly not in either of those counties at all. It really is not a practicable scheme.”

Rodney emitted a discontented grunt. “Doesn’t sound very encouraging certainly,” he admitted. “But how do the police manage in a case of the kind?”

“By having, not one agent but a thousand, and all in communication through a central office. And even the police fail if they haven’t enough data. But with regard to Barnby, of course his opinion has great weight. He knows the difficulties of these cases, and his outlook will probably be the judge’s outlook. But did you make clear to him the peculiarities of this case?—the character of the petitioner, her excellent relations with her husband, the sudden, unforeseen manner of the disappearance, and the total absence of any grounds for a suspicion of collusion? Did you present these points to him?”

No, I didn’t. We merely discussed the letter.”

“Well, see him again and put the whole case to him. My feeling is that a petition would probably succeed.”

“I hope you are right,” said Rodney, more encouraged than he would have liked to admit. “I’ll see Barnby again. Oh, and there is another point. That letter that Purcell sent to Penfield by mistake in June. It probably throws some light on the disappearance, and might be important as evidence on our side. I suppose Penfield did not tell you what was in it or show it to you?”

“No, he would say nothing about it; but he allowed me, at my request, to examine the envelope.”

Rodney grinned. “He might also have shown you the postman who delivered the letter. But if he won’t tell us anything, we might put him in the witness-box and make him disgorge his secret.”

“Yes, and you may have to if the court demands to have the letter produced. But I strongly advise you to avoid doing so if you can. I have the impression that the production of that letter would be very much the reverse of helpful—might, in fact, be fatal to the success of the case and would in addition be very disagreeable to Mrs. Purcell.”

Rodney looked at him in astonishment. “Then you know what was in the letter?” said he.

“No, but I have formed certain opinions which I have no doubt are correct, but which I do not feel at liberty to communicate. I advise you to leave Mr. Penfield alone. Remember that he is a lawyer, that he is Mrs. Purcell’s friend, that he does know what is in the letter, and that he thinks it best to keep his knowledge to himself. But he will have to be approached on the question as to whether he is willing to act for Mrs. Purcell against her husband. If you undertake that office you can raise the question of the letter with him, but I would urge you most strongly not to force his hand.”

Rodney listened to this advice with a slightly puzzled expression. Like Mr. Penfield, he viewed Thorndyke with mixed feelings, now thinking of him as an amateur, a doctor who dabbled in effectively in law, and now considering the possibility that he might command some means of acquiring knowledge that were not available to the orthodox legal practitioner. Here was a case in point. He had examined the envelope of that mysterious letter “at his own request” and evidently for a specific purpose, and from that inspection he had in some unaccountable way formed a very definite opinion as to what the envelope had contained. That was very curious. Of course, he might be wrong; but he seemed to he pretty confident. Then there was the present transaction. Rodney himself had rejected Varney’s suggestion with scorn. But Thorndyke had adopted it quite hopefully, and the plan had succeeded in the face of all probabilities. Could it be that Thorndyke had some odd means of gauging those probabilities? It looked rather like it.

“You are only guessing at the nature of that letter,” he said tentatively, “and you may have got it wrong.”

“That is quite possible,” Thorndyke agreed. “But Penfield isn’t guessing. Put the case to him, hear what he says, and follow his advice. And if you see Barnby again it would be better to say nothing about that letter. Penfield will advise you to keep it out of the case if you can, and that is my advice, too.”

When Rodney took his departure, which he did a few minutes later, he carried with him a growing suspicion that he had under-estimated Thorndyke; that the latter, perhaps, played a deeper game than at first sight appeared; and that he played with pieces unknown to traditional legal practice.

For some time after his visitor had left Thorndyke remained wrapped in profound thought. In his heart he was sensible of a deep distaste for this case that he was promoting. If it were to succeed, it could only be by misleading the court. It is true that the parties were acting in good faith, that the falsities which they would present were falsities that they believed to be true. But the whole case was based on a fiction, and Thorndyke detested fictions. Nor was he satisfied with his own position in an ethical sense. He knew that the case was fictitious, that the respondent was a dead man, and that the documents to be produced in evidence were forgeries. He was, in fact, an accessory to those forgeries. He did not like it at all. And he was not so optimistic as to the success of the petition as he had led Rodney to believe, though he was not very uneasy on that score. What troubled him was that this was, in effect, a bogus case, and that he was lending it his support.

But what was the alternative? His thoughts turned to Margaret, sweet-faced, sweet-natured, gracious-mannered, the perfect type of an English gentlewoman; and he thought of the fine, handsome, high-minded gentleman who had just gone away. These two loved one another—loved as only persons of character can love. Their marriage, if it could be achieved, would secure to them a lifelong happiness, in so far as such happiness is attainable by mortals. But between them and their happiness stood the fiction of Daniel Purcell. In order that they might marry, Purcell must either be proved to be dead or assumed to be alive.

Could he be proved to be dead? If he could, that were the better way, because it would demonstrate the truth. But was it possible? In a scientific sense it probably was. Science can accept a conclusion with reservations. But the law has to say “yes” or “no” without any reservations at all. This was not a case of death merely presumed. It was a death alleged to have occurred at a specific time and place and in a specific manner; and inseparably bound up with it was a charge of murder. If Purcell was dead, Varney had murdered him, and the murder was the issue that would be tried. But no jury would entertain for a moment the guilt of the accused on such evidence as Thorndyke could offer. And an acquittal would amount to a legal decision that Purcell was not dead. On that decision Margaret’s marriage to Rodney would be impossible.

Thus Thorndyke’s reflections led him back, as they always did, to the conclusion that Purcell’s death was incapable of legal proof, and must ever remain so, unless by some miracle new and conclusive evidence should come to light. But to wait for a miracle to happen was an unsatisfactory policy. If Purcell could not be proved to be dead, and if such failure of proof must wreck the happiness of two estimable persons, then it would appear that it might be allowable to accept what was the actual legal position and assume that he was alive.

So, once again, Thorndyke decided that he had no choice but to continue to share with Varney the secret of Purcell’s death and to hold his peace.

And if this must be, the petition must take its course, aided and abetted, if necessary, by him. After all, nobody would be injured and nothing done which was contrary either to public policy or private morals. There were only two alternatives, as matters stood. The fiction of Purcell as a living man would either keep Margaret and Rodney apart, as it was doing now, or it would be employed (with other fictions) to enable them to be united. And it was better that they should be united.

CHAPTER XIII

In which the Medico-Legal Worm Arrives

Romance lurks in unsuspected places. As we go our daily round, we are apt to look distastefully upon the scenes made dull by familiarity, and to seek distraction by letting our thoughts ramble far away into time and space, to ages and regions in which life seems more full of colour. In fancy, perchance, we thread the ghostly aisles of some tropical forest, or linger on the white beach of some lonely coral island, where the coconut palms, shivering in the sea breeze, patter a refrain to the song of the surf; or we wander by moonlight through the narrow streets of some Southern city and hear the thrum of the guitar serenading to the shrouded balcony; and behold! all Romance is at our very doors.

It was on a bright afternoon early in March that Thorndyke sat, with Philip Rodney by his side, on one of the lower benches of the lecture theatre of the Royal College of Surgeons. Not a likely place, this, to encounter Romance. Yet there it was—and Tragedy, too—lying unnoticed at present on the green baize cover of the lecturer’s table, its very existence unsuspected.

Meanwhile Thorndyke and Philip conversed in quiet undertones, for it still wanted some minutes to the hour at which the lecture would commence.

“I suppose,” said Philip, “you have had no report from that private detective fellow—I forget his name?”

“Bagwell. No, excepting the usual weekly note stating that he is still unable to pick up any trace of Purcell.”

“Ah,” commented Philip, “that doesn’t sound encouraging. Must be costing a lot of money, too. I fancy my brother and Maggie Purcell are both beginning to wish they had taken your advice and relied on the letter by itself. But Jack was overborne by Barnby’s insistence on corroborative evidence, and Maggie let him decide. And now they are sorry they listened to Barnby. They hadn’t bargained for all this delay.”

“Barnby was quite right as to the value of the additional evidence,” said Thorndyke. “What he didn’t grasp was the very great difficulty of getting it. But I think I hear the big-wigs approaching.”

As he spoke, the usher threw open the lecturer’s door. The audience stood up, the president entered, preceded by the mace-bearer and followed by the officers and the lecturer, and took his seat; the audience sat down, and the lecture began without further formalities.

The theatre was nearly full. It usually was when Professor D’Arcy lectured; for that genial savant had the magnetic gift of infusing his own enthusiasm into the lecture and so into his audience, even when, as on this occasion, his subject lay on the outside edge of medical science. Today he was lecturing on the epidermic appendages of the marine worms, and from the opening sentence he held his audience as by a spell, standing before the great blackboard with a bunch of coloured chalks in either hand, talking with easy eloquence—mostly over his shoulder—while he covered the black surface with those delightful drawings that added so much to the charm of his lectures. Philip watched his flying fingers with fascination, and struggled frantically to copy the diagrams into a large notebook with the aid of a handful of coloured pencils; while Thorndyke, not much addicted to note-taking, listened and watched with concentrated attention, mentally docketing and pigeon-holing any new or significant facts in what was to him a fairly familiar subject.

The latter part of the lecture dealt with those beautiful sea worms that build themselves tubes to live in—worms like the Serpula, that make their shelly or stony tubes by secretion from their own bodies, or, like the Sabella or Terebella, build them up with sand-grains, little stones or fragments of shell. Each, in turn, appeared in lively portraiture on the blackboard, and the trays on the table were full of specimens which were exhibited by the lecturer, and which the audience were invited to inspect more closely after the lecture.

Accordingly, when the last words of the peroration had been pronounced, the occupants of the benches trooped down into the arena to look at the exhibits and seek further details from the genial Professor. Thorndyke and Philip held back for a while on the outskirts of the crowd; but the Professor had seen them on their bench, and now approached, greeting them with a hearty hand shake and a facetious question.

“What are you doing here, Thorndyke? Is it possible that there are medico-legal possibilities even in a marine worm?”

“Oh, come, D’Arcy!” protested Thorndyke, “don’t make me such a hidebound specialist. May I have no rational interests in life? Must I live for ever in the witness-box like a marine worm in its tube?”

“I suspect you don’t get very far out of your tube,” said the Professor, with a chuckle and a sly glance at Philip.

“I got far enough out last summer,” retorted Thorndyke, “to come and aid and abet you in your worm-hunting. Have you forgotten Cornwall?”

“No, to be sure,” was the reply. “But that was only a momentary lapse, and I expect you had ulterior motives. However, the association of Cornwall, worm-hunting, and medical jurisprudence reminds me that I have something in your line. A friend of mine, who was wintering in Cornwall, picked it up on the beach at Morte Hoe and sent it to me. Now, where is it? It is on this table somewhere. It is a ridiculous thing—a small, flat cork, evidently from a zoologist’s collecting-bottle, for it has a label stuck on it with the inscription ‘Marine Worms.’ It seems that our zoologist was a sort of Robinson Crusoe, for he had bored a couple of holes through it and evidently used it as a button. But the most ludicrous thing about it is that a Terebella has built its tube on it, as if the worm had been prowling about, looking for lodgings, and had read the label and forthwith had engaged the apartments. Ah! here it is.”

He pounced on a little cardboard box, and, opening it, took out the cork button and laid it in Thorndyke’s palm.

As the Professor was describing the object, Philip looked at him with a distinctly startled expression, and uttered a smothered exclamation. He was about to speak, but suddenly checked himself and looked at Thorndyke, who flashed at him a quick glance of understanding.

“Isn’t that a quaint coincidence?” chuckled the Professor—“I mean that the worm should have taken up its abode and actually built his tube on the label?”

“Very quaint,” replied Thorndyke, still looking with deep interest at the object that lay in his hand.

“You realize,” Philip said in a low voice, as the Professor turned away to answer a question, “that this button came from Purcell’s oilskin coat?”

“Yes, I remember the incident. I realized what it was as soon as D’Arcy described the button.”

He glanced curiously at Philip, wondering whether he, too, realized exactly what this queer piece of jetsam was. For to Thorndyke its message had been conveyed even before the Professor had finished speaking. In that moment it had been borne to him that the unlooked-for miracle had happened, and that Margaret Purcell’s petition need never be filed.

“Well, Thorndyke,” said the Professor, “my friend’s treasure trove seems to interest you. I thought it would as an instance of the possibilities of coincidence. Quite a useful lesson to a lawyer, by the way.”

“Exactly,” said Thorndyke. “In fact, I was going to ask you to allow me to borrow it to examine at my leisure.”

The Professor was delighted. “There, now,” he chuckled, with a mischievous twinkle at Philip, “what did I tell you? He hasn’t come here for the comparative anatomy at all. He has just come to grub for legal data. And now, you see, the medico-legal worm has arrived, and is instantly collared by the medical jurist. Take him, by all means, Thorndyke. You needn’t borrow him. I present him as a gift to your black museum. You needn’t return him.”

Thorndyke thanked the Professor, and, having packed the specimen with infinite tenderness in its cotton wool, bestowed the box in his waistcoat pocket. A few minutes later he and Philip took their leave of the Professor and departed, making their way through Lincoln’s Inn to Chancery Lane.

“That button gave me quite a shock for a moment,” said Philip, “appearing out of the sea on the Cornish coast; for, of course, it was on Purcell’s coat when he went ashore—at least, I suppose it was. I understood Varney to say so.”

“He did,” said Thorndyke. “He mentioned the incident at dinner one evening, and he then said definitely that the cork button was on the coat when Purcell went up the ladder.”

“Yes, and it seemed rather mysterious at first, as Purcell went right away from Cornwall. But there is probably quite a simple explanation. Purcell went to the East Coast by sea, and it is most likely that, when he got on board the steamer, he obtained a proper button from the steward, cut off the jury button, and chucked it overboard. But it is a queer chance that it should have come back to us in this way.”

Thorndyke nodded. “A very queer chance,” he agreed.

As he spoke, he looked at Philip with a some what puzzled expression. He was, in fact, rather surprised. Philip Rodney was a doctor, a man of science, and an unquestionably intelligent person. He knew all the circumstances that were known, and he had seen and examined the button; and yet he had failed to observe the one vitally important fact that stared him in the face.

“What made you want to borrow the button?” Philip asked presently. “Was it that you wanted to keep it as a relic of the Purcell case?”

“I want to examine the worm-tube,” replied Thorndyke. “It is a rather unusual one; very uniform in composition. Mostly, Terebella tubes are very miscellaneous as to their materials—sand, shell, little pebbles, and so forth. The material of this one seems to be all alike.”

“Probably the stuff that the worm was able to pick up in the neighbourhood of Morte Hoe.”

“That is possible,” said Thorndyke; and the conversation dropped for a moment, each man occupying himself with reflections on the other.

To Philip it seemed rather surprising that a man like Thorndyke, full of important business, should find time, or even inclination, to occupy himself with trivialities like this. For, after all, what did it matter whether this worm-tube was composed of miscellaneous gatherings or of a number of similar particles? No scientific interest attached to the question. It seemed rather a silly quest. And yet Thorndyke had thought it worth while to borrow the specimen for this very purpose.

Thorndyke, for his part, was more than ever astonished at the mental obtuseness of this usually acute and intelligent man. Not only had he failed in the first place to observe a most striking and significant fact: he could not see that fact even when his nose was rubbed hard on it.

As they passed through Old Buildings and approached the main gateway, Philip slowed down.

“I am going into my brother’s chambers here to have tea with him. Do you care to join us? He will be glad to see you.”

Thorndyke, however, was in no mood for tea and gossip. He had got a first-class clue—a piece of really conclusive evidence. How conclusive it was and how far its conclusiveness went he could not tell at present; and he was eager to get to work on the assay of this specimen in an evidential sense—to see exactly what was the amount and kind of evidence that the sea had cast up on the shore of Morte Hoe. He therefore excused himself, and having bidden Philip adieu, he strode out into Chancery Lane and bore south towards the Temple.

On entering his chambers, he discovered his assistant, Polton, in the act of transferring boiling water from a copper kettle to a small silver teapot; whereby he was able to infer that his approach had been observed by the said Polton from his lookout in the laboratory above. The two men, master and man, exchanged friendly greetings, and Thorndyke then observed:

“I have got a job to do later on, Polton, when I have finished up the evening’s work. I shall want to grind some small sections of a mineral that I wish to identify. Would you put out one or two small hones and the other things that I shall need?”

“Yes, sir,” replied Polton. “I will put the mineral section outfit on a tray and bring it down after tea. But can’t I grind the sections? It seems a pity for you to be wasting your time on a mechanical job like that.”

“Thank you, Polton,” replied Thorndyke. “Of course you could cut the sections as well as, or better than, I can. But it is possible that I may have to produce the sections in evidence, and in that case it will be better if I can say that I cut them myself and that they were never out of my own hands. The courts don’t know you as I do, you see, Polton.”

Polton acknowledged the compliment with a gratified smile, and departed to the laboratory. As soon as he was gone, Thorndyke brought forth the little cardboard box, and, having taken out the button, carried it over to the window, where, with the aid of his pocket lens, he made a long and careful examination of the worm-tube, the result of which was to confirm his original observation. The mineral particles of which the tube was built up were of various shapes and sizes, from mere sand-grains up to quite respectable little pebbles. But, so far as he could see, they were all of a similar material. What that material was an expert mineralogist would have been able, no doubt, to say offhand, and an expert opinion would probably have to be obtained. But in the meantime his own knowledge was enough to enable him to form a fairly reliable opinion when he had made the necessary investigations.

As he drank his tea, he reflected on this extra ordinary windfall. Circumstances had conspired in the most singular manner against Varney. How much they had conspired remained to be seen. That depended on how much the worm-tube had to tell. But even if no further light were thrown on the matter by the nature of the mineral, there was evidence enough that Purcell had never landed at Penzance. The Terebella had already given that much testimony. And the cross-examination was yet to come.

Having finished tea, he fell to work on the reports and written opinions which had to be completed and sent off by the last post; and it was characteristic of the man that, though the button and its as yet half-read message lurked in the sub-conscious part of his mind as the engrossing object of interest, he was yet able to concentrate the whole of his conscious attention on the matters with which he was outwardly occupied. Twice during the evening Polton stole silently into the room, once to deposit on a side-table the little tray containing the mineral section appliances, and the second time to place on a small table near the fire a large tray bearing the kind of frugal, informal supper that Thorndyke usually consumed when alone and at work.

“If you wait a few moments, Polton, I shall have these letters ready for the post. Then we shall both be free. I don’t want to see anybody tonight unless it is something urgent.”

“Very well, sir,” replied Polton. “I will switch the bell on to the laboratory, and I’ll see that you are not disturbed unnecessarily.”

With this he took up the letters which Thorndyke had sealed and stamped and reluctantly withdrew, not without a last wistful glance at the apparatus on the tray.

As the door closed behind him, Thorndyke rose, and, bringing forth the button from the drawer in which he had bestowed it, began operations at once. First, with a pair of fine forceps he carefully picked off the worm-tube half a dozen of the largest fragments and laid them on a glass slide. This he placed on the stage of the microscope, and, having fitted on a two inch objective, made a preliminary inspection under various conditions of light, both transmitted and reflected. When he had got clearly into his mind the general character of the unknown rock, he fetched from a store cabinet in the office a number of shallow drawers filled with labelled specimens of rocks and minerals, and he also placed on the table in readiness for reference one or two standard works on geology and petrology. But before examining either the books or the specimens in the drawers, he opened out a geological chart of the British Isles and closely scrutinized the comparatively small area with which the button was concerned—the Land’s End and the north and south coast of Cornwall. A very brief scrutiny of the map showed him that the inquiry could now be narrowed down to a quite small group of rocks, the majority of which he could exclude at once by his own knowledge of the more familiar types; which was highly satisfactory. But there was evidently something more than this. Anyone who should have been observing him as he pored over the chart would have seen, by a suddenly increased attention, with a certain repressed eagerness, that some really illuminating fact had come into view; and his next proceedings would make clear to such an observer that the problem had already changed from one of search to a definite and particular identification.

From the chart he turned to the drawers of specimens, running his eye quickly over their contents, as if looking for some specific object; and this object he presently found in a little cardboard tray—a single fragment of a grey, compact rock, which he pounced upon at once, and, picking it out of its tray, laid it on the slide with the fragment from the worm-tube. Careful comparison gave the impression that they were identical in character, but the great difference in the size of the fragments compared was a source of possible error. Accordingly, he wrapped the specimen lightly in paper, and with a hammer from the tool drawer struck it a sharp blow, which broke it into a number of smaller fragments, some of them quite minute. Picking out one or two of the smallest from the paper and carefully noting the “conchoidal” character of the fracture, he placed them on a separate slide, which he at once labelled “stock specimen,” labelling the other slide “worm-tube.” Having taken this precaution against possible confusion, he laid the two slides on the stage of the microscope and once more made a minute comparison. And again the conclusion emerged that the fragments from the worm-tube were identical in all their characters with the fragment of the stock specimen.

It now remained to test this conclusion by more exact methods. Two more labelled slides having been prepared, Thorndyke laid them, label downwards, on the table and dropped on each a large drop of melted Canada balsam. In one drop, while it was still soft, he immersed two or three fragments from the worm-tube; in the other a like number of fragments of the stock specimen. Then he heated both slides over a spirit-lamp to liquefy the balsam and completely immerse the fragments, and laid them aside to cool while he prepared the appliances for grinding the sections.

This process was, as Polton had hinted, a rather tedious one. It consisted in rubbing the two slides backwards and forwards upon a wetted Turkey stone until the fragments of rock were ground to a flat surface. The flattened surfaces had then to be polished upon a smoother stone, and when this had been done the slides were once more heated over a spirit-lamp, the balsam liquefied, and each of the fragments neatly turned over with a needle on to its flat side. When the balsam was cool and set hard, the grinding process was repeated until each of the fragments was worn down to a thin plate or film with parallel sides. Then the slides were again heated, a fresh drop of balsam applied, and a cover-glass laid on top. The specimens were now finished and ready for examination.

On this, the final stage of the investigation, he bestowed the utmost care and attention. The two specimens were examined exhaustively and compared again and again by every possible method, including the use of the polariscope and the spectroscope, and the results of each observation were at once written down. Finally, Thorndyke turned to the books of reference, and, selecting a highly technical work on petrology, checked his written notes by the very detailed descriptions that it furnished of rocks of volcanic origin. And once again the results were entirely confirmatory of the opinion that he had at first formed. No doubt whatever was left in his mind as to the nature of the particles of rock of which the worm had built its tube. But if his opinion was correct, he held evidence producible in a court of law that Daniel Purcell had never landed at Penzance; that, in fact, his dead body was even now lying at the bottom of the sea.

As he consumed his frugal supper, Thorndyke turned over the situation in his mind. He had no doubts at all. But it would be necessary to get his identification of the rock confirmed by a recognized authority who could be called as a witness, and whose statement would be accepted by the court as establishing the facts. There was no difficulty about that. He had a friend who was connected with the Geological Museum, and who was recognized throughout the world as a first-class authority on everything relating to the physical and chemical properties of rocks and minerals. He would take the specimens tomorrow to this expert, and ask him to examine them; and when the authoritative opinion had been pronounced, he would consider what procedure he should adopt. Already there was growing up in his mind a doubt as to the expediency of taking action on purely scientific evidence, and in answer to that doubt a new scheme began to suggest itself.

But for the moment he put it aside. The important thing was to get the expert identification of the rock, and so put his evidence on the basis of established fact. The conversion of scientific into legal evidence was a separate matter that could be dealt with later. And having reached this conclusion, he took a sheet of notepaper from the rack and wrote a short letter to his friend at the Museum, making an appointment for the following afternoon. A few minutes later he dropped it into the box of the Fleet Street post office, and for the time being dismissed the case from his mind.

CHAPTER XIV

In which Mr. Varney is Disillusioned

Thorndyke’s visit to the Geological Museum was not a protracted affair, for his friend, Mr. Burston, made short work of the investigation.

“You say you have examined the specimens yourself,” said he. “Well, I expect you know what they are; just come to me for an official confirmation, h’m? However, don’t tell me what your conclusion was. I may as well start with an open mind. Write it down on this slip of paper and lay it on the table face downwards. And now let us have the specimens.”

Thorndyke produced from his pocket a cigar-case, from which he extracted a pill-box and the labelled microscope-slide.

“There are two little water-worn fragments in the pill-box,” he explained, “and three similar ones which I have ground into sections. I am sorry the specimens are so small, but they are the largest I had.”

Mr. Burston took the pill-box, and, tipping the two tiny pebbles into the palm of his hand, inspected them through a Coddington lens.

“Yes,” said he; “I don’t think it will be very difficult to decide what this is. I think I could tell you offhand. But I won’t. I’ll put it through the regular tests and make quite sure of it; and meanwhile you had better have a browse round the Museum.”

He bustled off to some inner sanctum of the curator’s domain, and Thorndyke adopted his advice by straying out into the galleries. But he had little opportunity to study the contents of the cases, for in a few minutes Mr. Burston returned with a slip of paper in his hand.

“Now,” he said facetiously, as they re-entered the room, “you see there’s no deception.”

He laid his slip of paper on the table beside Thorndyke’s, and invited the latter to “turn up the cards.” Thorndyke accordingly turned over the two slips of paper. Each bore the single word “phonolite.”

“I knew you had spotted it,” said Burston. “However, you have now got corroborative evidence, and I suppose you are happy. I only hope I haven’t helped to send some poor devil to chokee or worse. Good-bye. Glad you brought the things to me.”

He restored the pill-box and slide, and having shaken hands heartily returned to his lair, while Thorndyke went forth into Jermyn Street and took his way thoughtfully eastward.

In a scientific sense the Purcell case was now complete. But the more he thought about it the more did he feel the necessity for bringing the scheme of evidence into closer conformity with traditional legal practice. Even to a judge a purely theoretical train of evidence might seem inconclusive; to a jury, who had been well pounded by a persuasive counsel, it would probably appear quite unconvincing. It would be necessary to obtain corroboration along different lines and in a new direction; and the direction in which it would be well to explore in the first place was the ancient precinct of Lincoln’s Inn, where, at 62, Old Buildings, Mr. John Rodney had his professional chambers.

Now, at the very moment when Thorndyke was proceeding with swift strides from the neighbourhood of Jermyn Street towards Lincoln’s Inn on business of the most critical importance to Mr. Varney, it was decreed by the irony of Fate that the latter gentleman should be engaged in bringing his affairs to a crisis of another kind. For some time past he had been watching with growing impatience the dilatory proceedings of the lawyers in regard to Margaret’s petition. Especially had he chafed at the farce of the private detective, searching, as he knew, for a man whose body was lying on the bed of the sea hundreds of miles away from the area of the search. He was deeply disappointed, too. For when his advertisement scheme had been adopted by Thorndyke, he had supposed that all was plain sailing; he had but to send the necessary letter, and the dissolution of the marriage could be proceeded with at once. That was how it had appeared to him. And as soon as the marriage was dissolved he would make his declaration, and in due course his heart’s desire would be accomplished.

Very differently had things turned out. Months had passed, and not a sign of progress had been made. The ridiculous search for the missing man—ridiculous to him only, however—dragged on interminably, and made him gnash his teeth in secret. His omniscience was now a sheer aggravation; for it condemned him to look on at the futile activities that Barnby had suggested and Rodney initiated, recognizing all their futility, but unable to utter a protest. To a man of his temperament it was maddening.

But there was another source of trouble. His confidence in Margaret’s feelings towards him had been somewhat shaken of late. It had seemed to him there had been a change in her bearing towards him—a slight change, subtle and indefinable, but a change. She seemed as friendly, as cordial as ever; she welcomed his visits and appeared always glad to see him, and yet there was a something guarded, so he felt, as if she were consciously restraining any further increase of intimacy.

The thought of it troubled him profoundly. Of course, it might be nothing more than a little extra carefulness, due to her equivocal position. She had need to keep clear of anything in the slightest degree compromising; that he realized clearly. But still, the feeling lurked in his mind that she had changed, at least in manner, and sometimes he was aware of a horrible suspicion that he might have been over-confident. More than once he had been on the point of saying something indiscreet, and as time went on he felt ever growing a yearning to have his doubts set at rest.

On this present occasion he was taking tea with Margaret by invitation, with the ostensible object of showing her a set of etchings of some of the picturesque corners of Maidstone. He always enjoyed showing her his works, because he could see that she enjoyed looking at them; and these etchings of her native town would, he knew, have a double appeal.

“What a lovely old place it is!” she exclaimed, as she sipped her tea with her eyes fixed on the etchings that Varney had placed before her on a music-stand. “Why is it, Mr. Varney, that an etching or a drawing of any kind is so much more like the place than a photograph? It can’t be a question of accuracy, for the photograph is at least as accurate as a drawing, and contains a great deal more detail.”

“Yes,” agreed Varney, “and that is probably the explanation. An artist puts down what he sees and what anyone else would see and recognize. A photograph puts down what is there, regardless of how the scene would look to a spectator. Consequently, it is full of irrelevant detail, which gets in the way of the real effect as the eye would see it; and it may show appearances that the eye never sees at all, as in the case of Muybridge’s instantaneous photographs of galloping horses. A photograph of a Dutch clock might catch the pendulum in the middle of its swing, and then the clock would appear to have stopped. But an artist would always draw it at the end of its swing, where it pauses for an instant, and that is where the eye sees it when the clock is going.”

“Yes, of course,” said Margaret; “and now I understand why your etchings of the old streets and lanes show just the streets and lanes that I remember, whereas the photographs that I have all look more or less strange and unfamiliar. I suppose they are full of details that I never noticed; but your etchings pick out and emphasize the things that I used to look at with pleasure and which live in my memory. It is a long time since I have been to Maidstone. I should like to see it again; indeed, I am not sure that, if I were free to choose, I shouldn’t like to live there again. It is a dear old town.”

“Yes; isn’t it? But you say ‘if you were free to choose.’ Aren’t you free to choose where you will live?”

“In a sense I am, I suppose,” she replied; “but I don’t feel that I can make any definite arrangements for the future until—well, until I know what my own future is to be.”

“But surely you know that now. You have got that letter of Dan’s. That practically releases you. The rest is only a matter of time and legal formalities. If Jack Rodney had only got Penfield or some other solicitor to get the case started as soon as you had that letter, you would have had your decree by now and have been your own mistress. At least, that is my feeling on the subject. Of course, I am not a lawyer, and I may be wrong.”

“I don’t think you are,” said Margaret. “I have thought the same all along, and I fancy Mr. Rodney is beginning to regret that he did not follow Dr. Thorndyke’s advice and rely on the letter only. But he felt that he could hardly go against Mr. Barnby, who has had so much experience in this kind of practice. And Mr. Barnby was very positive that the letter was not enough.”

“Yes, Barnby has crabbed the whole business; and now after all these months you are just where you were, excepting that you have dropped a lot of money on this ridiculous private detective. Can’t you get Rodney to send the fellow packing and get the case started in earnest?”

“I am inclined to think that he is seriously considering that line of action, and I hope he is. Of course, I have not tried to influence him in the matter. It is silly for a lay person to embarrass a lawyer by urging him to do this or that against his judgment. But I must say that I have grown rather despondent as the time has dragged on and nothing has been done, and I shall be very relieved when a definite move is made. I have an impression that it will be quite soon.”

“That is good hearing,” exclaimed Varney, “because when a move is made it can’t fail to be successful. How can it? On that letter Dan could offer no defence, and it is pretty obvious that he has no intention of offering any. And if there is no defence the case must go in your favour.”

“Unless the judge suspects collusion, as Mr. Barnby seems to think he may.”

“But,” protested Varney, “judges don’t give their decisions on what they suspect, do they? I thought they decided on the evidence. Surely collusion would have to be proved like anything else; and it couldn’t be, because there has been no collusion. And I don’t see why anyone should suspect that there has been.”

“I agree with you entirely, Mr. Varney,” said Margaret, “and I do hope you are right. You are making me feel quite encouraged.”

“I am glad of that,” said he, “and I am encouraging myself at the same time. This delay has been frightfully disappointing. I had hoped that by this time the affair would have been over and you would have been free. However, we may hope that it won’t be so very long now.”

“It will take some months, in any case,” said Margaret.

“Yes, of course,” he admitted; “but that is a mere matter of waiting. We can wait patiently when we see the end definitely in view. And what a relief it will be when it is over! Just think of it! When the words are spoken and the shackles are struck off! Won’t that be a joyful day?”

As Varney was speaking, Margaret watched him furtively and a little uneasily. For there had come into his face an expression that she had seen more than once of late—an expression that filled her gentle soul with forebodings of trouble for this impulsive, warm-hearted friend. And now the note of danger was heightened by something significant in the words that he had used—something that expressed more than mere friendly solicitude.

“It will certainly be a relief when the whole business is over,” she said quietly; “and it is most kind and sympathetic of you to take such a warm interest in my future.”

“It isn’t kind at all,” he replied, “nor particularly sympathetic. I feel that I am an interested party. In a sense, your future is my future.”

He paused for a few moments, and she looked at him in something like dismay. Vainly she cast about for some means of changing the current of the conversation, of escaping to some less perilous topic. Before she had time to recover from her confusion, he looked up at her and burst out passionately:

“Maggie, I want to ask you a question. I know I oughtn’t to ask it, but you must try to forgive me. I can’t bear the suspense any longer. I think about it day and night, and it is eating my heart out. What I want to ask you is this: When it is all over—when that blessed day comes and you are free, will you—can I hope that you may be willing to listen to me if I ask you to let me be your devoted servant, your humble worshipper, and to try to make up to you by love and faithful service all that has been missing from your life in the past? For years—for many years, Maggie—I have been your friend—a friend far more loving and devoted than you have ever guessed, for in those days I hardly dared to dream even of intimate friendship. But now the barrier between us is no longer immovable. Soon it will be cast down for ever. And then—can it be, Maggie, that my dream will come true? That you will grant me a lifelong joy by letting me be the guardian of your happiness and peace?”

For a moment there had risen to Margaret’s face a flush of resentment, but it faded almost instantly and was gone, extinguished by a deep sense of the tragedy of this unfortunate but real and great passion. She had always liked Varney, and she had recognized and valued his quiet, unobtrusive friendship and the chivalrous deference with which he had been used to treat her. And now she was going to make him miserable, to destroy his cherished hopes of a future made happy in the realization of his great love for her. The sadness of it left no room for resentment, and her eyes filled as she answered unsteadily:

“You know, Mr. Varney, that, as a married woman, I have no right to speak or think of the making of a new marriage. But I feel that your question must be answered; and I wish, dear Mr. Varney, I wish from my heart that it could be answered differently. I have always valued your friendship—with very good reason; and I value your love, and am proud to have been thought worthy of it. But I cannot accept it. I can never accept it. It is dreadful to me, dear friend, to make you unhappy—you whom I like and admire so much. But it must be so. I have nothing but friendship to offer you, and I shall never have.”

“Why do you say you will never have, Maggie?” he urged. “May it not be that you will change? That the other will come if I wait long enough? And I will wait patiently—wait until I am an old man if need be, so that only the door is not shut. I will never weary you with importunities, but just wait your pleasure. Will you not let me wait and hope, Maggie?”

She shook her head sadly. “No, Mr. Varney,” she answered. “Believe me, it can never be. There is nothing to wait for. There will be no change. The future is certain so far as that. I am so sorry, dear generous friend. It grieves me to the heart to make you unhappy. But what I have said is final. I can never say anything different.”

Varney looked at her in incredulous despair. He could not believe in this sudden collapse of all his hopes; for his doubts of her had been but vague misgivings, born of impatience and unrest. But suddenly a new thought flashed into his mind.

“How do you know that?” he asked. “Why are you so certain? Is there anything now that you know of that—that must keep us apart for ever? You know what I mean, Maggie. Is there anything?”

She was silent for a few moments. Naturally, she was reluctant to disclose to another the secret that she had held so long locked in her own heart, and that even now she dared but to whisper to herself. But she felt that to this man, whose love she must reject and whose happiness she must shatter, she owed a sacred duty. He must not be allowed to wreck his life if a knowledge of the truth would save him.

“I will tell you, Mr. Varney,” she said. “You know how I came to marry Dan?”

“I think so,” he replied. “He never told me, but I guessed.”

“Well, if I had not married Dan I should have married John Rodney. There was no engagement and nothing was said; but we were deeply attached to one another, and we both understood. Then circumstances compelled me to marry Dan. Mr. Rodney knew what those circumstances were. He cherished no resentment against me. He did not even blame me. He has remained my friend ever since, and he has formed no other attachment. I know that he has never forgotten what might have been, and neither have I. Need I say any more?”

Varney shook his head. “No,” he replied gruffly. “I understand.”

For some moments there was a deep silence in the room. Margaret glanced timidly at her companion, shocked at the sudden change in his appearance. In a moment all the enthusiasm, the eager vivacity, had died out of his face, leaving it aged, drawn, and haggard. He had understood, and his heart was filled with black despair. At a word all his glorious dream-castles had come crashing down, leaving the world that had been so sunny a waste of dust and ashes. So he sat for a while silent, motionless, stunned by the suddenness of the calamity. At length he rose and began, in a dull, automatic way, to collect his etchings and bestow them in his portfolio. When he had secured them and tied the ribbons of the portfolio, he turned to Margaret and, standing before her, looked earnestly in her face.

“Good-bye, Maggie,” he said in a strange, muffled voice; “I expect I shan’t see you again for some time.”

She stood up, and with a little smothered sob held out her hand. He took it in both of his and, stooping, kissed it reverently. “Good-bye again,” he said, still holding her hand. “Don’t be unhappy about me. It couldn’t be helped. I shall often think of you and of how sweet you have been to me today; and I shall hope to hear soon that you have got your freedom. And I do hope to God that Rodney will make you happy. I think he will. He is a good fellow, an honest man, and a gentleman. He is worthy of you, and I wish you both long years of happiness.”

He kissed her hand once more, and then, releasing it, made his way gropingly out into the hail and to the door. She followed him with the tears streaming down her face, and watched him, as she had watched him once before, descending the stairs. At the landing he turned and waved his hand, and even as she returned his greeting he was gone. She went back to the drawing-room still weeping silently, very sad at heart at this half-foreseen tragedy. For the time being, she could see, Varney was a broken man. He had come full of hope and he had gone away in despair; and something seemed to hint—it may have been the valedictory tone of his last words—that she had looked on him for the last time, that the final wave of his hand was a last farewell.

Meanwhile Varney, possessed by a wild unrest, hurried through the streets, yearning, like a wounded animal, for the solitude of his lair. He wanted to shut himself in his studio and be alone with his misery. Presently he hailed a taxicab, and from its window gazed out impatiently to measure its progress. Soon it drew up at the familiar entry, and when he had paid the driver he darted in and shut the door; but hardly had he attained the sanctuary that he had longed for than the same unrest began to engender a longing to escape. Up and down the studio he paced, letting the unbidden thoughts surge chaotically through his mind, mingling the troubled past with the future of his dreams—the sunny future that might have been—and this with the empty reality that lay before him.

On the wall he had pinned an early proof of the aquatint that Thorndyke had liked and that he himself rather liked. He had done it partly from bravado and partly as a memorial of the event that had set both him and Maggie free. Presently he halted before it and let it set the tune to his meditations. There was the lighthouse looking over the fog-bank just as it had looked on him when he was washing the bloodstain from the deck. By that time Purcell was overboard, at the bottom of the sea. His oppressor was gone. His life was now his own, and her life was her own.

He looked at the memorial picture, and in a moment it seemed to him to have become futile. The murder itself was futile, so far as he was concerned, though it had set Maggie free. To what purpose had he killed Purcell? It had been to ensure a future for himself; and behold! there was to be no future for him after all. Thus in the bitterness of his disappointment he saw everything out of proportion and in false perspective. He forgot that it was not to win Margaret but to escape from the clutches of his parasite that he had pulled the trigger on that sunny day in June. He forgot that he had achieved the very object that was in his mind when he fired the shot: freedom to live a reputable life safe from the menace of the law. His passion for Margaret had become so absorbing that it had obscured all the other purposes of his life; and now that it was gone, it seemed to him that nothing was left.

As he stood thus gloomily reflecting with his eyes fixed on the little picture, he began to be aware of a new impulse. The lighthouse, the black-sailed luggers, the open sea, seemed to take on an unwonted friendliness. They were the setting of something besides tragedy. There, in Cornwall, he had been happy in a way despite the abiding menace of Purcell’s domination. There, at Sennen, he had lived under the same roof with her, had sat at her table, had been her guest and her accepted friend. It had not really been a happy period, but memory, like the sundial, numbers only the sunny hours, and Varney looked back on it with wistful eyes. At least his dream had not been shattered then. So, as he looked at the picture, he felt stirring within him a desire to go back and look upon those scenes again. Falmouth and Penzance and Sennen—especially Sennen—seemed to draw him. He wanted to look out across the sea to the Longships, and in the gathering gloom of the horizon to see the diamond and the ruby sparkle as they did that evening when he and the distant lighthouse seemed to hold secret converse.

It was, perhaps, a strange impulse. Whence it came he neither knew nor asked. It may have been the effect of memory and association. It may have been mere unrest. Or it may have been that a dead hand beckoned to him to come. Who shall say? He only knew that he was sensible of the impulse, and that it grew from moment to moment.

To a man in his condition, to feel an impulse is to act on it. No sooner was he conscious of the urge to go back and look upon the well-remembered scenes than he began to make his simple preparations for the journey. Like most experienced travellers he travelled light. Most of his kit, including his little case of sketching materials, was in the studio. The rest could be picked up at his lodgings en route for Paddington. Within ten minutes of his having formed the resolve to go, he stood on the threshold, locking the studio door from without with the extra key that he used when he was absent for more than a day. At the outer gate he paused to pocket the key, and stood for a few moments with his portmanteau in his hand, looking back at the studio with a curiously reflective air. Then, at last, he turned and went on his way. But if he could have looked, as the clairvoyant claims to look, through the bricks and mortar of London, he might at this very time have seen Dr. John Thorndyke striding up Chancery Lane from Fleet Street; might have followed him to the great gateway of Lincoln’s Inn (on the masonry whereof tradition has it that Ben Jonson worked as a bricklayer), and seen him pass through into the little square beyond, and finally plunge into the dark and narrow entry of one of the ancient red brick houses that have looked down upon the square for some three or four centuries—an entry on the jamb of which was painted the name of Mr. John Rodney.

But Varney was not a clairvoyant, and neither was Thorndyke. And so it befell that each of them went his way unconscious of the movements of the other.

CHAPTER XV

In which Thorndyke opens the Attack

As Thorndyke turned the corner at the head of the stairs, he encountered Philip Rodney with a kettle in his hand, which he had apparently been filling at some hidden source of water.

“This is a bit of luck,” said Philip, holding out his disengaged hand—“for me, at least; not, perhaps, for you. I have only just arrived, and Jack hasn’t come over from the courts yet. I hope this isn’t a business call.”

“In a sense it is,” replied Thorndyke, “as I am seeking information. But I think you can probably tell me all I want to know.”

“That’s all right,” said Philip. “I’ll just plant ‘Polly’ on the gas-stove, and while she is boiling we can smoke a preparatory pipe and you can get on with the examination-in-chief. Go in and take the presidential chair.”

Thorndyke entered the pleasant, homely room, half office, half sitting-room, and seating himself in the big armchair began to fill his pipe. In a few moments Philip entered, and sat down on a chair which commanded a view of the tiny kitchen and of “Polly,” seated on a gas-ring.

“Now,” said he, “fire away. What do you want to know?”

“I want,” replied Thorndyke, “to ask you one or two questions about your yacht.”

“The deuce you do!” exclaimed Philip. “Are you thinking of going in for a yacht yourself?”

“Not at present,” was the reply. “My questions have reference to that last trip that Purcell made in her, and the first one is: When you took over the yacht after that trip, did you find her in every respect as she was before? Was there anything missing that you could not account for, or any change in her condition, or anything about her that was not quite as you expected it to be?”

Philip looked at his visitor with undissembled surprise. “Now I wonder what makes you ask that. Have you any reason to expect that I should have found any change in her condition?”

“If you don’t mind,” said Thorndyke, “we will leave that question unanswered for the moment. I would rather not say, just now, what my object is in seeking this information. We can go into that later. Meanwhile, do you mind just answering my questions as if you were in the witness-box?”

A shade of annoyance crossed Philip’s face. He could not imagine what possible concern Thorndyke could have with his yacht, and he was inclined to resent the rather cryptic attitude of his questioner. Nevertheless, he answered readily:

“Of course I don’t mind. But, in fact, there is nothing to tell. I don’t remember noticing any thing unusual about the yacht, and there was nothing missing, so far as I know.”

“No rope or cordage of any kind, for instance?”

“No—at least, nothing to speak of. A new ball of spun-yarn had been broached. I noticed that, and I meant to ask Varney what he used it for. But there wasn’t a great deal of it gone, and I know of nothing else. Oh, wait! If I am in the witness-box I must tell the whole truth, be it never so trivial. There was a mark or stain or dirty smear of some kind on the jib. Is that any good to you?”

“Are you sure it wasn’t there before that day?”

“Quite. I sailed the yacht myself the day before, and I will swear that the jib was spotlessly clean then. So the mark must have been made by Purcell or Varney, because I noticed it the very next day.”

“What was the mark like?”

“It was just a faint wavy line, as if some dirty water had been spilt on the sail and allowed to dry partly before it was washed off.”

“Did you form any opinion as to how the mark might have been caused?”

Philip struggled, not quite successfully, to suppress a smile. To him there seemed something extremely ludicrous in this solemn interrogation concerning these meaningless trifles. But he answered as gravely as he could:

“I could only make a vague guess. I assumed that it was caused in some way by the accident that occurred. You may remember that the jib-halyard broke, and the sail went overboard and got caught under the yacht’s forefoot. That is when it must have happened. Perhaps the sail may have picked some dirt off the keel. Usually a dirty mark on the jib means mud on the fluke of the anchor, but it wasn’t that. The anchor hadn’t been down since it was scrubbed. The yacht rode at moorings in Sennen Cove. However, there was the mark; how it came there you are as well able to judge as I am.”

“And that is all you know; this mark on the sail and the spun-yarn? There is no other cordage missing?”

“No, not so far as I know.”

“And there is nothing else missing? No iron fittings or heavy objects of any kind?”

“Good Lord, no! How should there be? You don’t suspect Purcell of having hooked off with one of the anchors in his pocket, do you?”

Thorndyke smiled indulgently, but persisted in his questions.

“Do you mean that you know there was nothing missing, or only that you are not aware of any thing being missing?”

The persistence of the questions impressed Philip with a sudden suspicion that Thorndyke had something definite in his mind, that he had some reason for believing that something had been removed from the yacht. He ventured to suggest this to Thorndyke, who answered frankly enough:

“You are so far right, Philip, that I am not asking these questions at random. I would rather not say more than that just now.”

“Very well,” said Philip; “I won’t press you for an explanation. But I may say that we dismantled the yacht in rather a hurry, and hadn’t time to check the inventory, so I can’t really say whether there was anything missing or not. But you have come at a most opportune time, for it happens that we had arranged to go over to the place where she is laid up, at Battersea, to morrow afternoon for the very purpose of checking the inventory and generally overhauling the boat and the gear. If you care to come over with us, or meet us there, we can settle your questions quite definitely. How will that suit you?”

“It will suit me perfectly,” replied Thorndyke. “If you will give me the address and fix a time, I will meet you there.”

“It is a disused wharf with some empty work shops,” said Philip. “I will write down the directions, and if you will be at the gate at three o’clock tomorrow, we can go through the gear and fittings together.”

Thorndyke made a note of the whereabouts of the wharf, and having thus despatched the business on which he had come, he took an early opportunity to depart, not having any great desire to meet John Rodney and be subjected to the inevitable cross-examination. He could see that Philip was, naturally enough, extremely curious as to the object of his inquiries, and he preferred to leave the two brothers to discuss the matter. On the morrow his actions would be guided by the results, if any, of the survey of the yacht.

Three o’clock on the following afternoon found him waiting at a large wooden gate in a narrow thoroughfare close to the river. On the pavement by his side stood the green canvas-covered “research case,” which was his constant companion whenever he went abroad on professional business. It contained a very complete outfit of such reagents and apparatus as he might require in a preliminary investigation; but on the present occasion its usual contents had been reinforced by two large bottles, to obtain which Polton had that morning made a special visit to a wholesale chemist’s in the Borough. A church clock somewhere across the river struck the hour, and almost at the same moment John and Philip Rodney emerged from a tributary alley and advanced towards the gate.

“You are here first, then,” said Philip, “but we are not late. I heard a clock strike a moment ago.”

He produced a key from his pocket, with which he unlocked a wicket in the gate, and, having pushed it open, invited Thorndyke to enter. The latter passed through, and the two brothers followed, locking the wicket after them, and conducted Thorndyke across a large yard to a desolate looking wharf, beyond which was a stretch of unreclaimed shore. Here, drawn up well above high-water mark, a small, sharp-sterned yacht stood on chocks under a tarpaulin cover.

“This is the yacht,” said Philip, “but there is nothing on board of her. All the stores and gear and loose fittings are in the workshop behind us. Which will you see first?”

“Let us look at the gear,” replied Thorn-dyke; and they accordingly turned towards a large disused workshop at the rear of the wharf.

“Phil was telling me about your visit last night,” said Rodney, with an inquisitive eye on the research case, “and we are both fairly flummoxed. He gathered that these inquiries of yours are in some way connected with Purcell.”

“Yes, that is so. I want to ascertain whether, when you resumed possession of the yacht after Purcell left her, you found her in the same condition as before, and whether her stores, gear, and fittings were intact.”

“Did you suppose that Purcell might have taken some of them away with him?”

“I thought it not impossible,” Thorndyke replied.

“Now, I wonder why on earth you should think that,” said Rodney, “and what concern it should be of yours if he had.”

Thorndyke smiled evasively. “Everything is my concern,” he replied. “I am an Autolycus of the Law, a collector of miscellaneous trifles of evidence and unclassifiable scraps of information.”

“Well,” said Rodney, with a somewhat sour smile, “I have no experience of legal curiosity shops and oddment repositories. But I don’t know what you mean by ‘evidence.’ Evidence of what?”

“Of whatever it may chance to prove,” Thorndyke replied blandly.

“What did you suppose Purcell might have taken with him?” Rodney asked, with a trace of irritability in his tone.

“I had thought it possible that there might be some cordage missing and perhaps some iron fittings or other heavy objects. But, of course, that is mere surmise. My object is, as I have said, to ascertain whether the yacht was in all respects in the same condition when Purcell left her as when he came on board.”

Rodney gave a grunt of impatience; but at this moment Philip, who had been wrestling with a slightly rusty lock, threw open the door of the workshop, and they all entered. Thorndyke looked curiously about the long, narrow interior with its prosaic contents, so little suggestive of the tragedy which his thoughts associated with them. Over head the yacht’s spars rested on the tie-beams, from which hung bunches of blocks; on the floor reposed a long row of neatly painted half-hundred weights, a pile of chain cable, two anchors, a stove, and other oddments such as water-breakers, buckets, mops, etc.; and on the long benches at the side folded sails, locker cushions, sidelight lanterns, the binnacle, the cabin lamp, and other more delicate fittings. After a long look round, in the course of which his eye travelled along the row of ballast-weights, Thorndyke deposited his case on a bench and asked:

“Have you still got the broken jib-halyard that Philip was telling me about last night?”

“Yes,” answered Rodney; “it is here under the bench.”

He drew out a coil of rope, and, flinging it on the floor, began to uncoil it, when it separated into two lengths.

“Which are the broken ends?” asked Thorndyke.

“It broke near the middle,” replied Rodney, “where it chafed on the cleat when the sail was hoisted. This is the one end, you see, frayed out, like a brush in breaking, and the other—” He picked up the second half, and passing it rapidly through his hands held up the end. He did not finish the sentence, but stood, with a frown of surprise, staring at the rope in his hand.

“This is queer,” he said, after a pause. “The broken end has been cut off. Did you cut it off, Phil?”

“No,” replied Philip; “it is just as I took it from the locker, where, I suppose, you or Varney stowed it.”

“I wonder,” said Thorndyke, “how much has been cut off. Do you know what the original length of the rope was?”

“Yes,” replied Rodney; “forty-two feet. It is down in the inventory, but I remember working it out. Let us see how much there is here.”

He laid the two lengths of rope along the floor, and with Thorndyke’s spring tape care fully measured them. The combined length was exactly thirty-one feet.

“So,” said Thorndyke, “there are eleven feet missing without allowing for the lengthening of the rope by stretching.”

The two brothers glanced at one another, and both looked at Thorndyke with very evident surprise.

“Well,” said Philip, “you seem to be right about the cordage. But what made you go for the jib-halyard in particular?”

“Because if any cordage had been cut off it would naturally be taken from a broken rope in preference to a whole one.”

“Yes, of course. But I can’t understand how you came to suspect that any rope was missing at all.”

“We will talk about that presently,” said Thorndyke. “The next question is as to the iron fittings, chain, and so forth.”

“I don’t think any of those can be missing,” said Rodney. “You can’t very well cut a length of chain off with your pocket-knife.”

“No,” agreed Thorndyke, “but I thought you might have some odd piece of chain among the ballast.”

“We have no chain except the cable. Our only ballast is in the form of half-hundredweights. They are handier to stow than odd stuff.”

“How many half-hundredweights have you?”

“Twenty-four,” replied Rodney.

“There are only twenty-three in that row,” said Thorndyke. “I counted them as we came in and noted the odd number.”

The two brothers simultaneously checked Thorndyke’s statement and confirmed it. Then they glanced about the floor of the workshop, under the benches, and by the walls; but the missing weight was nowhere to be seen, nor was there any place in which an object of this size could have got hidden.

“It is very extraordinary,” said Philip. “There is certainly one weight missing. And no one has handled them but Jack and I. We hired a barrow and brought up all the gear ourselves.”

“There is just the chance,” said Thorndyke, “that one of them may have been overlooked and left in the yacht’s hold.”

“It is very unlikely,” replied Philip, “seeing that we took out the floor-boards, so that you can see the whole of the bilges from end to end. But I will run down and make sure.”

He ran out, literally, and crossing the wharf disappeared over the edge. In a couple of minutes he was back, breathing fast, and evidently not a little excited.

“It isn’t there,” he said. “Of course it couldn’t be. But the question is, what has become of it? It is a most mysterious affair.”

“It is,” agreed Rodney. “And what is still more mysterious is that Thorndyke seemed to suspect that it was missing even before he came here. Now didn’t you, Thorndyke?”

“I suspected that some heavy object was missing, as I mentioned,” was the reply, “and a ballast-weight was a likely object. By the way, can you fix a date on which you know that all the ballast-weights were in place?”

“Yes, I think I can,” replied Philip. “A few days before Purcell went to Penzance we beached the yacht to give her a scrape. Of course we had to take out the ballast, and when we launched her again I helped to put it back. I am certain that all the weights were there then, because I counted them after they were stowed in their places.”

“Then,” said Thorndyke, “it is virtually certain that they were all on board when Purcell and Varney started from Sennen.”

“I should say it is absolutely certain,” said Philip.

Thorndyke nodded gravely and appeared to reflect a while. But his reflections were broken in upon by John Rodney.

“Look here, Thorndyke, we have answered your questions and given you facilities for verifying certain opinions that you held, and now it is time that you were a little less reserved with us. You evidently connected the disappearance of this rope and this weight in some way with Purcell. Now, we are all interested in Purcell. You have got something up your sleeve, and we should like to know what that something is. It is perfectly obvious that you don’t imagine that Purcell, when he went up the pier ladder at Penzance, had a couple of fathoms of rope and a half-hundred weight concealed about his person.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Thorndyke, “I don’t imagine that Purcell ever went up the ladder at Penzance at all.”

“But Varney saw him go up,” protested Philip.

“Varney says he saw him go up,” Thorndyke corrected. “I do not accept Mr. Varney’s statement.”

“Then what on earth do you suggest?” demanded Philip. “And why should Varney say what isn’t true?”

“Let us sit down on this bench,” said Thorndyke, “and thrash the matter out. I will put my case to you, and you can give me your criticisms on it. I will begin by stating that some months ago I came to the conclusion that Purcell was dead.”

Both the brothers started and gazed at Thorndyke in utter astonishment. Then Rodney said:

“You say ‘some months ago.’ You must mean within the last three months.”

“No,” replied Thorndyke. “I decided that he died on the 2nd of last June, before the yacht reached Penzance.”

An exclamation burst simultaneously from both of his hearers, and Rodney protested impatiently:

“But this is sheer nonsense, if you will pardon me for saying so. Have you forgotten that two persons have received letters from him less than four months ago?”

“I suggest that we waive those letters and consider the other evidence.”

“But we can’t waive them!” exclaimed Rodney. “They are material evidence of the most conclusive kind.”

“I may say that I have ascertained that both those letters were forgeries. The evidence can be produced, if necessary, as both the letters are in existence, but I don’t propose to produce it now. I ask you to accept my statement for the time being and to leave the letters out of the discussion.”

“It is leaving out a good deal,” said Rodney. “I find it very difficult to believe that they were forgeries or to imagine who on earth could have forged them. However, we won’t contest the matter now. When did you come to this extra ordinary conclusion?”

“A little over four months ago,” replied Thorndyke.

“And you never said anything to any of us on the subject,” said Rodney, “and, what is more astonishing, you actually put in an advertisement, addressed to a man whom you believed to be dead.”

“And got an answer from him,” added Philip, with a derisive smile.

“Exactly,” said Thorndyke. “It was an experiment, and it was justified by the result. But let us get back to the matter that we have been investigating. I came to the conclusion, as I have said, that Purcell met his death during that voyage from Sennen to Penzance, and that Varney, for some reason, had thought it necessary to conceal the occurrence; but I decided that the evidence in my possession would not be convincing in a court of law.”

“I have no doubt that you were perfectly right in that,” Rodney remarked dryly.

“I further considered it very unlikely that any fresh evidence would ever be forthcoming, and that, since the death could not be proved, it was, for many reasons, undesirable that the question should ever be raised. Accordingly, I never communicated my belief to anybody.”

“Then,” said Rodney, “are we to understand that some new evidence has come to light, after all?”

“Yes. It came to light the other day at the College of Surgeons. I dare say Philip told you about it.”

“He told me that, by an extraordinary coincidence, that quaint button of Purcell’s had turned up, and that some sort of sea-worm had built a tube on it. But if that is what you mean, I don’t see the bearing of it as evidence.”

“Neither do I,” said Philip.

“You remember that Varney distinctly stated that when Purcell went up the ladder at Penzance he was wearing his oilskin coat, and that the button was then on it?”

“Yes. But I don’t see anything in that. Purcell went ashore, it is true, and he went away from Cornwall. But he seems to have gone by sea, and, as I suggested the other day, he probably got a fresh button when he went on board the steamer and chucked this cork one overboard.”

“I remember your making that suggestion,” said Thorndyke, “and very much astonished I was to hear you make it. I may say that I have ascertained that Purcell was never on board that steamer.”

“Well, he might have thrown it into the sea somewhere else. There is no particular mystery about its having got into the sea. But what was there about my suggestion that astonished you so much?”

“It was,” replied Thorndyke, “that you completely overlooked a most impressive fact which was staring you in the face and shouting aloud for recognition.”

“Indeed!” said Philip. “What fact was it that I overlooked?”

“Just consider,” replied Thorndyke, “what it was that Professor D’Arcy showed us. It was a cork button with a Terebella tube on it. Now an ordinary cork, if immersed long enough, will soak up water until it is waterlogged and then sink to the bottom. But this one was impregnated with paraffin wax. It could not get waterlogged and it could not sink. It would float for ever.”

“Well?” queried Philip.

“But it had sunk. It had been lying at the bottom of the sea for months—long enough for a Terebella to build a tube on it. Then at last it had broken loose, risen to the surface and drifted ashore.”

“You are taking the worm-tube as evidence,” said John Rodney, “that the button had sunk to bottom. Is it impossible—I am no naturalist—but is it impossible that the worm could have built its tube while the button was floating about in the sea?”

“It is quite impossible,” replied Thorndyke, “in the case of this particular worm, since the tube is built up of particles of rock gathered by the worm from the sea bottom. You will bear me out in that, Philip?”

“Oh, certainly,” replied Philip. “There is no doubt that the button has been at the bottom for a good many months. The question is how the deuce it can have got there, and what was holding it down.”

“You are not overlooking the fact that it is a button,” said Thorndyke—“I mean that it was attached to a garment?”

Both men looked at Thorndyke a little uncomfortably. Then Rodney replied:

“Your suggestion obviously is that the button was attached to a garment and that the garment contained a body. I am disposed to concede the garment, since I can think of no other means by which the button could have been held down, but I see no reason for assuming the body. I admit that I do not quite understand how Purcell’s oilskin coat could have got to the bottom of the sea, but still less can I imagine how Purcell’s body could have got to the bottom of the sea. What do you say, Phil?”

“I agree with you,” answered Philip. “Something must have held the button down, and I can think of nothing but the coat to which it was attached. But as to the body, it seems a gratuitous assumption, to say nothing of the various reasons for believing that Purcell is still alive. There is nothing wildly improbable in the supposition that the coat might have blown overboard and been sunk by something heavy in the pocket. As a matter of fact, it would have sunk by itself as soon as it got thoroughly soaked. You must admit, Thorndyke, that that is so.”

But Thorndyke shook his head. “We are not dealing with general probabilities,” said he. “We are dealing with a specific case. An empty oilskin coat, even if sunk by some object in the pocket, would have been comparatively light, and, like all moderately light bodies, would have drifted about the sea bottom, impelled by currents and tide-streams. But that is not the condition in the present case. There is evidence that this button was moored immovably to some very heavy object.”

“What evidence is there of that?” demanded Rodney.

“There is the conclusive fact that it has been all these months lying continuously in one place.”

“Indeed!” said Rodney, with hardly concealed scepticism. “That seems a bold thing to say. But if you know that it has been lying all the time in one place, perhaps you can point out the spot where it has been lying.”

“As a matter of fact I can,” said Thorndyke. “That button, Rodney, has been lying all these months on the sea bottom at the base of the Wolf Rock.”

The two brothers started very perceptibly. They stared at Thorndyke, then looked at one another, and then Rodney challenged the statement.

“You make this assertion very confidently,” he said. “Can you produce any evidence to support it?”

“I can produce perfectly convincing and conclusive evidence,” replied Thorndyke. “A very singular conjunction of circumstances enables us to fix with absolute certainty the place where that button has been lying. Do you happen to be acquainted with the peculiar resonant volcanic rock known as phonolite or clink-stone?”

Rodney shook his head a little impatiently. “No,” he answered; “I have never heard of it before.”

“It is not a very rare rock,” said Thorndyke, “but in the neighbourhood of the British Isles it occurs in only two places. One is inland in the North, and may be disregarded. The other is the Wolf Rock.”

Neither of his hearers made any comment on this statement, though it was evident that both were deeply impressed, and he continued:

“This Wolf Rock is a very remarkable structure. It is what is called a ‘volcanic neck’—that is, it is a mass of altered lava that once filled the funnel of a volcano. The volcano has disappeared, but this cast of the funnel remains standing up from the bottom of the sea like a great column. It is a single mass of phonolite, and thus entirely different in composition from the sea bed around or anywhere near these islands. But, of course, immediately at its base the sea bottom must be covered with decomposed fragments which have fallen from its sides, and it is with these fragments that our Terebella has built its tube. You remember, Philip, my pointing out to you, as we walked home from the College, that the worm-tube appeared to be built of fragments that were all alike. Now, that was a very striking and significant fact. It furnished prima facie evidence that the button had been moored in one place, and that it had therefore been attached to some very heavy object. That night I made an exhaustive examination of the material of the tube, and then the further fact emerged that the material was phonolite. This, as I have said, fixed the locality with exactness and certainty. And I may add that, in view of the importance of the matter in an evidential sense, I submitted the fragments yesterday to one of the greatest living authorities on petrology, who recognized them at once as phonolite.”

For some time after Thorndyke had finished speaking the two brothers sat wrapped in silent reflection. Both were deeply impressed, but each in a markedly different way. To John Rodney, the lawyer, accustomed to sworn testimony and documentary evidence, this scientific demonstration appeared amazingly ingenious but some what fantastic and unconvincing. In the case of Philip, the doctor, it was quite otherwise. Accustomed to acting on inferences from facts of his own observing, he gave full weight to each item of evidence, and his thoughts were already stretching out to the as yet unstated corollaries.

John Rodney was the first to speak. “What inference,” he asked, “do you wish us to draw from this very ingenious theory of yours?”

“It is rather more than a theory,” said Thorndyke, “but we will let that pass. The inference I leave to you; but perhaps it would help you if I were to recapitulate the facts.”

“Perhaps it would,” said Rodney.

Then,” said Thorndyke, “I will take them in their order. This is the case of a man who was seen to start on a voyage for a given destination in company with one other man. His start out to sea was witnessed by a number of persons. From that moment he was never seen again by any person excepting his one companion. He is said to have reached his destination, but his arrival there rests upon the unsupported verbal testimony of one person, the said companion. Thereafter he vanished utterly, and since then has made no sign of being alive; he has drawn no cheques, though he has a considerable balance at his bank; he has communicated with no one, and he has never been seen by anybody who could recognize him.”

“Is that quite correct?” interposed Philip. “He is said to have been seen at Falmouth and Ipswich, and then there are those letters.”

“His alleged appearance, embarking at Falmouth and disembarking at Ipswich,” replied Thorndyke, “rest, like his arrival at Penzance, upon the unsupported testimony of one person, his sole companion on the voyage. That statement I can prove to be untrue. He was never seen either at Falmouth or at Ipswich. As to the letters. I can prove them both to be forgeries and for the present I ask you to admit them as such pending the production of proof. But if we exclude the alleged appearances and the letters, what I have said is correct: from the time when this man put out to sea from Sennen he has never been seen by anyone but Varney, and there has never been any corroboration of Varney’s statement that he landed at Penzance.

“Some eight months later a portion of this man’s clothing is found. It bears evidence of having been lying at the bottom of the sea for many months, so that it must have sunk to its resting-place within a very short time of the man’s disappearance. The place where it has been lying is one over, or near, which the man must have sailed in the yacht. It has been moored to the bottom by some very heavy object, and a very heavy object has disappeared from the yacht. That heavy object had apparently not disappeared when the yacht started, and it is not known to have been on the yacht afterwards. The evidence goes to show that the disappearance of that object coincided in time with the disappearance of the man, and a quantity of cordage disappeared certainly on that day.

“Those are the facts at present in our possession with regard to the disappearance of Daniel Purcell, to which we may add that the disappearance was totally unexpected, that it has never been explained or accounted for excepting in a letter which is a manifest forgery, and that even in the latter, apart from the fictitious nature of the letter, the explanation is utterly inconsistent with all that is known of the missing man in respect of his character, his habits, his intentions, and his circumstances.”

CHAPTER XVI

In which John Rodney is Convinced

Once more, as Thorndyke concluded, there was a long, uncomfortable silence, during which the two brothers cogitated profoundly and with a very disturbed expression. At length John Rodney spoke.

“There is no denying, Thorndyke, that the body of circumstantial evidence that you have produced and expounded so skilfully and lucidly is extra ordinarily complete. Of course, it is subject to your being able to prove that Varney’ s reports as to Purcell’s appearance at Falmouth and Ipswich were false reports, and that the letters which purported to be written and sent by Purcell were in fact not written or sent by him. If you can prove those assertions, there will undoubtedly be a very formidable case against Varney, because those reports and those letters would then be evidence that someone was endeavouring to prove, falsely, that Purcell is alive. But this would amount to presumptive evidence that he is not alive, and that someone has reasons for concealing the fact of his death. But we must look to you to prove what you have asserted. You could hardly suggest that we should charge a highly respectable gentleman of our acquaintance with having murdered his friend and made away with the body—for that is obviously your meaning—on a mass of circumstantial evidence, which is, you must admit, rather highly theoretical.”

“I agree with you completely,” replied Thorndyke. “The evidence respecting the reports and the letters is obviously essential. But in the meantime it is of the first importance that we carry this investigation to an absolute finish. It is not merely a question of justice or our duty on grounds of public policy to uncover a crime and secure the punishment of the criminal. There are individual rights and interests to be guarded—those, I mean, of the missing man’s wife. If her husband is dead, common justice to her demands that his death should be proved and placed on public record.”

“Yes, indeed,” Rodney agreed heartily. “If Purcell is dead, then she is a widow, and the petition becomes unnecessary. By the way, I understand now why you were always so set against the private detective, but what I don’t understand is why you put in that advertisement.”

“It is quite simple,” was the reply. “I wanted another forged letter, written in terms dictated by myself—and I got it.”

“Ha!” exclaimed Rodney. And now, for the first time, he began to understand how Thorndyke had got his great reputation.

“You spoke just now,” Rodney continued, “of carrying this investigation to a finish. Haven’t you done so? Is there anything more to investigate?”

“We have not yet completed our examination of the yacht,” replied Thorndyke. “The facts that we have elicited enable us to make certain inferences concerning the circumstances of Purcell’s death—assuming his death to have occurred. We infer, for instance, that he did not fall overboard, nor was he pushed overboard. He met his death on the yacht, and it was his dead body which was cast into the sea with the sinker attached to it. That we may fairly infer. But we have, at present, no evidence as to the way in which he came by his death. Possibly a further examination of the yacht may show some traces from which we may form an opinion. By the way, I have been looking at that revolver that is hanging from the beam. Was that on board at the time?”

“Yes,” answered Rodney. “It was hanging on the cabin bulkhead. Be careful,” he added, as Thorndyke lifted it from its hook. “I don’t think it has been unloaded.”

Thorndyke opened the breech of the revolver, and, turning out the cartridges into his hand, peered down the barrel and into each chamber separately. Then he looked at the cartridges in his hand.

“This seems a little odd,” he remarked. “The barrel is quite clean and so is one chamber, but the other five chambers are extremely foul. And I notice that the cartridges are not all alike. There are five Eleys and one Curtis and Harvey. That is quite a suggestive coincidence.”

Philip looked with a distinctly startled expression at the little heap of cartridges in Thorndyke’s hand, and, picking out the odd one, examined it with knitted brows.

“When did you fire the revolver last, Jack?” he asked, looking up at his brother.

“On the day when we potted at those champagne bottles,” was the reply.

Philip raised his eyebrows. “Then,” said he, “this is a very remarkable affair. I distinctly remember on that occasion, when we had sunk all the bottles, reloading the revolver with Eleys, and that there were then three cartridges left over in the bag. When I had loaded I opened the new box of Curtis and Harvey’s, tipped them into the bag, and threw the box overboard.”

“Did you clean the revolver?” asked Thorndyke.

“No, I didn’t. I meant to clean it later, but forgot to.”

“But,” said Thorndyke, “it has undoubtedly been cleaned, and very thoroughly as to the barrel and one chamber. Shall we check the cartridges in the bag? There ought to be forty-nine Curtis and Harveys and three Eleys if what you have told us is correct.”

Philip searched among the raffle on the bench, and presently unearthed a small linen bag. Untying the string, he shot out on the bench a heap of cartridges, which he counted one by one. There were fifty-two in all, and three of them were Eleys.

“Then,” said Thorndyke, “it comes to this: since you used that revolver it has been used by someone else. That someone fired only a single shot, after which he carefully cleaned the barrel and the empty chamber and reloaded. Incidentally, he seems to have known where the cartridge-bag was kept, but he did not know about the change in the make of cartridges or that the revolver had not been cleaned. You notice, Rodney,” he added, “that the circumstantial evidence accumulates.”

“I do, indeed,” Rodney replied gloomily. “Is there anything else that you wish to examine?”

“Yes; there is the sail. Philip mentioned a stain on the jib. Shall we see if we can make any thing of that?”

“I don’t think you will make much of it,” said Philip. “It is very faint. However, you shall see it and judge for yourself.”

He picked out one of the bundles of white duck, and while he was unfolding it Thorndyke dragged an empty bench into the middle of the floor under the skylight. Over this the sail was spread so that the mysterious mark was in the middle of the bench. It was very inconspicuous—just a faint grey-green, wavy line, like the representation of an island on a map. The three men looked at it curiously for a few moments, then Thorndyke asked:

“Would you mind if I made a further stain on the sail? I should like to apply some reagents.”

“Of course you must do what is necessary,” said Rodney. “The evidence is more important than the sail.”

On this Thorndyke opened his research case and brought forth the two bottles that Polton had procured from the Borough, of which one was labelled “Tinct. Guaiaci Dil,” and the other “Ozon.” As they emerged from the case, Philip commented, “I shouldn’t have thought that the guaiacum test would be of any use after all these months, especially as the sail seems to have been scrubbed.”

“It will act, I think, if the pigment or its derivatives is there,” said Thorndyke; and as he spoke he poured a quantity of the tincture on the middle of the stained area. The pool of liquid rapidly spread considerably beyond the limits of the stain, growing paler as it extended. Then Thorndyke cautiously dropped small quantities of the ozonic ether at various points around the stained area, and watched closely as the two liquids mingled in the fabric of the sail. Gradually the ether spread towards the stain, and, first at one point and then at another, approached and finally crossed the wavy grey line; and at each point the same change occurred: first the faint grey line turned into a strong blue line, and then the colour extended to the enclosed space until the entire area of the stain stood out a conspicuous blue patch. Philip and Thorndyke looked at one another significantly, and the latter said: “You understand the meaning of this reaction, Rodney; this is a bloodstain, and a very carefully washed bloodstain.”

“So I supposed,” Rodney replied; and for a while no one spoke.

There was something very dramatic and solemn, they all felt, in the sudden appearance of this staring blue patch on the sail with the sinister message that it brought. But what followed was more dramatic still. As they stood silently regarding the blue stain, the mingled liquids continued to spread; and suddenly, at the extreme edge of the wet area, they became aware of a new spot of blue. At first a mere speck, it grew slowly, as the liquid spread over the canvas, into a small oval, and then a second spot appeared by its side. At this point Thorndyke poured out a fresh charge of the tincture, and when it had soaked into the cloth cautiously applied a sprinkling of ether. Instantly the blue spots began to elongate; fresh spots and patches appeared, and as they ran together there sprang out of the blank surface the clear impression of a hand—a left hand, complete in all its details excepting the third finger, which was represented by a round spot at some two-thirds of its length.

The dreadful significance of this apparition, and the uncanny and mysterious manner of its emergence from the white surface, produced a most profound impression on all the observers, but especially on Rodney, who stared at it with an expression of the utmost horror, but spoke not a word. His brother was hardly less appalled, and when he at length spoke it was in a hushed voice that was little above a whisper.

“It is horrible,” he murmured. “It seems almost supernatural, that accusing hand springing into existence out of the blank surface after all this time. I wonder,” he added, after a pause, “why the third finger made no mark, seeing that the others are so distinct.”

“I think,” said Thorndyke, “that the impression is there. That small round spot looks like the mark of a fingertip, and its position rather suggests a finger with a stiff joint.”

As he made this statement, both brothers simultaneously uttered a smothered exclamation.

“It is Varney’s hand!” gasped Philip. “You recognize it, Jack, don’t you? That is just where the tip of his stiff finger would come. Have you ever noticed Varney’ s left hand, Thorndyke?”

“You mean the ankylosed third finger? Yes; and I agree with you that this is undoubtedly the print of Varney’s hand.”

“Then,” said Rodney, “the case is complete. There is no need for any further investigation. On the evidence that is before us, to say nothing of the additional evidence that you can produce, there cannot be the shadow of a doubt that Purcell was murdered by Varney and his body sunk in the sea. You agree with me, I am sure, Thorndyke?”

“Certainly,” was the reply. “I consider the evidence so far conclusive that I have not the slightest doubt on the subject.”

“Very well,” said Rodney. “Then the next question is, what is to be done? Shall I lay a sworn information or will you? Or had we better go to the police together and make a joint statement?”

“Whatever we do,” replied Thorndyke, “don’t let us be premature. The evidence, as you say, is perfectly convincing. It leaves us with no doubt as to what happened on that day last June. It would probably be, in an intellectual sense, quite convincing to a judge. It might even be to a jury. But would it be sufficient to secure a conviction? I think it extremely doubtful.”

“Do you really?” exclaimed Philip. “I should have thought it impossible that anyone who had heard the evidence could fail to come to the inevitable conclusion.”

“You are probably right,” said Thorndyke. “But a jury who are trying an accused person on a capital charge have got to arrive at something more than a belief that the accused is guilty. They have got to be convinced that there is, humanly speaking, no possible doubt as to the prisoner’s guilt. No jury would give an adverse verdict on a balance of probabilities, nor would any judge encourage them to do so.”

“But surely,” said Philip, “this is something more than a mere balance of probabilities. The evidence all points in the same direction, and there is nothing to suggest a contrary conclusion.”

Thorndyke smiled dryly. “You might think differently after you have heard a capable counsel for the defence. But the position is this: we are dealing with a charge of murder. Now, in order to prove that a particular person is guilty of murder it is necessary first to establish the corpus delicti, as the phrase goes—that is, to prove that a murder has been committed by someone. But the proof that a person has been murdered involves the antecedent proof that he is dead. If there is any doubt that the alleged deceased is dead, no murder charge can be sustained. But proof of death usually involves the production of the body or of some identifiable part of it, or at least the evidence of some person who has seen it and can swear to its identity. There are exceptional cases, of course, and this might be accepted as one. But you can take it that the inability of the prosecution to produce the body or any part of it, or any witness who can testify to having seen it, or any direct evidence that the person alleged to have been murdered is actually dead, would make it extremely difficult to secure the conviction of the accused.”

“Yes, I see that,” said Philip. “But, after all, that is not our concern. If we give the authorities all the information that we possess, we shall have done our duty as citizens. As to the rest, we must leave the court to convict or acquit, according to its judgment.”

“Not at all,” Thorndyke dissented. “You are losing sight of our position in the case. There are two different issues, which are, however, inseparably connected. One is the fact of Purcell’s death, the other is Varney’s part in compassing it. Now it is the first issue that concerns us, or at least concerns me. If we could prove that Purcell is dead without bringing Varney into it at all, I should be willing to do so; for I strongly suspect that there were extenuating circumstances.”

“So do I,” said Rodney. “Purcell was a brute, whereas Varney has always seemed to be a perfectly decent, gentlemanly fellow.”

“That is the impression that I have received,” said Thorndyke, “and I feel no satisfaction in proceeding against Varney. My purpose all along has been, not to convict Varney but to prove that Purcell is dead. And that is what we have to do now, for Margaret Purcell’s sake. But we cannot leave Varney out of the case. For if Purcell is dead, he is dead because Varney killed him; and our only means of proving his death is to charge Varney with having murdered him. But if we charge Varney we must secure a conviction. We cannot afford to fail. If the court is convinced that Purcell is dead, it will convict Varney, for the evidence of his death is evidence of his murder; but if the court acquits Varney, it can do so only on the ground that there is no conclusive evidence that Purcell is dead. Varney’s acquittal would therefore leave Margaret Purcell still bound by law to a hypothetical husband, with the insecure chance of obtaining her release at some future time either by divorce or presumption of death. That would not be fair to her. She is a widow, and she is entitled to have her status acknowledged.”

Rodney nodded gloomily. A consciousness of what he stood to gain by Varney’s conviction lent an uncomfortable significance to Thorndyke’s words.

“Yes,” he agreed, half reluctantly, “there is no denying the truth of what you say, but I wish it might have been the other way about. If Purcell had murdered Varney I could have raised the hue and cry with a good deal more enthusiasm. I knew both the men well, and I liked Varney but detested Purcell. Still, one has to accept the facts.”

“Exactly,” said Thorndyke, who had realized and sympathized with Rodney’s qualms. “The position is not of our creating, and whatever our private sentiments may be, the fact remains that a man who elects to take the life of another must accept the consequences. That is Varney’s position so far as we can see, and if he is innocent it is for him to clear himself.”

“Yes, of course,” Rodney agreed; “but I wish the accusation had come through different channels.”

“So do I,” said Philip. “It is horrible to have to denounce a man with whom one has been on terms of intimate friendship. But apparently Thorndyke considers that we should not denounce him at present. That is what I don’t quite understand. You seemed to imply, Thorndyke, that the case was not complete enough to warrant our taking action, and that some further evidence ought to be obtained in order to make sure of a conviction. But what further evidence is it possible to obtain?”

“My feeling,” replied Thorndyke, “is that the case is at present, as your brother expressed it just now, somewhat theoretical, or, rather, hypothetical. The evidence is circumstantial from beginning to end. There is not a single item of direct evidence to furnish a starting-point. It would be insisted by the defence that Purcell’s death is a matter of mere inference, and that you cannot convict a man of the murder of another who may conceivably be still alive. We ought, if possible, to put Purcell’s death on the basis of demonstrable fact.”

“But how is that possible?” demanded Philip.

“The conclusive method of proving the death of a person is, as I have said, to produce that person’s body or some recognizable part of it.”

“But Purcell’s body is at the bottom of the sea.”

“True. But we know its whereabouts. It is a small area, with the lighthouse as a landmark. If that area were systematically worked over with a trawl or dredge, or, better still, with a set of creepers attached to a good-sized spar, there should be a very fair chance of recovering the body, or at least the clothing and the weight.”

Philip reflected for a few moments. “I think you are right,” he said at length. “The body appears, from what you say, to be quite close to the Wolf Rock, and almost certainly on the east side. With a good compass and the lighthouse as a sailing mark, it would be possible to ply up and down and search every inch of the bottom in the neighbourhood of the Rock.”

“There is only one difficulty,” said Rodney. “Your worm-tube was composed entirely of fragments of the Rock. But how large an area of the sea bottom is covered with those fragments? We should have to ascertain that if we are to work over the whole of it.”

“It would not be difficult to ascertain,” replied Thorndyke. “If we take soundings with a hand-lead as we approach the Rock, the samples that come up on the arming of the lead will tell us when we are over a bottom covered with phonolite debris.”

“Yes,” Rodney agreed, “that will answer if the depth is within the range of a hand-lead. If it isn’t we shall have to rig the tackle for a deep-sea lead. It will be rather a gruesome quest. Do I gather that you are prepared to come down with us and lend a hand? I hope you are.”

“So do I!” exclaimed Philip. “We shall be quite at home with the navigation, but if—er—if anything comes up on the creepers, it will be a good deal more in your line than ours.”

“I should certainly wish to come,” said Thorndyke, “and, in fact, I think it rather desirable that I should, as Philip suggests. But I can’t get away from town just at present, nor, I imagine, can you. We had better postpone the expedition for a week or so until the commencement of the spring vacation. That will give us time to make the necessary arrangements, to charter a suitable boat, and so forth. And, in any case, we shall have to pick our weather, having regard to the sort of sea that one may encounter in the neighbourhood of the Wolf.”

“Yes,” agreed Philip, “it will have to be a reasonably calm day when we make the attempt, so I suggest that we put it off until you and Jack are free; and meanwhile I will get on with the preliminary arrangements, the hiring of the boat and getting together the necessary gear.”

While they had been talking the evening had closed in, and the workshop was now almost in darkness. It being too late for the brothers to carry out the business that had brought them to the wharf, even if they had been in a state of mind suitable to the checking of inventories, they postponed the survey to a later date, locked up the workshop, and in company with Thorndyke made their way homeward.

CHAPTER XVII

In which there is a Meeting and a Farewell

It was quite early on a bright morning at the beginning of April when Thorndyke and the two Rodneys took their way from their hotel towards the harbour of Penzance. Philip had been in the town for a day or two, completing the arrangements for the voyage of exploration; the other two had come down from London only on the preceding evening.

“I hope the skipper will be punctual,” said Philip. “I told him to meet us on the pier at eight o’clock sharp. We want to get off as early as possible, for it is a longish run out to the Rock, and we may have to make a long day of it.”

“We probably shall,” said Rodney. “The Wolf Rock is a good departure for purposes of navigation, but when it comes to finding a spot of sea bottom only a foot or two in extent, our landmark isn’t very exact. It will take us a good many hours to search the whole area.”

“I wonder,” said Thorndyke, “what took them out there. According to Varney’s description and the evidence of the button, they must have had the Rock close aboard. But it was a good deal out of their way from Sennen to Penzance.”

“It was,” agreed Philip. “But you can’t make a bee-line in a sailing craft. That’s why I chartered a motor-boat for this job. Under canvas you can only keep as near to your course as the wind will let you. But Purcell was a deuce of a fellow for sea room. He always liked to keep a good offing. I remember that on that occasion he headed straight out to sea and got well outside the Longships before he turned south. I watched the yacht from the shore, and wondered how much longer he was going to hold on. It looked as if he were heading for America. Then, you remember, the fog came down, and they may have lost their bearings a bit; and the tides are pretty strong about here.”

“Yes,” said Thorndyke, “and as we may take it that the trouble, whatever it was, came to a head while they were enveloped in fog, it is likely that the yacht was left to take care of herself for a time, and may have drifted a good deal off her course. At any rate, it is clear that at one time she had the Rock right under her lee, and must have drifted past within a few feet.”

“It would have been a quaint position,” said Philip, “if she had bumped on to it and gone to the bottom. Then they would have kept one another company in Davy Jones’s locker.”

“It would have saved a lot of trouble if they had gone down together,” his brother remarked. “But from what you have just said, Thorndyke, it seems that you have a more definite idea as to the position of the body than I thought. Where do you suppose it to be?”

“Judging from all the facts taken together,” replied Thorndyke, “I should say that it is lying close to the base of the Rock on the east side. We have it from Varney that the yacht drifted down towards the Rock during the fog, and I gathered that she drifted past close to the east side. And we also learned from him that the jib had then come down, which was, in fact, the cause of her being adrift. But the bloodstains on the sail prove that the tragedy occurred either before the halyard broke or while the sail was down—almost certainly the latter. And we may take it that it occurred during the fog; that the fog created the opportunity; for we must remember that they were close to the lighthouse, and therefore, apart from the fog, easily within sight of it. For the same reason we may assume that the body was put overboard before the fog lifted. All these circumstances point to the body being close to the Rock, and the worm-tube emphatically confirms that inference.”

“Then,” said Philip, “in that case there is no great point in taking soundings.”

“Not in the first instance,” Thorndyke agreed. “But if we get no result close to the Rock, we may have to sample the bottom to see how far from the base the conditions indicated by the worm-tube extend.”

They walked on in silence for some time.

Presently Rodney remarked: “This reminds me of the last time I came down to a rendezvous on Penzance pier, when I expected to find Varney waiting for me and he wasn’t there. I wonder where he was, by the way.”

“He had probably gone to post a letter to Mr. Penfield at some remote pillar-box, where collections were not too frequent,” said Thorndyke.

Rodney looked at him quickly, once more astonished at his intimate knowledge of the details of the case. He was about to remark on it when Thorndyke asked:

“Have you seen much of Varney lately?”

“I haven’t seen him at all,” replied Rodney. “Have you, Phil?”

“No,” replied Philip; “not for quite a long time. Which is rather odd, for he used to look in at Maggie’s flat pretty often to have tea and show her his latest work. But he hasn’t been there for weeks, I know, because I was speaking to her about him only a day or two ago. She seemed to have an idea that he might have gone away on a sketching tour, though I don’t think she had anything to go on.”

“He can’t have smelt a rat and cleared out,” mused Rodney. “I don’t see how he could, though I shouldn’t be altogether sorry if he had. It will be a horrid business when we have to charge him and give evidence against him But it isn’t possible that he can have seen or heard anything.”

This was also Thorndyke’s opinion, but he was deeply interested in the report of Varney’s disappearance. Nor was he entirely without a clue to it. His observations of Margaret and Varney suggested a possible explanation, which he did not think it necessary to refer to. And, in fact, the conversation was here interrupted by their arrival at the pier, where an elderly fisherman, who had been watching their approach, came forward and saluted them.

“Here you are then, skipper,” said Philip; “Punctual to the minute. We’ve got a fine day for our trip, haven’t we?”

“Ay, sir,” replied the skipper; “’tis a wonderful calm day for the time of year. And glad I am to see it, if we are to work close into the Wolf, for it’s a lumpy bit of water at the best of times around the Rock.”

“Is everything ready?” asked Philip.

“Ay, sir. We are all ready to cast off this moment,” and in confirmation he preceded the party to the head of the ladder, and indicated the craft lying alongside the pier beneath it—a small converted Penzance lugger with a large open cock pit, in the fore part of which was the engine.

The four men descended the ladder, and while the skipper and the second fisherman, who constituted the crew, were preparing to cast off the shore ropes, Philip took a last look round to see that all was in order. Then the crew, who was named Joe Tregenna, pushed off and started the engine, the skipper took the tiller, and the boat got under way.

“You see,” said Philip, as the boat headed out to sea, “we have got good strong tackle for the creeping operations.”

He pointed over the boat’s side to a long stout spar which was slung outside the bulwarks. It was secured by a chain bridle to a trawl-rope, and to it were attached a number of creepers—lengths of chain fitted with rows of hooks—which hung down into the water and trailed alongside. The equipment also included a spirit-compass, fitted with sight-vanes; a sextant; a hand-lead, which lay on the cockpit floor, with its line neatly coiled round it; and a deep-sea lead, stowed away forward with its long line and the block for lowering and hoisting it.

The occupants of the cockpit were strangely silent. It was a beautiful spring day, bright and sunny, with a warm blue sky overhead and a tranquil sea, heaving quietly to the long swell from the Atlantic, showing a sunlit sparkle on the surface and clear sapphire in the depths. “Nature painted all things gay,” excepting the three men who sat on the side benches of the cockpit, whose countenances were expressive of the deepest gravity and even, in the case of the two Rodneys, of profound gloom.

“I shall be glad when this business is over,” said Philip. “I feel as nervous as a cat.”

“So do I,” his brother agreed. “It is a gruesome affair. I find myself almost hoping that nothing will come of it. And yet that would only leave us worse off than ever.”

“We mustn’t be prepared to accept failure,” said Thorndyke. “The thing is there, and we have got to find it; if not today, then tomorrow or some other day.”

The two brothers looked at Thorndyke, a little daunted by his resolute attitude. “Yes, of course you are right,” the elder admitted, “and it is only cowardice that makes me shrink from what we have to do. But when I think of what may come up, hanging from those creepers, I—bah! It is too horrible to think of! But I suppose it doesn’t make that sort of impression on you? You don’t find anything repulsive in the quest that we are engaged in?”

“No,” Thorndyke admitted. “My attention is occupied by the scientific and legal interest of the search. But I can fully sympathize with your feelings on the matter. To you Purcell is a real person, whom you have known and talked with; to me he is a mere abstraction connected with a very curious and interesting case. The really unpleasant part of that case—to me—will come when we have completed our evidence, if we are so fortunate—I mean when we have to set the criminal law in motion.”

“Yes,” said Philip, “that will be perfectly beastly.”

Once more silence fell upon the boat, broken only by the throb of the engine and the murmur of the water as it was cloven by the boat’s stern. And meanwhile the distant coast slipped past until they were abreast of the Land’s End, and far away to the south-west the solitary lighthouse rose on the verge of the horizon. Soon afterwards they began to overtake the scattered members of a fleet of luggers, some with lowered mainsails and hand-lines down, others with their black sails set, heading for some distant fishing-ground. Through the midst of them the boat was threading her way, when her occupants suddenly became aware that one of the smaller luggers was steering so as to close in. Observing this, the skipper was putting over the helm to avoid her, when a seafaring voice from the little craft was heard to hail.

“Motor-boat ahoy! Gentleman aboard wants to speak to you!”

The two Rodneys looked at one another in surprise and then at the approaching lugger.

“Who the deuce can it be?” exclaimed Rodney. “But perhaps it is a stranger who wants a passage. If it is we shall have to refuse. We can’t take anyone on board.”

The boat slowed down, for at a word from the skipper Joe Tregenna had reversed the propeller. The lugger closed in rapidly, watched anxiously by the two Rodneys and Thorndyke. Suddenly a man appeared standing on the bulwark rail and holding on by the mast stay, while with his free hand he held a binocular to his eyes. Nearer and nearer the lugger approached, and still the two Rodneys gazed with growing anxiety at the figure on the bulwark. At length the man removed the glasses from his eyes and waved them above his head, and as his face became visible both brothers uttered a cry of amazement.

“God!” exclaimed Philip. “It’s Varney! Sheer off, skipper! Don’t let him come along side.”

But it was too late. The boat had lost way and failed to answer her helm. The lugger sheered in, sweeping abreast within a foot, and as she crept past Varney sprang lightly from her gunwale and dropped on the side bench beside Jack Rodney.

“Well!” he exclaimed, “this is a queer meeting. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I first spotted you through the glasses. Motor-boat, too! Rather a come down, isn’t it, for seasoned yachtsmen?”

He looked curiously at his hosts, evidently a little perplexed by their silence and their unresponsive bearing. The Rodneys were, in fact, stricken dumb with dismay, and even Thorndyke was for the moment disconcerted. The lugger which had brought Varney had already gone about and was standing out to sea, leaving to them the alternative of accepting this most unwelcome passenger or of pursuing the lugger and insisting on his returning on board of her. But the Rodneys were too paralyzed to do anything but gaze at Varney in silent consternation, and Thorndyke did not feel that his position on the boat entitled him to take any action. Indeed, no action seemed to be practicable.

“This is an odd show,” said Varney, looking inquisitively about the boat. “What is the lay? You can’t be going out to fish in this craft. And you seem to be setting a course for the Scillies. What is it? Dredging? I see you’ve got a trawl-rope.”

As the Rodneys were still almost stupefied by the horror of the situation, Thorndyke took upon himself to reply.

“The occasion of this little voyage was a rather remarkable marine worm that was sent to Professor D’Arcy, and which came from the locality to which we are bound. We are going to explore the bottom there.”

Varney nodded. “You seem mighty keen on marine worms. I remember when I met you down here before you were in search of them, and so was Phil, though I don’t fancy he got many. He had the bottles labelled ready for them, and that was about as far as he went. Do you remember that button you made, Phil, from the cork of one?”

“Yes,” Philip replied huskily, “I remember.”

During this conversation Thorndyke had been observing Varney with close attention, and he noted a very appreciable change in his appearance. He looked aged and worn, and there was in his expression a weariness and dejection that seemed to confirm certain opinions that Thorndyke had formed as to the reasons for his sudden disappearance from surroundings which had certainly not been without their attractions to him. And, not for the first time, a feeling of compunction and of some distaste for this quest contended with the professional interest and the sense of duty that had been the impelling force behind the long, patient investigation.

Philip’s curt reply was followed by a rather long, uncomfortable silence. Varney, quick and sensitive by nature, perceived that there was something amiss, that in some way his presence was a source of embarrassment. He sat on the side bench by Jack Rodney, gazing with a far-away look over the sea towards the Longships, wishing that he had stayed on board the lugger or that there were some means of escaping from this glum and silent company. And as he meditated he brought forth from his pocket his tobacco-pouch and cigarette-book, and half unconsciously, with a dexterity born of long practice, rolled a cigarette, all unaware that three pairs of eyes were riveted on his strangely efficient maimed finger, that three minds were conjuring up the vivid picture of a blue handprint on a white sail.

When he had lit the cigarette, Varney once more looked about the boat, and again his eye lighted on the big coil of trawl-rope, with its end passed out through a fair-lead. He rose, and, crossing the cockpit, looked over the side.

“Why,” he exclaimed, “you’ve got a set of creepers! I thought you were going dredging. You won’t pick up much with creepers, will you?”

“They will pick up anything with weeds attached to it,” said Thorndyke.

Varney went back to his seat with a thoughtful, somewhat puzzled expression. He smoked in silence for a minute or two, and then suddenly asked: “Where is the place that you are going to explore for these worms?”

“Professor D’Arcy’ s specimen,” replied Thorndyke, “came from the neighbourhood of the Wolf Rock. That is where we are going to work.”

Varney made no comment on this answer. He looked long and steadily at Thorndyke; then he turned away his head, and once more gazed out to sea. Evidently he was thinking hard, and his companions, who watched him furtively, could have little doubt as to the trend of his thoughts. Gradually, as the nature of the exploration dawned on him, his manner changed more and more. A horrible pallor overspread his face, and a terrible restlessness took possession of him. He smoked furiously cigarette after cigarette. He brought various articles out of his pockets, fidgeted with them awhile, and put them back. He picked up the hand-lead, looking at its arming, ran the line through his fingers, and made fancy knots on the bight. And ever and anon his glance strayed to the tall lighthouse, standing out of the sea with its red and white ringed tower, and drawing inexorably nearer and nearer.

So the voyage went on until the boat was within half a mile of the Rock, when Philip, having caught a glance and a nod from Thorndyke, gave the order to stop the engine and lower the creepers. The spar was cast loose and dropped into the water with a heavy splash, the trawl-rope ran out through the fair-lead, and meanwhile Jack Rodney took a pair of cross-bearings on the lighthouse and a point of the distant land. Then the engine was restarted, the boat moved forward at half-speed, and the search began.

It was an intensely disagreeable experience for all excepting the puzzled but discreet skipper and the unconscious Joe. Varney, pale, haggard, and wild in aspect, fidgeted about the boat, now silent and moody, now making miserable efforts to appear interested or unconcerned, picking up and handling loose objects or portions of the gear, but constantly returning to the hand-lead, counting up the “marks” on the line, or making and pulling out various knots with his restless but curiously skilful fingers. And as his mood changed, Thorndyke watched him furtively, as if to judge by his manner how near they were to the object of the search.

It was a long and wearisome quest. Slowly the boat plied up and down on the eastern side of the Rock, gradually approaching it nearer and nearer at each return. From time to time the creepers caught on the rocky bottom, and had to be eased off; from time to time the dripping trawl-rope was hauled in and the creepers brought to the surface, offering to the anxious eyes that peered over the side nothing on the hooks but, perchance, a wisp of Zostera or a clinging spider-crab.

Calm as the day was and quiet as was the ocean, stirred only by the slumberous echoes of the great Atlantic swell, the sea was breaking heavily over the Rock; and as the boat closed in nearer and nearer, the water around boiled and eddied in an unpleasant and even dangerous manner. The lighthouse keepers, who had for some time past been watching from the gallery the movements of the boat, now began to make warning signs, and one of them bellowed through a megaphone to the searchers to keep farther away.

“What do you say?” Rodney asked in a low voice. “We can’t go any nearer? We shall be swamped or stove in? Shall we try another side?”

“Better try one more cast this side,” said Thorndyke; and he spoke so definitely that all the others, including Varney, looked at him curiously. But no one answered, and as the skipper made no demur the creepers were dropped for a fresh cast still nearer the Rock. The boat was then to the north of the lighthouse, and the course set was to the south, so as to pass the Rock again on the east side. As they approached, the man with the megaphone bawled out fresh warnings and continued to roar at them and flourish his arm until they were abreast of the Rock in a wild tumble of confused waves. At this moment, Philip, who had his hand on the trawl-rope between the bollard and the fair-lead, reported that he had felt a pull, but that it seemed as if the creepers had broken away. As soon, therefore, as the boat was clear of the backwash and in comparatively smooth water, the order was passed to haul in the trawl-rope and examine the creepers.

The two Rodneys looked over the side eagerly but fearfully, for both had noticed something new—a definite expectancy—in Thorndyke’s manner. Varney, too, who had hitherto taken but little notice of the creepers, now knelt on the side bench, gazing earnestly into the clear water whence the trawl-rope was rising. And still he toyed with the hand-lead, and absently made clove-hitches on the line and slipped them over his arm.

At length the spar came into view, and below it, on one of the creepers, a yellowish object, dimly visible through the wavering water.

“There’s somethin’ on this time,” said the skipper, craning over the side and steadying himself by the tiller, which he still held. All eyes were riveted on the half-seen yellowish shape, moving up and down to the rise and fall of the boat. Apart from the others, Varney knelt on the bench, not fidgeting now, but still, rigid, pale as wax, staring with dreadful fascination at the slowly rising object. Suddenly the skipper uttered an exclamation.

“Why, ’tis a sou’-wester! And all laced about wi’ spun-y’n! Surely ’tis—Steady, sir; you’ll be overboard! My God!”

The others looked round quickly, and even as they looked Varney fell, with a heavy splash, into the water alongside. There was a tumultuous rush to the place whence he had fallen, and arms were thrust into the water in vain efforts to grasp the sinking figure. Rodney darted forward for the boat-hook, but by the time he was back with it the doomed man was far out of reach; yet for a long time, as it seemed, the horror-stricken onlookers could see him through the clear, blue-green water, sinking, sinking, growing paler, more shadowy, more shapeless, but always steadily following the lead sinker, until at last he faded from their sight into the darkness of the ocean.

Not until some time after he had vanished did they haul on board the creeper with its dreadful burden. Indeed, that burden, in its entirety, was never hauled on board. As it reached the surface, Tregenna stopped hauling and held the rope steady; and for a sensible time all eyes were fixed upon a skull, with a great jagged hole above the brows, that looked up at them beneath the peak of the sou’wester, through the web of spun-yarn, like the face of some phantom warrior looking out through the bars of his helmet. Then as Philip, reaching out an unsteady hand, unhooked the sou’wester from the creeper, the encircling coils of spun-yarn slipped, and the skull dropped into the water. Still the fascinated eyes watched it as it sank, turning slowly over and over, and seeming to cast back glances of horrid valediction; watched it grow green and pallid and small, until it vanished into the darkness, even as Varney had vanished.

When it was quite invisible, Philip turned, and, flinging the hat down on the floor of the cockpit, sank on the bench with a groan. Thorndyke picked up the hat and unwound the spun-yarn.

“Do you identify it?” he asked; and then, as he turned it over, he added: “But I see it identifies itself.”

He held it towards Rodney, who was able to read in embroidered, lettering on the silk lining “Dan Purcell.”

Rodney nodded. “Yes,” he said, “but, of course, there was no doubt. Is it necessary for us to do anything more?” He indicated the creepers with a gesture of weariness and disgust.

“No,” replied Thorndyke. “We have seen the body and can swear to its identity, and I can certify as to the cause of death. We can produce this hat, with a bullet-hole, as I perceive, in the back, corresponding to the injury that we observed in the skull. I can also certify as to the death of Varney, and can furnish a sworn declaration of the facts that are within my knowledge. That may possibly be accepted by the authorities, having regard to the circumstances, as rendering any further inquiry unnecessary. But that is no concern of ours. We have established the fact that Daniel Purcell is dead, and our task is accomplished.

“Yes,” said Rodney, “our quest has been successful beyond my expectations. But it has been an awful experience. I can’t get the thought of poor Varney out of my mind.”

“Nor I,” said Philip. “And yet it was the best that could have happened. And there is a certain congruity in it, too. They are down there together. They had been companions, in a way, friends, the best part of their lives, and in death they are not divided.”

THE PUZZLE LOCK (1925)

I uo not remember what was the occasion of my dining with Thorndyke at Giamborini’s on the particular evening that is now in my mind. Doubtless, some piece of work completed had seemed to justify the modest festival. At any rate, there we were, seated at a somewhat retired table, selected by Thorndyke, with our backs to the large window through which the late June sunlight streamed. We had made our preliminary arrangements, including a bottle of Barsac, and were inspecting dubiously a collection of semi-edible hors d’oeuvres, when a man entered and took possession of a table just in front of ours, which had apparently been reserved for him, since he walked directly to it and drew away the single chair that had been set aslant against it.

I watched with amused interest his methodical procedure, for he was clearly a man who took his dinner seriously. A regular customer, too, I judged by the waiter’s manner and the reserved table with its single chair. But the man himself interested me. He was out of the common and there was a suggestion of character, with perhaps a spice of oddity, in his appearance. He appeared to be about sixty years of age, small and spare, with a much-wrinkled, mobile and rather whimsical face, surmounted by a crop of white, upstanding hair. From his waistcoat pocket protruded the ends of a fountain-pen, a pencil and a miniature electric torch such as surgeons use; a silver-mounted Coddington lens hung from his watch-guard and the middle finger of his left hand bore the largest seal ring that I have ever seen.

“Well,” said Thorndyke, who had been following my glance, “what do you make of him?”

“I don’t quite know,” I replied. “The Coddington suggests a naturalist or a scientist of some kind, but that blatant ring doesn’t. Perhaps he is an antiquary or a numismatist or even a philatelist. He deals with small objects of some kind.”

At this moment a man who had just entered strode up to our friend’s table and held out his hand, which the other shook, with no great enthusiasm, as I thought. Then the newcomer fetched a chair, and setting it by the table, seated himself and picked up the menu card, while the other observed him with a shade of disapproval. I judged that he would rather have dined alone, and that the personality of the new arrival—a flashy, bustling, obtrusive type of man—did not commend him.

From this couple my eye was attracted to a tall man who had halted near the door and stood looking about the room as if seeking someone. Suddenly he spied an empty, single table, and, bearing down on it, seated himself and began anxiously to study the menu under the supervision of a waiter. I glanced at him with slight disfavour. One makes allowances for the exuberance of youth, but when a middle-aged man presents the combination of heavily-greased hair parted in the middle, a waxed moustache of a suspiciously intense black, a pointed imperial and a single eyeglass, evidently ornamental in function, one views him with less tolerance. However, his get-up was not my concern, whereas my dinner was, and I had given this my undivided attention for some minutes when I heard Thorndyke emit a soft chuckle.

“Not bad,” he remarked, setting down his glass.

“Not at all,” I agreed, “for a restaurant wine.”

“I was not alluding to the wine,” said he “but to our friend Badger.”

“The inspector!” I exclaimed. “He isn’t here, is he? I don’t see him.”

“I am glad to hear you say that, Jervis,” said he. “It is a better effort than I thought. Still, he might manage his properties a little better. That is the second time his eyeglass has been in the soup.”

Following, the direction of his glance, I observed the man with the waxed moustache furtively wiping his eyeglass; and the temporary absence of the monocular grimace enabled me to note a resemblance to the familiar features of the detective officer.

“If you say that is Badger, I suppose it is,” said I. “He is certainly a little like our friend. But I shouldn’t have recognised him.”

“I don’t know that I should,” said Thorndyke, “but for the little unconscious tricks of movement. You know the habit he has of stroking the back of his head, and of opening his mouth and scratching the side of his chin. I saw him do it just now. He had forgotten his imperial until he touched it, and then the sudden arrest of movement was very striking. It doesn’t do to forget a false beard.”

“I wonder what his game is,” said I. “The disguise suggests that he is on the lookout for somebody who might know him; but apparently that somebody has not turned up yet. At any rate, he doesn’t seem to be watching anybody in particular.”

“No,” said Thorndyke. “But there is somebody whom he seems rather to avoid watching. Those two men at the table in front of ours are in his direct line of vision, but he hasn’t looked at them once since he sat down, though I noticed that he gave them one quick glance before he selected his table. I wonder if he has observed us. Probably not, as we have the strong light of the window behind us and his attention is otherwise occupied.”

I looked at the two men and from them to the detective, and I judged that my friend was right. On the inspector’s table was a good-sized fern in an ornamental pot, and this he had moved so that it was directly between him and the two strangers, to whom he must have been practically invisible; and now I could see that he did, in fact, steal an occasional glance at them over the edge of the menu card. Moreover, as their meal drew to an end, he hastily finished his own and beckoned to the waiter to bring the bill.

“We may as well wait and see them off,” said Thorndyke, who had already settled our account. “Badger always interests me. He is so ingenious and he has such shockingly bad luck.”

We had not long to wait. The two men rose from the table and walked slowly to the door, where they paused to light their cigars before going out. Then Badger rose, with his back towards them and his eyes on the mirror opposite; and as they went out, he snatched up his hat and stick and followed. Thorndyke looked at me inquiringly.

“Do we indulge in the pleasures of the chase?” he asked, and as I replied in the affirmative, we, too, made our way out and started in the wake of the inspector.

As we followed Badger at a discreet distance, we caught an occasional glimpse of the quarry ahead, whose proceedings evidently caused the inspector some embarrassment, for they had a way of stopping suddenly to elaborate some point that they were discussing, whereby it became necessary for the detective to drop farther in the rear than was quite safe, in view of the rather crowded state of the pavement. On one of these occasions, when the older man was apparently delivering himself of some excruciating joke, they both turned suddenly and looked back, the joker pointing to some object on the opposite side of the road. Several people turned to see what was being pointed at, and, of course, the inspector had to turn, too, to avoid being recognised. At this moment the two men popped into an entry, and when the inspector once more turned they were gone.

As soon as he missed them, Badger started forward almost at a run, and presently halted at the large entry of the Celestial Bank Chambers, into which he peered eagerly. Then, apparently sighting his quarry, he darted in, and we quickened our pace and followed. Half-way down the long hall we saw him standing at the door of a lift, frantically pressing the call-button.

“Poor Badger!” chuckled Thorndyke, as we walked past him unobserved. “His usual luck! He will hardly run them to earth now in this enormous building. We may as well go through to the Blenheim Street entrance.”

We pursued our way along the winding corridor and were close to the entrance when I noticed two men coming down the staircase that led to the ball.

“By Jingo I Here they are!” I exclaimed. “Shall we run back and give Badger the tip?”

Thorndyke hesitated. But it was too late. A taxi had just driven up and was discharging its fare. The younger man, catching the driver’s eye, ran out and seized the door-handle; and when his companion had entered the cab, he gave an address to the driver, and, stepping in quickly, slammed the door. As the cab moved off, Thorndyke pulled out his notebook and pencil and jotted down the number of the vehicle. Then we turned and retraced our steps; but when we reached the lift-door, the inspector had disappeared. Presumably, like the incomparable Tom Bowling, he had gone aloft.

“We must give it up, Jervis,” said Thorndyke. “I will send him anonymously the number of the cab, and that is all we can do. But I am sorry for Badger.”

With this we dismissed the incident from our minds—at least, I did; assuming that I had seen the last of the two strangers. Little did I suspect how soon and under what strange and tragic circumstances I should meet with them again!

It was about a week later that we received a visit from our old friend, Superintendent Miller of the Criminal Investigation Department. The passing years had put us on a footing of mutual trust and esteem, and the capable, straightforward detective officer was always a welcome visitor.

I’ve just dropped in,” said Miller, cutting off the end of the inevitable cigar, “to tell you about a rather queer case that we’ve got in hand. I know you are always interested in queer cases.”

Thorndyke smiled blandly. He had heard that kind of preamble before, and he knew, as did I, that when Miller became communicative we could safely infer that the Millerian bark was in shoal water.

“It is a case,” the superintendent continued, “of a very special brand of crook. Actually there is a gang, but it is the managing director that we have particularly got our eye on.”

“Is he a regular ‘habitual,’ then?” asked Thorndyke.

Well,” replied Miller, “as to that, I can’t positively say. The fact is that we haven’t actually seen the man to be sure of him.”

“I see,” said Thorndyke, with a grim smile. “You mean to say that you have got your eye on the place where he isn’t.”

“At the present moment,” Miller admitted, “that is the literal fact. We have lost sight of the man we suspected, but we hope to pick him up again presently. We want him badly, and his pals too. It is probably quite a small gang, but they are mighty fly; a lot too smart to be at large. And they’ll take some catching, for there is someone running the concern with a good deal more brains than crooks usually have.”

“What is their lay?” I asked.

“Burglary,” he replied. “Jewels and plate, but principally jewels; and the special feature of their work is that the swag disappears completely every time. None of the stuff has ever been traced. That is what drew our attention to them. After each robbery we made a round of all the fences, but there was not a sign. The stuff seemed to have vanished into smoke. Now that is very awkward. If you never see the men and you can’t trace the stuff, where are you? You’ve got nothing to go on.”

“But you seem to have got a clue of some kind.” I said.

“Yes. There isn’t a lot in it; but it seemed worth following up. One of our men happened to travel down to Colchester with a certain man, and when he came back two days later, he noticed this same man on the platform at Colchester and saw him get out at Liverpool Street. In the interval there had been a jewel robbery at Colchester. Then there was a robbery at Southampton, and our man went at once to Waterloo and saw all the trains in. On the second day, behold! the Colchester sportsman turns up at the barrier, so our man, who had a special taxi waiting, managed to track him home and afterwards got some particulars about him. He is a chap named Shemmonds; belongs to a firm of outside brokers. But nobody seems to know much about him and he doesn’t put in much time at the office.

“Well, then, Badger took him over and shadowed him for a day or two, but just as things were looking interesting, he slipped off the hook. Badger followed him to a restaurant, and, through the glass door, saw him go up to an elderly man at a table and shake hands with him. Then he took a chair at the table himself, so Badger popped in and took a seat near them where he could keep them in view. They went out together and Badger followed them, but he lost them in the Celestial Bank Chambers. They went up in the lift just before he could get to the door and that was the last he saw of them. But we have ascertained that they left the building in a taxi and that the taxi set them down at Great Turnstile.”

“It was rather smart of you to trace the cab,” Thorndyke remarked.

“You’ve got to keep your eyes skinned in our line of business,” said Miller. “But now we come to the real twister. From the time those two men went down Great Turnstile, nobody has set eyes on either of them. They seem to have vanished into thin air.”

“You found out who the other man was, then?” said I.

“Yes. The restaurant manager knew him; an old chap named Luttrell. And we knew him, too, because he has a thumping burglary insurance, and when he goes out of town he notifies his company, and they make arrangements with us to have the premises watched.”

“What is Luttrell?” I asked.

“Well, he is a bit of a mug, I should say, at least that’s his character in the trade. Goes in for being a dealer in jewels and antiques, but he’ll buy anything—furniture, pictures, plate, any blooming thing. Does it for a hobby, the regular dealers say. Likes the sport of bidding at the sales. But the knock-out men hate him; never know what he’s going to do. Must have private means, for though he doesn’t often drop money, he can’t make much. He’s no salesman. It is the buying that he seems to like. But he is a regular character, full of cranks and oddities. His rooms in Thavies Inn look like the British Museum gone mad. He has got electric alarms from all the doors up to his bedroom and the strong-room in his office is fitted with a puzzle lock instead of keys.”

“That doesn’t seem very safe,” I remarked.

“It is,” said Miller. “This one has fifteen alphabets. One of our men has calculated that it has about forty billion changes. No one is going to work that out, and there are no keys to get lost. But it is that strong-room that is worrying us, as well as the old joker himself. The Lord knows how much valuable stuff there is in it. What we are afraid of is that Shemmonds may have made away with the old chap and be lying low, waiting to swoop down on that strong-room.”

“But you said that Luttrell goes away sometimes,” said I.

“Yes; but then he always notifies his insurance company and he seals up his strong-room with a tape round the door-handle and a great seal on the door-post. This time he hasn’t notified the company and the door isn’t sealed. There’s a seal on the door-post—left from last time, I expect—but only the cut ends of tape. I got the caretaker to let me see the place this morning; and, by the way, doctor, I have taken a leaf out of your book. I always carry a bit of squeezing wax in my pocket now and a little box of French chalk. Very handy they are, too. As I had ’em with me this morning, I took a squeeze of the seal. May want it presently for identification.”

He brought out of his pocket a small tin box from which he carefully extracted an object wrapped in tissue paper. When the paper had been tenderly removed there was revealed a lump of moulding wax, one side of which was flattened and bore a sunk design.

“It’s quite a good squeeze,” said Miller, handing it to Thorndyke. “I dusted the seal with French chalk so that the wax shouldn’t stick to it.”

My colleague examined the “squeeze” through his lens, and passing it and the lens to me, asked: “Has this been photographed, Miller?”

“No,” was the reply, “but it ought to be before it gets damaged.”

“It ought, certainly,” said Thorndyke, “if you value it. Shall I get Polton to do it now?”

The superintendent accepted the offer gratefully and Thorndyke accordingly took the squeeze up to the laboratory, where he left it for our assistant to deal with. When he returned, Miller remarked: “It is a baffling case, this. Now that Shemmonds has dropped out of sight, there is nothing to go on and nothing to do but wait for something else to happen; another burglary or an attempt on the strong-room.”

“Is it clear that the strong-room has not been opened?” asked Thorndyke.

No, it isn’t,” replied Miller. “That’s part of the trouble. Luttrell has disappeared and he may be dead. If he is, Shemmonds will probably have been through his pockets. Of course there is no strong-room key. That is one of the advantages of a puzzle lock. But it is quite possible that Luttrell may have kept a note of the combination and carried it about him. It would have been risky to trust entirely to memory. And he would have had the keys of the office about him. Any one who had those could have slipped in during business hours without much difficulty. Luttrell’s premises are empty, but there are people in and out all day going to the other offices. Our man can’t follow them all in. I suppose you can’t make any suggestion, doctor?”

“I am afraid I can’t,” answered Thorndyke. “The case is so very much in the air. There is nothing against Shemmonds but bare suspicion. He has disappeared only in the sense that you have lost sight of him, and the same is true of Luttrell—though there is an abnormal element in his case. Still, you could hardly get a search-warrant on the facts that are known at present.”

“No,” Miller agreed, “they certainly would not authorise us to break open the strong-room, and nothing short of that would be much use.”

Here Polton made his appearance with the wax squeeze in a neat little box such as jewellers use.

“I’ve got two enlarged negatives,” said he; “nice clear ones. How many prints shall I make for Mr. Miller?”

“Oh, one will do, Mr. Polton,” said the superintendent. “If I want any more I’ll ask you.” He took up the little box, and, slipping it in his pocket, rose to depart. “I’ll let you know, doctor, how the case goes on, and perhaps you wouldn’t mind turning it over a bit in the interval. Something might occur to you.”

Thorndyke promised to think over the case, and when we had seen the superintendent launched down the stairs, we followed Polton up to the laboratory, where we each picked up one of the negatives and examined it against the light. I had already identified the seal by its shape—a vesica piscis or boat-shape—with the one that I had seen on Mr. Luttrell’s finger. Now, in the photograph, enlarged three diameters, I could clearly make out the details. The design was distinctive and curious rather than elegant. The two triangular spaces at the ends were occupied respectively by a memento mori and a winged hour-glass and the central portion was filled by a long inscription in Roman capitals, of which I could at first make nothing.

“Do you suppose this is some kind of cryptogram?” I asked.

“No,” Thorndyke replied. “I imagine the words were run together merely to economise space. This is what I make of it.”

He held the negative in his left hand, and with his right wrote down in pencil on a slip of paper the following four lines of doggerel verse

Eheu alas how fast the dam fugaces

Labuntur anni especially in the cases

Of poor old blokes like you and me Posthumus

Who only wait for vermes to consume us.”

“Well,” I exclaimed, “it is a choice specimen; one of old Luttrell’s merry conceited jests, I take it. But the joke was hardly worth the labour of engraving on a seal.”

“It is certainly a rather mild jest,” Thorndyke admitted. “But there may be something more in it than meets the eye.”

He looked at the inscription reflectively and appeared to read it through once or twice. Then he replaced the negative in the drying rack, and, picking up the paper, slipped it into his pocket-book.

“I don’t quite see,” said I, “why Miller brought this case to us or what he wants you to think over. In fact, I don’t see that there is a case at all.”

“It is a very shadowy case,” Thorndyke admitted. “Miller has done a good deal of guessing, and so has Badger; and it may easily turn out that they have found a mare’s nest. Nevertheless there is something to think about.”

“As, for instance—?”

“Well, Jervis, you saw the men; you saw how they behaved; you have heard Miller’s story and you have seen Mr. Luttrell’s seal. Put all those data together and you have the material for some very interesting speculation, to say the least. You might even carry it beyond speculation.”

I did not pursue the subject, for I knew that when Thorndyke used the word “speculation,” nothing would induce him to commit himself to an opinion. But later, bearing in mind the attention that he had seemed to bestow on Mr. Luttrell’s schoolboy verses, I got a print from the negative and studied the foolish in exhaustively. But if it had any hidden meaning—and I could imagine no reason for supposing that it had—that meaning remained hidden; and the only conclusion at which I could arrive was that a man of Luttrell’s age might have known better than to write such nonsense.

The superintendent did not leave the matter long in suspense. Three days later he paid us another visit, and half-apologetically reopened the subject.

“I am ashamed to come badgering you like this,” he said, “but I can’t get this case out of my head. I’ve a feeling that we ought to, get a move of some kind on. And, by the way—though that is nothing to do with it—I’ve copied out the stuff on that seal and I can’t make any sense of it. What the deuce are fugaces? I suppose ‘vermes’ are worms, though I don’t see why he spelt it that way.”

“The verses,” said Thorndyke, “are apparently a travesty of a Latin poem; one of the odes of Horace which begins:

Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, Labuntur anni,

which means, in effect, ‘Alas! Postume, the flying years slip by.’”

“Well,” said Miller, “any fool knows that—any middle-aged fool, at any rate. No need to put it into Latin. However, it’s of no consequence. To return to this case; I’ve got an authority to look over Luttrell’s premises—not to pull anything about, you know, just to look round. I called in on my way here to let the caretaker know that I should be coming in later. I thought that perhaps you might like to come with me. I wish you would, doctor. You’ve got such a knack of spotting things that other people overlook.”

He looked wistfully at Thorndyke, and as the latter was considering the proposal, he added: “The caretaker mentioned a rather odd circumstance. It seems that he keeps an eye on the electric meters in the building and that he has noticed a leakage of current in Mr. Luttrell’s. It is only a small leak; about thirty watts an hour. But he can’t account for it in any way. He has been right through the premises to see if any lamp has been left on in any of the rooms. But all the switches are off everywhere, and it can’t be a short circuit. Funny, isn’t it?

It was certainly odd, but there seemed to me nothing in it to account for the expression of suddenly awakened interest that I detected in Thorndyke’s face. However, it evidently had some special significance for him, for he asked almost eagerly “When are you making your inspection?”

“I am going there now,” replied Miller, and he added coaxingly, “Couldn’t you manage to run round with me?”

Thorndyke stood up. “Very well,” said he. “Let us go together. You may as well come, too, Jervis, if you can spare an hour.”

I agreed readily, for my colleague’s hardly disguised interest in the inspection suggested a definite problem in his mind; and we at once issued forth and made our way by Mitre Court and Fetter Lane to the abode of the missing dealer, an old-fashioned house near the end of Thavies Inn.

“I’ve been over the premises once,” said Miller, as the caretaker appeared with the keys, “and I think we had better begin the regular inspection with the offices. We can examine the stores and living-rooms afterwards.”

We accordingly entered the outer office, and as this was little more than a waiting-room, we passed through into the private office, which had the appearance of having been used also as a sitting-room or study. It was furnished with an easy-chair, a range of book-shelves and a handsome bureau book-case, while in the end wall was the massive iron door of the strong-room. On this, as the chief object of interest, we all bore down, and the superintendent expounded its peculiarities.

It is quite a good idea,” said he, “this letter-lock. There’s no keyhole—though a safe-lock is pretty hopeless to pick even if there was a keyhole—and no keys to get lost. As to guessing what the ‘open sesame’ may be—well, just look at it. You could spend a life time on it and be no forrader.”

The puzzle lock was contained in the solid iron door post, through a slot in which a row of fifteen A’s seemed to grin defiance on the would-be safe-robber. I put my finger on the milled edges of one or two of the letters and rotated the discs, noticing how easily and smoothly they turned.

“Well,” said Miller, “it’s no use fumbling with that. I’m just going to have a look through his ledger and see who his customers were. The book-case is unlocked. I tried it last time. And we’d better leave this as we found it.”

He put back the letters that I had moved, and turned away to explore the book-case; and as the letter-lock appeared to present nothing but an insoluble riddle, I followed him, leaving Thorndyke earnestly gazing at the meaningless row of letters.

The superintendent glanced back at him with an indulgent smile.

“The doctor is going to work out the combination,” he chuckled. “Well, well. There are only forty billion changes and he’s a young man for his age.”

With this encouraging comment, he opened the glass door of the book-case, and reaching down the ledger, laid it on the desk-like slope of the bureau.

“It is a poor chance,” said he, opening the ledger at the index, “but some of these people may be able to give us a hint where to look for Mr. Luttrell, and it is worth while to know what sort of business he did.”

He ran his finger down the list of names and had just turned to the account of one of the customers when we were startled by a loud click from the direction of the strong-room. We both turned sharply and beheld Thorndyke grasping the handle of the strong-room door, and I saw with amazement that the door was now slightly ajar.

“God!” exclaimed Miller, shutting the ledger and starting forward, “he’s got it open!” He strode over to the door, and directing an eager look at the indicator of the lock, burst into a laugh. “Well, I’m hanged!” he exclaimed. “Why, it was unlocked all the time! To think that none of us had the sense to tug the handle! But isn’t it just like old Luttrell to have a fool’s answer like that to the blessed puzzle!”

I looked at the indicator, not a little astonished to observe the row of fifteen A’s, which apparently formed the key combination. It may have been a very amusing joke on Mr. Luttrell’s part, but it did not look very secure. Thorndyke regarded us with an inscrutable glance and still grasped the handle, holding the door a bare half-inch open.

“There is something pushing against the door,” said he. “Shall I open it?

“May as well have a look at the inside,” replied Miller. Thereupon Thorndyke released the handle and quickly stepped aside. The door swung slowly open and the dead body of a man fell out into the room and rolled over on to its back.

“Mercy on us!” gasped Miller, springing back hastily and staring with horror and amazement at the grim apparition. “That is not Luttrell.” Then, suddenly starting forward and stooping over the dead man, be exclaimed “Why, it is Shemmonds. So that is where be disappeared to. I wonder what became of Luttrell?”

“There is somebody else in the strong-room,” said Thorndyke; and now, peering in through the doorway, I perceived a dim light, which seemed to come from a hidden recess, and by which I could see a pair of feet projecting round the corner. In a moment Miller had sprung in, and I followed. The strong-room was L shaped in plan, the arm of the L formed by a narrow passage at right angles to the main room. At the end of this a single small electric bulb was burning, the light of which showed the body of an elderly man stretched on the floor of the passage. I recognised him instantly in spite of the dimness of the light and the disfigurement caused by a ragged wound on the forehead.

“We had better get him out of this,” said Miller, speaking in a flurried tone, partly due to the shock of the horrible discovery and partly to the accompanying physical unpleasantness, “and then we will have a look round, This wasn’t just a mere robbery. We are going to find things out.”

With my help he lifted Luttrell’s corpse and together we carried it out, laying it on the floor of the room at the farther end, to which we also dragged the body of Shemmonds.

“There is no mystery as to how it happened,” I said, after a brief inspection of the two corpses. “Shemmonds evidently shot the old man from behind with the pistol close to the back of the head. The hair is all scorched round the wound of entry and the bullet came out at the forehead.”

“Yes,” agreed Miller, “that is all clear enough. But the mystery is why on earth Shemmonds didn’t let himself out. He must have known that the door was unlocked. Yet instead of turning the handle, he must have stood there like a fool, battering at the door with his fists. Just look at his hands.”

“The further mystery,” said Thorndyke who, all this time, had been making a minute examination of the lock both front without and within, “is how the door came to be shut. That is quite a curious problem.”

“Quite,” agreed Miller. “But it will keep. And there is a still more curious problem inside there. There is nearly all the swag from that Colchester robbery. Looks as if Luttrell was in it.”

Half reluctantly he re-entered the strong-room and Thorndyke and I followed. Near the angle of the passage he stooped to pick up an automatic pistol and a small, leather book, which he opened and looked into by the light of the lamp. At the first glance he uttered an exclamation and shut the book with a snap.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked, holding it out to us. “It is the nominal roll, address book and journal of the gang. We’ve got them in the hollow of our hand; and it is dawning upon me that old Luttrell was the managing director whom I have been looking for so long. Just run your eyes along those shelves. That’s loot; every bit of it. I can identify the articles from the lists that I made out.”

He stood looking gloatingly along the shelves with their burden of jewellery, plate and other valuables. Then his eye lighted on a drawer in the end wall just under the lamp; an iron drawer with a disproportionately large handle and bearing a very legible label inscribed “unmounted stones.”

“We’ll have a look at his stock of unmounted gems,” said Miller; and with that he bore down on the drawer, and seizing the handle, gave a vigorous pull. “Funny,” said he. “It isn’t locked, but something seems to be holding it back.”

He planted his foot on the wall and took a fresh purchase on the handle. “Wait a moment, Miller,” said Thorndyke; but even as he spoke, the superintendent gave a mighty heave; the drawer came out a full two feet; there was a loud click, and a moment later the strong-room door slammed.

“Good God!” exclaimed Miller, letting go the drawer, which immediately slid in with another click. “What was that?”

“That was the door shutting,” replied Thorndyke. “Quite a clever arrangement; like the mechanism of a repeater watch. Pulling out the drawer wound up and released a spring that shut the door. Very ingenious.”

“But,” gasped Miller, turning an ashen face to my colleague, “we’re shut in.”

“You are forgetting,” said I—a little nervously, I must admit—“that the lock is as we left it.”

The superintendent laughed, somewhat hysterically. “What a fool I am!” said he. “As bad as Shemmonds. Still we may as well—” Here he started along the passage and I heard him groping his way to the door, and later heard the handle turn. Suddenly the deep silence of the tomb-like chamber was rent by a yell of terror.

“The door won’t move! It’s locked fast!”

On this I rushed along the passage with a sickening fear at my heart. And even as I ran, there rose before my eyes the horrible vision of the corpse with the battered hands that had fallen out when we opened the door of this awful trap. He had been caught as we were caught. How soon might it not be that some stranger would be looking in on our corpses.

In the dim twilight by the door I found Miller clutching the handle and shaking it like a madman. His self-possession was completely shattered. Nor was my own condition much better. I flung my whole weight on the door in the faint hope that the lock was not really closed, but the massive iron structure was as immovable as a stone wall. I was nevertheless, gathering myself up for a second charge when I heard Thorndyke’s voice close behind me.

“That is no use, Jervis. The door is locked. But there is nothing to worry about.”

As he spoke, there suddenly appeared a bright circle of light from the little electric lamp that he always carried in his pocket. Within the circle, and now clearly visible, was a second indicator of the puzzle lock on the inside of the door-post. Its appearance was vaguely reassuring, especially in conjunction with Thorndyke’s calm voice; and it evidently appeared so to Miller, for he remarked, almost in his natural tones:

“But it seems to be unlocked still. There is the same AAAAAA that it showed when we came in.”

It was perfectly true. The slot of the letter-lock still showed the range of fifteen A’s, just as it had when the door was open. Could it be that the lock was a dummy and that there was some other means of opening the door? I was about to put this question to Thorndyke when he put the lamp into my hand, and, gently pushing me aside, stepped up to the indicator.

“Keep the light steady, Jervis,” said he, and forth with he began to manipulate the milled edges of the letter discs, beginnings as I noticed, at the right or reverse end of the slot and working backwards. I watched him with feverish interest and curiosity, as also did Miller, looking to see some word of fifteen letters develop in the slot. Instead of which, I saw, to my amazement and bewilderment my colleague’s finger transforming the row of A’s into a succession of M’s, which, however, were presently followed by an L and some X’s. When the row was completed it looked like some remote, antediluvian date set down in Roman numerals.

“Try the handle now, Miller,” said Thorndyke.

The superintendent needed no second bidding. Snatching at the handle, he turned it and bore heavily on the door. Almost instantly a thin line of light appeared at the edge; there was a sharp click, and the door swung right open. We fell out immediately—at least the superintendent and I did—thankful to find ourselves outside and alive. But, as we emerged, we both became aware of a man, white-faced and horror-stricken of aspect, stooping over the two corpses at the other end of the room. Our appearance was so sudden and unexpected—for the massive solidity of the safe-door had rendered our movements inaudible outside—that, for a moment or two, he stood immovable, staring at us, wild-eyed and open-mouthed. Then, suddenly, he sprang up erect, and, darting to the door, opened it and rushed out with Miller close on his heels.

He did not get very far. Following the superintendent, I saw the fugitive wriggling in the embrace of a tall man on the pavement, who, with Miller’s assistance, soon had a pair of handcuffs snapped on the man’s wrists and then departed with his captive in search of a cab.

“That’s one of ’em, I expect,” said Miller, as we returned to the office; then, as his glance fell on the open strong-room door, he mopped his face with his handkerchief. “That door gives me the creeps to look at it,” said he. “Lord I what a shake-up that was! I’ve never had such a scare in my life. When I heard that door shut and I remembered how that poor devil, Shemmonds, came tumbling out—phoo!” He wiped his brow again, and, walking towards the strong-room door, asked: “By the way, what was the magic word after all?” He stepped up to the indicator, and, after a quick glance, looked round at me in surprise. “Why!” he exclaimed, “blow me if it isn’t AAAA still! But the doctor altered it, didn’t he?”

At this moment Thorndyke appeared from the strong-room, where he had apparently been conducting some explorations, and to him the superintendent turned for an explanation.

“It is an ingenious device,” said he; “in fact, the whole strong-room is a monument of ingenuity, somewhat misapplied, but perfectly effective, as Mr. Shemmonds’s corpse testifies. The key-combination is a number expressed in Roman numerals, but the lock has a fly-back mechanism which acts as soon as the door begins to open. That was how Shemmonds was caught. He, no doubt purposely, avoided watching Luttrell set the lock—or else Luttrell didn’t let him—but as he went in with his intended victim, he looked at the indicator and saw the row of A’s, which he naturally assumed to be the key. Then, when he tried to let himself out, of course, the lock wouldn’t open.”

“It is rather odd that he didn’t try some other combinations,” said I.

“He probably did,” replied Thorndyke “but when they failed he would naturally come back to the A’s, which be had seen when the door was open. This is how it works.”

He shut the door, and then, closely watched by the superintendent and me, turned the milled rims of the letter-discs until the indicator showed a row of numerals thus: MMMMMMMCCCLXXXV. Grasping the handle, he turned it and gave a gentle pull, when the door began to open. But the instant it started from its bed, there was a loud click and all the letters of the indicator flew back to A.

“Well, I’m jiggered!” exclaimed Miller. “It must have been an awful suck-in for that poor blighter, Shemmonds. Took me in, too. I saw those A’s and the door open, and I thought I knew all about it. But what beats me, doctor, is how you managed to work it out. I can’t see what you had to go on. Would it be allowable to ask how it was done?”

“Certainly,” replied Thorndyke “but we had better defer the explanation. You have got those two bodies to dispose of and some other matters, and we must get back to our chambers. I will write down the key-combination, in case you want it, and then you must come and see us and let us know what luck you have had.”

He wrote the numerals on a slip of paper, and when he had handed it to the superintendent, we took our leave.

“I find myself,” said I, as we walked home, “in much the same position as Miller. I don’t see what you had to go on. It is clear to me that you not only worked out the lock-combination—from the seal inscription, as I assume—but that you identified Luttrell as the director of the gang. I don’t, in the least, understand how you did it.”

“And yet, Jervis,” said he, “it was an essentially simple case. If you review it and cast up the items of evidence, you will see that we really had all the facts. The problem was merely to co-ordinate them and extract their significance. Take first the character of Luttrell. We saw the man in company with another, evidently a fairly intimate acquaintance. They were being shadowed by a detective, and it is pretty clear that they detected the sleuth, for they shook him off quite neatly. Later, we learn from Miller that one of these men is suspected to be a member of a firm of swell burglars and that the other is a well-to-do, rather eccentric and very miscellaneous dealer, who has a strong-room fitted with a puzzle lock. I am astonished that the usually acute Miller did not notice how well Luttrell fitted the part of the managing director whom he was looking for. Here was a dealer who bought and sold all sorts of queer but valuable things, who must have had unlimited facilities for getting rid of stones, bullion and silver, and who used a puzzle lock. Now, who uses a puzzle lock? No one, certainly, who can conveniently use a key. But to the manager of a gang of thieves it would be a valuable safeguard, for he might at any moment be robbed of his keys, and perhaps made away with. But he could not be robbed of the secret passwords and his possession of it would be a security against murder. So you see that the simple probabilities pointed to Luttrell as the head of the gang.

“And now consider the problem of the lock. First, we saw that Luttrell wore on his left hand a huge, cumbrous seal ring, that he carried a Coddington lens on his watch-guard, and a small electric lamp in his pocket. That told us very, little. But when Miller told us about the lock and showed us the squeeze of the seal, and when we saw that the seal bore a long inscription in minute lettering, a connection began to appear. As Miller justly observed, no man—especially no elderly man—could trust the key combination exclusively to his memory. He would carry about him some record to which he could refer in case his memory failed him. But that record would hardly be one that anybody could read, or the secrecy and safety of the lock would be gone. It would probably be some kind of cryptogram; and when we saw this inscription and considered it in conjunction with the lens and the lamp, it seemed highly probable that the key-combination was contained in the inscription; and that probability was further increased when we saw the nonsensical doggerel of which the inscription was made up. The suggestion was that the verses had been made for some purpose independent of their sense. Accordingly I gave the inscription very careful consideration.

Now we learned from Miller that the puzzle lock had fifteen letters. The key might be one long word, such as ‘superlativeness,’ a number of short words, or some chemical or other formula. Or it was possible that it might be of the nature of a chronogram. I have never heard of chronograms being used for secret records or messages, but it has often occurred to me that they would be extremely suitable. And this was an exceptionally suitable case.”

“Chronogram,” said I. “Isn’t that something connected with medals?”

“They have often been used on medals,” he replied. “In effect, a chronogram is an inscription some of the letters of which form a date connected with the subject of the inscription. Usually the date letters are or cut larger than the others for convenience in reading, but, of course, this is not essential. The principle of a chronogram is this. The letters of the Roman alphabet are of two kinds: those that are simply letters and nothing else, and those that are numerals as well as letters. The numeral letters are M = a thousand, D = five hundred, C = one hundred, L = fifty, X = ten, V = five, and I = one. Now, in deciphering a chronogram, you pick out all the numeral letters and add them up without regard to their order. The total gives you the date.

“Well, as I said, it occurred to me that this might be of the nature of a chronogram; but as the lock had letters and not figures, the number, if there was one, would have to be expressed in Roman numerals, and it would have to form a number of fifteen numeral letters. As it was thus quite easy to put my hypothesis to the test, I proceeded to treat the inscription as a chronogram and decipher it; and behold! it yielded a number of fifteen letters, which, of course, was as near certainty as was possible, short of actual experiment.”

“Let us see how you did the decipherment,” I said, as we entered our chambers and shut the door. I procured a large note-block and pencil, and, laying them on the table, drew up two chairs.

“Now,” said I, “fire away.”

“Very well,” he said. “We will begin by writing the inscription in proper chronogram form with the numeral letters double size and treating the U’s as V’s and the W’s as double V’s according to the rules.”

Here he wrote out the inscription in Roman capitals thus:

“eheV aLas hoVV fast the DaM fVgaCes LabVntVr annI espeCIaLLy In the Cases of poor oLD bLokes LIke yoV anD Me posthVMVs VVho onLy VVaIt for VerMes to ConsVMe Vs.”

“Now,” said he, “let us make a column of each line and add them up, thus:

1. V=5, L=50, VV=10, D=500, M=1000, V=5, C=100—Total 1670

2. L=50, V=5, V=5, I=1, C=100, I=1, L=50, L=50, I=1, C=100—Total 363

3. L=50, D=500, L=50, L=50, I=1, V=5, D=500, M=1000, V=5, M=1000, V=5—Total 3166

4. VV=10, L=50, VV=10, I=1, V=5, M=1000, C=100, V=5, M=1000, V=5—Total 2186

“Now,” he continued “we take the four totals and add them together, thus:

1670+363+3166+2186 = 7385

and we get the grand total of seven thousand three hundred and eighty-five and this, expressed in Roman numerals, is MMMMMMMCCCLXXXV. Here, then, is a number consisting of fifteen letters, the exact number of spaces in the indicator of the puzzle lock; and I repeat that this striking coincidence, added to, or rather multiplied into, the other probabilities, made it practically certain that this was the key-combination. It remained only to test it by actual experiment.”

“By the way,” said I,” I noticed that you perked up rather suddenly when Miller mentioned the electric meter.”

“Naturally,” he replied. “It seemed that there must be a small lamp switched on somewhere in the building, and the only place that had not been examined was the strong-room. But if there was a lamp alight there, someone had been in the strong-room. And, as, the only person who was known to be able to get in was missing, it seemed probable that he was in there still. But if he was, he was pretty certainly dead; and there was quite a considerable probability that some one else was in there with him, since his companion was missing, too, and both had disappeared at the same time. But I must confess that that spring drawer was beyond my expectations, though I suspected it as soon as I saw Miller pulling at it. Luttrell was an ingenious old rascal; he almost deserved a better fate. However, I expect his death will have delivered the gang into the hands of the police.”

Events fell out as Thorndyke surmised. Mr. Luttrell’s little journal, in conjunction with the confession of the spy who had been captured on the premises, enabled the police to swoop down on the disconcerted gang before any breath of suspicion had reached them; with the result that they are now secured in strong-rooms of another kind whereof the doors are fitted with appliances as effective as, though less ingenious than, Mr. Luttrell’s puzzle lock.

THE GREEN CHECK JACKET (1925)

The visits of our old friend, Mr. Brodribb, even when strictly professional, usually took the outward form of a friendly call. On the present occasion there was no such pretence. The old solicitor entered our chambers carrying a small suitcase (the stamped initials on which, “R.M.,” I noticed, instantly attracted an inquisitive glance from Thorndyke, being obviously not Mr. Brodribb’s own) which he placed on the table and then shook hands with an evident air of business.

“I have come, Thorndyke,” he said, with unusual directness, “to ask your advice on a matter which is causing me some uneasiness. Do you know Reginald Merrill?”

“Slightly,” was the reply. “I meet him occasionally in court; and, of course, I know him as the author of that interesting book on Prehistoric Flint-mines.”

“Well,” said Brodribb, “he has disappeared. He is missing. I don’t like to use the expression; but when a responsible man is absent from his usual places of resort, when he apparently had no expectation of being so absent, and when he has made no provision for such absence, I think we may regard him as having disappeared in a legal sense. His absence calls for active inquiry.”

“Undoubtedly,” agreed Thorndyke; “and I take it that you are the person on whom the duty devolves?”

I think so. I am his solicitor and the executor of his will—at least I believe so; and the only near relative of his whom I know is his nephew and heir, Ethelbert Crick, his sister’s son. But Crick seems to have disappeared, too; and about the same time as Merrill. It is an extraordinary affair.”

“You say that you believe you are Merrill’s executor. Haven’t you seen the will?”

“I have seen a will. I have it in my safe. But Merrill said he was going to draw up another, and he may have done so. But if he has, he will almost certainly have appointed me his executor, and I shall assume that he has and act accordingly.”

“Was there any special reason for making a new will?” Thorndyke asked.

“Yes,” replied Brodribb. “He has just come into quite a considerable fortune, and he was pretty well off before. Under the old will, practically the whole of his property went to Crick. There was a small bequest to a man named Samuel Horder, his cousin’s son; and Horder was the alternative legatee if Crick should die before Merrill. Now, I understood Merrill to say that, in view of this extra fortune, he wished to do rather more for Horder, and I gathered that he proposed to divide the estate more or less equally between the two men. The whole estate was more than he thought necessary for Crick. And now, as we have cleared up the preliminaries, I will give you the circum stances of the disappearance.

“Last Wednesday, the 5th, I had a note from him saying that he would have some reports ready for me on the following day, but that he would be away from his office from 10.30 A.M. to about 6.30, and suggesting that I should send round in the evening if I wanted the papers particularly. Now it happened that my clerk, Page, had to go to a place near London Bridge on Thursday morning, and, oddly enough, he saw Mr. Merrill come out of Edginton’s, the ship-fitters, with a man who was carrying a largish handbag. There was nothing in it, of course, but Page is an observant man and he noticed Merrill’s companion so far as to observe that he was wearing a Norfolk jacket of a greenish shepherd’s plaid and a grey tweed hat. He also noted the time by the big clock in the street near to Edginton’s—11.46—and that Merrill looked up at it, and that the two men then walked off rather quickly in the direction of the station. Well, in the evening, I sent Page round to Merrill’s chambers in Fig-tree Court to get the papers. He arrived there just after 6.30, but he found the oak shut, and though he rapped at the door on the chance that Merrill might have come in—he lives in the chambers adjoining the office—there was no answer. So he went for a walk round the Temple, deciding to return a little later.

“Well, he had gone as far as the cloisters and was loitering there to look in the window of the wig shop when he saw a man in a greenish shepherd’s plaid jacket and a tweed hat coming up Pump Court. As the man approached Page thought he recognised him; in fact, he felt so sure that he stopped him and asked him if he knew what time Mr. Merrill would be home. But the man looked at him in astonishment. ‘Merrill?’ said he. ‘I don’t know anyone of that name.’ Thereupon Page apologised and explained how be had been misled by the pattern and colour of the jacket.

“After walking about for nearly half an hour, Page went back to Merrill’s chambers; but the oak was shut and he could get no answer by rapping with his stick, so he scribbled a note and dropped it into the letter-box and came away. The next morning I sent him round again, but the chambers were still shut up, and they have been shut up ever since; and nothing what ever has been seen or heard of Merrill.

“On Saturday, thinking it possible that Crick might be able to give me some news of his uncle, I called at his lodgings; and then, to my astonishment, I learned that he also was missing. He had gone away early on Thursday morning, saying that he had to go on business to Rochester, and that he might not be home to dinner. But he never came home at all. I called again on Sunday evening, and, as he had still not returned, I decided to take more active measures.

“This afternoon, immediately after lunch, I called at the Porter’s Lodge, and, having briefly explained the circumstances and who I was, asked the porter to bring the duplicate key—which he had for the laundress—and accompany me to Mr. Merrill’s chambers to see if, by chance, the tenant might be lying in them dead or insensible. He assured me that this could not be the case, since he had given the key every morning to the laundress, who had, in fact, returned it to him only a couple of hours previously. Nevertheless, he took the key and looked up the laundress, who had rooms near the lodge, who was fortunately at home and who turned out to be a most respectable and intelligent elderly woman; and we went together to Merrill’s chambers. The porter admitted us, and when we had been right I through the set and ascertained definitely that Merrill was not there, he handed the key to the laundress, Mrs. Butler, and went away.

“When he was gone, I had a talk with Mrs. Butler, from which some rather startling facts transpired. It seemed that on Thursday, as Merrill was going to be out all day, she took the opportunity to have a grand clean-up of the chambers, to tidy up the lobby, and to look over the chests of drawers and the wardrobe and shake out and brush the clothes and see that no moths had got in. ‘When I had finished,’ she said, ‘the place was like the inside of a band-box; just as he liked to see it.’

“‘And, after all, Mrs. Butler,’ said I, ‘he never did see it.’

“‘Oh, yes, he did,’ says she. ‘I don’t know when he came in, but when I let myself in the next morning, I could see that he had been in since I left.’

“‘How did you know that?’ I asked.

“‘Well,’ says she,’ I left the carpet-sweeper standing against the wardrobe door. I remembered it after I left and would have gone back and moved it, but I had already handed the key in at the Porter’s Lodge. But when I went in next morning it wasn’t there. It had been moved into the corner by the fireplace. Then the looking-glass had been moved. I could see that, because, before I went away, I had tidied my hair by it, and being short, I had to tilt it to see my face in it. Now it was tilted to suit a tall person and I could not see myself in it. Then I saw that the shaving had been moved, and when I put it back in its place, I found it was damp. It wouldn’t have kept damp for twenty-four hours at this time of year.’ That was perfectly true, you know, Thorndyke.”

“Perfectly,” agreed Thorndyke, “that woman is an excellent observer.”

“Well,” continued Brodribb, “on this she examined the shaving soap and the sponge and found them both perceptibly damp. It appeared practically certain that Merrill had been in on the preceding evening and had shaved; but by way of confirmation, I suggested that she should look over his clothes and see whether he had changed any of his garments. She did so, beginning with those that were hanging in the wardrobe, which she took down one at a time. Suddenly she gave a cry of surprise, and I got a bit of a start myself when she handed out a greenish shepherd’s plaid Norfolk jacket.

“‘That,’ she said, ‘was not here when I brushed these clothes,’ and it was obvious from its dusty condition that it could not have been; ‘and,’ she added, ‘I have never seen it before to my knowledge, and I think I should have remembered it.’ I asked her if there was any coat missing and she answered that she had brushed a grey tweed jacket that seemed to have disappeared.

“Well, it was a queer affair. The first thing to be done was to ascertain, if possible whether that jacket was or was not Merrill’s. That, I thought, you would be able to judge better than I; so I borrowed his suitcase and popped the jacket into it, together with another jacket that was undoubtedly his, for comparison. Here is the suitcase and the two jackets are inside.”

“It is really a question that could be better decided by a tailor,” said Thorndyke. “The differences of measurement can’t be great if they could both be worn by the same person. But we shall see.” He rose, and having spread some sheets of newspaper over the table, opened the suitcase and took out the two jackets, which ho laid out side by side. Then, with his spring-tape, he proceeded systematically to measure the two garments, entering each pair of measurements on a slip of paper divided into two columns. Mr. Brodribb and I watched him expectantly and compared the two sets of figures as they were written down; and very soon it became evident that they were, at least, not identical. At length Thorndyke laid down the tape, and picking up the paper, studied it closely.

“I think,” he said, “we may conclude that these two jackets were not made for the same person. The differences are not great, but they are consistent. The elbow creases, for instance, agree with the total length of the sleeves. The owner of the green jacket has longer arms and a bigger span than Merrill, but his chest measurement is nearly two inches greater and he has much more sloping shoulders. He could hardly have buttoned Merrill’s jacket.”

“Then,” said Brodribb, “the next question is, did Merrill come home in some other man’s coat or did some other man enter his chambers? From what Page has told us it seems pretty evident that a stranger must have got into those chambers. But if that is so, the questions arise: What the deuce was the fellow’s object in changing into Merrill’s clothes and shaving? How did he get into Merrill’s chambers? What was he doing there? What has become of Merrill? And what is the meaning of the whole affair?”

“To some of those questions,” said Thorndyke, “the answers are fairly obvious. If we assume, as I do, that the owner of the green jacket is the man whom Page saw at London Bridge and afterwards in the cloisters, the reason for the change of garments becomes plain enough. Page told the man that he had identified him by this very distinctive jacket as the person with whom Merrill was last seen alive. Evidently that man’s safety demanded hat he should get rid of the incriminating jacket without delay. Then, as to his having shaved: did Page give you any description of the man?”

“Yes; he was a tallish man, about thirty-five, with a large dark moustache and a torpedo beard.”

“Very well,” said Thorndyke; “then we may say that the man who went into Merrill’s chambers was a moustached bearded man in a green jacket and that he man who came out was a clean-shaved man in a grey jacket, whom Page himself would probably have passed without a second glance. That is clear enough. And as to how he got into the chambers, evidently he let himself in with Merrill’s key; and if he did, I am afraid we can make a pretty shrewd guess as to what has become of Merrill, and only hope that we are guessing wrong. As to what this man was doing in those chambers and what is the meaning of the whole affair, that is a more difficult question. If the man had Merrill’s latchkey, we may assume that he had the rest of Merrill’s keys; that he had, in fact, free access to any locked receptacles in those chambers. The circumstances suggest that he entered the chambers for the purpose of getting possession of some valuable objects contained in them. Do you happen to know whether Merrill had any property of considerable value on the premises?”

“I don’t,” replied Brodribb. “He had a safe, but I don’t know what he kept in it. Principally documents, I should think. Certainly not money, in any considerable amounts. The only thing of value that I actually know of is the new will; and that would only be valuable in certain circumstances.”

The abrupt and rather ambiguous conclusion of Mr. Brodribb’s statement was not lost either on Thorndyke or on me. Apparently the cautious old lawyer had suddenly realised, as I had, that if anything had happened to Merrill, those “certain circumstances” had already come into being. From what he had told us it appeared that, under the new will, Crick stood to inherit a half of Mr. Merrill’s fortune, whereas under the old will he stood to inherit nearly the whole. And it was a great fortune. The loss or destruction of the new will would be worth a good many thousand pounds to Mr. Crick.

“Well,” said Brodribb, after a pause, “what is to be done? I suppose I ought to communicate with the police.”

“You will have to, sooner or later,” said Thorndyke; “but meanwhile, leave these two jackets—or, at least, the green one—with me for the present and let me see if I can extract any further information from it.”

“You won’t find anything in the pockets but dirt. I’ve tried them.”

“I hope you left the dirt,” said Thorndyke.

I did,” replied Brodribb, “excepting what came out on my fingers. Very well; I’ll leave the coats with you for today, and I will see if I can get any further news of Crick from his landlady.”

With this the old solicitor shook hands and went off with such an evident air of purpose that I remarked: “Brodribb is off to find out whether Mr. Crick was the proprietor of a green plaid Norfolk jacket.”

Thorndyke smiled. “It was rather quaint,” said he, “to see the sudden way in which he drew in his horns when the inwardness of the affair dawned on him. But we mustn’t start with a preconceived theory. Our business is to get hold of some more facts. There is little enough to go on at present. Let us begin by having a good look at this green jacket.”

He picked it up and carried it to the window, where we both looked it over critically.

“It is rather dusty,” I remarked, “especially on the front, and there is a white mark on the middle button.”

“Yes. Chalk, apparently; and if you look closely, there are white traces on the other buttons and on the front of the coat. The back is much less dusty.”

As he spoke, Thorndyke turned the garment round, and then, from the side of the skirt, picked a small, hair-like object which he felt between his finger and thumb, looked at closely and handed to me.

“A bit of barley beard,” said I, “and there are two more on the other side. He must have walked along a narrow path through a barley field—the state of the front of his coat almost suggests that he had crawled.”

“Yes; it is earthy dust; but Polton’s extractor will give us more information about that. We had better hand it over to him; but first we will go through the pockets in spite of Brodribb’s discouragement.”

“By Jove!” I exclaimed, as I thrust my hand into one of the side pockets, “he was right about the dirt. Look at this.” I drew out my hand with a quite considerable pinch of dry earth and one or two little fragments of chalk. “It looks as if he had been crawling in loose earth.”

“It does,” Thorndyke agreed, inspecting his own “catch”—a pinch of reddish earth and a fragment of chalk of the size of a large pea. “The earth is very characteristic, this red-brown loam that you find overlying the chalk. All his outside pockets seem to have caught more or less of it. However, we can leave Polton to collect it and prepare it for examination. I’ll take the coat up to him now, and while he is working at it I think I will walk round to Edginton’s and see if I can pick up any further particulars.”

He went up to the laboratory floor, where our assistant, Polton, carried on his curious and varied activities, and when he returned we sallied forth together. In Fleet Street we picked up a disengaged taxicab, by which we were whisked across Blackfriars Bridge and a few minutes later set down at the corner of Tooley Street. We made our way to the ship-chandler’s shop, where Thorndyke proceeded to put a few discreet questions to the manager, who listened politely and with sympathetic interest.

“The difficulty is,” said he, “that there were a good many gentlemen in here last Thursday. You say they came about I I.45. If you could tell me what they bought, we could look at the bill-duplicate book and that might help us.”

“I don’t actually know what they bought,” said Thorndyke. “It might have been a length of rope; a rope, perhaps, say twelve or fourteen fathoms or perhaps more. But I may be wrong.”

I stared at Thorndyke in amazement. Long as I known him, this extraordinary faculty of instantaneous induction always came on me as a fresh surprise. I had supposed that in this case we had absolutely nothing to go on; and yet here he was with at least a tentative suggestion before the inquiry appeared to have begun. And that suggestion was clear evidence that he had already arrived at a hypothetical solution of the mystery. I was still pondering on this astonishing fact when the manager approached with an open book and accompanied by an assistant.

“I see,” said he, “that there is an entry, apparently about mid-day on Thursday, of the sale of a fifteen-fathom length of deep-sea lead-line, and my friend, here, remembers selling it.”

“Yes,” the assistant confirmed, “I remember it because he wanted to get it into his handbag, and it took the three of us to stuff it in. Thick lead-line is pretty stiff when it’s new.”

“Do you remember what these gentlemen were like and how they were dressed?”

“One was a rather elderly gentleman, clean-shaved, I think. The other I remember better because he had rather queer-looking eyes—very pale grey. He had a pointed beard and he wore a greenish check coat and a cloth hat. That’s all I remember about him.”

“It is more than most people would have remembered,” said Thorndyke. “I am very much obliged to you; and I think I will ask you to let me have a fifteen-fathom length of that same lead-line.”

By this time my capacity for astonishment was exhausted. What on earth could my colleague want with a deep-sea lead-line? But, after all, why not? If he had then and there purchased a Trotman’s anchor, a shark-hook and a set of International code signals, I should have been prepared to accept the proceeding with out comment. Thorndyke was a law unto himself.

Nevertheless, as I walked homeward by his side, carrying the coil of rope, I continued to speculate on this singular case. Thorndyke had arrived at a hypothetical solution of Mr. Brodribb’s problem; and it was evidently correct, so far, as the entry in the bill-book proved. But what was the connection between a dusty jacket and a length of thin rope? And why this particular length? I could make nothing of it. But I determined, as soon as we got home, to see what new facts Polton’s activities had brought to light.

The results were disappointing. Polton’s dust extractor had been busy, and the products in the form of tiny heaps of dust, were methodically set out on a sheet of white paper, each little heap covered with a watch-glass and accompanied by its written particulars as to the part of the garment from which it had come. I examined a few samples under the microscope, but though curious and interesting, as all dust is, they showed nothing very distinctive. The dust might have come from anyone’s coat. There was, of course, a good deal of yellowish sandy loam, a few particles of chalk, a quantity of fine ash, clinker and particles of coal—railway dust from a locomotive—ordinary town and house dust and some oddments such as pollen grains, including those of the sow-thistle, mallow, poppy and valerian, and in one sample I found two scales from the wing of the common blue butterfly. That was all; and it told me nothing but that the owner of the coat had recently been in a chalk district and that he had taken a railway journey.

While I was working with the microscope, Polton was busy with an occupation that I did not understand. He had cemented the little pieces of chalk that we had found in the pockets to a plate of glass by means of pitch, and he was now brushing them under water with a soft brush and from time to time decanting the milky water into a tall sediment glass. Now, as most people know, chalk is largely composed of microscopic shells—foraminifera—which can be detached by gently brushing the chalk under water. But what was the object? There was no doubt that the material was chalk, and we knew that foraminifera were there. Why trouble to prove what is common knowledge? I questioned Polton, but he knew nothing of the purpose of the investigation. He merely beamed on me like a crinkly old graven image and went on brushing. I dipped up a sample of the white sediment and examined it under the microscope. Of course there were foraminifera, and very beautiful they were. But what about it? The whole proceeding looked purposeless. And yet I knew that it was not. Thorndyke was the last man in the world to expend his energies in flogging a dead horse.

Presently he came up to the laboratory, and, when he had looked at the dust specimens and confirmed my opinion of them, he fell to work on the chalk sediment. Having prepared a number of slides, he sat down at the microscope with a sharp pencil and a block of smooth paper with the apparent purpose of cataloguing and making drawings of the foraminifera. And at this task I left him while I went forth to collect some books that I had ordered from a bookseller in the Charing Cross Road.

When I returned with my purchases about an hour later I found him putting back in a press a portfolio of large-scale Ordnance maps of Kent which he had apparently been consulting, and I noticed on the table his sheet of drawings and a monograph of the fossil foraminifera.

“Well, Thorndyke,” I said cheerfully,” I suppose this time, you know exactly what has become of Merrill.”

“I can guess,” he replied, “and so can you. But the actual data are distressingly vague. We have certain indications, as you will have noticed. The trouble will be to bring them to a focus. It is a case for constructive imagination on the one hand and the method of exclusion on the other. I shall make a preliminary circle-round tomorrow.”

“Meaning by that?”

“I have a hypothesis. It is probably wrong. If it is, we must try another, and yet another. Every time we fail we shall narrow the field of inquiry until by eliminating one possibility after another, we may hope to arrive at the solution. My first essay will take me down into Kent.”

“You are not going into those wild regions alone, Thorndyke,” said I. “You will need my protection and support to say nothing of my invaluable advice. I presume you realise that?”

“Undoubtedly,” he replied gravely. “I was reckoning on a two-man expedition. Besides, you are as much interested in the case as I am. And now, let us go forth and dine and fortify ourselves for the perils of tomorrow.”

In the course of dinner I led the conversation to the products of Polton’s labours and remarked upon their very indefinite significance; but Thorndyke was more indefinite still, as he usually was in cases of a highly speculative character.

“You are expecting too much from Polton,” he said with a smile. “This is not a matter of foraminifera or pollen or butterfly-scales; they are only items of circumstantial evidence. What we have to do is to consider the whole body of facts in our possession; what Brodribb has told us, what we know for ourselves and what we have ascertained by investigation. The case is still very much in the air, but it is not so vague as you seem to imply.”

This was all I could get out of him; and as the “whole body of facts” yielded no suggestion at all to me, I could only possess my soul in patience and hope for some enlightenment on the morrow.

About a quarter to eleven on the following morning, while Thorndyke was giving final instructions to Polton and I was speculating on the contents of the suitcase that was going to accompany us, footsteps became audible on our stairs. Their crescendo terminated in a flourish on our little brass knocker which I recognised as Brodribb’s knock. I accordingly opened the door, and in walked our old friend. His keen blue eye took in at once our informal raiment and the suitcase and lighted up with something like curiosity.

“Off on an expedition?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied Thorndyke. “A little trip down into Kent. Gravesend, in fact.”

“Gravesend,” repeated Brodribb with further awakened interest. “That was rather a favourite resort of poor Merrill’s. By the way, your expedition is not connected with his disappearance, I suppose?”

“As a matter of fact it is,” replied Thorndyke. “Just a tentative exploration, you know.”

“I know,” said Brodribb, all agog now, “and I’m coming with you. I’ve got a clear day and I’m not going to take a refusal.”

“No refusal was contemplated,” rejoined Thorndyke. “You’ll probably waste a day, but we shall benefit by your society. Polton will let your clerk know that you haven’t absconded, or you can look in at the office yourself. We have plenty of time.”

Brodribb chose the latter plan, which enabled him to exchange his tall hat and morning coat for a soft hat and jacket, and we accordingly made our way to Charing Cross via Lincoln’s Inn, where Brodribb’s office was situated. I noticed that Brodribb, with his customary discretion, asked no questions, though he must have observed, as I had, the striking fact that Thorndyke had in some way connected Merrill with Gravesend; and in fact with the exception of Brodribb’s account of his failure to get any news of Mr. Crick, no reference was made to the nature of our expedition until we alighted at our destination.

On emerging from the station, Thorndyke turned to the left and led the way out of the approach into a street, on the opposite side of which a rather grimy statue of Queen Victoria greeted us with a supercilious stare. Here we turned to the south along a prosperous thoroughfare, and presently crossing a main road, followed its rather sordid continuation until the urban squalor began to be tempered by traces of rusticity, and the suburb became a village. Passing a pleasant looking inn and a smithy, which seemed to have an out-patient department for invalid carts, we came into a quiet lane offering a leafy vista with glimpses of thatched and tiled cottages whose gardens were gay with summer flowers. Opposite these, some rough stone steps led up to a stile by the side of an open gate which gave access to a wide cart-track. Here Thorndyke halted, and producing his pocket map-case, com pared the surroundings with the map. At length he pocketed the case, and turning towards the cart-track, said: “This is our way, for better or worse. In a few minutes we shall probably know whether we have found a clue or a mare’s nest.”

We followed the track up a rise until, reaching the crest of the hill, we saw stretching away below us a wide, fertile valley with wooded heights beyond, over the brow of which peeped the square tower of some village church.

“Well,” said Brodribb, taking off his hat to enjoy the light breeze, “clue or no clue, this is perfectly delightful and well worth the journey. Just look at those charming little blue butterflies fluttering round that mallow. What a magnificent prospect And where, but in Kent, will you see such a barley field as that?”

It was, indeed, a beautiful landscape. But as my eye travelled over the enormous barley field, its tawny surface rippling, in golden waves before the summer breeze, it was not the beauty of the scene that occupied my mind. I was thinking of those three ends of barley beard that we had picked from the skirts of the green jacket. The cart-track had now contracted to a foot path; but it was a broader path than I should have looked for, running straight across the great field to a far-away stile; and half way along it on the left hand side I could see, rising above the barley, the top of a rough fence around a small, square enclosure that looked like a pound—though it was in an unlikely situation.

We pursued the broad path across the field until we were nearly abreast of the pound, and I was about to draw Thorndyke’s attention to it, when I perceived a narrow lane through the barley—hardly a path, but rather a track, trodden through the crop by some persons who had gone to the enclosure. Into this track Thorndyke turned as if he had been looking for it, and walked towards the enclosure, closely scrutinising the ground as he went. Brodribb and I, of course, followed in single file, brushing through the barley as we went; and as we drew nearer we could see that there was an opening in the enclosing fence and that inside was a deep hollow the edges of which were fringed with clumps of pink valerian. At the opening of the fence Thorndyke halted and looked back.

“Well,” said Brodribb, “is it going to be a mare’s nest?”

“No,” replied Thorndyke. “It is a clue, and something more!”

As he spoke, he pointed to the foot of one of the principal posts of the fence, to which was secured a short length of rope, the frayed ends of which suggested that it had broken under a heavy strain. And now I could see what the enclosure was. Inside it was a deep pit, and at the bottom of the pit, to one side, was a circular hole, black as night, and apparently leading down into the bowels of the earth.

“That must be a dene hole,” said I, looking at the yawning cavity.

“It is,” Thorndyke replied.

“Ha,” said Brodribb, “so that is a dene hole, is it? Damned unpleasant looking place. Dene holes were one of poor Merrill’s hobbies. He used to go down to explore them. I hope you are not suggesting that he went down this one.”

“I am afraid that is what has happened, Brodribb,” was the reply. “That end of rope looks like his. It is deep-sea lead-line. I have a length of it here, bought at the same place as he bought his, and probably cut from the same sample.” He opened the suitcase, and taking out the coil of line that we had bought, flung it down by the foot of the post. Obviously it was identical with the broken end. “However,” he added,” we shall see.”

“We are going down, are we?” asked Brodribb.

“We?” repeated Thorndyke. “I am going down if it is practicable. Not otherwise. If it is an ordinary seventy-foot shaft with perpendicular sides, we shall have to get proper appliances. But you had better stay above, in any case.”

“Nonsense!” exclaimed Brodribb. “I am not such a back number as you think. I have been a mountain-climber in my time and I’m not a bit nervous. I can get down all right if there is any foothold, and I’ve got a rope to hang on to. And you can see for yourself that somebody has been down with a rope only.”

“Yes,” replied Thorndyke, “but I don’t see that that somebody has come up again.”

“No,” Brodribb admitted; “that’s true. The rope seems to have broken; and you say your rope is the same stuff?

Thorndyke looked at me inquiringly as I stooped and examined the frayed end of the strange rope.

“What do you say, Jervis?” he asked.

“That rope didn’t break,” I replied. “It has been, chafed or sawn through. It is quite different in appearance from a broken end.”

“That was what I decided as soon as I saw it,” said Thorndyke. “Besides, a new rope of this size and quality couldn’t possibly break under the weight of a man.”

Brodribb gazed at the frayed end with an expression of horror.

“What a diabolical thing!” he exclaimed. “You mean that some wretch deliberately cut the rope and let another man drop down the shaft! But it can’t be. I really think you must be mistaken. It must have been a defective rope.”

“Well, that is what it looks like,” replied Thorndyke. He made a ‘running bowline” at the end of our rope and slipped the loop over his shoulders, drawing it tight under his arms. Then he turned towards the pit. “You had better take a couple of turns round the foot of the post, Jervis,” said he, “and pay out just enough to keep the rope taut.”

He took an electric inspection-lamp from the suit case, slipped the battery in his pocket and hooked the bull’s-eye to a button-hole, and when all was ready, he climbed down into the pit, crossed the sloping floor, and crouching down, peered into the forbidding hole, throwing down it a beam of light from his bull’s-eye. Then he stood up and grasped the rope.

“It is quite practicable,” said he; “only about twenty feet deep, and good foothold all the way.” With this he crouched once more, backed into the hole and disappeared from view. He evidently descended pretty quickly, to judge by the rate at which I had to pay out the rope, and in quite a short time I felt the tension slacken and began to haul up the line. As the loop came out of the hole, Mr. Brodribb took possession of it, and regardless of my protests, proceeded to secure it under his arms.

“But how the deuce am I going to get down?” I demanded.

“That’s all right, Jervis,” he replied persuasively. “I’ll just have a look round and then come up and let you down.”

It being obviously useless to argue, I adjusted the rope and made ready to pay out. He climbed down into the pit with astonishing agility, backed into the hole and disappeared; and the tension of the rope informed me that he was making quite a rapid descent. He had nearly reached the bottom when there were borne to my ears the hollow reverberations of what sounded like a cry of alarm. But all was apparently well, for the rope continued to draw out steadily, and when at last its tension relaxed, I felt an unmistakable signal shake, and at once drew it up.

As my curiosity made me unwilling to remain passively waiting for Brodribb’s return, I secured the end of the rope to the post with a “fisherman’s bend” and let myself down into the pit. Advancing to the hole, I lay down and put my head over the edge. A dim light from Thorndyke’s lamp came up the shaft and showed me that we were by no means the first explorers, for there were foot-holes cut in the chalk all the way down, apparently of some considerable age. With the aid of these and the rope, it appeared quite easy to descend and I decided to go down forthwith. Accordingly I backed towards the shaft, found the first of the foot-holes, and grasping the rope with one hand and using the other to hang on to the upper cavities, easily let myself down the well-like shaft. As I neared the bottom the light of the lamp was thrown full on the shaft-wall; a pair of hands grasped me and I heard Thorndyke’s voice saying: “Look where you are treading, Jervis,” on which I looked down and saw immediately below me a man lying on his face by an irregular coil of rope.

I stepped down carefully on to the chalk floor and looked round. We were in a small chamber in one side of which was the black opening of a low tunnel. Thorndyke and Brodribb were standing at the feet of the prostrate figure examining a revolver which the solicitor held.

“It has certainly been fired,” said the latter. “One chamber is empty and the barrel is foul.”

“That may be,” replied Thorndyke; “but there is no bullet wound. This man died from a knife wound in the chest.” He threw the light of his lamp on the corpse and as I turned it partly over to verify his statement, he added: “This is poor Mr. Merrill. We found the revolver lying by his side.”

“The cause of death is clear enough,” said I, “and it certainly wasn’t suicide. The question is—” At this moment Thorndyke stooped and threw a beam of light down the tunnel, and Brodribb and I simultaneously uttered an exclamation. At the extreme end, about forty feet away, the body of another man lay. Instantly Brodribb started forward, and stooping to clear the low roof—it was about four feet six inches high—hurried along the tunnel. Thorndyke and I followed close behind. As we reached the body, which was lying supine with a small electric torch by its side, and the light of Thorndyke’s lamp fell on the upturned face, Brodribb gasped: “God save us! it’s Crick! And here is the knife.” He was about to pick up the weapon when Thorndyke put out his hand.

“That knife,” said he, “must be touched by no hand but the one that dealt the blow. It may be crucial evidence.”

“Evidence of what?” demanded Brodribb. “There is Merrill with a knife wound in his chest and a pistol by his side. Here is Crick with a bullet wound in his breast, a knife by his side and the empty sheath secured round his waist. What more evidence do you want?”

“That depends on what you seek to prove,” said Thorndyke. “What is your interpretation of the facts that you have stated?

“Why, it is as plain as daylight,” answered Brodribb, “incredible as the affair seems, having regard to the characters of the two men. Crick stabbed Merrill and Merrill shot him dead. Then Merrill tried to escape, but the rope broke, he was trapped and he bled to death at the foot of the shaft.”

“And who do you say died first?” Thorndyke asked.

It was a curious question and it caused me to look inquisitively at my colleague. But Brodribb answered promptly: “Why, Crick, of course. Here he lies where he fell. There is a track of blood along the floor of the tunnel, as you can see, and there is Merrill at the entrance, dead in the act of trying to escape.”

Thorndyke nodded in a rather mysterious way and there was a brief silence. Then I ventured to remark: “You seem to be losing sight of the man with the green jacket.”

Brodribb started and looked at me with a frown of surprise.

Bless my soul!” he exclaimed, “so I am. I had clean forgotten him in these horrors. But what is your point? Is there any evidence that he has been here?”

“I don’t know,” said I. “He bought the rope and he was seen with Merrill apparently going towards London Bridge Station. And I gather that it was the green jacket that piloted Thorndyke to this place.”

In a sense,” Thorndyke admitted, “that is so. But we will talk about that later. Meanwhile there are one or two facts that I will draw your attention to. First as to the wounds; they are almost identical in position. Each is on the left side, just below the nipple; a vital spot, which would be fully exposed by a man who was climbing down holding on to a rope. Then, if you look along the floor where I am throwing the light, you can see a distinct trace of something having been dragged along, although there seems to have been an effort to obliterate it; and the blood marks are more in the nature of smears than drops.” He gently turned the body over and pointed to the back, which was thickly covered with chalk. “This corpse has obviously been dragged along the floor,” he continued. “It wouldn’t have been marked in that way by merely falling. Further, the rope, when last seen, was being stuffed into a handbag. The rope is here, but where is the handbag? Finally, the rope was cut by some one outside, and evidently after the murders had been committed.”

As he concluded, he spread his handkerchief over the knife, and wrapping it up carefully without touching it with his fingers, placed it in his outside breast-pocket. Then we went back towards the shaft, where Thorndyke knelt down by the body of Merrill and systematically emptied the pockets.

“What are you searching for?” asked Brodribb.

“Keys,” was the reply; “and there aren’t any. It is a vital point, seeing that the man with the green jacket evidently let himself into Merrill’s chambers that same day.”

“Yes,” Brodribb agreed with a reflective frown; “it is. But tell us, Thorndyke, how you reconstruct this horrible crime.”

“My theory,” said Thorndyke “is that the three men came here together. They made the rope fast to the post. The stranger in the green jacket came down first and waited at the foot of the shaft. Merrill came down next, and the stranger stabbed him just as he reached the bottom, while his arms were still up hanging on to the rope. Crick followed and was shot in the same place and the same manner. Then the stranger dragged Crick’s body along the tunnel, swept away the marks as well as he could, put the knife and the lamp by the body, dropped the revolver by Merrill’s corpse, took the keys and went up, sawed through the rope—probably with a pocket saw—and threw the end down the shaft. Then he took the next train to London and went straight to Merrill’s chambers, where he opened the safe or other receptacles and took possession of what he wanted.”

Brodribb nodded. “It was a diabolically clever scheme,” said he.

“The scheme was ingenious enough,” Thorndyke agreed, “but the execution was contemptible. He has left traces at every turn. Otherwise we shouldn’t be here. He has acted on the assumption that the world contains no one but fools. But that is a fool’s assumption.”

When we had ascended, in the reverse order of our descent, Thorndyke detached our rope and also the frayed end, which we took with us, and we then took our way back towards the town; and I noted that as we stood by the dene hole, there was not a human creature in sight; nor did we meet a single person until we were close to the village. It was an ideal spot for a murder.

“I suppose you will notify the police?” said Brodribb.

“Yes,” replied Thorndyke. “I shall call on the Chief Constable and give him the facts and advise him to keep some of them to himself for the present, and also to arrange for an adjournment of the inquest. Our friend with the green jacket must be made to think that he has played a trump card.”

Apparently the Chief Constable was a man who knew all the moves of criminal investigation, for at the inquest the discovery was attributed to the local police acting on information received from somebody who had “noticed the broken rope.”

None of us was summoned to give evidence nor were our names mentioned, but the inquest was adjourned for three weeks, for further inquiries.

But in those three weeks there were some singular developments, of which the scene was the clerks’ office at Mr. Brodribb’s premises in Lincoln’s Inn. There late on a certain forenoon, Thorndyke and I arrived, each provided with a bag and a sheaf of documents, and were duly admitted by Mr. Page.

“Now,” said Thorndyke, “are you quite confident, Mr. Page, that you would recognise this man, even if he had shaved off his beard and moustache?”

“Quite confident,” replied Page. “I should know him by his eyes. Very queer eyes they were; light, greenish grey. And I should know his voice, too.”

“Good,” said Thorndyke; and as Page disappeared into the private office, we sat down and examined our documents, eyed furtively by the junior clerk. Some ten minutes later the door opened and a man entered; and the first glance at him brought my nerves to concert pitch. He was a thick-set, muscular man, clean-shaved and rather dark. But my attention was instantly arrested by his eyes—singularly pale eyes which gave an almost unhuman character to his face. He reminded me of a certain species of lemur that I once saw.

“I have got an appointment with Mr. Brodribb,” he said, addressing the clerk. “My name is Horder.”

The clerk slipped off his stool and moved towards the door of the private office, but at that moment Page came out. As his eyes met Horder’s, he stopped dead; and instantly the two men seemed to stiffen like a couple of dogs that have suddenly met at a street corner. I watched Horder narrowly. He had been rather pale when he came in. Now he was ghastly, and his whole aspect indicated extreme nervous tension.

“Did you wish to see Mr. Brodribb?” asked Page, still gazing intently at the other.

“Yes,” was the irritable reply; “I have given my name once—Horder.”

Mr. Page turned and re-entered the private office, leaving the door ajar.

Mr. Horder to see you, sir,” I heard him say. He came out and shut the door. “If you will sit down, Mr. Brodribb will see you in a minute or two,” he said, offering a chair; he then took his hat from a peg, glanced at his watch and went out.

A couple of minutes passed. Once, I thought I heard stealthy footsteps out in the entry; but no one came in or knocked. Presently the door of the private office opened and a tall gentleman came out. And then, once more, my nerves sprang to attention. The tall gentleman was Detective-Superintendent Miller.

The superintendent walked across the office, opened the door, looked out, and then, leaving it ajar, came back to where Horder was sitting.

“You are Mr. Samuel Horder, I think,” said he.

“Yes, I am,” was the reply. “What about it?”

“I am a police officer, and I arrest you on a charge of having unlawfully entered the premises of the late Reginald Merrill; and it is my duty to caution you—”

Here Horder, who had risen to his feet, and slipped his right hand under the skirt of his coat, made a sudden spring at the officer. But in that instant Thorndyke had gripped his right arm at the elbow and wrist and swung him round; the superintendent seized his left arm while I pounced upon the revolver in his right hand and kept its muzzle pointed to the floor. But it was an uncomfortable affair. Our prisoner was a strong man and he fought like a wild beast; and he had his finger hooked round the trigger of the revolver. The four of us, locked together, gyrated round the office, knocking over chairs and bumping against the walls, the junior clerk skipped round the room with his eyes glued on the pistol and old Brodribb charged out of his sanctum, flourishing a long ruler. However, it did not last long. In the midst of the uproar, two massive constables stole in and joined the fray. There was a yell from the prisoner, the revolver rattled to the floor and then I heard two successive metallic clicks.

“He’ll be all right now,” murmured the constable who had fixed on the handcuffs, with the manner of one who has administered a soothing remedy.

“I notice,” said Thorndyke, when the prisoner had been removed, “that you charged him only with unlawful entry.”

“Yes,” replied Miller, “until we have taken his fingerprints. Mr. Singleton has developed up three fingers and a thumb, beautifully clear, on that knife that you gave us. If they prove to be Horder’s finger prints, of course, it is a true bill for the murder.”

The fingerprints on the knife proved undoubtedly to be Horder’s. But the case did not rest on them alone. When his rooms were searched, there were found not only Mr. Merrill’s keys but also Mr. Merrill’s second will, which had been missed from the safe when it was opened by the maker’s locksmith; thus illustrating afresh the perverse stupidity of the criminal mind.

“A satisfactory case,” remarked Thorndyke, “in respect of the result; but there was too much luck for us to take much credit from it. On Brodribb’s opening statement, it was pretty clear that a crime had been committed. Merrill was missing and some one had possession of his keys and had entered his premises. It also appeared nearly certain that the thing stolen must be the second will, since there was nothing else of value to steal; and the will was of very great value to two persons, Crick and Horder, to each of whom its destruction was worth many thousands of pounds. To both of them its value was conditional on the immediate death of Merrill, before another will could be made; and to Horder it was further conditional on the death of Crick and that he should die before Merrill—for otherwise the estate would go to Crick’s heirs or next of kin. The prima facie suspicion therefore fell on these two men. But Crick was missing; and the question was, had he absconded or was he dead?

“And now as to the investigation. The green jacket showed earthy dust and chalk on the front and chalk-marks on the buttons. The indication was that the wearer had either crawled on chalky ground or climbed up a chalky face. But the marks on the buttons suggested climbing; for a horizontal surface is usually covered by soil, whereas on a vertical surface the chalk is exposed. But the time factor showed us that this man could not have travelled far from London. He was seen going towards London Bridge Station about the time when a train was due to go down to Kent. That train went to Maidstone and Gillingham, calling at Gravesend, Strood, Snodland, Rochester, Chatham and other places abounding in chalk and connected with the cement industry. In that district there were no true cliffs, but there were numerous chalk-pits, railway embankments and other excavations. The evidence pointed to one of these excavations. Then Crick was known to have gone to Rochester—earlier in the day—which further suggested the district, though Rochester is the least chalky part of it.

“The question was, what kind of excavation had been climbed into? And for what purpose had the climbing been performed? But here the personality of the missing man gave us a hint. Merrill had written a book to prove that dene holes were simply prehistoric flint-mines. He had explored a number of dene holes and described them in his book. Now the district through which this train had passed was peculiarly rich in dene holes; and then there was the suggestive fact that Merrill had been last seen coming out of a rope-seller’s shop. This latter fact was so important that I followed it up at once by calling at Edginton’s. There I ascertained that Merrill or his companion had bought a fifteen-fathom length of deep-sea lead-line. Now this was profoundly significant. The maximum depth of a dene hole is about seventy feet. Fifteen fathoms—ninety feet—is therefore the exact length required, allowing for loops and fastenings. This new fact converted the dene-hole hypothesis into what was virtually a certainty, especially when one considered how readily these dangerous pits lent themselves either to fatal accidents or to murder. I accordingly adopted the dene-hole suggestion as a working hypothesis.

“The next question was, ‘Where was this dene-hole?’ And an uncommonly difficult question it was. I began to fear that the inquiry would fail from the impossibility of solving it. But at this point I got some help from a new quarter. I had given the coat to Polton to extract the dust and I had told him to wash the little lumps of chalk for foraminifera.”

“What are foraminifera?” asked Brodribb.

“They are minute sea shells. Chalk js largely composed of them; and although chalk is in no sense a local rock, there is nevertheless a good deal of variation in the species of foraminifera found in different localities. So I had the chalk washed out as a matter of routine. Well, the dust was confirmatory but not illuminating. There was railway dust, of the South Eastern type—I expect you know it—chalk, loam dust, pollen-grains of the mallow and valerian (which grows in chalk-pits and railway cuttings) and some wing scales of the common blue butterfly, which haunts the chalk—I expect he had touched a dead butterfly. But all this would have answered for a good part of Kent. Then I examined the foraminifera and identified the species by the plates in Warnford’s Monograph. The result was most encouraging. There were nine species in all, and of these five were marked as ‘found in the Gravesend chalk,’ two more ‘from the Kentish chalk’ and the other two ‘from the English chalk.’ This was a very striking result. More than half the contained foraminifera were from the Gravesend chalk.

“The problem now was to determine the geologic meaning of the term Gravesend. I ruled out Rochester, as I had heard of no dene holes in that neighbourhood, and I consulted Merrill’s book and the large-scale Ordnance map. Merrill had worked in the Gravesend district and the adjacent part of Essex and he gave a list of the dene holes that he had explored, including the Clapper Napper Hole in Swanscombe Wood. But, checking his list by the Ordnance map, I found that there was one dene hole marked on the map which was not in his list. As it was evidently necessary to search all the dene holes in the district, I determined to begin with the one that he seemed to have missed. And there luck favoured us. It turned out to be the right one.”

“I don’t see that there was much luck in it,” said Brodribb. “You calculated the probabilities and adopted the greatest.”

“At any rate,” said Thorndyke, “there was Merrill and there was Crick; and as soon as I saw them I knew that Horder was the murderer. For the whole tableau had obviously been arranged to demonstrate that Crick died before Merrill and establish Horder as Merrill’s heir.”

“A diabolical plot,” commented Brodribb. “Horribly ingenious, too. By the way—which of them did die first in your opinion?”

“Merrill, I should say, undoubtedly,” replied Thorndyke.

“That will be good hearing for Crick’s next of kin,” said Brodribb. “And you haven’t done with this case yet, Thorndyke. I shall retain you on the question of survivorship.”

THE SEAL OF NEBUCHADNEZZAR (1925)

“I suppose, Thorndyke,” said I, “footprints yield quite a lot of information if you think about them enough?”

The question was called forth by the circumstance of my friend halting and stooping to examine the little pit made in the loamy soil of the path by the walking stick of some unknown wayfarer. Ever since we had entered this path—to which we had been directed by the station-master of Pinwell Junction as a short cut to our destination—I had noticed my friend scanning its surface, marked with numerous footprints, as if he were mentally reconstructing the personalities of the various travellers who had trodden it before us. This I knew to be a habit of his, almost unconsciously pursued; and the present conditions certainly favoured it, for here, as the path traversed a small wood, the slightly moist, plastic surface took impressions with the sharpness of moulding wax.

“Yes,” he answered, “but you must do more than think. You need to train your eyes to observe in conspicuous characteristics.”

“Such as these, for instance,” said. I, with a grin, pointing to a blatant print of a Cox’s “Invicta” rubber sole with its prancing-horse trade-mark.

Thorndyke smiled. “A man,” said he, “who wears a sole like that is a mere advertising agent. He who runs may read those characteristics, but as there are thousands of persons wearing ‘Invicta’ soles, the observation merely identifies the wearer as a member of a large genus. It has to be carried a good deal further to identify him as an individual; otherwise, a standardised sole is apt to be rather misleading than helpful. Its gross distinctiveness tends to divert the novice’s attention from the more specific characteristics which he would seek in a plain footprint like that of this man’s companion.”

“Why companion?” I asked. “The two men were walking the same way, but what evidence is there that they were companions?”

“A good deal, if you follow the series of tracks, as I have been doing. In the first place, there is the stride. Both men were rather tall, as shown by the size of their feet, but both have a distinctly short stride. Now the leather-soled man’s short stride is accounted for by the way in which he put down his stick. He held it stiffly, leaning upon it to some extent and helping himself with it. There is one impression of the stick to every two paces; every impression of his left foot has a stick impression opposite to it. The suggestion is that he was old, weak or infirm. But the rubber-soled man walked with his stick in the ordinary way—one stick impression to every four paces. His abnormally short stride is not to be accounted for excepting by the assumption that he stepped short to keep pace with the other man.

“Then the two sets of footprints are usually separate. Neither man has trodden nor set his stick on the other man’s tracks, excepting in those places where the path is too narrow for them to walk abreast, and there, in the one case I noticed the rubber soles treading on the prints of the leather soles, whereas at this spot the prints of the leather soles are imposed on those of the rubber soles. That, of course, is conclusive evidence that the two men were here at the same time.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “that settles the question without troubling about the stride. But after all, Thorndyke, this is a matter of reasoning, as I said; of thinking about the footprints and their meaning. No special acuteness of observation or training of vision comes into it. The mere facts are obvious enough; it is their interpretation that yields the knowledge.”

“That is true so far,” said he, “but we haven’t exhausted our material. Look carefully at the impressions of the two sticks and tell me if you see any thing remarkable in either of them?”

I stooped and examined the little pits that the two sticks had made in the path, and, to tell the truth, found them extremely unilluminating.

“They seem very much alike,” I said. “The rubber-soled man’s stick is rather larger than the other and the leather-soled man’s stick has made deeper holes—probably because it was smaller and he was leaning on it more heavily.”

Thorndyke shook his head. “You’ve missed the point, Anstey, and you’ve missed it because you have failed to observe the visible facts. It is quite a neat point, too, and might in certain circumstances be a very important one.”

“Indeed,” said I. “What is the point?”

“That,” said he, “I shall leave you to infer from the visible facts, which are these: first, the impressions of the smaller stick are on the right-hand side of the man who made them, and second, that each impression is shallowest towards the front and the right-hand side.”

I examined the impressions carefully and verified Thorndyke’s statement.

Well,” I said, “what about it? What does it prove?”

Thorndyke smiled in his exasperating fashion. “The proof,” said he, “is arrived at by reasoning from the facts. My learned friend has the facts. If he will consider them, the conclusion will emerge.”

“But,” said I, “I don’t see your drift. The impression is shallower on one side, I suppose, because the ferrule of the stick was worn away on that side. But I repeat, what about it? Do you expect me to infer why the fool that it belonged to wore his stick away all at one side?”

“Now, don’t get irritable, Anstey,” said he. “Preserve a philosophic calm. I assure you that this is quite an interesting problem.”

So it may be,” I replied. “But I’m hanged if I can imagine why he wore his stick down in that way. However, it doesn’t really matter. It isn’t my stick—and by Jingo, here is old Brodribb—caught us in the act of wasting our time on academic chin-wags and delaying his business. The debate is adjourned.”

Our discussion had brought us to the opening of the wood, which now framed the figure of the solicitor. As he caught sight of us, he hurried forward, holding out his hand.

“Good men and true!” he exclaimed. “I thought you would probably come this way, and it is very good of you to have come at all, especially as it is a mere formality.”

“What is?” asked Thorndyke. “Your telegram spoke of an ‘alleged suicide.’ I take it that there is some ground for inquiry?”

“I don’t know that there is,” replied Brodribb. “But the deceased was insured for three thousand pounds, which will be lost to the estate if the suicide is confirmed. So I put it to my fellow that it was worth an expert’s fee to make sure whether or not things are what they seem. A verdict of death by misadventure will save us three thousand pounds. Verbum sap.” As he concluded, the old lawyer winked with exaggerated cunning and stuck his elbow into my ribs.

Thorndyke ignored the facetious suggestion of bribery and corruption and inquired dryly: “What are the circumstances of the case?”

“I’d better give you a sketch of them before we get to the house,” replied Brodribb. “The dead man is Martin Rowlands, the brother of my neighbour in New Square, Tom Rowlands. Poor old Tom found the telegram waiting when he got to his office this morning and immediately rushed into my office with it and begged me to come down here with him. So I came. Couldn’t refuse a brother solicitor. He’s waiting at the house now.

“The circumstances are these. Last evening, when he had finished dinner, Rowlands went out for a walk. That is his usual habit in the summer months—it is light until nearly half-past nine nowadays. Well, that is the last time he was seen alive by the servants. No one saw him come in. But there was nothing unusual in that, for he had a private entrance to the annexe in which his library, museum and workrooms were situated, and when he returned from his walk, he usually entered the house that way and went straight to his study or workroom and spent the evening there. So the servants very seldom saw him after dinner.

“Last night he evidently followed his usual custom. But, this morning, when the housemaid went to his bedroom with his morning tea, she was astonished to find the room empty and the bed undisturbed. She at once reported to the housekeeper, and the pair made their way to the annexe. There they found the study door locked, and as there was no answer after repeated knockings, they went out into the grounds to reconnoitre. The study window was closed and fastened, but the workroom window was unbolted, so that they were able to open it from outside. Then the housemaid climbed in and went to the side door, which she opened and admitted the housekeeper. The two went to the workroom, and as the door which communicated with the study was open, they were able to enter the latter, and there they found Martin Rowlands, sitting in an arm-chair by the table, stone-dead, cold and stiff. On the table were a whisky decanter, a siphon of soda water, a box of cigars, an ash-bowl with the stump of a cigar in it, and a bottle of photographic tabloids of cyanide of potassium.

“The housekeeper immediately sent off for a doctor and dispatched a telegram to Tom Rowlands at his office. The doctor arrived about nine and decided that the deceased had been dead about twelve hours. The cause of death was apparently cyanide poisoning, but, of course, that will be ascertained or disproved by the post-mortem. Those are all the known facts at present. The doctor helped the servants to place the body on a sofa, but as it is as stiff as a frozen sheep, they might as well have left it where it was.”

“Have the police been communicated with?” I asked.

“No,” replied Brodribb. “There were no suspicious circumstances, so far as any of us could see, and I don’t know that I should have felt justified in sending for you—though I always like to have Thorndyke’s opinion in a case of sudden death—if it had not been for the insurance.”

Thorndyke nodded. “It looks like a straightforward case of suicide,” said he. “As to the state of deceased’s affairs, his brother will be able to give us any necessary information, I suppose?

“Yes,” replied Brodribb. “As a matter of fact, I think Martin has been a bit worried just lately; but Tom will tell you about that. This is the place.”

We turned in at a gateway that opened into the grounds of a substantial though unpretentious house, and as we approached the front door, it was opened by a fresh-coloured, white-haired man whom we both knew pretty well in our professional capacities. He greeted us cordially, and though he was evidently deeply shocked by the tragedy, struggled to maintain a calm, business-like manner.

“It is good of you to come down,” said he; “but I am afraid we have troubled you rather unnecessarily. Still, Brodribb thought it best—ex abundantia cautelce, you know—to have the circumstances reviewed by a competent authority. There is nothing abnormal in the affair excepting its having happened. My poor brother was the sanest of men, I should say, and we are not a suicidal family. I suppose you had better see the body first?”

As Thorndyke assented, he conducted us to the end of the hall and into the annexe, where we entered the study, the door of which was now open, though the key was still in the lock. The table still bore the things that Brodribb had described, but the chair was empty, and its late occupant lay on a sofa, covered with a large tablecloth. Thorndyke advanced to the sofa and gently drew away the cloth, revealing the body of a man, fully dressed, lying stiffly and awkwardly on its back with the feet raised and the stiffened limbs extended. There was something strangely and horribly artificial in the aspect of the corpse, for, though it was lying down, it had the posture of a seated figure, and thus bore the semblance of a hideously realistic effigy which had been picked up from a chair and laid down. I stood looking at it from a little distance with a layman’s distaste for the presence of a dead body, but still regarding it with attention and some curiosity. Presently my glance fell on the soles of the shoes—which were, indeed, exhibited plainly enough—and I noted, as an odd coincidence that they were “Invicta” rubber soles, like those which we had just been discussing in the wood; that it was even possible that those very footprints had been made by the feet of this grisly lay figure.

“I expect, Thorndyke,” Brodribb said tactfully, “you would rather make your inspection alone. If you should want us, you will find us in the dining room,” and with this he retired, taking Mr. Rowlands with him.

As soon as they were gone I drew Thorndyke’s attention to the rubber soles.

“It is a queer thing,” said I, “but we may have actually been discussing this poor fellow’s own prints.”

“As a matter of fact, we were,” he replied, pointing to a drawing-pin that had been trodden on and had stuck into one of the rubber heels. “I noticed this at the time, and apparently you did not, which illustrates what I was saying about the tendency of these very distinctive types of sole to distract attention from those individual peculiarities which are the ones that really matter.”

“Then,” said I, “if they were his footprints, the man with the remarkable stick was with him. I wonder who he was. Some neighbour who was walking home from the station with him, I expect.”

“Probably,” said Thorndyke, “and as the prints were quite recent—they might even have been made last night—that person may be wanted as a witness at the inquest as the last person who saw deceased alive. That depends on the time the prints were made.”

He walked back to the sofa and inspected the corpse very methodically, giving close attention to the mouth and hands. Then he made a general inspection of the room, examined the objects on the table and the floor under it, strayed into the adjoining workshop, where he peered into the deep laboratory sink, took an empty tumbler from a shelf, held it up to the light and inspected the shelf—where a damp ring showed that the tumbler had been put there to drain—and from the workshop wandered into a little lobby and from thence out at the side door, down the flagged path to the side gate and back again.

“It is all very negative,” he remarked discontentedly, as we returned to the study, “except that bottle of tabloids, which is pretty positive evidence of premeditation. That looks like a fresh box of cigars. Two missing. One stump in the ash-tray and more ash than one cigar would account for. However, let us go into the dining and hear what Rowlands has to tell us,” and with this he walked out and crossed the hall and I followed him.

As we entered the dining the two men looked at us and Brodribb asked: “Well, what is the verdict?”

“At present,” Thorndyke replied, “it is an open verdict. Nothing has come to light that disagrees with the obvious appearances. But I should like to hear more of the antecedents of the tragedy. You were saying that deceased had been somewhat worried lately. What does that amount to?”

It amounts to nothing,” said Rowlands “at least, I should have thought so, in the case of a level-headed man like my brother. Still as it is all there is, so far as I know, to account for what has happened, I had better give you the story. It seems trivial enough.

“Some short time ago, a Major Cohen, who h just come home from Mesopotamia, sold to dealer named Lyon a small gold cylinder seal that he had picked up in the neighbourhood of Baghdad. The Lord knows how he came by it, but he had it and he showed it to Lyon, who bought it of him for a matter of twenty pounds. Cohen, of course, knew nothing about the thing, and Lyon didn’t know much more, for although he is a dealer, he is no expert. But he is a very clever faker—or rather, I should say, restorer, for he does quite a legitimate trade. He was a jeweller and watch-jobber originally, a most ingenious workman, and his line is to buy up damaged antiques and restore them. Then he sells them to minor collectors, though quite honestly as restorations, so I oughtn’t to call him a faker. But, as I said, he has no real knowledge of antiques, and all he saw in Cohen’s seal was a gold cylinder seal, apparently ancient and genuine, and on that he bought it for about twice the value of the gold and thought no more about it.

“About a fortnight later, my brother Martin went to his shop in Petty France, Westminster, to get some repairs done, and Lyon, knowing that my brother was a collector of Babylonian antiquities, showed him the seal; and Martin, seeing at once that it was genuine and a thing of some interest and value, bought it straight-way for forty pounds without examining it at all minutely, as it was obviously worth that much in any case. But when he got home and took a rolled impression of it on moulding wax, he made a most astonishing discovery. The impression showed a mass of minute cuneiformic characters, and on deciphering these he learned with amazement and delight that this was none other than the seal of Nebuchadnezzar.

“Hardly able to believe in his good fortune, he hurried off to the British Museum and showed his treasure to the Keeper of the Babylonian Antiquities, who fully confirmed the identity of the seal and was naturally eager to acquire it for the Museum. Of course, Martin wouldn’t sell it, but he allowed the keeper to take a record of its weight and measurements and to make an impression on clay to exhibit in the case of seal-rollings.

“Meanwhile, it seems that Cohen, before disposing of the seal, had amused himself by making a number of rolled impressions on clay. Some of these he took to Lyon, who bought them for a few shillings and put one of them in his shop window as a curio. There it was seen and recognised by an American Assyriologist, who went in and bought it and then began to question Lyon closely as to whence he had obtained it. The dealer made no secret of the matter, but gave Cohen’s name and address, saying nothing, however, about the seal. In fact, he was unaware of the connection between the seal and the rollings as Cohen had sold him the latter as genuine clay tablets which he said he had found in Mesopotamia. But, of course, the expert saw that it was a recent rolling and that some one must have the seal.

“Accordingly, off he went to Cohen and questioned him closely, whereupon Cohen began to smell a rat. He admitted that he had had the seal, but refused to say what had become of it until the expert told him what it was and how much it was worth. This the expert did, very reluctantly and in strict confidence, and when Cohen learned that it was the seal of Nebuchadnezzar and that it was worth anything up to ten thousand pounds, he nearly fainted; and then he and the expert together bustled off to Lyon’s shop.

“But now Lyon smelt a rat, too. He refused absolutely to disclose the whereabouts of the seal; and having, by now, guessed that the seal-rollings were those of the seal, he took one of them to the British Museum, and then, of course, the murder was out. And further to complicate the matter, the Assyriologist, Professor Bateman, seems to have talked freely to his American friends at his hotel, with the result that Lyon’s shop was besieged by wealthy American collectors, all roaring for the seal and all perfectly regardless of cost. Finally, as they could get no change out of Lyon, they went to the British Museum, where they learned that my brother had the seal and got his address—or rather mine, for he had, fortunately for himself, given my office as his address. Then they proceeded to bombard him with letters, as also did Cohen and Lyon.

“It was an uncomfortable situation. Cohen was like a madman. He swore that Lyon had swindled him and he demanded to have the seal returned or the proper price paid. Lyon, for his part, went about like a roaring lion of Judah, making a similar demand; and the millionaire collectors offered wild sums for the seal. Poor Martin was very much worried about it. He was particularly unhappy about Cohen, who had actually found the seal and who was a disabled soldier—he had been wounded in both legs and was permanently lame. As to Lyon, he had no grievance, for he was a dealer and it was his business to know the value of his own stock; but still it was hard luck even on him. And then there were the collectors, pestering him daily with entreaties and extravagant offers. It was very worrying for him. They would probably have come down here to see him, but he kept his private address a close secret.

“I don’t know what he meant to do about it. What he did was to arrange with me for the loan of my private office and have a field day, interviewing the whole lot of them—Lyon, the Professor and the assorted millionaires. That was three days ago, and the whole boiling of them turned up; and by the same token one of them was the kind of pestilent fool that walks off with the wrong hat or umbrella.”

“Did he walk off with your hat?” asked Brodribb.

“No, but he took my stick; a nice old stick that belonged to my father.”

“What sort of stick did he leave in its place?” Thorndyke asked.

“Well,” replied Rowlands, “I must admit that there was some excuse, for the stick that he left was almost a facsimile of my own. I don’t think I should have noticed it but for the feel. When I began to walk with it, I was aware of something unusual in the feel of it.”

“Perhaps it was not quite the same length as yours,” Thorndyke suggested.

“No, it wasn’t that,” said Rowlands. “The length was all right, but there was some more subtle difference. Possibly, as I am left-handed and carry my stick on the left side, it may in the course of years have acquired a left-handed bias, if such a thing is possible. I’ll go and get the stick for you to see.”

He went out of the room and returned in a few moments with an old-fashioned Malacca cane, the ivory handle of which was secured by a broad silver band. Thorndyke took it from him and looked it over with a degree of interest and attention that rather surprised me. For the loss of Rowlands’ stick was a trivial incident and no concern of ours. Nevertheless, my colleague inspected it most methodically, handle, silver band and ferrule; especially the ferrule, which he examined as if it were quite a rare and curious object.

“You needn’t worry about your stick, Tom,” said Brodribb with a mischievous smile. “Thorndyke will get it back if you ask him nicely.”

“It oughtn’t to be very difficult,” said Thorndyke, handing back the stick,” if you have a list of the visitors who called that day.”

“Their names will be in the appointments book,” said Rowlands. “I must look them up. Some of them I remember—Cohen, Lyon, Bateman and two or three of the collectors. But to return to our history. I don’t know what passed at the interviews or what Martin intended to do, but I have no doubt he made some notes on the subject. I must search for them, for, of course, we shall have to dispose of the seal.”

“By the way,” said Thorndyke, “where is the seal?”

“Why, it is here in the safe,” replied Rowlands; “and it oughtn’t to be. It should have been taken to the bank.”

“I suppose there is no doubt that it is in the safe?” said Thorndyke.

“No,” replied Rowlands; “at least—” He stood up suddenly. “I haven’t seen it,” he said. “Perhaps we had better make sure.”

He led the way quickly to the study, where he halted and stood looking at the shrouded corpse. “The key will be in his pocket,” he said, almost in a whisper. Then, slowly and reluctantly, he approached the sofa, and gently drawing away the cover from the body, began to search the dead man’s pockets.

“Here it is,” he said at length, producing a bunch of keys and separating one, which he apparently knew. He crossed to the safe, and inserting the key, threw open the door.

“Ha!” he exclaimed with evident relief, “it is all right. Your question gave me quite a start. Is it necessary to open the packet?”

He held out a little sealed parcel on which was written “The Seal of Nebuchadnezzar,” and looked inquiringly at Thorndyke.

“You spoke of making sure,” the latter replied with a faint smile.

“Yes, I suppose it would be best,” said Rowlands; and with that, he cut the thread with which it was fastened, broke the seal and opened the package, disclosing a small cardboard box in which lay a cylindrical abject rolled up in a slip of paper.

Rowlands picked it out, and removing the paper, displayed a little cylinder of gold pitted all over with minute cuneiform characters. It was about an inch and a quarter long by half an inch thick and had a hole bored through its axis from end to end.

“This paper, I see,” said Rowlands, “contains a copy of the keeper’s description of the seal—its weight, dimensions and so on. We may as well take care of that.”

He handed the little cylinder to Thorndyke, who held it delicately in his fingers and looked at it with a gravely reflective air. Indeed, small as it was, there was some thing very impressive in its appearance and in the thought that it had been handled by and probably worn on the person of the great king in those remote, almost mythical times, so familiar and yet so immeasurably far away. So I reflected as I watched Thorndyke inspecting the venerable little object in his queer, exact, scientific way, examining the minute characters through his lens, scrutinising the ends and even peering through the central hole.

“I notice,” he said, glancing at the paper which Rowlands held, “that the keeper has given only one transverse diameter, apparently assuming that it is a true cylinder. But it isn’t. The diameter varies. It is not quite circular in section and the sides are not perfectly parallel.”

He produced his pocket calliper-gauge, and, closing the jaws on the cylinder, took the reading of the vernier. Then he turned the cylinder, on which the gauge became visibly out of contact.

“There is a difference of nearly two millimetres,” he said when he had again closed the gauge and taken the reading.

“Ah, Thorndyke,” said Brodribb,” that keeper hadn’t got your mathematically exact eye; and, in fact, the precise measurements don’t seem to matter much.”

“On the other hand,” retorted Thorndyke, “inexact measurements are of no use at all.”

When we had all handled and inspected the seal, Rowlands repacked it and returned it to the safe, and we went back to the dining-room.

“Well, Thorndyke,” said Brodribb, “how does the insurance question stand? What is our position?”

“I think,” Thorndyke replied, “that we will leave the question open until the inquest has been held. You must insist on an expert analysis, and perhaps that may throw fresh light on the matter. And now we must be off to the station. I expect you have plenty to do.”

“We have,” said Brodribb, “so I won’t offer to walk with you. You know the way.”

Politely but firmly declining Rowlands’ offer of material hospitality, Thorndyke took up his research-case, and having shaken hands with our hosts, we followed them to the door and took our departure.

“Not a very satisfactory case,” I remarked as we set forth along the road, “but you can’t make a bull’s-eye every time.”

“No,” he agreed; “you can only observe and note the facts. Which reminds me that we have some data to collect in the wood. I shall take casts of those foot prints in case they should turn out to be of importance. It is always a useful precaution, seeing that footprints are fugitive.”

It seemed to me an excessive precaution, but I made no comment; and when we arrived at the footpath through the wood and he had selected the sharpest foot prints, I watched him take out from his case the plaster-tin, water-bottle, spoon and little rubber bowl, and wondered what was in his mind. The “Invicta” footprints were obviously those of the dead man. But what if they were? And of what use were the casts of the other man’s feet? The man was unknown, and as far as I could see, there was nothing suspicious in his presence here. But when Thorndyke had poured the liquid plaster into the two pairs of footprints, he went on to a still more incomprehensible proceeding. Mixing some fresh plaster, he filled up with it two adjoining impressions of the strange man’s stick. Then, taking a reel of thread from the case, he cut off about two yards, and stretching it taut, held it exactly across the middle of the two holes, until the plaster set and fixed it in position. After waiting for the plaster to set hard, and having, meanwhile, taken up and packed the casts of the footprints, he gently raised, first the one and then the other cast; each of which was a snowy white facsimile of the tip of the stick which had made the impression the two casts, being joined by a length of thread which gave the exact distance apart of the two impressions.

“I suppose,” said I, as he made a pencil mark on one of the casts, “the thread is to show the length of the stride?”

“No,” he answered. “It is to show the exact direction in which the man was walking and to mark the front and back of the stick.”

I could make nothing of this. It was highly ingenious, but what on earth was the use of it? What could it possibly prove?

I put a few tentative questions, but could get no explanation beyond the obvious truth that it was of no use to postpone the collection of evidence until after the event. What event he was referring to, I did not gather; nor was I any further enlightened when, on arriving at Victoria, he hailed a taxicab and directed the driver to set him down at Scotland Yard.

“You had better not wait,” he said, as he got out. I have some business to talk over with Miller or the Assistant Commissioner and may be detained some time. But I shall be at home all the evening.”

Taking this as an invitation to drop in at his chambers, I did so after dinner and made another ineffectual attempt to pump him.

I am sorry to be so evasive,” said he, “but this case is so extremely speculative that I cannot come to any definite conclusion until I have more data. I may have been theorising in the air. But I am going forth tomorrow morning at half-past eight in the hope of putting some of my inferences to the test. If my learned friend would care to lend his distinguished support to the expedition, his society would be appreciated. But it will be a case of passive observation and quite possibly nothing will happen.”

“Well, I will come and look on,” said I. “Passive observation is my speciality,” and with this I took my departure, rather more mystified than ever.

Punctually, next morning at half-past eight, I arrived at the entry of Thorndyke’s chambers. A taxicab was already waiting at the kerb, and, as I stepped on the threshold, my colleague appeared on the stairs. Together we entered the cab which at once moved off, and proceeding down Middle Temple Lane to the Embankment, headed westward. Our first stopping-place was New Scotland Yard, but there Thorndyke remained only a minute or two. Our further progress was in the direction of Westminster, and in a few minutes we drew up at the corner of Petty France, where we alighted and paid off the taxi. Sauntering slowly westward and passing a large, covered car that was drawn up by the pavement, we presently encountered no less a person than Mr. Superintendent Miller, dressed in the height of fashion and smoking a cigar. The meeting was not, apparently, unexpected, for Miller began, without preamble: “It’s all right, so far, doctor, unless we are too late. It will be an awful suck-in if we are. Two plain-clothes men have been here ever since you called yesterday evening, and nothing has happened yet.”

“You mustn’t treat it as a certainty, Miller,” said Thorndyke. “We are only acting on reasonable probabilities. But it may be a false shot, after all.”

Miller smiled indulgently. “I know, sir. I’ve heard you say that sort of thing before. At any rate, he’s there at present; I saw him just now through the shop window—and, by gum! here he is!”

I followed the superintendent’s glance and saw a tallish, elderly man advancing on the opposite side of the street. He walked stiffly with the aid of a stick and with a pronounced stoop as if suffering from some weakness of the back, and he carried in his free hand a small wooden case suspended by a rug-strap. But what instantly attracted my attention was his walking-stick, which appeared, so far as I could remember, to be an exact replica of the one that Tom Rowlands had shown us.

We continued to walk westward, allowing Mr. Lyon—as I assumed him to be—to pass us. Then we turned back and followed at a little distance; and I noticed that two tall, military-looking men whom we had met kept close behind us. At the corner of Petty France Mr. Lyon hailed a taxicab; and Miller quickened his pace and bore down on the big covered car.

“Jump in,” he said, opening the door as Lyon entered the cab. “We mustn’t lose sight of him,” and with this he fairly shoved Thorndyke and me into the car, and having spoken a word to the driver, stepped in himself and was followed by the two plain-clothes men. The car started forward, and having made a spurt which brought it within a few yards of the taxi, slowed down to the pace of the latter and followed it through the increasing traffic until we turned into Whitehall, where our driver allowed the taxi to draw ahead somewhat. At Charing Cross, however, we closed up and kept immediately behind our quarry in the dense traffic of the Strand; and when it turned to cross opposite the Acropolis Hotel, we still followed and swept past it in the hotel courtyard so that we reached the main entrance first. By the time that Mr. Lyon had paid his fare we had already entered and were waiting in the hall of the hotel.

As he followed us in, he paused and looked about him until his glance fell on a stoutish, clean-shaved man who was sitting in a wicker chair, who, on catching his eye, rose and advanced towards him. At this moment Superintendent Miller touched him on the shoulder, causing him to spin round with an expression of very distinct alarm.

“Mr. Maurice Lyon, I think,” said Miller. “I am a detective officer.” He paused and looked hard at the dealer, who had turned deathly pale. Then he continued: “You are carrying a walking-stick which I believe is not your property.”

Lyon gave a gasp of relief. “You are quite right,” said he. “But I don’t know whose property it is. If you do, I shall be pleased to return it in exchange for my own, which I left by mistake.”

He held it out in an irresolute fashion, and Miller took it from him and handed it to Thorndyke.

“Is that the stick?” he asked.

Thorndyke looked the stick over quickly, and then, inverting it, made a minute examination of the ferrule, finishing up by taking its dimensions in two diameters and comparing the results with some written notes.

Mr. Lyon fidgeted impatiently. “There’s no need for all this fuss,” said he. “I have told you that the stick is not mine.”

“Quite so,” said Miller, “but we must have a few words privately about that stick.”

Here he turned to an hotel official, who had just arrived under the guidance of one of the plain-clothes men, and who suggested rather anxiously that our business would be better transacted in a private room at the back of the building than in the public hall. He was just moving off to show us the way when the clean-shaved stranger edged up to Lyon and extended his hand towards the wooden case.

“Shall I take this?” he asked suavely.

“Not just now, sir,” said Miller, firmly fending him off. “Mr. Lyon will talk to you presently.”

“But that case is my property,” the other objected truculently; “and who are you, anyway?”

“I am a police officer,” replied Miller. “But if that is your property, you had better come with us and keep an eye on it.”

I have never seen a man look more uncomfortable than did the owner of that case—with the exception of Mr. Lyon; whose complexion had once more taken on a tallowy whiteness. But as the manager led the way to the back of the hall the two men followed silently, shepherded by the superintendent and the rest of our party, until we reached a small, marble-floored lobby or ante-room, when our conductor shut us in and retired.

“Now,” said Miller, “I want to know what is in that case.”

“I can tell you,” said the stranger. “It is a piece of sculpture, and it belongs to me.”

Miller nodded. “Let us have a look at it,” said he.

There being no table, Lyon sat down on a chair, and resting the case on his knees, unfastened the straps with trembling fingers on which a drop of sweat fell now and again from his forehead. When the case was free, he opened the lid and displayed the head of a small plaster bust, a miniature copy of Donatello’s “St. Cecilia,” the shoulders of which were wedged in with balls of paper. These Lyon picked out clumsily, and when he had removed the last of them, he lifted out the bust with infinite care and held it out for Miller’s inspection. The officer took it from him tenderly—after an eager glance into the empty case—and holding it with both hands, looked at it rather blankly.

“Feels rather damp,” he remarked with a some what nonplussed air; and then he cast an obviously inquiring glance at Thorndyke, who took the bust from him, and holding it poised in the palm of his hand, appeared to be estimating its weight. Glancing past him at Lyon, I noticed with astonishment that the dealer was watching him with a ghastly stare of manifest terror, while the stranger was hardly less disturbed.

“For God’s sake, man, be careful!” the latter exclaimed, starting forward. “You’ll drop it!”

The prediction was hardly uttered before it was verified. Drop it he did; and in a perfectly deliberate, purposeful manner, so that the bust fell on its back on the marble floor and was instantly shattered into a hundred fragments. It was an amazing affair. But what followed was still more amazing. For, as the snowy fragments scattered to right and left, from one of them a little yellow metal cylinder detached itself and rolled slowly along the floor. The stranger darted forward and stooped to seize it; but Miller stooped, too, and I judged that the superintendent’s cranium was the harder, for he rose, rubbing his head with one hand and with the other holding out the cylinder to Thorndyke.

“Can you tell us what this is, doctor?” he asked.

“Yes,” was the reply. “It is the seal of Nebuchadnezzar, and it is the property of the executors of the late Martin Rowlands, who was murdered the night before last.”

As he finished speaking, Lyon slithered from his chair and lay upon the floor insensible, while the stranger made a sudden burst for the door, where he was instantly folded in the embrace of a massive plain-clothes man, who held him immovable while his colleague clicked on the handcuffs.

“So,” I remarked, as we walked home, “your casts of the stick and the footprints were not wanted after all.”

“On the contrary,” he replied,” they are wanted very much. If the seal should fail to hang Mr. Lyon, the casts will assuredly fit the rope round his neck.” (This, by the way, actually happened. The defence that Lyon received the seal from some unknown person was countered by the unexpected production in court of the casts of Lyon’s feet and the stick, which proved that the prisoner had been at Pinwell, and in the company of the deceased at or about the date of the murder, and secured his conviction.)

“By the way,” said I,” how did you fix this crime on Lyon? It began, I think, with those stick impressions in the wood. What was there peculiar about those impressions?”

“Their peculiarity was that they were the impressions of a stick which apparently did not belong to the person who was carrying it.”

“Good Lord, Thorndyke!” I exclaimed, “is that possible? How could an impression on the ground suggest ownership?

“It is a curious point,” he replied, “though essentially simple, which turns on the way in which the ferrule of a stick becomes worn. In a plain, symmetrical stick with out a handle, the ferrule wears evenly all round; but in a stick with a crook or other definite handle, which is grasped in a particular way and always put down in the same position, the ferrule becomes worn on one side—the side opposite the handle, or the front of the stick. But the important point is that the bevel of wear is not exactly opposite the handle. It is slightly to one side, for this reason. A man puts his stick down with the handle fore and aft; but as he steps forward, his hand swings away from his body, rotating the stick slightly outward. Consequently, the wear on the ferrule is slightly inward. That is to say, that in a right-handed man’s stick the wear is slightly to the left and in a left-handed man’s stick the wear is slightly to the right. But if a right-handed man walks with a left-handed stick, the impression on the ground will show the bevel of wear on the right side—which is the wrong side; and the right-handed rotation will throw it still farther to the right. Now in this case, the impressions showed a shallow part, corresponding to the bevel of wear, on the right side. Therefore it was a left-handed stick. But it was being carried in the right hand. Therefore it—apparently—did not belong to the person who was carrying it.

“Of course, as the person was unknown, the point was merely curious and did not concern us. But see how quickly circumstantial evidence mounts up. When we saw the feet of deceased, we knew that the footprints in the wood were his. Consequently the man with the stick was in his company; and that man at once came into the picture. Then Tom Rowlands told us that he had lost his stick and that he was left-handed; arid he showed us the stick that he had got in exchange, and behold! that is a right-handed stick, as I ascertained by examining the ferrule. Here, then, is a left-handed man who has lost a stick and got a right-handed one in exchange; and there, in the wood, was a right-handed man who was carrying a left-handed stick and who was in company with the deceased. It was a striking coincidence. But further, the suggestion was that this unknown man was one of those who had called at Tom’s office, and therefore one who wanted to get possession of the seal. This instantly suggested the question, Did he succeed in getting possession of the seal? We went to the safe and at once it became obvious that he did.”

“The seal in the safe was a forgery, of course?”

“Yes; and a bad forgery, though skilfully done. It was an electrotype; it was unsymmetrical; it did not agree with the keeper’s measurements; and the perforation, though soiled at the ends, was bright in the middle from the boring tool.”

“But how did you know that Lyon had made it?”

“I didn’t. But he was by far the most probable person. He had a seal-rolling, from which an electro could be made, and he had the great skill that was necessary to turn a flat electro into a cylinder. He was an experienced faker of antiques, and he was a dealer who would have facilities for getting rid of the stolen seal. But it was only a probability, though, as time pressed, we had to act on it. Of course, when we saw him with the stick in his hand, it became virtually a certainty.”

“And how did you guess that the seal was in the bust?”

“I had expected to find it enclosed in some plaster object, that being the safest way to hide it and smuggle it out of this country and into the United States. When I saw the bust, it was obvious. It was a hastily-made copy of one of Brucciani’s busts. The plaster was damp—Brucciani’s bake theirs dry—and had evidently been made only a few hours. So I broke it. If I had been mistaken 1 could have replaced it for five shillings, but the whole circumstances made it practically a certainty.”

“Have you any idea as to how Lyon administered the poison?”

“We can only surmise,” he replied. “Probably he took with him some solution of cyanide—if that was what was used—and poured it into Rowlands’ whisky when his attention was otherwise occupied. It would be quite easy; and a single gulp of a quick-acting poison like that would finish the business in a minute or two. But we are not likely ever to know the details.”

The evidence at the inquest showed that Thorndyke was probably right, and his evidence at the trial clenched the case against Lyon. As to the other man—who proved to be an American dealer well known to the New York Customs officials—the case against him broke down from lack of evidence that he was privy either to the murder or the theft. And so ended the case of Nebuchadnezzar’s seal: a case that left Mr. Brodribb more than ever convinced that Thorndyke was either gifted with a sixth sense which enabled him to smell out evidence or was in league with some familiar demon who did it for him.

PHYLLIS ANNESLEY’S PERIL (1925)

“One is sometimes disposed to regret,” said Thorndyke, as we sat waiting for the arrival of Mr. Mayfield, the solicitor, “that our practice is so largely concerned with the sordid and the unpleasant.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Medical Jurisprudence is not always a particularly delicate subject. But it is our line of practice and we have got to take it as we find it.”

“A philosophic conclusion, Jervis,” he rejoined,” and worthy of my learned friend. It happens that the most intimate contact of Law and Medicine is in crimes against the person and consequently the proper study of the Medical Jurist is crime of that type. It is a regrettable fact, but we must accept it.”

“At the same time,” said I, “there don’t seem to be any Medico-legal issues in this Bland case. The woman was obviously murdered. The only question is, who murdered her? And the answer to that question seems pretty obvious.”

“It does,” said Thorndyke. “But we shall be better able to judge when we have heard what Mayfield has to tell us. And I think I hear him coming up the stairs now.”

I rose to open the door for our visitor, and, as he entered, I looked at him curiously. Mr. Mayfield was quite a young man, and the mixture of deference and nervousness in his manner as he entered the room suggested no great professional experience.

“I am afraid, sir,” said he, taking the easy-chair that Thorndyke offered him, “that I ought to have come to you sooner, for the inquest, or, at least, the police court proceedings.”

“You reserved your defence, I think?” said Thorndyke.

“Yes,” replied the solicitor, with a wry smile. “I had to. There seemed to be nothing to say. So I put in a plea of Not Guilty and reserved the defence in the hope that something might turn up. But I am gravelled completely. It looks a perfectly hopeless case. I don’t know how it strikes you, sir.”

“I have seen only the newspaper reports,” said Thorndyke. “They are certainly not encouraging. But let us disregard them. I suggest that you recite the facts of the case and I can ask any questions that are necessary to elucidate it further.”

“Very well, sir,” said Mayfield. “Then I will begin with the disappearance of Mrs. Lucy Bland. That occurred about the eighteenth of last May. At that time she was living, apart from her husband, at Wimbledon, in furnished lodgings. After lunch on the eighteenth she went out, saying that she should not be home until nght. She was seen by someone who knew her at Wimbledon Station on the down side about three o’clock. At shortly after six probably on the same day, she went to the Post Office at Lower Ditton to buy some stamps. The postmistress, who knew her by sight, is certain that she called there, but cannot swear to the exact date. At any rate, she did not go home that night and was never seen alive again. Her landlady communicated with her husband and he at once applied to the police. But all the inquiries that were made led to nothing. She had disappeared without leaving a trace.

“The discovery was made four months later, on the sixteenth of September. On that day some workmen went to ‘The Larches,’ a smallish, old-fashioned, river side house just outside Lower Ditton, to examine the electric wiring. The house was let to a new tenant, and as the meter had shown an unaccountable leakage of current during the previous quarter, they went to see what was wrong.

“To get at the main, they had to take up part of the floor of the dining-room; and when they got the boards up, they were horrified to discover a pair of feet—evidently a woman’s feet—projecting from under the next board. They immediately went to the police station and reported what they had seen, whereupon the inspector and a sergeant accompanied them back to the house and directed them to take up several more boards—which they did; and there, jammed in between the joists, was the body of a woman who was subsequently identified as Mrs. Lucy Bland. The corpse appeared to be perfectly fresh and only quite recently dead; but at the post mortem it was discovered that it had been embalmed or preserved by injecting a solution of formaldehyde and might have been dead three or four months. The cause of death was given at the inquest as suffocation, probably preceded by the forcible administration of chloroform.”

“The house, I understand,” said Thorndyke,” belongs to one of the accused?”

“Yes. Miss Phyllis Annesley. It is her freehold, and she lived in it until recently. Last autumn, however, she took to travelling about and then partly dismantle the house and stored most of the furniture; but she kept two bedrooms furnished and the kitchen and dining, room in just usable condition, and she used to put up there for a day or two in the intervals of her journeys, either alone or with her maid.”

“And as to Miss Annesley’s relations with the Blands?”

“She had known them both for some years. With Leonard Bland she was admittedly on affectionate terms, though there is no suggestion of improper relations between them. But Bland used to visit her when she lived there and they used to go for picnics on the river in the boat belonging to the house. Mrs. Bland also occasionally visited Miss Annesley, and they seem to have been on quite civil terms. Of course, she knew about her husband’s affection for the lady, but she doesn’t seem to have had any strong feeling about it.”

“And what were the relations of the husband and wife?” asked Thorndyke.

“Rather queer. They didn’t suit one another, so they simply agreed to go their own ways. But they don’t seem to have been unfriendly, and Mr. Bland was most scrupulous in regard to his financial obligations to his wife. He not only allowed her liberal maintenance but went out of his way to make provision for her. I will give you an instance, which impressed me very much.

“An old acquaintance of his, a Mr. Julius Wicks, who had been working for some years in the film studio at Los Angeles, came to England about a year ago and proposed to Bland that they should start one or two picture theatres in the provinces, Bland to find the money—which he was able to do—and Wicks to provide the technical knowledge and do the actual management. Bland agreed, and a partnership was arranged on the basis of two-thirds of the profits to Bland and one-third to Wicks; with the proviso that if Bland should die, all his rights as partner should be vested in his wife.”

“And supposing Wicks should die?”

“Well, Wicks was not married, though he was engaged to a film actress. On his death, his share would go to Bland, and similarly, on Bland’s death, if he should die after his wife, his share would go to his partner.”

“Bland seems to have been a fairly good business man,” said I.

“Yes,” Mayfield agreed. “The arrangement was all in his favour. But he was the capitalist, you see. However, the point is that Bland was quite mindful of his wife’s interests. There was nothing like enmity.”

“Then,” said Thorndyke, “one motive is excluded. Was the question of divorce ever raised?”

It couldn’t be,” said Mayfield. “There were no grounds on either side. But it seems to have been recognised and admitted that if Bland had been free he would have married Miss Annesley. They were greatly attached to one another.”

“That seems a fairly solid motive,” said I.

“It appears to be,” Mayfield admitted. “But to me, who have known these people for years and have always had the highest opinion of them, it seems—Well, I can’t associate this atrocious crime with them at all. However, that is not to the point. I must get on with the facts.

“Very soon after the discovery at ‘The Larches,’ the police learned that there had been rumours in Lower Ditton for some time past of strange happenings at the house and that two labourers named Brodie and Stanton knew something definite. They accordingly looked up these two men and examined them separately, when both men made substantially identical statements, which were to this effect:

“About the middle of May—neither of them was able to give an exact date—between nine and ten in the evening, they were walking together along the lane in which ‘The Larches’ is situated when they saw a man lurking in the front garden of the house. As they were passing, he came to the gate and beckoned to them, and when they approached he whispered: ‘I say, mates, there’s something rummy going on in this house.’

“‘How do you know?’ asked Brodie.

“‘I’ve been looking in through a hole in the shutter,’ the man replied. ‘They seem to be hiding something under the floor. Come and have a look.’

“The two men followed him up the garden to the back of the house, where he took them to one of the windows of a ground-floor room and pointed to two holes in the outside shutters.

“‘Just take a peep in through them,’ said he.

“Each of the men put an eye to one of the holes and looked in; and this is what they both saw:—There were two rooms, communicating, with a wide arch between them. Through the arch and at the far end of the second room were two persons, a man and a woman. They were on their hands and knees, apparently doing something to the floor. Presently the man, who had on a painter’s white blouse, rose and picked up a board which he stood on end against the wall. Then he stooped again and seemed to lay hold of something that lay on the floor—something that looked like a large bundle or a roll of carpet. At this moment something passed across in front of the holes and shut out the view—so that there must have been a third person in the room. When the obstructing body moved away again, the man was kneeling on the floor looking down at the bundle and the woman had come forward and was standing just in the arch with a pair of pincers in her hand. She was dressed in a spotted pinafore with a white sailor collar, and both the men recognised her at once as Miss Annesley.”

“They knew her by sight, then?” said Thorndyke.

“Yes. They were Ditton men. It is a small place and everybody in it must have known Miss Annesley and Bland, too, for that matter. Well, they saw her standing in the archway quite distinctly. Neither of the men has the least doubt as to her identity. They watched her for perhaps half a minute. Then the invisible person inside moved in front of the peepholes and shut out the scene.

“When the obstruction moved away, the woman was back in the farther room, kneeling on the floor. The bundle had disappeared and the man was in the act of taking the board, which he had rested against the wall, and laying it in its place in the floor. After this, the obstruction kept coming and going, so that the watchers only got occasional glimpses of what was going on. They saw the man apparently hammering nails into the floor and they heard faint sounds of knocking. On one occasion, towards the end of the proceedings, they saw the man standing in the archway with his face towards them, apparently looking at something in his hand. They couldn’t see what the thing was, but they clearly recognised the man as Mr. Bland, whom they both knew well by sight. Then the view was shut out again, and when they next saw Mr. Bland, he was standing by Miss Annesley in the farther room, looking down at the floor and taking off his blouse. As it seemed that the business was over and that Bland and Miss Annesley would probably be coming out, the men thought it best to clear off, lest they should be seen.

“As they walked up the lane, they discussed the mysterious proceedings that they had witnessed, but could make nothing of them. The stranger suggested that perhaps Miss Annesley was hiding her plate or valuables to keep them safe while she was travelling, and hinted that it might be worth someone’s while to take the floor up later on and see what was there. But this suggestion Brodie and Stanton, who are most respectable men, condemned strongly, and they agreed that, as the affair was no concern of theirs, they had better say nothing about it. But they evidently must have talked to some extent, for the affair got to be spoken about in the village, and, of course, when the body was discovered under the floor, the gossip soon reached the ears of the police.”

“Has the third man come forward to give evidence?” Thorndyke asked.

“No, he has not been found yet. He was a stranger to both the men; apparently a labourer or farm-hand on tramp. But nothing is known about him. So that is the case; and it is about as hopeless as it is possible to be. Of course, there is the known character of the accused; but against that is a perfectly intelligible motive and the evidence of two eye-witnesses. Do you think you would be disposed to undertake the defence, sir? I realise that it is asking a great deal of you.”

“I should like to think the matter over,” said Thorndyke, “and make a few preliminary inquiries. And I should want to read over the depositions in full detail. Can you let me have them?”

“I have a verbatim report of the police court proceedings and of the inquest. I will leave them with you now. And when may I hope to have your decision?”

“By the day after tomorrow at the latest,” was the reply, on which the young solicitor produced a bundle of papers from his bag, and having laid them on the table, thanked us both and took his leave.

“Well, Thorndyke,” I said when Mayfield had gone, “I am fairly mystified. I know you would not undertake a merely formal defence, but what else you could do is, I must confess, beyond my imagination. It seems to me that the prosecution have only to call the witnesses and the verdict of ‘Guilty’ follows automatically.”

“That is how it appears to me,” said Thorndyke. “And if it still appears so when I have read the reports and made my preliminary investigations, I shall decline the brief. But appearances are sometimes misleading.”

With this he took the reports and the notebook, in which he had made a few brief memoranda of Mayfield’s summary of the case, and drawing a chair to the table, proceeded, with quiet concentration, to read through and make notes on the evidence. When he had finished, he passed the reports to me and rose, pocketing his note book and glancing at his watch.

“Read the evidence through carefully, Jervis,” said he,” and tell me if you see any possible way out. I have one or two calls to make, but I shall not be more than an hour. When I come back, I should like to hear your views on the case.”

During his absence I read the reports through with the closest attention. Something in Thorndyke’s tone had seemed to hint at a possible flaw in the case for the prosecution. But I could find no escape from the conviction that these two persons were guilty. The reports merely amplified what Mayfield had told us; and the added detail, especially in the case of the eye witnesses, only made the evidence more conclusive. I could not see the material for even a formal defence.

In less than an hour my colleague re-entered the room, and I was about to give him my impressions of the evidence when he said “It is rather early, Jervis, but I think we had better go and get some lunch. I have arranged to go down to Ditton this afternoon and have a look at the house. Mayfield has given me a note to the police sergeant, who has the key and is virtually in possession.”

“I don’t see what you will gain by looking at the house,” said I.

“Neither do I,” he replied. “But it is a good rule always to inspect the scene of a crime and o the evidence as far as possible.”

“Well,” I said, “it is a forlorn hope. I have read through the evidence and it seems to me that the accused are as good as convicted. I can see no line of defence at all. Can you?”

“At present I cannot,” he replied. “But there are one or two points that I should like to clear up before I decide whether or not to undertake the defence. And I have a great belief in first-hand observation.”

We consumed a simplified lunch at one of our regular haunts in Fleet Street and from thence were conveyed by a taxi to Waterloo, where we caught the selected train to Lower Ditton. I had put the reports in my pocket, and during our journey I read them over again, to see if I could discover any point that would be cleared up by an inspection of the premises.

For, in spite of the rather vague purpose implied by Thorndyke’s explanation, something in my colleague’s manner, coupled with long experience of his method made me suspect that he had some definite object in L view. But nothing was said by either of us during the journey, nor did we discuss the case; indeed, so far as 1 could see, there was nothing to discuss.

Our reception at the Lower Ditton Police Station was something more than cordial. The sergeant recognised Thorndyke instantly—it appeared that he was an enthusiastic admirer of my colleague—and after a brief glance at Mayfield’s note, took a key from his desk and put on his helmet.

“Lord bless you, sir,” said he, “I don’t need to be told who you are. I’ve seen you in court, and heard you. I’ll come along with you to the house myself.”

I suspected that Thorndyke would have gladly dispensed with this attention, but he accepted it with genial courtesy, and we went forth through the village and along the quiet lane in which the ill-omened house was situated. And as we went, the sergeant commented on the case with curiously unofficial freedom.

“You’ve got your work cut out, sir, if you are going to conduct the defence. But I wish you luck. I’ve known Miss Annesley for some years—she was well known in the village here—and a nicer, gentler, more pleasant lady you wouldn’t wish to meet. To think of her in connection with a murder—and such a murder, too—such a brutal, callous affair! Well, it’s beyond me. And yet there it is, unless those two men are lying.”

“Is there any reason to suppose that they are?” I asked.

“Well, no; there isn’t. They are good, sober, decent men. And it would be such an atrociously wicked lie. And they both knew the prisoners, and liked them. Everybody liked Mr. Bland and Miss Annesley, though their friendship for one another may not have been quite in order. But I can tell you, sir, these two men are frightfully cut up at having to give evidence. This is the house!”

He opened a gate and we entered the garden, beyond which was a smallish, old-fashioned house, of which the ground-floor windows were protected by outside shutters. We walked round to the back of the house, where was another garden with a lawn and a path leading down to the river.

“Is that a boat-house?” Thorndyke asked, pointing to a small gable that appeared above a clump of lilac bushes.

“Yes, replied the sergeant. “And there is a boat in it; a good, beamy, comfortable tub that Miss Annesley and her friend used to go out picnicking in. This is the window that the men peeped in at, but you can’t see much now because the room is all dark.”

I looked at the two French windows, which opened on to the lawn, and reflected on this new instance of the folly of wrong-doers. Each window was fitted with a pair of strong shutters, which bolted on the inside, and each shutter was pierced, about five feet from the sill, by a circular hole a little over an inch in diameter. It seemed incredible that two sane persons, engaged in the concealment of a murdered body, should have left those four holes uncovered for any chance eavesdropper to spy on their doings.

But my astonishment at this lack of precaution was still greater when the sergeant admitted us and we stood inside the room, for both the windows, as well as the pair in the farther room, were furnished with heavy curtains.

“Yes,” said the sergeant, in answer to my comment “it’s a queer thing how people overlook matters of vital importance. You see, they drew the drawing-room curtains all right, but they forgot these. Is there anything in particular that you want to see, sir?”

“I should like to see where the body was hidden,’ said Thorndyke, “but I will just look round the rooms first.”

He walked slowly to and fro, looking about him and evidently fixing the appearance of the rooms on his memory. Not that there was much to see or remember. The two nearly square rooms communicated through a wide arch, once closed by curtains, as shown by the brass curtain-rod. The back room had been completely dismantled with the exception of the window curtains, but the front room, although the floor and the walls, were bare, was not entirely unfurnished. The sideboard was still in position and bore at each end a tall electric light standard, as did also the mantelpiece. There were three dining chairs and a good-sized gate-leg table stood closed against the wall.

“I see you have not had the floor-boards nailed down,” said Thorndyke.

“No, sir; not yet. So we can see where the body was hidden and where the electric main is. The electricians took up the wrong board at first—that is how they came to discover the body. And one of them said that the boards over the main had been raised recently, and he thought that the—er—the accused had meant to hide the body there, but when they got the floor up they struck the main and had to choose a fresh place.”

He stooped, and lifting the loose boards, which he stood on end against the mantelpiece, exposed the joists and the earth floor about a foot below them. In one of the spaces the electric main ran and in the adjoining one the apparently disused gas main.

“This is where we found poor Mrs. Bland,” said the sergeant, pointing to an empty space. “It was an awful sight. Gave me quite a turn. The poor lady was lying on her side jammed down between the joists and her nose flattened up against one of the timbers. They must have been brutes that did it, and I can’t—I really can’t believe that Miss Annesley was one of them.”

“It looks a narrow place for a body to lie in,” said I.

“The joists are sixteen inches apart,” said Thorndyke, laying his pocket rule across the space, “and two and a half inches thick. Heavy timber and wide spaces.”

He stood up, and turning round, looked towards the windows of the back room. I followed his glance and noted, almost with a start, the two holes in the shutter of the left-hand window (the right-hand window, of course, from outside) glaring into the darkened room like a pair of inquisitive, accusing eyes. The holes in the other window were hardly visible, and the reason for the difference was obvious. The one window had small panes and thick muntins, or sash-bars, whereas the other was glazed, with large sheets of plate glass and had no muntins.

“Of course it would be dark at the time,” I said in response to his unspoken comment, “and this room would be lighted up, more or less.”

“Not so very dark in May,” he replied. “There is a furnished bedroom, isn’t there, sergeant?”

“Two, sir,” was the reply; and the sergeant forthwith opened the door and led the way across the hall and up the stairs.

“This is Miss Annesley’s room,” he said, opening a door gingerly and peering in.

We entered the room and looked about us with vague curiosity. It was a simply-furnished room, but dainty and tasteful, with its small four-post bedstead, light easy-chair and little, ladylike writing-table.

“That’s Mr. Bland,” said the sergeant, pointing to a double photograph-frame on the table, “and the lady is Miss Annesley herself.”

I took up the frame and looked curio at the two portraits. For a pair of murderers they were certainly uncommonly prepossessing. The man, who looked about thirty-five, was a typical good-looking, middle-class Englishman, while the woman was distinctly handsome, with a thoughtful, refined and gentle cast of face.

“She has something of a Japanese air,” said I, “with that coil on the top of the head and the big ivory hairpin stuck through it.”

I passed the frame to Thorndyke, who regarded each portrait attentively, and then, taking both photograph out of the frame, closely examined each in turn, back and front, before replacing them.

“The other bedroom,” said the sergeant as Thorndyke laid down the frame, “is the spare room. There’s nothing to see in it.”

Nevertheless he conducted us into it, and when we I had verified his statement we returned downstairs.

“Before we go,” said Thorndyke, “I will just see what is opposite those holes.”

He walked to the window and was just looking out through one of the holes when the sergeant, who had followed him closely, suddenly slid along the floor and nearly fell.

“Well, I never!” he exclaimed, recovering himself and stooping to pick up some small object. “There’s a dangerous thing to leave lying about the floor. Bit of slate pencil—at least, that is what it looks like.”

He handed it to Thorndyke, who glanced at it and remarked “Yes, things that roll under the foot are apt to produce broken bones; but I think you had better take care of it. I may have to ask you something about it at the trial.”

We bade the sergeant farewell at the bottom of the lane, and as we turned into the footpath to the station I said: “We don’t seem to have picked up very much more than Mayfield told us—excepting that bit of slate pencil. By the way, why did you tell the sergeant to keep it?”

“On the broad principle of keeping everything, relevant or irrelevant. But it wasn’t slate pencil; it was a fragment of a small carbon rod.”

“Presumably dropped by the electricians who had been working in the room,” said I, and then asked “Have you come to any decision about this case?”

“Yes; I shall undertake the defence.”

“Well,” I said, “I can’t imagine what line you will take. Strong suspicion would have fallen on these two persons even if there had been no witnesses; but the evidence of those two eye-witnesses seems to clench the matter.”

“Precisely,” said Thorndyke. “That is my position. I rest my case on the evidence of those two men—as I hope it will appear under cross-examination.”

This statement of Thorndyke’s gave me much food or reflection during the days that followed. But it was not very nourishing food, for the case still remained perfectly incomprehensible. To be sure, if the evidence of the two eye-witnesses could be shown to be false, the ease against the prisoners would break down, since it would bring another suspected person into view. But their evidence was clearly not false. They were men of known respectability and no one doubted the truth of their statements.

Nor was the obscurity of the case lightened in any way by Thorndyke’s proceedings. We called together on the two prisoners, but from neither did we elicit any fresh facts. Neither could establish a clear alibi or suggest any explanation of the eye-witnesses’ statements. They gave a simple denial of having been in the house at that time or of having ever taken up the floor.

Both prisoners, however, impressed me favourably. Bland, whom we interviewed at Brixton, seemed a pleasant, manly fellow, frank and straightforward though quite shrewd and business-like; while Miss Annesley, whom we saw at Holloway, was a really charming young lady—sweet-faced, dignified and very gracious and gentle in manner. In one respect, indeed, I found her disappointing. The picturesque coil had disappeared from the top of her head and her hair had been shortened (“bobbed” is, I believe, the correct term) into a mere fringe. Thorndyke also noticed the change, and in fact commented on it.

“Yes,” she admitted, “it is a disimprovement in my case. It doesn’t suit me. But I really had no choice. When I was in Paris in the spring I had an accident. I was having my hair cleaned with petrol when it caught fire. It was most alarming. The hairdresser had the presence of mind to throw a damp towel over my head, and that saved my life. But my hair was nearly all burnt. There was nothing for it but to have it trimmed as evenly as possible. But it looked horrid at first. I had my photograph taken by Barton soon after I came home, just as a record, you know, and it looks awfully odd. I look like a Bluecoat boy.”

“By the way,” said Thorndyke, “when did you return?”

“I landed in England about the middle of April and went straight to my little flat at Paddington, where I have been living ever since.”

“You don’t remember where you were on the eighteenth of May?

“I was living at my flat, but I can’t remember what I did on that day. You don’t, as a rule, unless you keep a diary, which I do not.”

This was not very promising. As we came away from the prison, I felt, on the one hand, a conviction that this sweet, gracious lady could have had no hand in this horrible crime, and on the other an utter despair of extricating her from the web of circumstances in which she had become enmeshed.

From Thorndyke I could gather nothing, except that he was going on with his investigations—a significant fact, in his case. To my artfully disguised questions he had one invariable reply: “My dear Jervis, you have read the evidence, you have seen the house, you have all the facts. Think the case over and consider the possibilities of cross-examination.” And that was all I could get out of him.

He was certainly very busy, but his activities only increased my bewilderment. He sent a well-known architect down to make a scale-plan of the house and grounds; and he dispatched Polton to take photographs of the place from every possible point of view. The latter, indeed, was up to his eyes in work, and enjoying himself amazingly, but as secret as an oyster. As he went about, beaming with happiness and crinkling with self-complacency, he exasperated me to that extent that I could have banged his little head against the wall. In short, though I had watched the development of the case from the beginning, I was still without a glimmer of understanding of it even when I took my seat in court on the morning of the trial.

It was a memorable occasion, and every incident in it is still vivid in my memory. Particularly do I remember looking with a sort of horrified fascination at the female prisoner, standing by her friend in the dock, pale but composed and looking the very type and picture of womanly beauty and dignity; and reflecting with a shudder that the graceful neck—looking longer and more slender from the shortness of the hair—might very probably be, within a matter of days, encircled by the hangman’s rope. These lugubrious reflections were interrupted by the entrance of two persons, a man and a woman, who were apparently connected with the case, since as they took their seats they both looked towards the dock and exchanged silent greetings with the prisoners.

“Do you know who those people are, Mayfield?” I asked.

“That is Mr. Julius Wicks, Mr. Bland’s partner, and his fiancée, Miss Eugenia Kropp, the film actress,” he replied.

I was about to ask him if they were here to give evidence when, the preliminaries having come to an end, the counsel for the Crown, Sir John Turville, rose and began his opening speech.

It was a good speech and eminently correct; but its very moderation made it the more damaging. It began with an outline of the facts, almost identical with Mayfield’s summary, and a statement of the evidence which would presently be given by the principal witnesses.

“And now,” said Sir John, when he had finished his recital, “let us bring these facts to a focus. Considered as a related group, this is what they show us. On the sixteenth of September there is found, concealed under the floor of a certain room in a certain house, the body of a woman who has evidently been murdered. That woman is the separated wife of a man who is on affectionate terms with another woman whom he would admittedly wish to marry and who would be willing to marry him. This murdered woman is, in short, the obstacle to the marriage desired by these two persons. Now the house in which the corpse is concealed is the property of one of those two persons, and both of them have access to it; and no other person has access to it. Here, then, to begin with, is a set of profoundly suspicious circumstances.

“But there are others far more significant. That unfortunate lady, the unwanted wife of the prisoner, Bland, disappeared mysteriously on the eighteenth of last May; and witnesses will prove that the body was deposited under the floor on or about that date. Now, on or about that same date, in that same house, in that same room, in the same part of that room, those two persons, the prisoners at the bar, were seen by two eminently respectable witnesses in the act of concealing some large object under the floor. What could that object have been? The floor of the room has been taken up and nothing whatever but the corpse of this poor murdered lady has been found under it. The irresistible conclusion is that those two persons were then and there engaged in concealing that corpse.

“To sum up, then, the reasons or believing that the prisoners are guilty of the crime with which they are charged are threefold. They had an intelligible and strong motive to commit that crime; they had the opportunity to commit it; and we have evidence from two eye-witnesses which makes it practically an observed fact that the prisoners did actually commit that crime.”

As the Crown counsel sat down, pending the swearing of the first witness, I turned to Thorndyke and said anxiously: “I can’t imagine what you are going to reply to that.”

“My reply,” he answered quietly, “will be largely governed by what I am able to elicit in cross-examination.” Here the first witness was called—the electrician who discovered the body—and gave his evidence, but Thorndyke made no cross-examination. He was followed by the sergeant, who described the discovery in more detail. As the Crown counsel sat down, Thorndyke rose, and I pricked up my ears.

“Have you mentioned everything that you saw or found in this room?” he asked.

“Yes, at that time. Later—on the second of October—I found a small piece of a carbon pencil on the floor of the front room near the window.”

He produced from his pocket an envelope from which he extracted the fragment of the alleged “slate pencil” and passed it to Thorndyke, who, having passed to the judge with the intimation that he wished it to be put in evidence, sat down. The judge inspected the fragment curiously and then cast an inquisitive glance at Thorndyke—as he had done once or twice before. For my colleague’s appearance in the role of counsel was a rare event, and one usually productive of surprises.

To the long succession of witnesses who followed Thorndyke listened attentively but did not cross-examine, I saw the judge look at him curiously from time to time and my own curiosity grew more and more intense. Evidently he was saving himself up for the crucial witnesses. At length the name of James Brodie was called, and a serious-looking elderly workman entered the box. He gave his evidence clearly and confidently, though with manifest reluctance, and I could see that his vivid description of that sinister scene made a great impression on the jury. When the examination in chief was finished, Thorndyke rose, and the judge settled himself to listen with an air of close attention.

“Have you ever been inside ‘The Larches’?” Thorndyke asked.

“No, sir. I’ve passed the house twice every day for years, but I’ve never been inside it.”

“When you looked in through the shutter, was the room well lighted?”

“No, ’twas very dim. I could only just see what the people were doing.”

“Yet you recognised Miss Annesley quite clearly?”

“Not at first, I didn’t. Not until she came and stood in the archway. The light seemed quite good there.”

“Did you see her come out of the front room and walk to the arch?”

“No. I saw her in the front room and then something must have stopped up the hole, for ’twas all dark. Then the hole got clear again and I saw her standing in the arch. But I only saw her for a moment or two. Then the hole got stopped again and when it opened she was back in the front room.”

“How did you know that the woman in the front room was Miss Annesley? Could you see her face in that dim light?”

“No, but I could tell her by her dress. She wore a striped pinafore with a big, white sailor-collar. Besides, there wasn’t nobody else there.”

“And with regard to Mr. Bland. Did you see him walk out of the front room and up to the arch?”

“No. ’Twas the same as with Miss Annesley. Something kept passing across the hole. I see him in the front room; then I see him in the arch and then I see him in the front room again.”

“When they were in the archway, were they moving or standing still?”

“They both seemed to be standing quite still.”

“Was Miss Annesley looking straight towards you?”

“No. Her face was turned away a little.”

“I want you to look at these photographs and tell us if any of them shows the head in the position in which you saw it.”

He handed a bundle of photographs to the witness, who looked at them, one after another, and at length picked out one.

“That is exactly how she looked,” said he. “She might have been standing for this very picture.”

He passed the photograph to Thorndyke, who noted the number written on it and passed it to the judge, who also noted the number and laid it on his desk. Thorndyke then resumed: “You say the light was very dim in the front room. Were the electric lamps alight?”

“None that I could see were alight.”

“How many electric lamps could you see?”

“Well, there was three hanging from the ceiling and there was two standards on the mantelpiece and one on the sideboard. None of them was alight.”

“Was there only one standard on the sideboard?”

“There may have been more, but I couldn’t see ’em because I could only see just one corner of the sideboard.”

“Could you see the whole of the mantelpiece?”

“Yes. There was a standard lamp at each end.”

“Could you see anything on the near side of the mantelpiece?”

“There was a table there: a folding table with twisted legs. But I could only see part of that. The side of the arch cut it off.”

“You have said that you could see Miss Annesley quite clearly and could see how she was dressed. Could you see how her hair was arranged?”

“Yes. ’Twas done up on the top of her head in what they calls a bun and there was a sort of a skewer stuck through it.”

As the witness gave this answer, a light broke on me. Not a very clear light, for the mystery was still unsolved. But I could see that Thorndyke had a very definite strategic plan. And, glancing at the dock, I was immediately aware that the prisoners had seen the light, too.

“You have described what looked like a hole in the floor,” Thorndyke resumed, “where some boards had been raised, near the middle of the room. Was that hole nearer the sideboard or nearer the mantel piece?”

“It was nearer the mantelpiece,” the witness replied; on which Thorndyke sat down, the witness left the box, and both the judge and the counsel for the prosecution rapidly turned over their notes with evident surprise.

The next witness was Albert Stanton and his evidence was virtually a repetition of Brodie’s; and when, in cross Thorndyke put over again the same series of questions, he elicited precisely the same answers even to the recognition of the same photograph. And again I began to see a glimmer of light. But only a glimmer.

Stanton being the last of the witnesses for the Crown, his brief re-examination by Sir John Turville completed the case for the prosecution. Thereupon Thorndyke rose and announced that he called witnesses, and forth with the first of them appeared in the box. This was Frederick Stokes, A.R.I.B.A., architect, and he deposed that he had made a careful survey of the house called “The Larches” at Lower Ditton and prepared a plan on the scale of half an inch to a foot. He swore that the plan—of which he produced the original and a number of lithographed duplicates—was true and exact in every respect. Thorndyke took the plans from him and passing them to the judge asked that the original should be put in evidence and the duplicates handed to the jury.

The next witness was Joseph Barton of Kensington, photographer. He deposed to having taken photographs of Miss Annesley on various occasions, the last being on the twenty-third of last April. He produced copies of them all with the date written on each. He swore that the dates written were the correct dates. The photographs were handed up to the judge, who looked them over, one by one. Suddenly he seemed, as it were, to stiffen and turned quickly from the photographs to his notes; and I knew that he had struck the last portrait—the one with the short hair.

As the photographer left the box, his place was taken by no less a person than our ingenious laboratory assistant; who, having taken his place, beamed on the judge, the jury and the court in general, with a face wreathed in crinkly smiles. Nathaniel Polton, being sworn, deposed that, on the fifteenth of October, he proceeded to “The Larches” at Lower Ditton and took three photographs of the ground-floor rooms. The first was taken through the right-hand hole of the shutter marked A in the plan; the second through the left-hand hole, and the third from a point inside the back room between the windows and nearer to the window marked B. He produced those photographs with the particulars written on each. He had also made some composite photographs showing the two prisoners dressed as the witnesses, Brodie and Stanton, had described them. The bodies in those photographs were the bodies of Miss Winifred Blake and Mr. Robert Anstey, K.C., respectively. On these bodies the heads of the prisoners had been printed; and here Polton described the method of substitution in detail. The purpose of the photographs was to show that a photograph could be produced with the head of one person and the body of another. He also deposed to having seen and taken possession of two photographs, one of each of the two prisoners, which he found in the bedroom and which he now produced and passed to the judge. And this completed his evidence.

Thorndyke now called the prisoner, Bland, and having elicited from him a sworn denial of the charge, proceeded to examine him respecting the profits from his three picture theatres; which, it appeared, amount to over six thousand pounds per annum.

“In the event of your death, what becomes of this valuable property?”

“If my wife had been alive it would have gone to her, but as she is dead, it goes to my partner and manager, Mr. Julius Wicks.”

“In whose custody was the house at Ditton while Miss Annesley was in France?”

“In mine. The keys were in my possession.”

“Were the keys ever out of your possession?”

Only for one day. My partner, Mr. Wicks, asked to be allowed to use the boat for a trip on the river and to take a meal in the house. So lent him the keys, which he returned the next day.”

After a short cross-examination, Bland returned to the dock and was succeeded by Miss Annesley, who, having given a sworn denial of the charge, described her movements in France and in London about the period of the crime. She also described, in answer to a question, the circumstances under which she had lost her hair.

“Can you remember the date on which this accident happened?” Thorndyke asked.

“Yes. It was on the thirtieth of March. I made a note of the date, so that I could see how long my hair took to grow.”

As Thorndyke sat down, the counsel for the prosecution rose and made a somewhat searching cross-examination, but without in any way shaking the prisoner’s evidence. When this was concluded and Miss Annesley had returned to the dock, Thorndyke rose to address the court for the defence.

“I shall not occupy your time, gentlemen,” he began, “by examining the whole mass of evidence nor by arguing the question of motive. The guilt or innocence of the prisoners turns on the accuracy or inaccuracy of the evidence of the two witnesses, Brodie and Stanton; and to the examination of that evidence I shall confine myself.

“Now that evidence, as you may have noticed, presents some remarkable discrepancies. In the first place, both witnesses describe what they saw in identical terms. They saw exactly the same things in exactly the same relative positions. But this is a physical impossibility, if they were really looking into a room; for they were looking in from different points of view; through different holes, which were two feet six inches apart. But there is another much more striking discrepancy. Both these men have described, most intelligently, fully and clearly, a number of objects in that room which were totally invisible to both of them; and they have described as only partly visible other objects which were in full view. Both witnesses, for instance, have described the mantelpiece with its two standard lamps and a table with twisted legs on the near side of it; and both saw one corner only of the sideboard. But if you look at the architect’s plan and test it with a straight-edge, you will see that neither the mantelpiece nor the table could possibly be seen by either. The whole of that side of the room was hidden from them by the jamb of the arch. While as to the sideboard, the whole of it, with its two standards, was visible to Brodie, and to Stanton the whole of it excepting a small portion of the near side. But further, if you lay the straight-edge on the point marked C and test it against the sides of the arch, you will see that a person standing at that spot would get the exact view described by both the witnesses. I pass round duplicate plans with pencil lines ruled on them; but in case you find any difficulty in following the plans, I have put in the photographs of the room taken by Polton. The first photograph was taken through the hole used by Brodie, and shows exactly what he would have seen on looking through that hole; and you see that it agrees completely with the plan but disagrees totally with his description. The second photograph shows what was visible to Stanton; and the third photograph, taken from the point marked C, shows exactly the view described by both the witnesses, but which neither of them could possibly have seen under the circumstances stated.

“Now what is the explanation of these extraordinary discrepancies? No one, I suppose, doubts the honesty of, these witnesses. I certainly do not. I have no doubt whatever that they were telling the truth to the best of their belief. Yet they have stated that they saw things which it is physically impossible that they could have seen. How can these amazing contradictions be reconciled?”

He paused, and in the breathless silence, I noticed that the judge was gazing at him with an expression of intense expectancy; an expression that was reflected on the jury and indeed on every person present.

“Well, gentlemen,” he resumed, “there is one explanation which completely reconciles these contradictions; and that explanation also reconciles all the other strange contradictions and discrepancies which you may have noticed. If we assume that these two men, instead of looking through an arch into a room, as they believed, were really looking at a moving picture thrown on a screen stretched across the arch, all the contradictions vanish. Everything becomes perfectly plain, consistent and understandable.

“Thus both men, from two different points of view, saw exactly the same scene; naturally, if they were both looking at the same picture, but otherwise quite impossible. Again, both men, from the point A, saw a view which was visible only from the point C. Perfectly natural if they were both looking at a picture taken from the point C; for a picture is the same picture from whatever point of view it is seen. But otherwise a physical impossibility.

“You may object that these men would have seen the difference between a picture and a real room. Per haps they would, even in that dim light—if they had looked at the scene with both eyes. But each man was looking with only one eye—through a small hole. Now it requires the use of both eyes to distinguish between a solid object and a flat picture. To a one-eyed man there is no difference—which is probably the reason that one-eyed artists are such accurate draughtsmen—they see the world around them as a flat picture, just as they draw it, whereas a two-eyed artist has to turn the solid into the flat. For the same reason, if you look at a picture with one eye shut it tends to look solid, really because the frame and the solid objects around it have gone flat. So that, if this picture was coloured, as it must have been, it would have been indistinguishable, to these one-eyed observers, from the solid reality.

“Then, let us see how the other contradictions disappear. There is the appearance of the prisoner Annesley. She was seen—on or after the eighteenth of May—with her long hair coiled on the top of her head. But at that date her hair was quite short. You have heard the evidence and you have the photograph taken on the twenty-third of April showing her with short hair, like a man’s. Here is a contradiction which vanishes at once if you realise that these men were not looking at Miss Annesley at all, but at a photograph of her taken more than a year previously.

“And everything agrees with this assumption. The appearance of Miss Annesley has been declared by the witnesses to be identical with that photograph—a copy of which was in the house and could have been copied by anyone who had access to the house. Her figure was perfectly stationary. She appeared suddenly in the arch and then disappeared; she was not seen to come or to go. And the light kept coming and going, with intervals of darkness which are inexplicable, but that exactly fitted these appearances and disappearances. Then the figure was well lighted, though the room was nearly dark. Of course it was well lighted. It had to be recognised. And of course the rest of the room was dimly lighted, because the film-actors in the background had to be unrecognised.

“Then there is the extraordinary dress; the striped pinafore with the great white collar and the painter’s blouse worn by Bland. Why this ridiculous masquerade? Its purpose is obvious. It was to make these observers believe that the portraits in the arch—which they mistook for real people—were the same persons as the film-actors in the background, whose features they could not distinguish. And Mr. Polton has shown us how the clothing of the portraits was managed.

“Then there is the lighting of the room. How was it lighted? None of the electric lamps was alight. But—a piece of a carbon pencil from an arc lamp, such as kinematographers use, has been found near the point C, from which spot the picture would have been taken and exhibited; and the electric light meter showed, about this date, an unaccountable leakage of current such as would be explained by the use of an arc lamp.

“Then the evidence of the witnesses shows the hole in the floor in the wrong place. Of course it could not have been a real hole, for the gas and electric mains were just underneath. It was probably an oblong of black paper. But why was it in the wrong place? The explanation, I suggest, is that the picture was taken before the murder (and probably shown before the murder, too); that the spot shown was the one in which it was intended to bury the body, but that when the floor was taken up after the murder, the mains were found underneath and a new spot had to be chosen.

“Finally—as to the discrepancies—what has become of the third spectator? The mysterious man who came to the gate and called in these two men from the lane—along which they were known to pass every day at about the same time? Who is this mysterious individual? And where is he? Can we give him a name? Can we say that he is at this moment in this court, sitting amongst the spectators, listening to the pleadings in defence of his innocent victims, the prisoners who stand at the bar on their deliverance? I affirm, gentlemen, that we can. And more than that it is not permitted to me to say.”

He paused, and a strange, impressive hush fell on the court. Men and women furtively looked about them; the jury stared openly into the body of the court, and the judge, looking up from his notes, cast a searching glance among the spectators. Suddenly my eye lighted on Mr. Wicks and his fiancée. The man was wiping away the sweat that streamed down his ashen, ghastly face; the woman had rested her head in her hands, and was trembling as if in an ague-fit.

I was not the only observer. One after another—spectators, ushers, jurymen, counsel, judge—noticed the terror-stricken pair, until every eye in the court was turned on them. And the silence that fell on the place was like the silence of the grave.

It was a dramatic moment. The air was electric; the crowded court tense with emotion. And Thorndyke, looking, with his commanding figure and severe impassive face, like a personification of Fate and Justices stood awhile motionless and silent, letting emotion set the coping-stone on reason.

At length he resumed his address. “Before concluding,” he began, “I have to say a few words on another aspect of the case. The learned counsel for the prosecution, referring to the motive for this crime, has suggested a desire on the part of the prisoners to remove the obstacle to their marriage. But it has been given in evidence that there are other persons who had a yet stronger and more definite motive for getting rid of the deceased Lucy Bland. You have heard that in the event of Bland’s death, his partner, Julius Wicks, stood to inherit property of the value of six thousand pounds per annum, provided that Bland’s wife was already dead. Now, the murder of Lucy Bland has fulfilled one of the conditions for the devolution of this property; and if you should convict and his lordship should sentence the prisoner, Bland, then his death on the gallows would fulfil the other condition and this great property would pass to his partner, Julius Wicks—This is a material point; as is also the fact that Wicks is, as you have heard, an expert film-producer and kinema operator; that he has been proved to have had access to the house at Ditton, and that he is engaged to a film-actress.

“In conclusion, I submit that the evidence of Brodie and Stanton makes it certain that they were looking at a moving picture, and that all the other evidence confirms that certainty. But the evidence of this moving picture is the evidence of a conspiracy to throw suspicion on the prisoners. But a conspiracy implies conspirators. And there can be no doubt that those conspirators were the actual murderers of Lucy Bland. But if this be so, and I affirm that there can be no possible doubt that it is so, then it follows that the prisoners are innocent of the crime with which they are charged, and I accordingly ask you for a verdict of’ Not Guilty.’”

As Thorndyke sat down a faint hum arose in the court; but still all eyes were turned towards Wicks and Eugenia Kropp. A moment later the pair rose and walked unsteadily towards the door. But here, I noticed, Superintendent Miller had suddenly appeared and stood at the portal with a uniformed constable. As Wicks and Miss Kropp reached the door, I saw the constable shake his head. With, or without authority, he was refusing to let them leave the court. There was a brief pause. Suddenly there broke out a confused uproar; a scuffle, a loud shriek, the report of a pistol and the shattering of glass; and then I saw Miller grasping the man’s wrists and pinning him to the wall, while the shrieking woman struggled with the constable to get to the door.

After the removal of the disturbers—in custody—events moved swiftly. The Crown counsel’s reply was brief and colourless, practically abandoning the charge, while the judge’s summing-up was a mere précis of Thorndyke’s argument with a plain direction for an acquittal. But nothing more was needed; for the jury had so clearly made up their minds that the clerk had hardly uttered his challenge when the foreman replied with the verdict of “Not Guilty.” A minute later, when the applause had subsided and after brief congratulations by the judge, the prisoners came down from the dock, into the court, moist-eyed but smiling, to wring Thorndyke’s hands and thank him for this wonderful deliverance.

“Yes,” agreed Mayfield—himself disposed furtively to wipe his eyes—“that is the word. It was wonderful And yet it was all so obvious—when you knew.”

A SOWER OF PESTILENCE (1925)

The affectionate relations that existed between Thorndyke and his devoted follower, Polton, were probably due, at least in part, to certain similarities in their characters. Polton was an accomplished and versatile craftsman, a man who could do anything, and do it well; and Thorndyke has often said that if he had not been a man of science, he would, by choice, have; been a skilled craftsman. Even as things were, he was a masterly manipulator of all instruments of research, and a good enough workman to devise new appliances and processes and to collaborate with his assistant ix carrying them out.

Such a collaboration was taking place when the present case opened. It had occurred to Thorndyke that lithography might be usefully applied to medico-legal research, and on this particular morning he and Polton were experimenting in the art of printing from the stone. In the midst of their labours the bell from our chambers below was heard to ring, and Polton, reluctantly laying down the inking roller and wiping his hands on the southern aspect of his trousers, departed to open the door.

“It’s a Mr. Rabbage,” he reported on his return. “Says he has an appointment with you, sir.”

“So he has,” said Thorndyke. “And, as I under stand that he is going to offer us a profound mystery for solution, you had better come down with me, Jervis, and hear what be has to say.”

Mr. Rabbage turned out to be a elderly gentleman who, as we entered, peered at us through a pair of deep, concave spectacles and greeted us “with a smile that was child like and bland.” Thorndyke looked him over and adroitly brought him to the point.

“Yes,” said Mr. Rabbage, “it is really a most mysterious affair that has brought me here. I have already laid it before a very talented detective officer whom I know slightly—a Mr. Badger; but he frankly admitted that it was beyond him and strongly advised me to consult you.”

“Inspector Badger was kind enough to pay me a very handsome compliment,” said Thorndyke.

“Yes. He said that you would certainly be able to solve this mystery without any difficulty. So here I am. And perhaps I had better explain who I am, in case you don’t happen to know my name. I am the director of the St. Francis Home of Rest for aged, invalid and destitute cats: an institution where these deserving animals are enabled to convert the autumn of their troubled lives into a sort of Indian summer of comfort and repose. The home is, I may say, my own venture. I support it out of my own means. But I am open to receive contributions; and to that end there is secured to the garden railings a large box with a wide slit and an inscription inviting donations of money, of articles of value, or of food or delicacies for the inmates.”

“And do you get much?” I asked.

Of money,” he replied, “very little. Of articles of value, none at all. As to gifts of food, they are numerous, but they often display a strange ignorance of the habits of the domestic cat. Such things, for instance, as pickles and banana-skins, though doubtless kindly meant, are quite unsuitable as diet. But the most singular donation that I have ever received was that which I found in the box the day before yesterday. There were a number of articles, but all apparently from the same donor; and their character was so mysterious that I showed them to Mr. Badger, as I have told you, who was as puzzled as I was and referred me to you. The collection comprised three ladies’ purses, a morocco-leather wallet and a small aluminium case. I have brought them with me to show you.”

“What did the purses contain? “Thorndyke asked.

“Nothing,” replied Mr. Rabbage, gazing at us with wide-open eyes. “They were perfectly empty. That is the astonishing circumstance.”

“And the leather wallet?”

“Empty, too, excepting for a few odd papers.”

“And the aluminium case?”

“Ah!” exclaimed Mr. Rabbage, “that was the most amazing of all. It contained a number of glass tubes! and those tubes contained—now, what do you suppose?” He paused impressively, and then, as neither of us offered a suggestion, be answered his own question. “Fleas and lice! Yes, actually! Fleas and lice! Isn’t that an extraordinary donation?”

“It is certainly,” Thorndyke agreed. “Anyone might have known that, with a houseful of cats, you could produce your own fleas.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Rabbage. “That is what instantly occurred to me, and also, I may say, to Mr. Badger. But let me show you the things.”

He produced from a handbag and spread out on the table a collection of articles which were, evidently, the “husks” of the gleanings of some facetious pickpocket, to whom Mr. Rabbage’s donation-box must have appeared as a perfect God-send. Thorndyke picked up the purses, one after the other, and having glanced at their empty interiors, put them aside. The letter-wallet he looked through more attentively, but without disturbing its contents, and then he took up and opened the aluminium case. This certainly was a rather mysterious affair. It opened like a cigarette case. One side was fitted with six glass specimen-tubes, each provided with a well-fitting parchment cap, perforated with a number of needle-holes; and of the six tubes, four contained fleas—about a dozen in each tube—some of which were dead, but others still alive, and the remaining two lice, all of which were dead. In the opposite side of the case, secured with a catch, was a thin celluloid note-tablet on which some numbers had been written in pencil.

“Well,” said Mr. Rabbage, when the examination was finished, “can you offer any solution of the mystery?”

Thorndyke shook his head gravely. “Not offhand,” he replied. “This is a matter which will require careful consideration. Leave these things with me for further examination and I will let you know, in the course of a few days, what conclusion we arrive at.”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Rabbage, rising and holding out his hand. “You have my address, I think.”

He glanced at his watch, snatched up his handbag and darted to the door; and a moment later we heard him bustling down the stairs in the hurried, strenuous manner that is characteristic of persons who spend most of their lives doing nothing.

“I’m surprised at you, Thorndyke,” I said when he had gone, “encouraging that ass, Badger, in his silly practical jokes. Why didn’t you tell this old nincompoop that he had just got a pick-pocket’s leavings and have done with it?”

“For the reason, my learned brother, that I haven’t done with it. I am a little curious as to whose pocket has been picked, and what that person was doing with a collection of fleas and lice.”

I don’t see that it is any business of yours,” said I. “And as to the vermin, I should suggest that the owner of the case is an entomologist who specialises in epizoa. Probably he is collecting varieties and races.”

“And how,” asked Thorndyke, opening the case and handing it to me, “does my learned friend account for the faint scent of aniseed that exhales from this collection?

“I don’t account for it at all,” said I. “It is a nasty smell. I noticed it when you first opened the case. I can only suppose that the flea-merchant likes it, or thinks that the fleas do.”

“The latter seems the more probable,” said Thorndyke, “for you notice that the odour seems to principally from the parchment caps of the four tubes that contain fleas. The caps of the louse tubes don’t seem to be scented. And now let us have a little closer look at the letter-wallet.”

He opened the wallet and took out its contents, which were unilluminating enough. Apparently it had been gutted by the pickpocket and only the manifestly valueless articles left. One or two bills, recording purchases at shops, a timetable, a brief letter in French, without its envelope and bearing neither address, date, nor signature, and a set of small maps mounted on thin card: this was the whole collection, and not one of the articles appeared to furnish the slightest clue to the identity of the owner.

Thorndyke looked at the letter curiously and read it aloud.

It is just a little singular,” he remarked, “that this note should be addressed to nobody by name, should bear neither address, date, nor signature, and should have had its envelope removed. There is almost an appearance of avoiding the means of identification. Yet the matter is simple and innocent enough: just an appointment to meet at the Mile End Picture Palace. But these maps are more interesting; in fact, they are quite curious.”

He took them out of the wallet—lifting them carefully by the edges, I noticed—and laid them out on the table. There were seven cards, and each had a map, or rather a section, pasted on both sides. The sections had been cut out of a three map of London, and as each card was three inches by four and a half, each section represented an area of one mile by a mile and a half. They had been very carefully prepared neatly stuck on the cards and varnished, and every section bore a distinguishing letter. But the most curious feature was a number of small circles drawn in pencil on various parts of the maps, each circle enclosing a number.

“What do you make of those circles, Thorndyke?” I asked.

“One can only make a speculative hypothesis,” be replied. “I am disposed to associate them with the fleas and lice. You notice that the maps all represent the most squalid parts of East London—Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, and so forth, where the material would be plentiful; and you also notice that the celluloid tablet in the insect case bears a number of pencilled jottings that might refer to these maps. Here, for instance, is a note, ‘B 21 a + b—,’ and you observe that each entry has an a and a b with either a plus or a minus sign. Now, if we assume that a means fleas and b lice, or vice versa, the maps and the notes together might form a record of collections or experiments with a geographical basis.”

“They might,” I agreed, “but there isn’t a particle of evidence that they do. It is a most fantastic hypothesis. We don’t know, and we have no reason to suppose, that the insect-case and the wallet were the property of the same person. And we have no means of finding out whether they were or were not.”

“There I think you do us an injustice, Jervis,” said he. “Are we not lithographers?”

“I don’t see where the lithography comes in,” said I.

“Then you ought to. This is a test case. These maps are varnished, and are thus virtually lithographic transfer paper; and the celluloid tablet also has a non-absorbent surface. Now, if you handle transfer paper carelessly when drawing on it, you are apt to find, when you have transferred to the stone, that your finger prints ink up, as well as the drawing. So it is possible that if we put these maps and the note-tablet on the stone, we may be able to ink up the prints of the fingers that have handled them and so prove whether they were or were not the same fingers.”

“That would be interesting as an experiment,” said I,” though I don’t see that it matters two straws whether they were the same or not.”

“Probably it doesn’t,” he replied, “though it may. But we have a new method and we may as well try it.”

We took the things up to the laboratory and explained the problem to Polton, who entered into the inquiry with enthusiasm. Producing from a cupboard a fresh stone, he picked the maps out of the wallet one by one (with a pair of watchmaker’s tweezers) and fell to work forthwith on the task of transferring the invisible—and possibly non-existent—fingerprints from the maps and the note-tablet to the stone. I watched him go through the various processes in his neat, careful, dexterous fashion and hoped that all his trouble would not be in vain. Nor was it; for when he began cautiously ink up the stone, it was evident that something was there, though it was not so evident what that something was. Presently, however, the vague markings took more definite shape, and now could be recognised eight rather confused masses of fingerprints, badly smeared, some incomplete, and all mixed up and superimposed so as to make the identification of any one print almost an impossibility.

Thorndyke looked them over dubiously. “It is a dreadful muddle,” said he, “but I think we can pick out the prints well enough for identification if that should be necessary. Which of these is the notes tablet, Polton?”

“The one in the right-hand top corner, sir,” was the reply.

“Ah!” said Thorndyke, “then that answers our question. Confused as the impressions are, you can see quite plainly that the left thumb is the same thumb as that on the maps.”

“Yes,” I agreed after making the comparison, “there is not much doubt that they are the same. And now the question is, what about it?”

“Yes,” said Thorndyke; “that is the question.” And with this we retired from the laboratory, leaving Polton joyfully pulling off proofs.

During the next few days I had a vague impression that my colleague was working at this case, though with what object I could not imagine. Mr. Rabbage’s problem was too absurd to take seriously, and Thorndyke was beyond working out cases, as he used to at one time, for the sake of mere experience. However, a day or two later, a genuine case turned up and occupied our attention to some purpose.

It was about six in the evening when Mr. Nicholas Balcombe called on us by appointment, and proceeded, in a business-like fashion, to state his case.

“I was advised by my friend Stalker, of the Griffin Life Assurance Office, to consult you,” said he. “Stalker tells me that you have got him out of endless difficulties, and I am hoping that you will be able to help me out of mine, though they are not so clearly within your province as Stalker’s. But you will know about that better than I do.

“I am the manager of Rutherford’s Bank—the Cornhill Branch—and I have just had a very alarming experience. The day before yesterday, about three in the afternoon, a deed-box was handed in with a note from one of our customers—Mr. Pilcher, the solicitor, of Pilcher, Markham and Sudburys—asking us to deposit it in our strong-room and give the bearer a receipt for it. Of course this was done, in the ordinary way of business; but there was one exceptional circumstance that turns out to have been, as it would appear, providential. Owing to the increase of business our strong-room had become insufficient for our needs, and we have lately had a second one built on the most modern lines and perfectly fire-proof. This had not been taken into use when Pilcher’s deed-box arrived, but as the old room was very full, I opened the new room and saw the deed-box deposited in it.

“Well, nothing happened up to the time that I left the bank, but about two o’clock in the morning the night watchman noticed a smell of burning, and on investigating, located the smell as apparently proceeding from the door of the new strong-room. He at once reported to the senior clerk, whose turn it was to sleep on the premises, and the latter at once telephoned to the police station. In a few minutes a police officer arrived with a couple of firemen and a hand-extinguisher. The clerk took them down to the strong-room and unlocked the door. As soon as it was opened, a volume of smoke and fumes burst out, and then they saw the deed-box—or rather the distorted remains of it—lying on the floor. The police took possession of what was left, but a very cursory examination on the spot showed that the box was, in effect, an incendiary bomb, with a slow time fuse or some similar arrangement.”

“Was any damage done?” Thorndyke asked.

“Mercifully, no,” replied Mr. Balcombe. “But just think of what might have happened! If I had put the box in the old strong-room it is certain that thousands of pounds’ worth of valuable property would have been destroyed. Or again, if instead of an incendiary bomb the box had contained a high explosive, the whole building would probably have been blown to pieces.”

“What explanation does Pilcher give?”

“A very simple one. He knows nothing about it. The note was a forgery; and on the firm’s headed paper, or a perfect imitation of it. And mind you,” Mr. Balcombe continued, “my experience is not a solitary one. I have made private inquiries of other bank managers, and I find that several of them have been subjected to similar outrages, some with serious results. And probably there are more. They don’t talk about these things, you know. Then there are those fires: the great timber fire at Stepney, and those big warehouse fires near the London Docks; there is something queer about them. It looks as if some gang was at work for purposes of pure mischief and destruction.”

“You have consulted the police, of course?”

“Yes. And they know something, I feel sure. But they are extremely reticent; so I suppose they don’t know enough. At any rate, I should like you to investigate the case independently and so would my directors. The position is most alarming.”

“Could you let me see Pilcher’s letter?” Thorndyke asked.

“1 have brought it with me,” said Balcombe. “Thought you would probably want to examine it. I will leave it with you; and if we can give you any other information or assistance, we shall be only too glad.”

“Was the box brought by hand?” inquired Thorndyke.

“Yes,” replied Balcombe, “but I didn’t see the bearer. I can get you a description from the man who received the package, if that would be any use.”

“We may as well have it,” said Thorndyke, “and the name and address of the person giving it, in case he is wanted as a witness.”

“You shall have it,” said Balcombe, rising and picking up his hat. “I will see to it myself. And you will let me know, in due course, if any information comes to hand?”

Thorndyke gave the required promise and our client took his leave.

“Well,” I said with a laugh, as the brisk footsteps died away on the stairs, “you have had a very handsome compliment paid you. Our friend seems to think that you are one of those master craftsmen who can make bricks, not only without straw, but without clay. There’s absolutely nothing to go on.”

“It is certainly rather in the air,” Thorndyke agreed. “There is this letter and the description of the man who left the packet, when we get it, and neither of them is likely to help us much.”

He looked over the letter and its envelope, held the former up to the light and then handed them to me.

“We ought to find out whether this is Pilcher’s own paper or an imitation,” said I, when I had examined the letter and envelope without finding anything in the least degree distinctive or characteristic; “because, if it is their paper, the unknown man must have had some sort of connection with their establishment or staff.”

“There must have been some sort of connection in any case,” said Thorndyke. “Even an imitation implies possession of an original. But you are quite right. It is a line of inquiry, and practically the only one that offers.”

The inquiry was made on the following day, and the fact clearly established that the paper was Pitcher’s paper, but the ink was not their ink. The handwriting appeared to be disguised, and no one connected with the firm was able to recognise it. The staff, even to the caretaker, were all eminently respectable and beyond suspicion of being implicated in an affair of the kind.

“But after all,” said Mr. Pitcher, “there are a hundred ways in which a sheet of paper may go astray if anyone wants it: at the printer’s, the stationer’s, or even in this office—for the paper is always in the letter-rack on the table.”

Thus our only clue—if so it could be called—came to an end, and I waited with some curiosity to see what Thorndyke would do next. But so far as I could see, he did nothing, nor did he make any reference to this obscure case during the next few days. We had a good deal of other work on hand, and I assumed that this fully occupied his attention.

One evening, about a week later, he made the first reference to the case and a very mysterious communication it seemed to me.

“I have projected a little expedition for tomorrow,” said he. “I am proposing to spend the day, or part of it, in the pastoral region of Bethnal Green.”

“In connection with any of our cases?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “Balcombe’s. I have been making some cautious inquiries with Polton’s assistance, principally among hawkers and coffee-shop keepers, and I think I have struck a promising track.”

“What kind of inquiries have you been making?” said I.

“I have been looking for a man, or men, engaged in giving street entertainments. That is what our data seemed to suggest, among other possibilities.”

“Our data!” I exclaimed. “1 didn’t know we had any.”

“We had Balcombe’s account of the attempt to burn the bank. That gave us some hint as to the kind of man to look for. And there were certain other data, which my learned friend may recall.”

“I don’t recall anything suggesting a street entertainer,” said I.

“Not directly,” he replied. “It was one of several hypotheses, but it is probably the correct one, as I have heard of such a person as I had assumed, and have ascertained where he is likely to be found on certain days. Tomorrow I propose to go over his beat in the hope of getting a glimpse of him. If you think of coming with me, I may remind you that it is not a dressy neighbourhood.”

On the following morning we set forth about ten o’clock, and as raiment which is inconspicuous at Bethnal Green may be rather noticeable in the Temple, we slipped out by the Tudor Street gate and made our way to Blackfriars Station. In place of the usual “research-case,” I noticed that Thorndyke was carrying a somewhat shabby wood-fibre attaché case, and that he had no walking-stick. We got out at Aldgate and presently struck up Vallance Street in the direction of Bethnal Green; and by the brisk pace and the direct route adopted, I judged that Thorndyke had a definite objective. However, when we entered the maze of small streets adjoining the Bethnal Green Road, our pace was reduced to a saunter, and at corners and crossroads Thorndyke halted from time to time to look along the streets; and occasionally he referred to a card which he produced from his pocket, on which were written the names of streets and days of the week.

A couple of hours passed in this apparently aimless perambulation of the back streets.

“It doesn’t look as if you were going to have much luck,” I remarked, suppressing a yawn. “And I am not sure that we are not, in our turn, being ‘spotted.’ I have noted a man—a small, shabby-looking fellow, apparently keeping us in view from a distance, though I don’t see him at the moment.”

“It is quite likely,” said Thorndyke. “This is a shady neighbourhood, and any native could see that we don’t belong to it. Good morning! Taking a little fresh air?”

The latter question was addressed to a man who was standing at the door of a small coffee-shop, having apparently come to the surface for a “breather.”

“Dunno about fresh,” was the reply, “but it’s the best there is. By the by, I saw one of them blokes what I was a-tellin’ you about go by just now. Foreigner with the rats. If you want to see him give a show, I expect you’ll find him in that bit of waste ground off Bolter’s Rents.”

“Bolter’s Rents?” Thorndyke repeated. “Is that a turning out of Salcombe Street?”

“Quite right,” was the reply. “Half-way up on the right-hand side.”

Thanking our informant, Thorndyke strode off up the street, and as we turned the next corner I glanced back. At the moment, the small man whom I had noticed before stepped out of a doorway and came after us at a pace suggesting anxiety not to lose sight of us.

Bolter’s Rents turned out to be a wide paved alley, one side of which opened into a patch of waste ground where a number of old houses had been demolished. This space had an unspeakably squalid appearance; for not only had the debris of the demolished houses been left in unsavoury heaps, but the place had evidently been adopted by the neighbourhood as a general dumping-ground for household refuse. The earth was strewn with vegetable, and even animal, leavings; flies and bluebottles hummed around and settled in hundreds on the garbage, and the air was pervaded by an odour like that of an old-fashioned brick dust-bin.

But in spite of these trifling disadvantages, a considerable crowd had collected, mainly composed of women and children; and at the centre of the crowd a man was giving an entertainment with a troupe of performing rats. We had sauntered slowly up the “Rents” and now halted to look on. At the moment, a white rat was climbing a pole at the top of which a little flag was stuck in a socket. We watched him rapidly climb the pole, seize the flagstaff in his teeth, lift it out of the socket, climb down the pole and deliver the flag to his master. Then a little carriage was produced and the rat harnessed into it, another white rat being dressed in a cloak and placed in the seat, and the latter—introduced to the audience as Lady Murphy—was taken for a drive round the stage.

While the entertainment was proceeding I inspected the establishment and its owner. The stage was composed of light hinged boards opened out on a small four-wheeled hand-cart, apparently home-made. At one end was a largish cage, divided by a wire partition into two parts, one of which contained a number of white and piebald rats, while the inmates of the other compartment were all wild rats; but not, I noted, the common brown or Norway rat, but the old-fashioned British black rat. I remarked upon the circumstance to Thorndyke.

“Yes,” he said, “they were probably caught locally. The sewers here will be inhabited by brown rats, but the houses, in an old neighbourhood like this, will be infested principally by the black rat. What do you make of the exhibitor?”

I had already noticed him, and now unobtrusively examined him again. He was a medium-sized man with a sallow complexion, dark, restless eyes—which frequently wandered in our direction—a crop of stiff, bushy, upstanding hair—he wore no hat—and a ragged beard.

“A Slav of some kind, I should think,” was my reply; “a Russian, or perhaps a Lett. But that beard is not perfectly convincing.”

“No,” Thorndyke agreed, “but it is a good makes up. Perhaps we had better move on flow; we have a deputy, you observe.”

As he spoke, the small man whom I had observed following us strolled up the Rents; and as he drew nearer, revealed to my astonished gaze no less a person than our ingenious laboratory assistant, Polton. Strangely altered, indeed, was our usually neat and spruce artificer with his seedy clothing and grubby hands; but as he sauntered up, profoundly unaware of our existence, a faint reminiscence of the familiar crinkly smile stole across his face.

We were just moving off when a chorus of shrieks mingled with laughter arose from the spectators, who hastily scattered right and left, and I had a momentary glimpse of a big black rat bounding across the space, to disappear into one of the many heaps of debris. It seemed that the exhibitor had just opened the cage to take out a black rat when one of the waiting performers—presumably a new recruit—had seized the opportunity to spring out and escape.

“Well,” a grinning woman remarked to me, genially, “there’s plenty more where that one came from. You should see this place on a moonlight night! Fair alive with ’em it is.”

We sauntered up the Rents and along the cross street at the top; and as we went, I reflected on the very singular inquiry in which Thorndyke seemed to be engaged. The rat-tamer’s appearance was suspicious. He didn’t quite look the part, and his beard was almost certainly a make-up—and a skilful one, too, for it was no mere “property” beard; and the restless, furtive eyes, and a certain suppressed excitement in his bearing, hinted at something more than met the eye. But if this was Mr. Balcombe’s incendiary, how had Thorndyke arrived at his identity, and, above all, by what process of reasoning had he contrived to associate the bank outrage with performing rats,? That he had done so, his systematic procedure made quite clear. But how? It had seemed to me that we had not a single fact on which to start an investigation.

We had walked the length of the cross street, and had halted before turning, when a troop of children emerged from the Rents. Then came the exhibitor, towing his cart, with the cage shrouded in a cloth, then more children, and finally, at a little distance, Polton, slouching along idly but keeping the cart in view.

“I think,” said Thorndyke, “it would be instructive, as a study in urban sanitation, to have a look round the scene of the late exhibition.”

We retraced our steps down Bolter’s Rents, now practically deserted, and wandered around the patch of waste land and in among the piles of bricks and rotting timber where the houses had been pulled down.

“Your lady friend was right,” said Thorndyke. “This is a perfect Paradise for rats. Convenient residences among the ruins and unlimited provisions to be had for the mere picking up.”

“Apparently you were right, too,” said I, “as to the species inhabiting these eligible premises. That seems to be a black rat,” and I pointed to a deceased specimen that lay near the entrance to a burrow.

Thorndyke stooped over the little corpse, and after a brief inspection, drew a glove on his right hand.

“Yes,” he said, “this is a typical specimen of Mus rattus, though it is unusually light in colour. I think it will be worth taking away to examine at our leisure.”

Glancing round to see that we were unobserved, he opened his attaché case and took from it a largish tin canister and removed the lid—which, I noted, was anointed at the joint with vaseline. Stooping, he picked up the dead rat by the tail with his gloved fingers dropped it into the canister, clapped on the lid, and replaced it in the attache case. Then he pulled off the glove and threw it on a rubbish heap.

“You are mighty particular,” said I.

“A dead rat is a dirty thing,” said he, “and it was only an old glove.”

On our way home I made various cautious attempt to extract from Thorndyke some hint as to the purpose of his investigation and his mode of procedure. But I could extract nothing from him beyond certain generalities.

“When a man,” said he, “introduces an incendiary bomb into the strong-room of a bank, we may reasonably inquire as to his motives. And when we have reached the fairly obvious conclusion as to what those motives must be, we may ask ourselves what kind of conduct such motives will probably generate; that is, what sort of activities will be likely to be associated with such motives and with the appropriate state of mind. And when we have decided on that, too, we may look for a person engaged in those activities; and if we find such a person we may consider that we have a prima facie case. The rest is a matter of verification.”

“That is all very well, Thorndyke,” I objected, “but if I find a man trying to set fire to a bank, I don’t immediately infer that his customary occupation is exhibiting performing rats in a back street of Bethnal Green.”

Thorndyke laughed quietly. “My learned friend’s observation is perfectly just. It is not a universal rule. But we are dealing with a specific case in which certain other facts are known to us. Still, the connection, if there is one, has yet to be established. This exhibitor may turn out not to be Balcombe’s man after all.”

“And if he is not?”

“I think we shall want him all the same; but I shall know better in a couple of hours’ time.”

What transpired during those two hours I did not discover at the time, for I had an engagement to dine with some legal friends and must needs hurry away as soon as I had purified myself from the effects of our travel in the unclean East. When I returned to our chambers, about half-past ten, I found Thorndyke seated in his easy chair immersed in a treatise on old musical instruments. Apparently he had finished with the case.

“How did Polton get on?” I asked.

“Admirably,” replied Thorndyke. “He shadowed our entertaining friend from Bethnal Green to a by street in Ratcliff, where he apparently resides. But he did more than that. We had made up a little book of a dozen leaves of transfer paper in which I wrote in French some infallible rules for taming rats. Just as the man was going into his house, Polton accosted him and asked him for an expert opinion on these directions. The foreign gentleman was at first impatient and huffy, but when he had glanced at the book, he became interested, and a good deal amused, and finally read the whole set of rules through attentively. Then he handed the book back to Polton and recommended him to follow the rules carefully, offering to supply him with a few rats to experiment on, an offer which Polton asked him to hold over for a day or two.

“As soon as he got home, Polton dismembered the book and put the leaves down on the stone, with this result.”

He took from his pocket-book a number of small pieces of paper, each of which was marked more or less distinctly with lithographed reproductions of fingerprints, and laid them on the table. I looked through them attentively, and with a faint sense of familiarity.

“Isn’t that left thumb,” said I, “rather similar to the print on the maps from Mr. Rabbage’s letter wallet?”

“It is identical,” he replied. “Here are the proofs of the map-prints and the note-tablet. If you compare them you can see that not only the left thumb but the other prints are the same in all.”

Careful comparison showed that this was so.

“But,” I exclaimed, “I don’t understand this at all. These are the fingerprints of Mr. Rabbage’s mysterious entomologist. I thought you were looking for Balcombe’s man.”

“My impression,” he replied “is that they are t same person, though the evidence is far from conclusive. But we shall soon know. I have sworn an information against the foreign gent, and Miller has arranged to raid the house at Ratcliff early tomorrow and as it promises to be a highly interesting event, I propose to be present. Shall I have the pleasure of my learned friend’s company?”

“Most undoubtedly,” I replied, “though I am absolutely in the dark as to the meaning of the whole affair.”

“Then,” said Thorndyke, “I recommend you to go over the history of both cases systematically in the interval.”

Six o’clock on the following morning found us in an empty house in Old Gravel Lane, Ratcliff, in company with Superintendent Miller and three stalwart plain clothes men, awaiting the report of a patrol. We were all dressed in engineers’ overalls, reeking with naphthalin. Our trousers were tucked into our socks, and socks and boots were thickly smeared with vaseline, as were our wrists, around which our sleeves were bound closely with tape. These preparations, together with an automatic pistol served out to each of us, gave me some faint inkling of the nature of the case, though it was still very confused in my mind.

About a quarter-past six a messenger arrived and reported that the house which was to be raided was open. Thereupon Miller and one of his men set forth, and the rest of us followed at short intervals. On arriving at the house, which was but a short distance from our rendezvous, we found a stolid plain-clothes man guarding the open door and a frowsy-looking woman, who carried a jug of milk, angrily demanding in very imperfect English to be allowed to pass into her house. Pushing past the protesting housekeeper, we entered the grimy passage, where Miller was just emerging from a ground-floor room.

“That is the woman’s quarters,” said he, “and the kitchen seems to be a sort of rat-menagerie. We’d better try the first-floor.”

He led the way up the stairs, and when he reached the landing he tried the handle of the front room. Finding the door locked or bolted, he passed on to the back room and tried the door of that, with the same result. Then, holding up a warning finger, he proceeded to whistle a popular air in a fine, penetrating tone, and to perform a double shuffle on the bare floor. Almost immediately an angry voice was heard in the front room, and slippered feet padded quickly across the floor. Then a bolt was drawn noisily, the door flew open, and for an instant I had a view of the rat-show man, clothed in a suit of very soiled pyjamas. But it was only for an instant. Even as our eyes met, he tried to slam the door to, and failing—in consequence of an intruding constabulary foot—he sprang back, leaped over a bed and darted through a communicating doorway into the back room and shut and bolted the door.

“That’s unfortunate,” said Miller. “Now we’re going to have trouble.”

The superintendent was right. On the first attempt to force the door, a pistol-shot from within blew a hole in the top panel and made a notch in the ear of the would-be invader. The latter replied through the hole, and there followed a sort of snarl and the sound of a shattered bottle. Then, as the constable stood aside and shot after shot came from within, the door became studded with ragged holes. Meanwhile Miller, Thorndyke and I tiptoed out on the landing, and taking as long a run as was possible, flung ourselves, simultaneously on the back-room door. The weight of three large men was too much for the crazy woodwork. As we fell on it together, there was a bursting crash, the hinges tore away, the door flew inwards, and we staggered into the room.

It was a narrow shave for some of us. Before we could recover our footing, the showman had turned with his pistol pointing straight at Miller’s head. A bare instant before it exploded, Thorndyke, whose momentum had carried him half-way across the room, caught it with an upward snatch, and its report was followed by a harmless shower of plaster from the ceiling. Immediately our quarry changed his tactics. Leaving the pistol in Thorndyke’s grasp, he darted across the room towards a work-bench on which stood a row of upright, cylindrical tins. He was in the act of reaching out for one of these when Thorndyke grasped his pyjamas between the shoulders and dragged him back, while Miller rushed forward and seized him. For a few moments there was a frantic and furious struggle, for the fellow fought with hands and feet and teeth with the ferocity of a wild cat, and, overpowered as he was, still strove to drag his captors towards the bench. Suddenly, once more, a pistol-shot rang out, and then all was still. By accident or design the struggling man had got hold of the pistol that Thorndyke still grasped and pressed the trigger, and the bullet had entered his own head just above the ear.

“Pooh!” exclaimed Miller, rising and wiping his forehead, “that was a near one. If you hadn’t stopped him, doctor, we’d all have gone up like rockets.”

“You think those things are bombs, then?” said I.

“Think!” he repeated. “I removed two exactly like them from the General Post Office, and they turned out to be charged with T.N.T. And those square ones on the shelf are twin brothers of the one that went off in Rutherford’s Bank.”

As we were speaking, I happened to glance round at the doorway, and there, to my surprise, was the woman whom we had seen below, still holding the jug of milk and staring in with an expression of horror at the dead revolutionary. Thorndyke also observed her, and stepping across to where she stood, asked: “Can you tell me if there has been, or is now, anyone sick in this house?

“Yes,” the woman replied, without removing her eyes from the dead man. “Dere is a chentleman sick upstairs. I haf not seen him. He used to look after him,” and she nodded to the dead body of the showman.

“I think we will go up and have a look at this sick gentleman,” said Thorndyke. “You had better not come, Miller.”

We started together up the stairs, and as we went I asked: “Do you suppose this is a case of plague?”

“No,” he replied. “I fancy the plague department is in the kitchen; but we shall see.”

He looked round the landing which we had now reached and then opened the door of the front room. Immediately I was aware of a strange, intensely fetid odour, and glancing into the room, I perceived a man lying, apparently in a state of stupor, in a bed covered with indescribably filthy bed-clothes. Thorndyke entered and approached the bed, and I followed. The light was rather dim, and it was not until we were quite close that I suddenly recognised the disease.

“Good God!” I exclaimed, “it is typhus!”

“Yes,” said Thorndyke; “and look at the bed clothes, and look at the poor devil’s neck. We can see now how that villain collected his specimens.”

I stooped over the poor, muttering, unconscious wretch and was filled with horror. Bed-clothes, pillow and patient were all alike crawling with vermin.

* * * *

“Of course,” I said as we walked homewards, “I see the general drift of this case, but what I can’t under stand is how you connected up the facts.”

“Well,” replied Thorndyke, “let us set out the argument and trace the connections. The starting—point was the aluminium case that Mr. Rabbage brought us. Those tubes of fleas and lice were clearly an abnormal phenomenon. They might, as you suggested, have belonged to a scientific collector; but that was not probable. The fleas were alive, and were meant to remain alive, as the perforated caps of the tubes proved,’ And the lice had merely died, as lice quickly do if they are not fed. They did not appear to have been killed. But against your view there were two very striking facts, one of which I fancy you did not observe. The fleas were not the common human flea; they were Asiatic rat-fleas.”

“You are quite right,” I admitted. “I did not notice that.”

“Then,” he continued, “there was the aniseed with which the parchment caps of the tubes were scented. Now aniseed is irresistible to rats. It is an infallible bait. But it is not specially attractive to fleas. What then was the purpose of the scent? The answer, fantastic as it was, had to be provisionally accepted because it was the only one that suggested itself. If one of these tubes had been exposed to rats—dropped down a rat-hole, for instance—it is certain that the rats would have gnawed off the parchment cap. Then the fleas would have been liberated, and as they were rat-fleas, they would have immediately fastened upon the rats. The tubes, therefore, appeared to be an apparatus for disseminating rat-fleas.

“But why should anyone want to disseminate rat-fleas? That question at once brought into view another striking fact, Here, in these tubes, were rat-fleas and body-lice: both carriers of deadly disease. The rat-flea is a carrier of plague; the body-louse is a carrier of typhus. It was an impressive coincidence. It suggested that the dissemination of rat-fleas might be really the dissemination of plague; and if the lice were distributed, too, that might mean the distribution of typhus.

“And now consider the maps. The circles on them all marked old slum-areas tenanted by low-class aliens. But old slums abound in rats; and low-class aliens abound in body-lice. Here was another coincidence. Then there was the note-tablet bearing numbers associated with the letters a and b and plus and minus signs. The letters a and b might mean rat and louse or plague and typhus, and the plus and minus might mean a success or a failure to produce an outbreak of disease. That was merely speculative, but it was quite consistent.

“So far we were dealing with a hypothesis based on simple observation. But that hypothesis could be proved or disproved. The question was: Were these insects infected insects, or were they not? To settle this I took one flea from each of the four tubes and ‘sowed’ it on agar, with the result that from each flea I got a typical culture of plague bacillus, which I verified with Haffkine’s ‘Stalactite test.’ I also examined one louse from each of the two tubes, and in each case got a definite typhus reaction. So the insects were infected and the hypothesis was confirmed.

“The next thing was to find the owner of the tubes, Now the circles on the maps indicated some sort of activity, presumably connected with rats and carried on in these areas.

I visited those areas and got into conversation with the inhabitants on the subject of rats, rat-catchers, rat pits, sewermen, and everything bearing on rats; and at length I heard of an exhibitor of performing rats. You know the rest. We found the man, we observe that all his rats, excepting the tame white ones, were I black rats—the special plague-carrying species—and we found on this spot a dead rat, which I ascertained on examining the body, had died of plague. Finally there was Polton’s little book giving us the finger prints of the owner of the aluminium case. That completed the identification; and inquiries at the Local Government Board showed that cases of plague and typhus had occurred in the marked areas.”

“Had not the authorities taken any steps in the matter?” I asked.

Oh, yes,” he replied. “They had carried out an energetic rat campaign in the London Docks, the likeliest source of infection. Naturally, they would not think of a criminal lunatic industriously sowing plague broad cast.”

“Then how did you connect this man with the bank outrage?”

“I never did, very conclusively,” he replied. “It was mostly a matter of inference. You see, the two crimes were essentially similar. They were varieties of the same type. Both were cases of idiotic destructiveness, and the agent in each was evidently a moral imbecile who was a professed enemy of society. Such persons are rare in this country, and when they occur are usually foreigners, most commonly Russians, or East Europeans of some kind. The only actual clue was the date on Pilcher’s letter, the rather peculiar figures of which were extraordinarily like those on the maps and the note-tablet. Still, it was little more than a guess, though it happens to have turned out correct.”

“And how do you suppose this fellow avoided getting plague and typhus himself?”

“It was quite likely that he had had both. But he could easily avoid the typhus by keeping himself clean and his clothing disinfected; and as to the plague, he could have used Haffkine’s plague-prophylactic and given it to the woman. Clearly it would not have suited him to have a case of plague in the house and have the health officer inspecting the premises.”

That was the end of the case, unless I should include in the history a very handsome fee sent to my colleague by the President of the Local Government Board.

“I think we have earned it,” said Thorndyke; “and yet I am not sure that Mr. Rabbage is not entitled to a share.”

And in fact, when that benevolent person called a few days later to receive a slightly ambiguous report and tender his fee, he departed beaming, bearing a donation wherewith to endow an additional bed, cot, or basket, in the St. Francis Home of Rest.

REX V. BURNABY (1925)

IT is a normal incident in general medical practice that the family doctor soon drifts into the position of a family friend. The Burnabys had been among my earliest patients, and mutual sympathies had quickly brought about the more intimate relationship. It was a pleasant household, pervaded by a quiet geniality and a particularly attractive homely, unaffected culture. It was an interesting household, too, for the disparity in age between the husband and wife made the domestic conditions a little unusual and invited speculative observation. And there were other matters, to be referred to presently.

Frank Burnaby was a somewhat delicate man of about fifty: quiet, rather shy, gentle, kindly, and singularly innocent and trustful. He held a post at the Records Office, and was full of quaint and curious lore derive from the ancient documents on which he worked: selections from which he would retail in the family circle with a picturesque imagination and a fund of quiet, dry humour that made them delightful to listen to. I have never met a more attractive man, or one whom 1 liked better or respected more.

Equally attractive, in an entirely different way, was his wife: an extremely charming and really beautiful woman of under thirty—little more than a girl, in fact: amiable, high-spirited and full of fun and frolic, but nevertheless an accomplished, cultivated woman with a strong interest in her husband’s pursuits. They appeared to me an exceedingly happy and united couple deeply attached to one another and in perfect sympathy. There were four children—three boys and a girl—of Burnaby’s by his first wife; and their devotion to their young stepmother spoke volumes for her care of them.

But there was a fly in the domestic ointment: at least, that was what I felt. There was another family friend, a youngish man named Cyril Parker. Not that I had anything against him, personally, but I was not quite happy about the relationship. He was a markedly good-looking man, pleasant, witty, and extremely well informed; for he was a partner in a publishing house and acted as reader for the firm; whence it happened that he, like Mr. Burnaby, gathered stores of interesting matter from his professional reading. But I could not disguise from myself that his admiration and affection for Mrs. Burnaby were definitely inside the danger zone, and that the intimacy—on his side, at any rate—was growing rather ominously. On her side there seemed nothing more than frank, though very pronounced, friendship. But I looked at the relationship askance. She was a woman whom any man might have fallen in love with, and I did not like the expression that I sometimes detected in Parker’s eyes when he was looking at her. Still, there was nothing in the conduct of either to which the slightest exception could have been taken or which in any way foreshadowed the terrible disaster which was so shortly to befall.

The starting-point of the tragedy was a comparatively trivial event. By much poring over crabbed manuscripts, Mr. Burnaby developed symptoms of eye-strain which caused me to send him to an oculist for an opinion and a prescription for suitable spectacles. On the evening of the day on which he had consulted the oculist, I received an urgent summons from Mrs. Burnaby, and, on arriving at the house, found her husband somewhat seriously ill. His symptoms were rather puzzling, for they corresponded to no known disease. His face was flushed, his temperature slightly raised, his pulse rapid, though the breathing was slow, his throat was excessively dry, and his pupils widely dilated. It was an extraordinary condition, resembling nothing within my knowledge excepting atropine poisoning.

“Has he been taking medicine of any kind?” I asked.

Mrs. Burnaby shook her head. “He never takes any drugs or medicine but what you prescribe; and it couldn’t be anything that he has taken, because the attack came on quite soon after he came home, before he had either food or drink.”

It was very mysterious and the patient himself could throw no light on the origin of the attack. While I was reflecting on the matter, I happened to glance at the mantelpiece, on which I noticed a drop labelled “The Eye Drops” and a prescription envelope. Opening the latter I found the oculist’s prescription for the drops—a very weak solution of atropine sulphate.

“Has he had any of these drops?” I asked.

“Yes,” replied Mrs. Burnaby. “I dropped some into his eyes as soon as he came in; two drops in each eye, according to the directions.”

It was very odd. The amount of atropine in those four drops was less than a hundredth of a grain; an impossibly small dose to produce the symptoms. Yet he had all the appearance of having taken a poisonous dose, which he obviously had not, since the drop-bottle was nearly full. I could make nothing of it. However, I treated it as a case of atropine poisoning; and as the treatment produced marked improvement, I went home, more mystified than ever.

When I called on the following morning, I learned that he was practically well, and had gone to his office. But that evening I had another urgent message, and on hurrying round to Burnaby’s house, found him suffering from an attack similar to, but even more severe than, the one on the previous day. I immediately administered an injection of pilocarpine and other appropriate remedies, and had the satisfaction of seeing a rapid improvement in his condition. But whereas the efficacy of the treatment proved that the symptoms were really due to atropine, no atropine appeared to have been taken excepting the minute quantity contained in the eye-drops.

It was very mysterious. The most exhaustive inquiries failed to suggest any possible source of the poison excepting the drops; and as each attack had occurred a short time after the use of them, it was impossible to ignore the apparent connection, in spite of the absurdly minute dose.

“I can only suppose,” said I, addressing Mrs. Burnaby and Mr. Parker, who had called to make inquiries, “that Burnaby is the subject of an idiosyncrasy—that he is abnormally sensitive to this drug.”

“Is that a known condition?” asked Parker.

“Oh, yes,” I replied. “People vary enormously in the way in which they react to drugs. Some are so intolerant of particular drugs—iodine, for instance—that ordinary medicinal doses produce poisonous effects, while others have the most extraordinary tolerance. Christisori, in his Treatise on Poisons, gives a case of a man, unaccustomed to opium, who took nearly an ounce of laudanum without any effect—a dose that would have killed an ordinary man. These drugs are terrible pitfalls for the doctor who doesn’t know his patient. Just think what might have happened to Burnaby if someone had given him a full medicinal dose of belladonna.”

“Does belladonna have the same effect as atropine?” asked Mrs. Burnaby.

“It is the same,” I replied. “Atropine is the active principle of belladonna.”

“What a mercy,” she exclaimed, “that we discovered this idiosyncrasy in time. I suppose he had better discontinue the drops?”

“Yes,” I answered, “most emphatically; and I will write to Mr. Haines and let him know that the atropine is impracticable.”

I accordingly wrote to the oculist, who was politely sceptical as to the connection between the drops and the attacks. However, Burnaby settled the matter by refusing point-blank to have any further dealings with atropine; and his decision was so far justified that, for the time being, the attacks did not recur.

A couple of months passed. The incident had, to a great extent, faded from my mind. But then it was revived in a way that not only filled me with astonishment but caused me very grave anxiety. I was just about to set out on my morning round when Burnaby’s housemaid met me at my door, breathing quickly and carrying a note. It was from Mrs. Burnaby, begging me to call at once and telling me that her husband had been seized by an attack similar to the previous ones. I ran back for my emergency bag and then hurried round to the house, where I found Burnaby lying on a sofa, very flushed, rather alarmed, and exhibiting well-marked symptoms of atropine poisoning. The attack, however, was not a very severe one, and the application of the appropriate remedies soon produced a change for the better.

“Now, Burnaby,” I said, as he sat up with a sigh of relief. “what have you been up to? Haven’t been tinkering with those drops again?”

“No,” he replied. “Why should I? Haines has finished with my eyes.”

“Well, you’ve been taking something with atropine in it.”

“I suppose I have, but I can’t imagine what. I have had no medicine of any kind.”

“No pills, lozenges, liniment, plaster, or ointment?”

“Nothing medicinal of any sort,” he replied. “In fact, I have swallowed nothing today but my breakfast; and the attack came on directly after, though it was a simple enough meal, goodness knows—just a couple of pigeon’s eggs and some toast and tea.”

“Pigeon’s eggs,” said I, with a grin, “why not sparrow’s?”

“Cyril sent them—as a joke, I think,” Mrs. Burnaby explained (Cyril, of course, was Mr. Parker), “but I must say Frank enjoyed them. You see, Cyril has taken lately to keeping pigeons and rabbits and other edible beasts, and I think he has done it principally for Frank’s sake, as you have ordered him a special diet. We are constantly getting things from Cyril now—pigeons and rabbits especially; and much younger than we can buy them at the shops.”

“Yes,” said Burnaby, “he is most generous. I should think he supplies more than half my diet. I hardly like to accept so much from him.”

“It gives him pleasure to send these gifts,” said Mrs. Burnaby; “but I wish it gave him pleasure to slaughter the creatures first. He always brings or sends them alive, and the cook hates killing them. As to me, I couldn’t do it, though I deal with the corpses afterwards. I prepare nearly all Frank’s food myself.”

“Yes,” said Burnaby, with a glance of deep affection at his wife, “Margaret is an artist in kickshaws and I consume the works of art. I can tell you, doctor, I live like a fighting cock.”

This was all very well, but it was beside the question; which was, where did the atropine come from? If Burnaby had swallowed nothing but his breakfast, it would seem that the atropine must have been in that. I pointed this out.

“But you know, doctor,” said Burnaby,” that isn’t possible. We can write the eggs off. You can’t get poison into an egg without making a hole in the shell, and these eggs were intact. And as to the bread and butter, and the tea, we all had the same, and none of the others seem any the worse.”

That isn’t very conclusive,” said I. “A dose of atropine that would be poisonous to you would probably have no appreciable effect on the others. But, of course, the real mystery is how on earth atropine could have got into any of the food.”

It couldn’t,” said Burnaby and that really was my own conviction. But it was an unsatisfactory conclusion, for it left the mystery unexplained; and when a length I took my leave, to continue my rounds of visits, it was with the uncomfortable feeling that I had failed to trace the origin of the danger or to secure my patient against its recurrence.

Nor was my uneasiness unjustified. Little more than a week had passed when a fresh summons brought me to Burnaby’s house, full of bewilderment and apprehension. And indeed there was good cause for apprehension; for when I arrived, to find Burnaby lying speechless and sightless his blue eyes turned to blank discs of black, glittering with the unnatural “belladonna sparkle,”—when I felt his racing pulse and watched his vain efforts to swallow a sip of water,—I began to ask myself whether he was not beyond recall. The same question was asked mutely by the terrified eyes of his wife, who rose like a ghost from his bedside as I entered the room. But once more he responded to the remedies, though more slowly this time, and at the end of an hour I was relieved to see that the urgent danger was past, although he still remained very ill.

Meanwhile, inquiries failed utterly to elicit any explanation of the attack. The symptoms had set in shortly after dinner; a simple meal, consisting of a pigeon cooked en casserole by Mrs. Burnaby herself, vegetables and a light pudding which had been shared by the rest of the family, and a little Chablis from a bottle that had been unsealed and opened in the dining-room. Nothing else had been taken and no medicaments of any kind used. On the other hand, any doubts as to the nature of the attack were set at rest by a chemical test made by me and confirmed by the Clinical Research Association, Atropine was demonstrably present, though the amount was comparatively small. But its source remained an impenetrable mystery.

It was a profoundly disturbing state of affairs. The last attack had narrowly missed a fatal termination and the poison was still untraced. From the same unknown source a fresh charge might be delivered at any moment, and who could say what the result would be? Poor Burnaby was in a state of chronic terror and his wife began to look haggard and worn with constant anxiety and apprehension. Nor was I in much better case myself, for, whatever should befall, the responsibility was mine. I racked my brains for some possible explanation, but could think of none, though there were times when a horrible thought would creep into my mind, only to be indignantly cast out.

One evening a few days after the last attack, I received a visit from Burnaby’s brother, a pathologist attached to one of the London hospitals, but not in practice. Very different was Dr. Burnaby from his gentle, amiable brother; a strong, resolute, energetic man and none too suave in manner. We were already acquainted, so no introductions were necessary, and he came to the point with characteristic directness.

“You can guess what I have come about, Jardine—this atropine business. What is being done in the matter?”

“I don’t know that anything is being done,” I answered lamely. “I can make nothing of it.”

“Waiting for the next attack and the inquest, h’m? Well, that won’t do, you know. This affair has got to be stopped before it is too late. If you don’t know where the poison comes from, somebody does. H’m! And it is time to find out who that somebody is. There aren’t many to choose from. I am going there now to have a look round and make a few inquiries. You’d better come with me.”

“Are they expecting you?” I asked.

“No,” he answered gruffly; “but I’m not a stranger and neither are you.”

I decided to go round with him, though I didn’t much like his manner. This was evidently meant to be a surprise visit, and I had no great difficulty in guessing at what was in his mind. On the other hand, I was not sorry to share the responsibility with a man of his position and a relative of the patient. Accordingly, I set forth with him willingly enough; and it is significant of my state of mind at this time, that I took my emergency bag with me.

When we arrived Burnaby and his wife were just sitting down to dinner—the children took their evening meal by themselves—and they welcomed us with the ready hospitality that made this such a pleasant household. Dr. Burnaby’s place was laid opposite mine, and I was faintly amused to note his eye furtively travelling over the table, evidently assessing each article of food as a possible vehicle of atropine. “If you had only let us know you were coming, Jim,” said Mrs. Burnaby when the joint made its appearance, “we would have had something better than saddle of mutton. As it is, you must take pot-luck.”

“Saddle of mutton is good enough for me,” replied Dr. Burnaby. “But what on earth is that stuff that Frank has got?” he added, as Burnaby lifted the lid from a little casserole.

“That,” she answered, “is a fricassee of rabbit. Such a tiny creature it was; a mere infant. Cook nearly wept at having to kill it.”

“Kill it!” exclaimed the doctor; “do you buy your rabbits alive?”

“We didn’t buy this one,” she replied. “It was brought by Cyril—Mr. Parker, you know,” she added hastily and with a slight flush, as she caught a grim glance of interrogation. “He sends quite a lot of poultry and rabbits and things for Frank from his little farm.”

“Ha!” said the doctor with a reflective eye on the casserole. “H’m! Breeds them himself, hey? Whereabouts is his farm?”

“At Eltham. But it isn’t really a farm. He just keeps rabbits and fowls and pigeons in a place at the back of his garden.”

“Is your cook English?” Dr. Burnaby asked, glancing again at the casserole. “That affair of Frank’s has rather a French look.”

“Bless you, Jim,” said Burnaby, “I am not dependent on mere cooks. I am a pampered gourmet. Margaret prepares most of my food with her own sacred hands. Cooks can’t do this sort of thing,” and he helped himself afresh from the casserole.

Dr. Burnaby seemed to reflect profoundly upon this explanation. Then he abruptly changed the subject from cookery to the Lindisfarne Gospels and thereby set his brother’s chin wagging to a new tune. For Burnaby’s affections as a scholar were set on seventh- and eighth-century manuscripts and his knowledge of them was as great as his enthusiasm.

“Oh, get on with your dinner, Frank, you old windbag,” exclaimed Mrs. Burnaby. “You are letting everything get cold.”

So I am, dear,” he admitted, “but—I won’t be a minute. I just want Jim to see those collotypes of the Durham Book. Excuse me.”

He sprang up from the table and darted into the adjoining library, whence he returned almost immediately carrying a small portfolio.

“These are the plates,” he said, handing the portfolio to his brother. “Have a look at them while I dispose of the arrears.”

He took up his knife and fork and made as if to resume his meal. Then he laid them down and leaned back in his chair. “I don’t think I want any more, after all,” he said.

The tone in which he spoke caused me to look at him critically; for my talk with his brother had made me a little nervous and apprehensive of further trouble. What I now saw was by no means reassuring. A slight flush and a trace of anxiety in his expression made me ask, with outward composure but inward alarm: “You are feeling quite fit, I hope, Burnaby?”

“Well, not so very,” he replied. “My eyes are going a bit misty and my throat—” Here he worked his lips and swallowed as if with some effort.

I rose hastily, and, catching a terrified glance from his wife, went to him and looked into his eyes. And thereupon my heart sank. For already his pupils were twice their natural size and the darkened eyes exhibited the too-familiar sparkle. I was sensible of a thrill of terror, and, as I looked into Burnaby’s now distinctly alarmed face, his brother’s ominous words echoed in my ears. Had I waited “for the next attack and the inquest”?

The symptoms, once started, developed apace. From moment to moment he grew worse, and the rapid enlargement of the pupils gave an alarming hint as to the intensity of the poisoning. I darted out into the hail for my bag, and as I re-entered, I saw him rise, groping blindly with his hands, until his wife, ashen-faced and trembling, took his arm and led him to the door.

“I had better give him a dose of pilocarpine at once,” I said, getting out my hypodermic syringe and glancing at Dr. Burnaby, who watched me with stony composure.

“Yes,” he agreed, “and a little morphine, too! and he will probably need some stimulant. I won’t come up; only be in the way.”

I followed the patient up to the bedroom and administered the antidotes forthwith. Then, while he was getting partially undressed with his wife’s help, I went downstairs in search of brandy and hot water, I was about to enter the dining-room when, through the partly-open door, I saw Dr. Burnaby standing by the fireplace with his open handbag—which he had fetched in from the hall—on the table before him, and in his hand a little Bohemian glass jar from the mantel piece. Involuntarily, I halted for a moment; and as I did so, he carefully deposited the little ornament in the bag and closed the latter, locking it with a small key which he then put in his pocket.

It was an excessively odd proceeding, but, of course, it was no concern of mine. Nevertheless, instead of entering the dining-room, I stole softly towards the kitchen and fetched the hot water myself. When I returned, the bag was back on the hall table and I found Dr. Burnaby grimly pacing up and down the dining room. He asked me a few questions while I was looking for the brandy, and then, somewhat to my surprise, proposed to come up and lend a hand with the patient.

On entering the bedroom, we found poor Burnaby lying half-undressed on the bed and in a very pitiable state; terrified, physically distressed and inclined to ramble mentally. His wife knelt by the bed, white-faced, red-eyed and evidently panic-stricken, though she was quite quiet and self-restrained. As we entered, she rose to make way for us, and while we were examining the patient’s pulse and listening to his racing heart, she silently busied herself with the preparations for administering the stimulants.

“You don’t think he is going to die, do you?” she whispered, as Dr. Burnaby handed me back my stethoscope.

“It is no use thinking,” he replied dryly—and I thought rather callously—“we shall see,” and with this he turned his back to her and looked at his brother with a gloomy frown.

For more than an hour that question was an open one. From moment to moment I expected to feel the wildly-racing pulse flicker out; to hear the troubled breathing die away in an expiring rattle. From time to time we cautiously increased the antidotes and administered restoratives, but I must confess that I had little hope. Dr. Burnaby was undisguisedly pessimistic. And as the weary minutes dragged on, and I looked momentarily for the arrival of the dread messenger, there would keep stealing into my mind a question that I hardly dared to entertain. What was the meaning of it all? Whence had the poison come? And why, in this household, had it found its way to Burnaby alone—the one inmate to whom it was specially deadly?

At last—at long last—there came a change; hardly perceptible at first, and viewed with little confidence. But after a time it became more pronounced; and then, quite rapidly, the symptoms began to clear up. The patient swallowed with ease, and great relish, a cup of coffee; the heart slowed down, the breathing became natural, and presently, as the morphine began to take effect, he sank into a doze which passed by degrees into a quiet sleep.

“I think he will do now,” said Dr. Burnaby, “so I won’t stay any longer. But it was a near thing, Jardine; most uncomfortably near.”

He walked to the door, where, as he went out, he turned and bowed stiffly to his sister-in-law. I followed him down the stairs, rather expecting him to revert to the subject of his visit to me. But he made no reference to it, nor, indeed, did he say anything until he stood on the doorstep with his bag in his hand. Then he made a somewhat cryptic remark: “Well, Jardine,” he said, “the Durham Book saved him. But for those collotypes, he would be a dead man.,” and with that he walked away, leaving me to interpret as best I could this decidedly obscure remark.

A quarter of an hour later, as Burnaby was peacefully asleep and apparently out of all danger, I took my own departure, and as soon as I was outside the house, I proceeded to put into execution a plan that had been forming in my mind during the last hour. There was some mystery in this case that was evidently beyond my powers to solve. But solved it had to be, if Burnaby’s life was to be saved, to say nothing of my own reputation; so I had decided to put the facts before my friend and former teacher, Dr. Thorndyke, and seek his advice, and if necessary, his assistance.

It was now past ten o’clock, but I determined to take my chance of finding him at his chambers, and accordingly, having found a taxi, I directed the driver to set me down at the gate of Inner Temple Lane. My former experience of Thorndyke’s habits led me to be hopeful, and my hopes were not unjustified on this occasion, for when I had mounted to the first pair landing of No. 5A King’s Bench Walk, and assaulted the knocker of the inner door, I was relieved to find him not only at home, but alone and disengaged. “It’s a deuce of a time to come knocking you up,” I said, as he shook my hand, “but I am in rather a hole, and the matter is urgent, so—”

“So you paid me the compliment of treating me as a friend,” said he. “Very proper of you. What is the nature of your difficulty?”

“Why, I’ve got a case of recurrent atropine poisoning and I can make absolutely nothing of it.”

Here I began to give a brief outline sketch of the facts, but after a minute or two he stopped me.

“It is of no use being sketchy, Jardine,” said he. “The night is young. Let us have a complete history of the case, with particulars of all the persons concerned and their mutual relations. And don’t spare detail.”

He seated himself with a notebook on his knee, and when he had lighted his pipe, I plunged into the narrative of the case, beginning with the eye-drop incident and finishing with the alarming events of the present evening.

He listened with close attention, refraining from interrupting me excepting occasionally to ask for a date, which he jotted down with a few other notes. When I had finished, he laid aside his notebook, and, as he knocked out his pipe, observed: “A very remarkable case, Jardine, and interesting by reason of the unusual nature of the poison.”

“Oh, hang the interest!” I exclaimed. “I am not a toxicologist. I am a general practitioner; and I want to know what the deuce I ought to do.”

I think,” said he, “that your duty is perfectly obvious. You ought to communicate with the police, either alone or in conjunction with some member of the family.”

I looked at him in dismay. “But,” I faltered, “what have I got to tell the police?”

“What you have told me,” he replied; “which, put in a nutshell, amounts to this: Frank Burnaby has had three attacks of atropine poisoning, disregarding the eye-drops. Each attack has appeared to be associated with some article of food prepared by Mrs. Burnaby and supplied by Mr. Cyril Parker.”

“But, good God!” I exclaimed, “you don’t suspect Mrs. Burnaby?”

“I suspect nobody,” he replied. “It may not be criminal poisoning at all. But Mr. Burnaby has to be protected, and the case certainly needs investigation.”

“You don’t think I could make a few inquiries myself first?” I suggested.

He shook his head. “The risk is too great,” he replied. “The man might die before you reached a conclusion; whereas a few inquiries made by the police would probably put a stop to the affair, unless the poisoning is in some inconceivable way inadvertent.”

That was what his advice amounted to, and I felt that he was right. But it put on me a horribly unpleasant duty; and as I wended homewards I tried to devise some means of mitigating its unpleasantness Finally I decided to try to persuade Mrs. Burnaby to make a joint communication with me.

But the necessity never arose. When I made my morning visit, I found a taxicab drawn up opposite the door and the housemaid who admitted me looked as if she had seen a ghost.

“Why, what is the matter, Mabel?” I asked, as she ushered me funereally into the drawing-room.

She shook her head. “I don’t know, sir. Something awful, I’m afraid. I’ll tell them you are here.” With this she shut the door and departed.

The housemaid’s manner and the unusually formal reception filled me with vague forebodings. But even as I was wondering what could have happened, the question was answered by the entry of a tall man who looked like a guardsman in mufti.

“Dr. Jardine?” he asked; and as I nodded, he explained, presenting his card, “I am Detective Lane. I have been instructed to make some inquiries in respect of certain information which we have received. It is stated that Mr. Frank Burnaby is suffering from the effects of poison. So far as you know, is that true?”

“I hope he is recovered now,” I replied, “but he was suffering last night from what appeared to be atropine poisoning.”

“Have there been any previous attacks of the same kind?” the sergeant asked.

“Yes,” I answered. “This was the fifth attack; but the first two were evidently due to some eye-drops that he had used.”

“And in the case of the other three; have you any idea as to how the poison came to be taken? Whether it was in the food, for instance?”

“I have no idea, sergeant. I know nothing more than what I have told you; and, of course, I am not going to make any guesses. Is it admissible to ask who gave the information?”

“I am afraid not, sir,” he replied. “But you will soon know. There is a definite charge against Mrs. Burnaby—I have just made the arrest—and we shall want your evidence for the prosecution.”

I stared at him in utter consternation. “Do you mean,” I gasped, “that you have arrested Mrs. Burnaby?”

“Yes,” he replied; “on a charge of having administered poison to her husband.”

I was absolutely thunderstruck. And yet, when I remembered Thorndyke’s words and recalled my own dim and hastily-dismissed surmises, there was nothing so very surprising in this shocking turn of events.

“Could I have a few words with Mrs. Burnaby?” I asked.

“Not alone,” he replied, “and better not at all. Still, if you have any business—”

“I have,” said I; whereupon he led the way to the dining-room, where I found Mrs. Burnaby seated rigidly in a chair, pale as death, but quite calm though rather dazed. Opposite her a military-looking man sat stiffly by the table with an air of being unconscious of her presence, and he took no notice as I walked over to his prisoner and silently pressed her hand.

“I’ve come, Mrs. Burnaby,” said I, “to ask if there is anything that you want me to do. Does Burnaby know about this horrible affair?

No,” she answered. “You will have to tell him if he is fit to hear it; and if not, I want you to let my father know as soon as you can. That is all; and you had better go now, as we mustn’t detain these gentlemen. Good-bye.”

She shook my hand unemotionally, and when I had faltered a few words of vague encouragement and sympathy, I went out of the room, but waited in the hall to see the last of her.

The police officers were most polite and considerate. When she came out, they attended her in quite a deferential manner. As the sergeant was in the act of opening the street door, the bell rang; and when the door opened it disclosed Mr. Parker standing on threshold. He was about to address Mrs. Burnaby but she passed him with a slight bow, and descended the steps, preceded by the sergeant and followed by the detective. The former held the door of the cab open while she entered, when he entered also and shut the door. The detective took his seat beside the driver and the cab moved off.

“What is in the wind, Jardine?” Parker asked looking at me with a distinctly alarmed expression. “Those fellows look like plain-clothes policemen.”

“They are,” said I. “They have just arrest Mrs. Burnaby on a charge of having attempted to poison her husband.”

I thought Parker would have fallen. As it was, he staggered to a hall chair and dropped on it in a state of collapse. “Good God!” he gasped. “What a frightful thing! But there can’t possibly be any evidence—any real grounds for suspecting her. It must be just a wild guess. I wonder who started it.”

On this subject I had pretty strong suspicions, but I did not mention them; and when I had seen Parker into the dining-room and explained matters a little further I went upstairs, bracing myself for my very disagreeable task.

Burnaby was quite recovered, though rather torpid from the effects of the morphine. But my news roused him most effectually. In a moment he was out of bed, hurriedly preparing to dress; and though his pale, set face told how deeply the catastrophe had shocked him, he was quite collected and had all his wits about him.

“It’s of no use letting our emotions loose, doctor,” said he, in reply to my expressions of sympathy. “Margaret is in a very dangerous position. You have only to consider what she is—a young, beautiful woman—and what I am, to realise that. We must act promptly. I shall go and see her father; he is a very capable lawyer; and we must get a first-class counsel.”

This seemed to be an opportunity for mentioning Thorndyke’s peculiar qualifications in a case of this kind, and I did so. Burnaby listened attentively, apparently not unimpressed; but he replied cautiously: “We shall have to leave the choice of the counsel to Harratt; but if you care, meanwhile, to consult with Dr. Thorndyke, you have my authority. I will tell Harratt.”

On this I took my departure, not a little relieved at the way he had taken the evil tidings; and as soon as I had disposed of the more urgent part of my work, I betook myself to Thorndyke’s chambers, just in time to catch him on his return from the Courts.

“Well, Jardine,” he said, when I had brought the history up to date, “what is it that you want me to do?”

“I want you to do what you can to establish Mrs. Burnaby’s innocence,” I replied.

He looked at me reflectively for a few moments; then he said, quietly but rather significantly: “It is not my practice to give ex parte evidence. An expert witness cannot act as an advocate. If I investigate the evidence in this case, it will have to be at your risk, as representing the accused, since any fact, no matter how damaging, which is in the possession of the witness must be disclosed in accordance with the terms of the oath, to say nothing of the obvious duty of every person to further the ends of justice. Speaking as a lawyer, and taking the known facts at their face value, I do not advise you to employ me to investigate the case at large. You might find that you had merely strengthened the hand of the prosecution.

“But I will make a suggestion. There seems to me to be in this case a very curious and interesting possibility. Let me investigate that independently. If my inquiries yield a positive result, I will let you know and you can call me as a witness. If they yield a negative result, you had better leave me out of the case.”

To this suggestion I necessarily agreed; but when I took my leave of Thorndyke I went away with a sense of discouragement and failure. His reference to “the face value of the known facts” clearly implied that those facts were adverse to the accused; while the “curious possibility” suggested nothing but a forlorn hope from which he had no great expectations.

I need not follow the weary business in detail. At the first hearing before the magistrate the police merely stated the charge and gave evidence of arrest, both they and the defence asking for a remand and neither apparently desiring to show their hand. Accordingly the case was adjourned for seven days, and as bail was refused, the prisoner was detained in custody.

During those seven dreary days I spent as much time as I could with Burnaby, and though I was filled with admiration of his fortitude and self his drawn and pallid face wrung my heart. In those few days he seemed to have changed into an old man. At his house I also met Mr. Harratt, Mrs. Burnaby’s father, a fine, dignified man and a typical old lawyer; and it was unspeakably pathetic to see the father and the husband of the accused woman each trying to support the courage of the other while both were torn with anxiety and apprehension. On one occasion Mr. Parker was present and looked more haggard and depressed than either. But Mr. Harratt’s manner towards him was so frigid and forbidding that he did not repeat his visit. At these meetings we discussed the case freely, which was a further affliction to me. For even I could not fail to see that any evidence that I could give directly supported the case for the prosecution.

So six of the seven days ran out, and all the time there was no word from Thorndyke. But on the evening of the sixth day I received a letter from him, curt and dry, but still giving out a ray of hope. This was the brief message:

“I have gone into the question of which I spoke to you and consider that the point is worth raising. I have accordingly written to Mr. Harratt advising him to that effect.”

It was a somewhat colourless communication. But I knew Thorndyke well enough to realise that his promises usually understated his intentions. And when, on the following morning, I met Mr. Harratt and Burnaby at the court, something in their manner—a new vivacity and expectancy—suggested that Thorndyke had been more explicit in his communication to the lawyer. But, all the same, their anxiety, for all their outward courage, was enough to have touched a heart of stone.

The spectacle that that court presented when the case was called forms a tableau that is painted on my memory in indelible colours. The mingling of squalor and tragedy, of frivolity and dread solemnity—the grave magistrate on the bench, the stolid policemen, the busy, preoccupied lawyers, and the gibbering crowd of spectators, greedy for sensation, with eager eyes riveted on the figure in the dock—offered such a medley of contrasts as I hope never to look upon again.

As to the prisoner herself, her appearance brought my heart into my mouth. Rigid as a marble statue and nearly as void of colour, she stood in the dock, guarded by two constables, looking with stony bewilderment on the motley scene, outwardly calm, but with the calm of one who looks death in the face; and when the prosecuting counsel rose to open the case for the police, she looked at him as a victim on the scaffold might look upon the executioner.

As I listened to the brief opening address, my heart sank, though the counsel, Sir Harold Layton, K.C., presented his case with that scrupulous fairness to the accused that makes an English court of justice a thing without parallel in the world. But the mere facts, baldly stated without comment, were appalling. No persuasive rhetoric was needed to show that they led direct to the damning conclusion.

Frank Burnaby, an elderly man, married to a young and beautiful woman, had on three separate occasions had administered to him a certain deadly poison, to wit, atropine. It would be proved that he had suffered from the effects of that poison; that the symptoms followed the taking of certain articles of food of which he alone had partaken; that the said food did actually contain the said poison; and that the food which contained the poison was specially prepared for his sole consumption by his wife, the accused, with her own hands. No evidence was at present available as to how the accused obtained the poison or that she had any such poison in her possession, nor would any suggestion be offered as to the motive of the crime. But, on the evidence of the actual administration of the poison, he would ask that the prisoner be committed for trial. He then proceeded to call the witnesses, of whom I was naturally the first. When I had been sworn and given my description, the counsel asked a few questions which elicited the history of the case and which I need not repeat. He then continued:

“Have you any doubt as to the cause of Mr. Burnaby’s symptoms?”

“No. They were certainly due to atropine poisoning.”

“Has Mr. Burnaby any constitutional peculiarity in respect of atropine?”

“Yes. He is abnormally susceptible to the effects of atropine.”

“Was this peculiar susceptibility known to the accused?”

“Yes. It was communicated to her by me.”

“Was it known, so far as you are aware, to any other persons?”

“Mr. Parker was present when I told her, and Mr. Burnaby and his brother, Dr. Burnaby, were also informed.”

“Is there any way, so far as you know, in which the accused could have obtained possession of atropine?”

“Only by having the oculist’s prescription for the eye-drops made up.”

“Do you know of any medium, other than the food, by which atropine might have been taken by Mr. Burnaby?”

“I do not,” I replied; and this concluded my evidence. But as I stepped out of the witness-box, I reflected gloomily that every word that I had spoken was a rivet in the fetters of the silent figure in the dock.

The next witness was the cook. She testified that she had killed and skinned the rabbit and had then handed it to the accused, who made it into a fricassee and prepared it for the table. Witness took no part in the preparation and she was absent from the kitchen on one occasion for several minutes, leaving the accused there alone.

When the cook had concluded her evidence, the name of James Burnaby was called, and the doctor entered the witness-box, looking distinctly uncomfortable, but grim and resolute. The first few questions elicited the circumstances of his visit to his brother’s house and of the sudden attack of illness. That illness he had at once recognised as acute atropine poisoning, and had assumed that the poison was in the specially prepared food.

“Did you take any measures to verify this opinion?” counsel asked.

“Yes. As soon as I was alone, I took part of the remainder of the rabbit and put it in a glass jar which I found on the mantelpiece and which I first rinsed out with water. Later, I carried the sample of food to Professor Berry, who analysed it in my presence and found it to contain atropine. He obtained from it a thirtieth of a grain of atropine sulphate.”

“Is that a poisonous dose?”

“Not to an ordinary person, though it is considerably beyond the medicinal dose. But it would have been a poisonous dose to Frank Burnaby. If he had swallowed this, in addition to what he had already taken, I feel no doubt that it would have killed him.”

This concluded the case for the prosecution, and a black case it undoubtedly looked. There was no cross-examination; and as Thorndyke had arrived some time previously and conferred with Mr. Harratt and his counsel, I concluded that the defence would take the form of a counter-attack by the raising of a fresh issue. And so it turned out. When Thorndyke entered the witness-box and had disposed of the preliminaries, the counsel for the defence “gave him his head.”

“You have made certain investigations in regard to this case, I believe?” Thorndyke assented, and the counsel continued: “I will not ask you specific questions, but will request you to describe your investigations and their result, and tell us what caused you to make them.”

“This case,” Thorndyke began, “was brought to my notice by Dr. Jardine, who gave me all the facts known to him. These facts were very remarkable, and, taken together, they suggested a possible explanation of the poisoning. There were four striking points in the case. First, there was the very unusual nature of the poison. Second, the abnormal susceptibility of Mr. Burnaby to this particular poison. Third, the fact that all the food in which the poison appeared to have been conveyed came from the same source: it was sent by Mr. Cyril Parker. Fourth, that food consisted of pigeon’s eggs, pigeon’s flesh, and rabbit’s flesh.”

“What is there remarkable about that?” the counsel asked.

“The remarkable point is that the pigeon and the rabbit have an extraordinary immunity to atropine. Most vegetable-feeding birds and animals are more or less immune to vegetable poisons. Many birds and animals are largely immune to atropine; but among birds the pigeon is exceptionally immune, while the rabbit is the most extreme instance among animals. A single rabbit can take without the slightest harm more than a hundred times the quantity of atropine that would kill a man; and rabbits habitually feed freely on the leaves and berries of the belladonna or deadly nightshade.”

“Does the deadly nightshade contain atropine?” the counsel asked.

“Yes. Atropine is the active principle of the belladonna plant and gives to it its poisonous properties.”

“And if an animal, such as a rabbit, were to feed on the nightshade plant, would its flesh be poisonous?”

“Yes. Cases of belladonna poisoning from eating rabbit have been recorded—by Firth and Bentley, for instance.”

“And you suspected that the poison in this case had been contained in the pigeon and the rabbit themselves?”

“Yes. It was a striking coincidence that the poisoning should follow the consumption of these two specially immune animals. But there was a further reason for connecting them. The symptoms were strictly proportionate to the probable amount of poison in each case. Thus the symptoms were only slight after eating the pigeon’s eggs. But the eggs of a poisoned pigeon could contain only a minute quantity of the poison. After eating the pigeon the symptoms were much more severe, and the body of a pigeon which had fed on belladonna would contain much more atropine than could be contained in an egg. Finally, after eating the rabbit, the symptoms were extremely violent; but a rabbit has the greatest immunity and is the most likely to have eaten large quantities of belladonna leaves.”

“Did you take any measures to put your theory to the test?”

“Yes. Last Monday I went to Eltham, where I had ascertained that Mr. Cyril Parker lives, and inspected his premises from the outside. At the end of his garden is a small paddock enclosed by a wall. Approaching this across a meadow and looking over the wall, I saw that the enclosure was provided with small fowl-houses, pigeon-cotes, and rabbit hutches. All these were open and their inmates were roaming about the paddock. On one side of the enclosure, by the wall was a dense mass of deadly nightshade plants, extending the whole length of the wall and about a couple of yards in width. At one part of this was a ring fence of wire netting, and inside it were five half-grown rabbits. There was a basket containing a small quantity of cabbage leaves and other green stuff, but as I watched, I saw the young rabbits browsing freely on the nightshade plants in preference to the food provided for them.

“On the following day I went to Eltham again taking with me an assistant who carried a young rabbit in a small hamper. We watched the paddock until the coast was clear. Then my assistant got over the wall and abstracted a young rabbit from inside the ring fence and handed it to me. He then took the rabbit from the hamper and dropped it inside the fence. As soon as we were clear of the meadow, we killed the captured rabbit—to prevent any possible elimination of any poison that it might have swallowed. On arriving in London, I at once took the dead rabbit to St. Margaret’s Hospital, where, in the chemical laboratory, and in the presence of Dr. Woodford, the Professor of Chemistry, I skinned it and prepared it as if for cooking by removing the viscera. I then separated the flesh from the bones and handed the former to Dr. Woodford, who, in my presence, carried out an exhaustive chemical test for atropine. The result was that atropine was found to be present in all the muscles; and, on making a quantitative test, the muscles alone yielded no less than .93 grain.”

“Is that a poisonous dose?” the counsel asked.

“Yes; it is a poisonous dose for a normal man. In the case of an abnormally susceptible person like Mr. Burnaby it would certainly be a fatal dose.”

This completed Thorndyke’s evidence. There was no cross and the magistrate put no questions. When Dr. Woodford had been called and had given confirmatory evidence, Mrs. Burnaby’s counsel proceeded to address the bench. But the magistrate cut him short.

“There is really no case to argue,” said he. “The evidence of the expert witnesses makes it perfectly clear that the poison was already in the food when it came into the hands of the accused. Consequently the charge against her of introducing the poison falls to the ground and the case must be dismissed. I am sure everyone will sympathise with the unfortunate lady who has been the victim of these extraordinary circumstances, and will rejoice, as I do, at the clearing up of the mystery. The prisoner is discharged.”

It was a dramatic moment when, amidst the applause of the spectators, Mrs. Burnaby stepped down from the dock and clasped her husband’s outstretched hand But, overwhelmed as they both were by the sudden relief, I thought it best not to linger, but, after congratulations, to take myself off with Thorndyke. But one pleasant incident I witnessed before I went Dr. Burnaby had been standing apart, evidently some what embarrassed, when suddenly Mrs. Burnaby ran to him and held out her hand.

“I suppose, Margaret,” he said gruffly, “you think I’m an old beast?”

“Indeed I don’t,” she replied. “You acted quite properly, and I respect you for having the moral courage to do it. And don’t forget, Jim, that you action has saved Frank’s life. But for you, there would have been no Dr. Thorndyke; and but for Dr. Thorndyke, there would have been another poisoned rabbit.”

“What do you make of this case?” I asked, as Thorndyke and I walked away from the court. “Do you suppose the poisoning was accidental?

He shook his head. “No, Jardine,” he replied. “There are too many coincidences. You notice that the poisoned animals did not appear until after Mr. Parker had learned from you that Burnaby was abnormally sensitive to atropine and could consequently be poisoned by an ordinary medicinal dose. Then the sending of the animals alive looks like a precaution divert suspicion from himself and confuse the issue Again, that ring fence among the belladonna plans has a fishy look, and the plants themselves were not only abnormally numerous but many of them very young and looked as if they had been planted. Further, I happen to know that Parker’s firm published, only last year, a book on toxicology in which the immunity of pigeons and rabbits was mentioned and which Parker probably read.”

“Then do you believe that he intended to let Mrs. Burnaby—the woman with whom he was in love—bear the brunt of his crime? It seems incredibly villainous and cowardly.”

“I do not,” he replied. “I imagine that the rabbit that I captured, or one of the others, would have been sent to Burnaby in a few days’ time. The cook would probably have prepared it for him and it would almost certainly have killed him; and his death would have been proof of Mrs. Burnaby’s innocence. Suspicion would have been transferred to the cook. But I don’t suppose any action will be taken against him, for it is practically certain that no jury would convict him on my evidence.”

Thorndyke was right in his opinion. No proceedings were taken against Parker. But the house of the Burnabys knew him no more.

A MYSTERY OF THE SAND-HILLS (1925)

I have occasionally wondered how often Mystery and Romance present themselves to us ordinary men of affairs only to be passed by without recognition. More often, I suspect than most of us imagine. The uncanny tendency of my talented friend John Thorndyke to become involved in strange, mysterious and abnormal circumstances has almost become a joke against him. But yet, on reflection, I am disposed to think that his experiences have not differed essentially from those of other men, but that his extraordinary powers of observation and rapid inference have enabled him to detect abnormal elements in what, to ordinary men, appeared to be quite commonplace occurrences. Certainly this was so in the singular Roscoff case, in which, if I had been alone, I should assuredly have seen nothing to merit more than a passing attention.

It happened that on a certain summer morning—it was the fourteenth of August, to be exact—we were discussing this very subject as we walked across the golf-links from Sandwich towards the sea. I was spending a holiday in the old town with my wife, in order that she might paint the ancient streets, and we had induced Thorndyke to come down and stay with us for a few days. This was his last morning, and we had come forth betimes to stroll across the sand-hills to Shellness.

It was a solitary place in those days. When we came off the sand-hills on to the smooth, sandy beach, there was not a soul in sight, and our own footprints were the first to mark the firm strip of sand between high-water mark and the edge of the quiet surf.

We had walked a hundred yards or so when Thorndyke stopped and looked down at the dry sand above tide-marks and then along the wet beach.

“Would that be a shrimper?” he cogitated, referring to some impressions of bare feet in the sand. “If so, he couldn’t have come from Pegwell, for the River Stour bars the way. But he came out of the sea and seems to have made straight for the sand-hills.”

“Then he probably was a shrimper,” said I, not deeply interested.

“Yet,” said Thorndyke, “it was an odd time for a shrimper to be at work.”

“What was an odd time?” I demanded. “When was he at work?”

“He came out of the sea at this place,” Thorndyke replied, glancing at his watch, “at about half-past eleven last night, or from that to twelve.”

“Good Lord, Thorndyke!” I exclaimed, “how on earth do you know that?”

“But it is obvious, Anstey,” he replied. “It is now half-past nine, and it will be high-water at eleven, as we ascertained before we came out. Now, if you look at those footprints on the sand, you see that they stop short—or rather begin—about two-thirds of the distance from high-water mark to the edge of the surf. Since they are visible and distinct, they must have been made after last high-water. But since they do not extend to the water’s edge, they must have been made when the tide was going out; and the place where they begin is the place where the edge of the surf was when the footprints were made. But the place is, as we see, about an hour below the high-water mark. Therefore, when the man came out of the sea, the tide had been going down for an hour, roughly. As it is high-water at eleven this morning, it was high-water at about ten-forty last night; and as the man came out of the sea about an hour after high-water, he must have come out at, or about, eleven-forty. Isn’t that obvious?”

“Perfectly,” I replied, laughing. “It is as simple as sucking eggs when you think it out. But how the deuce do you manage always to spot these obvious things at a glance? Most men would have just glanced at those footprints and passed them without a second thought.”

“That,” he replied, “is a mere matter of habit; the habit of trying to extract the significance of simple appearances. It has become almost automatic with me.”

During our discussion we had been walking forward slowly, straying on to the edge of the sand-hills. Suddenly, in a hollow between the hills, my eye lighted upon a heap of clothes, apparently, to judge by their orderly disposal, those of a bather. Thorndyke also had observed them and we approached together and looked down on them curiously.

“Here is another problem for you,” said I. “Find the bather. I don’t see him anywhere.”

“You won’t find him here,” said Thorndyke. “These clothes have been out all night. Do you see the little spider’s web on the boots with a few dewdrops still clinging to it? There has been no dew forming for a good many hours. Let us have a look at the beach.”

We strode out through the loose sand and stiff, reedy grass to the smooth beach, and here we could plainly see a line of prints of naked feet leading straight down to the sea, but ending abruptly about two-thirds of the way to the water’s edge.

“This looks like our nocturnal shrimper,” said I. “He seems to have gone into the sea here and come out at the other place. But if they are the same footprints, he must have forgotten to dress before he went home. It is a quaint affair.”

“It is a most remarkable affair,” Thorndyke agreed; “and if the footprints are not the same it will be still more inexplicable.”

He produced from his pocket a small spring tape-measure with which he carefully took the lengths of two of the most distinct footprints and the length of the stride. Then we walked back along the beach to the other set of tracks, two of which he measured in the same manner.

“Apparently they are the same,” he said, putting away his tape; “indeed, they could hardly be otherwise. But the mystery is, what has become of the man? He couldn’t have gone away without his clothes, unless he is a lunatic, which his proceedings rather suggest. There is just the possibility that he went into the sea again and was drowned. Shall we walk along towards Shellness and see if we can find any further traces?”

We walked nearly half a mile along the beach, but the smooth surface of the sand was everywhere unbroken. At length we turned to retrace our steps; and at this moment I observed two men advancing across the sand-hills. By the time we had reached the mysterious heap of garments they were quite near, and, attracted no doubt by the intentness with which we were regarding the clothes, they altered their course to see what we were looking at. As they approached, I recognized one of them as a barrister named Hallet, a neighbour of mine in the Temple, whom I had already met in the town, and we exchanged greetings.

“What is the excitement?” he asked, looking at the heap of clothes and then glancing along the deserted beach; “and where is the owner of the togs? I don’t see him anywhere.”

“That is the problem,” said I. “He seems to have disappeared.”

“Gad!” exclaimed Hallett, “if he has gone home without his clothes, He’ll create a sensation in the town! What?”

Here the other man, who carried a set of golf clubs, stooped over the clothes with a look of keen interest.

“I believe I recognize these things, Hallett; in fact, I am sure I do. That waistcoat, for instance. You must have noticed that waistcoat. I saw you playing with the chap a couple of days ago. Tall, clean-shaven, dark fellow. Temporary member, you know. What was his name? Popoff, or something like that?”

“Roscoff,” said Hallett. “Yes, by Jove, I believe you are right. And now I come to think of it, he mentioned to me that he sometimes came up here for a swim. He said he particularly liked a paddle by moonlight, and I told him he was a fool to run the risk of bathing in a lonely place like this, especially at night.”

“Well, that is what he seems to have done,” said Thorndyke, “for these clothes have certainly been here all night, as you can see by that spider’s web.”

“Then he has come to grief, poor beggar!” said Hallett; “probably got carried away by the current. There is a devil of a tide here on the flood.”

He started to walk towards the beach, and the other man, dropping his clubs, followed.

“Yes,” said Hallett, “that is what has happened. You can see his footprints plainly enough going down to the sea; but there are no tracks coming back.”

“There are some tracks of bare feet coming out of the sea farther up the beach,” said I, “which seem to be his.”

Hallett shook his head. “They can’t be his,” he said, “for it is obvious that he never did come back. Probably they are the tracks of some shrimper. The question is, what are we to do! Better take his things to the dormy-house and then let the police know what has happened.”

We went back and began to gather up the clothes, each of us taking one or two articles.

“You were right, Morris,” said Hallett, as he picked up the shirt. “Here’s his name, “P. Roscoff,” and I see it is on the vest and the shorts, too. And I recognize the stick now not that that matters, as the clothes are marked.”

On our way across the links to the dormy-house mutual introductions took place. Morris was a London solicitor, and both he and Hallett knew Thorndyke by name.

“The coroner will have an expert witness,” Hallett remarked as we entered the house. “Rather a waste in a simple case like this. We had better put the things in here.”

He opened the door of a small room furnished with a good-sized table and a set of lockers, into one of which he inserted a key.

“Before we lock them up,” said Thorndyke, “I suggest that we make and sign a list of them and of the contents of the pockets to put with them.”

“Very well,” agreed Hallett. “You know the ropes in these cases. I’ll write down the descriptions, if you will call them out.”

Thorndyke looked over the collection and first enumerated the articles: a tweed jacket and trousers, light, knitted wool waistcoat, black and yellow stripes, blue cotton shirt, net vest and shorts, marked in ink “P. Roscoff,” brown merino socks, brown shoes, tweed cap, and a walking-stick—a mottled Malacca cane with a horn crooked handle. When Hallett had written down this list, Thorndyke laid the clothes on the table and began to empty the pockets, one at a time, dictating the descriptions of the articles to Hallett while Morris took them from him and laid them on a sheet of newspaper. In the jacket pockets were a handkerchief, marked “P.R.,” a letter-case containing a few stamps, one or two hotel bills and local tradesmen’s receipts, and some visiting cards inscribed “Mr. Peter Roscoff, Bell Hotel, Sandwich,” a leather cigarette-case, a 3B pencil fitted with a point-protector, and a fragment of what Thorndyke decided to be vine charcoal.

“That lot is not very illuminating,” remarked Morris, peering into the pockets of the letter-case. “No letter or anything indicating his permanent address. However, that isn’t our concern.” He laid aside the letter-case, and picking up a pocket-knife that Thorndyke had just taken from the trousers pocket, examined it curiously. “Queer knife, that,” he remarked. ‘steel blade—mighty sharp, too—nail file and an ivory blade. Silly arrangement, it seems. A paperknife is more convenient carried loose, and you don’t want a handle to it.”

“Perhaps it was meant for a fruit-knife,” suggested Hallett, adding it to the list and glancing at a little heap of silver coins that Thorndyke had just laid down. “I wonder,” he added, “what has made that money turn so black. Looks! as if he had been taking some medicine containing sulphur. What do you think, doctor?”

“It is quite a probable explanation,” replied Thorndyke, “though we haven’t the means of testing it. But you notice that this vesta-box from the other pocket is quite bright, which is rather against your theory.”

He held out a little silver box bearing the engraved monogram “P.R.,” the burnished surface of which contrasted strongly with the dull brownish-black of the coins. Hallett looked at it with an affirmative grunt, and having entered it in his list and added a bunch of keys and a watch from the waistcoat pocket, laid down his pen.

“That’s the lot, is it?” said he, rising and beginning to gather up the clothes. “My word! Look at the sand on the table! Isn’t it astonishing how saturated with sand one’s clothes become after a day on the links here? When I undress at night, the bathroom floor is like the bottom of a bird-cage. Shall I put the things in the locker now?”

“I think,” said Thorndyke, “that, as I may have to give evidence, I should like to look them over before you put them away.”

Hallett grinned. “There’s going to be some expert evidence after all,” he said. “Well, fire away, and let me know when you have finished. I am going to smoke a cigarette outside.”

With this, he and Morris sauntered out, and I thought it best to go with them, though I was a little curious as to my colleague’s object in examining these derelicts. However, my curiosity was not entirely baulked, for my friends went no farther than the little garden that surrounded the house, and from the place where we stood I was able to look in through the window and observe Thorndyke’s proceedings.

Very methodical they were. First he laid on the table a sheet of newspaper and on this deposited the jacket, which he examined carefully all over, picking some small object off the inside near the front, and giving special attention to a thick smear of paint which I had noticed on the left cuff. Then, with his spring tape he measured the sleeves and other principal dimensions. Finally, holding the jacket upside down, he beat it gently with his stick, causing a shower of sand to fall on the paper. He then laid the jacket aside, and, taking from his pocket one or two seed envelopes (which I believe he always carried), very carefully shot the sand from the paper into one of them and wrote a few words on it—presumably the source of the sand—and similarly disposing of the small object that he had picked off the surface.

This rather odd procedure was repeated with the other garments—a fresh sheet of newspaper being used for each and with the socks, shoes, and cap. The latter he examined minutely, especially as to the inside, from which he picked out two or three small objects, which I could not see, but assumed to be hairs. Even the walking-stick was inspected and measured, and the articles from the pockets scrutinized afresh, particularly the curious pocket-knife, the ivory blade of which he examined on both sides through his lens.

Hallett and Morris glanced in at him from time to time with indulgent smiles, and the former remarked:

“I like the hopeful enthusiasm of the real pukka expert, and the way he refuses to admit the existence of the ordinary and commonplace. I wonder what he has found out from those things. But here he is. Well, doctor, what’s the verdict? Was it temporary insanity or misadventure?”

Thorndyke shook his head. “The inquiry is adjourned pending the production of fresh evidence,” he replied, adding: “I have folded the clothes up and put all the effects together in a paper parcel, excepting the stick.”

When Hallett had deposited the derelicts in the locker, he came out and looked across the links with an air of indecision.

“I suppose,” said he, “we ought to notify the police. I’ll do that. When do you think the body is likely to wash up, and where?”

“It is impossible to say,” replied Thorndyke. “The set of the current is towards the Thames, but the body might wash up anywhere along the coast. A case is recorded of a bather drowned off Brighton whose body came up six weeks later at Walton-on-the-Naze. But that was quite exceptional. I shall send the coroner and the Chief Constable a note with my address, and I should think you had better do the same. And that is all that we can do, until we get the summons for the inquest, if there ever is one.”

To this we all agreed; and as the morning was now spent we walked back together across the links to the town, where we encountered my wife returning homeward with her sketching kit. This Thorndyke and I took possession of and having parted from Hallett and Morris opposite the Barbican, we made our way to our lodgings in quest of lunch. Naturally, the events of the morning were related to my wife and discussed by us all, but I noted that Thorndyke made no reference to his inspection of the clothes, and accordingly I said nothing about the matter before my wife; and no opportunity of opening the subject occurred until the evening, when I accompanied him to the station. Then, as we paced the platform while waiting for his train, I put my question:

“By the way, did you extract any information from those garments? I saw you going through them very thoroughly.”

“I got a suggestion from them,” he replied, “but it is such an odd one that I hardly like to mention it. Taking the appearances at their face value, the suggestion was that the clothes were not all those of the same man. There seemed to be traces of two men, one of whom appeared to belong to this district, while the other would seem to have been associated with the eastern coast of Thanet between Ramsgate and Margate, and by preference, on the scale of probabilities, to Dumpton or Broadstairs.”

“How on earth did you arrive at the localities?” I asked.

“Principally,” he replied, “by the peculiarities of the sand which fell from the garments and which was not the same in all of them. You see, Anstey,” he continued, ‘sand is analogous to dust. Both consist of minute fragments detached from larger masses; and just as, by examining microscopically the dust of a room, you can ascertain the colour and material of the carpets, curtains, furniture coverings, and other textiles, detached particles of which form the dust of that room, so, by examining sand, you can judge of the character of the cliffs, rocks, and other large masses that occur in the locality, fragments of which become ground off by the surf and incorporated in the sand of the beach. Some of the sand from these clothes is very characteristic and will probably be still more so when I examine it under the microscope.”

“But,” I objected, “isn’t there a fallacy in that line of reasoning? Might not one man have worn the different garments at different times and in different places?”

“That is certainly a possibility that has to be borne in mind,” he replied. “But here comes my train. We shall have to adjourn this discussion until you come back to the mill.”

As a matter of fact, the discussion was never resumed, for, by the time that I came back to “the mill,” the affair had faded from my mind, and the accumulations of grist monopolized my attention; and it is probable that it would have passed into complete oblivion but for the circumstance of its being revived in a very singular manner, which was as follows.

One afternoon about the middle of October my old friend, Mr. Brodribb, a well-known solicitor, called to give me some verbal instructions. When he had finished our business, he said:

“I’ve got a client waiting outside, whom I am taking up to introduce to Thorndyke. You’d better come along with us.”

“What is the nature of your client’s case?” I asked.

“Hanged if I know,” chuckled Brodribb. “He won’t say. That’s why I am taking him to our friend. I’ve never seen Thorndyke stumped yet, but I think this case will put the lid on him. Are you coming?”

“I am, most emphatically,” said I, “if your client doesn’t object.”

“He’s not going to be asked,” said Brodribb. “He’ll think you are part of the show. Here he is.”

In my outer office we found a gentlemanly, middle-aged man to whom Brodribb introduced me, and whom he hustled down the stairs and up King’s Bench Walk to Thorndyke’s chambers. There we found my colleague earnestly studying a will with the aid of a watchmaker’s eyeglass, and Brodribb opened the proceedings without ceremony.

“I’ve brought a client of mine, Mr. Capes, to see you, Thorndyke. He has a little problem that he wants you to solve.”

Thorndyke bowed to the client and then asked:

“What is the nature of the problem?”

“Ah!” said Brodribb, with a mischievous twinkle, “that’s what you’ve got to find out. Mr. Capes is a somewhat reticent gentleman.”

Thorndyke cast a quick look at the client and from him to the solicitor. It was not the first time that old Brodribb’s high spirits had overflowed in the form of a “leg-pull,” though Thorndyke had no more whole-hearted admirer than the shrewd, facetious old lawyer.

Mr. Capes smiled a deprecating smile. “It isn’t quite so bad as that,” he said. “But I really can’t give you much information. It isn’t mine to give. I am afraid of telling someone else’s secrets, if I say very much.”

“Of course you mustn’t do that,” said Thorndyke. “But, I suppose you can indicate in general terms the nature of your difficulty and the kind of help you want from us.”

“I think I can,” Mr. Capes replied. “At any rate, I will try. My difficulty is that a certain person with whom I wish to communicate has disappeared in what appears to me to be a rather remarkable manner. When I last heard from him, he was staying at a certain seaside resort and he stated in his letter that he was returning on the following day to his rooms in London. A few days later, I called at his rooms and found that he had not yet returned. But his luggage, which he had sent on independently, had arrived on the day which he had mentioned. So it is evident that he must have left his seaside lodgings. But from that day to this I have had no communication from him, and he has never returned to his rooms nor written to his landlady.”

“About how long ago was this?” Thorndyke asked.

“It is just about two months since I heard from him.”

“You don’t wish to give the name of the seaside resort where he was staying.”

“I think I had better not,” answered Mr. Capes. “There are circumstances—they don’t concern me, but they do concern him very much—which seem to make it necessary for me to say as little as possible.”

“And there is nothing further that you can tell us?”

“I am afraid not, excepting that, if I could get into communication with him, I could tell him of something very much to his advantage and which might prevent him from doing something which it would be much better that he should not do.”

Thorndyke cogitated profoundly while Brodribb watched him with undisguised enjoyment. Presently my colleague looked up and addressed our secretive client.

“Did you ever play the game of “Clump,” Mr. Capes? It is a somewhat legal form of game in which one player asks questions of the others, who are required to answer “yes” or “no” in the proper witness-box style.”

“I know the game,” said Capes, looking a little puzzled, “but——”

“Shall we try a round or two?” asked Thorndyke, with an unmoved countenance. “You don’t wish to make any statements, but if I ask you certain specific questions, will you answer “yes or no”?”

Mr. Capes reflected awhile. At length he said: “I am afraid I can’t commit myself to a promise. Still, if you like to ask a question or two, I will answer them if I can.”

“Very well,” said Thorndyke, “then, as a start, supposing I suggest that the date of the letter that you received was the thirteenth of August? What do you say? Yes or no?”

Mr. Capes sat bolt upright and stared at Thorndyke open-mouthed.

“How on earth did you guess that?” he exclaimed in an astonished tone. “It’s most extraordinary! But you are right. It was dated the thirteenth.”

“Then,” said Thorndyke, “as we have fixed the time we will have a try at the place. What do you say if I suggest that the seaside resort was in the neighbourhood of Broadstairs?”

Mr. Capes was positively thunderstruck. As he sat gazing at Thorndyke he looked like amazement personified.

“But,” he exclaimed, “you can’t be guessing! You know! You know that he was at Broadstairs. And yet, how could you? I haven’t even hinted at who he is.”

“I have a certain man in my mind,” said Thorndyke, “who may have disappeared from Broadstairs. Shall I suggest a few personal characteristics?”

Mr. Capes nodded eagerly and Thorndyke continued:

“If I suggest, for instance, that he was an artist—a painter in oil”—Capes nodded again—“that he was somewhat fastidious as to his pigments?”

“Yes,” said Capes. “Unnecessarily so in my opinion, and I am an artist myself. What else?”

“That he worked with his palette in his right hand and held his brush with his left?”

“Yes, yes,” exclaimed Capes, half-rising from his chair; “and what was he like?”

“By gum,” murmured Brodribb, “we haven’t stumped him after all.”

Evidently we had not, for he proceeded:

“As to his physical characteristics, I suggest that he was a shortish man—about five feet seven—rather stout, fair hair, slightly bald and wearing a rather large and ragged moustache.”

Mr. Capes was astounded—and so was I, for that matter—and for some moments there was a silence, broken only by old Brodribb, who sat chuckling softly and rubbing his hands. At length Mr. Capes said:

“You have described him exactly, but I needn’t tell you that. What I do not understand at all is how you knew that I was referring to this particular man, seeing that I mentioned no name. By the way, sir, may I ask when you saw him last?”

“I have no reason to suppose,” replied Thorndyke, “that I have ever seen him at all,” an answer that reduced Mr. Capes to a state of stupefaction and brought our old friend Brodribb to the verge of apoplexy. “This man,” Thorndyke continued, “is a purely hypothetical individual whom I have described from certain traces left by him. I have reason to believe that he left Broadstairs on the fourteenth of August and I have certain opinions as to what became of him thereafter. But a few more details would be useful, and I shall continue my interrogation. Now this man sent his luggage on separately. That suggests a possible intention of breaking his journey to London. What do you say?”

“I don’t know,” replied Capes, “but I think it probable.”

“I suggest that he broke his journey for the purpose of holding an interview with some other person.”

“I cannot say,” answered Capes, “but if he did break his journey it would probably be for that purpose.”

“And supposing that interview to have taken place, would it be likely to be an amicable interview?”

“I am afraid not. I suspect that my—er—acquaintance might have made certain proposals which would have been unacceptable, but which he might have been able to enforce. However, that is only surmise,” Capes added hastily. “I really know nothing more than I have told you, except the missing man’s name, and that I would rather not mention.”

“It is not material,” said Thorndyke, “at least, not at present. If it should become essential, I will let you know.”

“M—yes,” said Mr. Capes. “But you were saying that you had certain opinions as to what has become of this person.”

“Yes,” Thorndyke replied; ‘speculative opinions. But they will have to be verified. If they turn out to be correct—or incorrect either—I will let you know in the course of a few days. Has Mr. Brodribb your address?”

“He has; but you had better have it, too.”

He produced his card, and, after an ineffectual effort to extract a statement from Thorndyke, took his departure.

The third act of this singular drama opened in the same setting as the first, for the following Sunday morning found my colleague and me following the path from Sandwich to the sea. But we were not alone this time. At our side marched Major Robertson, the eminent dog trainer, and behind him trotted one of his superlatively educated fox-hounds.

We came out on the shore at the same point as on the former occasion, and turning towards Shellness, walked along the smooth sand with a careful eye on the not very distinctive landmarks. At length Thorndyke halted.

“This is the place,” said he. “I fixed it in my mind by that distant tree, which coincides with the chimney of that cottage on the marshes. The clothes lay in that hollow between the two big sand-hills.”

We advanced to the spot, but, as a hollow is useless as a landmark, Thorndyke ascended the nearest sand-hill and stuck his stick in the summit and tied his handkerchief to the handle.

“That,” he said, “will serve as a centre which we can keep in sight, and if we describe a series of gradually widening concentric circles round it, we shall cover the whole ground completely.”

“How far do you propose to go?” asked the major.

We must be guided by the appearance of the ground,” replied Thorndyke. “But the circumstances suggest that if there is anything buried, it can’t be very far from where the clothes were laid. And it is pretty certain to be in a hollow.”

The major nodded; and when he had attached a long leash to the dog’s collar, we started, at first skirting the base of the sand-hill, and then, guided by our own footmarks in the loose sand, gradually increasing the distance from the high mound, above which Thorndyke’s handkerchief fluttered in the light breeze. Thus we continued, walking slowly, keeping close to the previously made circle of footprints and watching the dog; who certainly did a vast amount of sniffing, but appeared to let his mind run unduly on the subject of rabbits.

In this way half an hour was consumed, and I was beginning to wonder whether we were going after all to draw a blank, when the dog’s demeanour underwent a sudden change. At the moment we were crossing a range of high sand-hills, covered with stiff, reedy grass and stunted gorse, and before us lay a deep hollow, naked of vegetation and presenting a bare, smooth surface of the characteristic greyish-yellow sand. On the side of the hill the dog checked, and, with upraised muzzle, began to sniff the air with a curiously suspicious expression, clearly unconnected with the rabbit question. On this, the major unfastened the leash, and the dog, left to his own devices, put his nose to the ground and began rapidly to cast to and fro, zig-zagging down the side of the hill and growing every moment more excited. In the same sinuous manner he proceeded across the hollow until he reached a spot near the middle; and here he came to a sudden stop and began to scratch up the sand with furious eagerness.

“It’s a find, sure enough!” exclaimed the major, nearly as excited as his pupil; and, as he spoke, he ran down the hillside, followed by me and Thorndyke, who, as he reached the bottom, drew from his “poacher’s pocket” a large fern-trowel in a leather sheath. It was not a very efficient digging implement, but it threw up the loose sand faster than the scratchings of the dog.

It was easy ground to excavate. Working at the spot that the dog had located, Thorndyke had soon hollowed out a small cavity some eighteen inches deep. Into the bottom of this he thrust the pointed blade of the big trowel. Then he paused and looked round at the major and me, who were craning eagerly over the little pit.

“There is something there,” said he. “Feel the handle of the trowel.”

I grasped the wooden handle, and, working it gently up and down, was aware of a definite but somewhat soft resistance. The major verified my observation, and then Thorndyke resumed his digging, widening the pit and working with increased caution. Ten minutes” more careful excavation brought into view a recognizable shape—a shoulder and upper arm; and following the lines of this, further diggings disclosed the form of a head and shoulders plainly discernable though still shrouded in sand. Finally, with the point of the trowel and a borrowed handkerchief—mine—the adhering sand was cleared away; and then, from the bottom of the deep, funnel-shaped hole, there looked up at us, with a most weird and horrible effect, the discoloured face of a man.

In that face, the passing weeks had wrought inevitable changes, on which I need not dwell. But the features were easily recognizable, and I could see at once that the man corresponded completely with Thorndyke’s description. The cheeks were full; the hair on the temples was of a pale, yellowish brown; a straggling, fair moustache covered the mouth; and, when the sand had been sufficiently cleared away, I could see a small, tonsure-like bald patch near the back of the crown. But I could see something more than this. On the left temple, just behind the eyebrow, was a ragged, shapeless wound such as might have been made by a hammer.

“That turns into certainty what we have already surmised,” said Thorndyke, gently pressing the scalp around the wound. “It must have killed him instantly. The skull is smashed in like an egg-shell. And this is undoubtedly the weapon,” he added, drawing out of the sand beside the body a big, hexagon-headed screw-bolt, “very prudently buried with the body. And that is all that really concerns us. We can leave the police to finish the disinterment; but you notice, Anstey, that the corpse is nude with the exception of the vest and probably the pants. The shirt has disappeared. Which is exactly what we should have expected.”

Slowly, but with the feeling of something accomplished, we took our way back to the town, having collected Thorndyke’s stick on the way. Presently, the major left us, to look up a friend at the club house on the links. As soon as we were alone, I put in a demand for an elucidation.

“I see the general trend of your investigations,” said I “but I can’t imagine how they yielded so much detail; as to the personal appearance of this man, for instance.”

“The evidence in this case,” he replied, “was analogous to circumstantial evidence. It depended on the cumulative effect of a number of facts, each separately inconclusive, but all pointing to the same conclusion. Shall I run over the data in their order and in accordance with their connections?”

I gave an emphatic affirmative, and he continued:

“We begin, naturally, with the first fact, which is, of course, the most interesting and important; the fact which arrests attention, which shows that something has to be explained and possibly suggests a line of inquiry. You remember that I measured the footprints in the sand for comparison with the other footprints. Then I had the dimensions of the feet of the presumed bather. But as soon as I looked at the shoes which purported to be those of that bather, I felt a conviction that his feet would never go into them.

“Now, that was a very striking fact—if it really was a fact—and it came on top of another fact hardly less striking. The bather had gone into the sea; and at a considerable distance he had unquestionably come out again. Then, could be no possible doubt. In foot-measurement an, length of stride the two sets of tracks were indentical; and there were no other tracks. That man had come ashore and he had remained ashore. But yet he had not put on his clothes. He couldn’t have gone away naked; but obviously he was not there. As a criminal lawyer, you must admit that there was prima fade evidence of something very abnormal and probably criminal.

On our way to the dormy-house, I carried the stick in the same hand as my own and noted that it was very little shorter. Therefore it was a tall man’s stick. Apparently, then, the stick did not belong to the shoes, but to the man who had made the footprints. Then, when we came to the dormy-house, another striking fact presented itself. You remember that Hallett commented on the quantity of sand that fell from the clothes on to the table. I am astonished that he did not notice the very peculiar character of that sand. It was perfectly unlike the sand which would fall from his own clothes. The sand on the sand-hills is dune sand—wind-borne sand, or, as the legal term has it, æolian sand; and it is perfectly characteristic. As it has been carried by the wind, it is necessarily fine. The grains are small; and as the action of the wind sorts them out, they are extremely uniform in size. Moreover, by being continually blown about and rubbed together, they become rounded by mutual attrition. And then dune sand is nearly pure sand, composed of grains of silica unmixed with other substances.

“Beach sand is quite different. Much of it is half-formed, freshly broken down silica and is often very coarse; and, as I pointed out at the time, it is mixed with all sorts of foreign substances derived from masses in the neighbourhood. This particular sand was loaded with black and white particles, of which the white were mostly chalk, and the black particles of coal. Now there is very little chalk in the Shellness sand, as there are no cliffs quite near, and chalk rapidly disappears from sand by reason of its softness; and there is no coal.”

“Where does the coal come from?” I asked.

“Principally from the Goodwins,” he replied. “It is derived from the cargoes of colliers whose wrecks are embedded in those sands, and from the bunkers of wrecked steamers. This coal sinks down through the seventy odd feet of sand and at last works out at the bottom, where it drifts slowly across the floor of the sea in a north-westerly direction until some easterly gale throws it up on the Thanet shore between Ramsgate and Foreness Point. Most of it comes up at Dumpton and Broadstairs, there you may see the poor people, in the winter, gathering coal pebbles to feed their fires.

“This sand, then, almost certainly came from the Thanet coast; but the missing man, Roscoff, had been staying in Sandwich, playing golf on the sand-hills. This was another striking discrepancy, and it made me decide to examine the clothes exhaustively, garment by garment. I did so; and this is what I found.

“The jacket, trousers, socks and shoes were those of a shortish, rather stout man, as shown by measurements, and the cap was his, since it was made of the same cloth as the jacket and trousers.

“The waistcoat, shirt, underclothes and stick were those of a tall man.

“The garments, socks and shoes of the short man were charged with Thanet beach sand, and contained no dune sand, excepting the cap, which might have fallen off on the sand-hills.

“The waistcoat was saturated with dune sand and contained no beach sand, and a little dune sand was obtained from the shirt and under-garments. That is to say, that the short man’s clothes contained beach sand only, while the tall man’s clothes contained only dune sand.

“The short man’s clothes were all unmarked; the tall man’s clothes were either marked or conspicuously recognizable, as the waistcoat and also the stick.

“The garments of the short man which had been left were those that could not have been worn by a tall man without attracting instant attention and the shoes could not have been put on at all; whereas the garments of the short man which had disappeared—the waistcoat, shirt and underclothes—were those that could have been worn by a tall man without attracting attention. The obvious suggestion was that the tall man had gone off in the short man’s shirt and waistcoat but otherwise in his own clothes.

“And now as to the personal characteristics of the short man. From the cap I obtained five hairs. They were all blond, and two of them were of the peculiar, atrophic, “point of exclamation” type that grow at the margin of a bald area. Therefore he was a fair man and partially bald. On the inside of the jacket, clinging to the rough tweed, I found a single long, thin, fair moustache hair, which suggested a long, soft moustache. The edge of the left cuff was thickly marked with oil-paint-not a single smear, but an accumulation such as a painter picks up when he reaches with his brush hand across a loaded palette. The suggestion—not very conclusive—was that he was an oil-painter and left-handed. But there was strong confirmation. There was an artist’s pencil—3B—and a stump of vine charcoal such as an oil-painter might carry. The silver coins in his pocket were blackened with sulphide as they would be if a piece of artist’s soft, vulcanized rubber has been in the pocket with them. And there was the pocket-knife. It contained a sharp steel pencil-blade, a charcoal file and an ivory palette-blade; and that palette-blade had been used by a left-handed man.”

“How did you arrive at that?” I asked.

“By the bevels worn at the edges,” he replied. “An old palette-knife used by a right-handed man shows a bevel of wear on the under side of the left-hand edge and the upper side of the right-hand edge; in the case of a left handed man the wear shows on the under side of the right hand edge and the upper side of the left-hand edge. This being an ivory blade, showed the wear very distinctly and proved conclusively that the user was left-handed; and as an ivory palette-knife is used only by fastidiously careful painters for such pigments as the cadmiums, which might be discoloured by a steel blade, one was justified in assuing that he was somewhat fastidious as to his pigments.”

As I listened to Thorndyke’s exposition I was profoundly impressed. His conclusions, which had sounded like mere speculative guesses, were, I now realized, based upon an analysis of the evidence as careful and as impartial as the summing up of a judge. And these conclusions he had drawn instantaneously from the appearances of things that had been before my eyes all the time and from which I had learned nothing.

“What do you suppose is the meaning of the affair?” I asked presently. “What was the motive of the murder?”

“We can only guess,” he replied. “But, interpreting Capes” hints, I should suspect that our artist friend was a blackmailer; that he had come over here to squeeze Roscoff—perhaps not for the first time—and that his victim lured him out on the sand-hills for a private talk and then took the only effective means of ridding himself of his persecutor. That is my view of the case; but, of course, it is only surmise.”

Surmise as it was, however, it turned out to be literally correct. At the inquest Capes had to tell all that he knew, which was uncommonly little, though no one was able to add to it. The murdered man, Joseph Bertrand, had fastened on Roscoff and made a regular income by blackmailing him. That much Capes knew; and he knew that the victim had been in prison and that that was the secret. But who Roscoff was and what was his real name—for Roscoff was apparently a nom de guerre—he had no idea. So he could not help the police. The murderer had got clear away and there was no hint as to where to look for him; and so far as I know, nothing has ever been heard of him since.

THE APPARITION OF BURLING COURT (1925)

Thorndyke seldom took a formal holiday. He did not seem to need one. As he himself put it, “A holiday implies the exchange of a less pleasurable occupation for one more pleasurable. But there is no occupation more pleasurable than the practice of Medical Jurisprudence.” Moreover, his work was less affected by terms and vacations than that of an ordinary barrister, and the Long Vacation often found him with his hands full. Even when he did appear to take a holiday the appearance tended to be misleading, and it was apt to turn out that his disappearance from his usual haunts was associated with a case of unusual interest at a distance.

Thus it was on the occasion when our old friend, Mr. Brodribb, of Lincoln’s Inn, beguiled him into a fortnight’s change at St. David’s-at-Cliffe, a seaside hamlet on the Kentish coast. There was a case in the background, and a very curious case it turned out to be, though at first it appeared to me quite a commonplace affair; and the manner of its introduction was as follows.

One hot afternoon in the early part of the Long Vacation the old solicitor dropped in for a cup of tea and a chat. That, at least, was how he explained his visit; but my experience of Mr. Brodribb led me to suspect some ulterior purpose in the call, and as he sat by the open window, teacup in hand, looking, with his fine pink complexion, his silky white hair and his faultless “turn out,” the very type of the courtly, old-fashioned lawyer, I waited expectantly for the matter of his visit to transpire. And, presently, out it came.

“I am going to take a little holiday down at St. David’s,” said he. “Just a quiet spell by the sea, you know. Delightful place. So quiet and restful and so breezy and fresh. Ever been there?”

“No,” replied Thorndyke. “I only just know the name.”

“Well, why shouldn’t you come down for a week or so? Both of you. I shall stay at Burling Court, the Lumleys’ place. I can’t invite you there as I’m only a guest, but I know of some comfortable rooms in the village that I could get for you. I wish you would come down, Thorndyke,” he added after a pause. “I’m rather unhappy about young Lumley—I’m the family lawyer, you know, and so was my father and my grandfather, so I feel almost as if the Lumleys were my own kin—and I should like to have your advice and help.”

“Why not have it now?” suggested Thorndyke.

“I will,” he replied; “but I should like your help on the spot too. I’d like you to see Lumley have a talk with him and tell me what you think of him.”

“What is amiss with him?” Thorndyke asked.

“Well,” answered Brodribb, “it looks uncomfortably like insanity. He has delusions—sees apparitions and that sort of thing. And there is some insanity in the family. But I had better give you the facts in their natural order.

“About four months ago Giles Lumley of Burling Court died; and as he was a widower without issue, the estate passed to his nearest male relative, my present client, Frank Lumley, who was also the principal beneficiary under the will. At the time of Giles’ death Frank was abroad, but a cousin of his, Lewis Price, was staying at the house with his wife as a more or less permanent guest; and as Price’s circumstances were not very flourishing, and as he is the next heir to the estate, Frank—who is a bachelor—wrote to him at once telling him to look upon Burling Court as his home for as long as he pleased.”

That was extremely generous of him,” I remarked.

“Yes,” Brodribb agreed; “Frank is a good fellow; a very high-minded gentleman and a very sweet man but a little queer—very queer just now. Well, Frank came back from abroad and took up his abode at the house; and for a time all went well. Then, one day, Price called on me and gave me some very unpleasant news. It seemed that Frank, who had always been rather neurotic and imaginative, had been interesting himself a good deal in psychical research and—and balderdash of that kind, you know. Well, there was no great harm in that, perhaps. But just lately he had taken to seeing visions and—what was worse—talking about them; so much so that Price got uneasy and privately invited a mental specialist down to lunch; and the specialist, having had a longish talk with Frank, Price confidentially that he (Frank) was obviously suffering from insane delusions. Thereupon Price called me and begged me to see Frank myself and what ought to be done; so I made an occasion for him to come and see me at the office.”

“And what did you think of him?” asked Thorndyke.

I was horrified—horrified,” said Mr. Brodribb. “I assure you, Thorndyke, that that poor young man sat in my office and talked like a stark lunatic. Quite quietly, you know. No excitement, though he was evidently anxious and unhappy. But there he sat gravely talking the damnedest nonsense you ever heard.”

“As, for instance—?”

“Well, his infernal visions. Luminous birds flying about in the dark, and a human head suspended in mid air—upside down, too. But I had better give you his story as he told it. I made full shorthand notes as he was talking, and I’ve brought them with me, though I hardly need them.

“His trouble seems to have begun soon after he took up his quarters at Burling Court. Being a bookish sort of fellow, he started to go through his library systematically; and presently he came across a small manuscript book, which turned out to be a soft of family history, or rather a collection of episodes. It was rather a lurid little book, for it apparently dwelt chiefly on the family crime, the family spectre and the family madness.”

“Did you know about these heirlooms?” Thorndyke asked.

“No; it was the first I’d heard of “em. Price knew there was some soft of family superstition, but he didn’t know what it was; and Giles knew about it—so Price tells me—but didn’t care to talk about it. He never mentioned it to me.”

“What is the nature of the tradition?” inquired Thorndyke.

“I’ll tell you,” said Brodribb, taking out his notes. “I’ve got it all down, and poor Frank reeled the stuff off as if he had learned it by heart. The book, which is dated 1819, was apparently written by a Walter Lumley and the story of the crime and the spook runs thus:

“About 1720 the property passed to a Gilbert Lumley, a naval officer, who then gave up the sea, married and settled down at Burling Court. A year or two later some trouble arose about his wife and a man named Glynn, a neighbouring squire. With or without cause, Lumley became violently jealous, and the end of it was that he lured Glynn to a large cavern in the cliffs and there murdered him. It was a most ferocious and vindictive crime. The cavern, which was then used by smugglers, had a beam across the roof bearing a tackle for hoisting out boat cargoes, and this tackle Lumley fastened to Glynn’s ankles—having first pinioned him—and hoisted him up so that he hung head downwards a foot or so clear of the floor of the cave. And there he left him hanging until the rising tide flowed into the cave and drowned him.

“The very next day the murder was discovered, and as Lumley was the nearest justice of the peace, the discoverers reported to him and took him to the cave to the body. When he entered the cave the corpse was stilt hanging as he had left the living man, and a bat was flittering round and round the dead man’s head. He had the body taken down and carried to Glynn’s house and took the necessary measures for the inquest. Of course, everyone suspected him of the murder, but there was no evidence against him. The verdict was murder by some person unknown, and as Gilbert Lumley was not sensitive, everything seemed to have gone quite satisfactorily.

“But it hadn’t. One night, exactly a month after murder, Gilbert retired to his bedroom in the dark. He was in the act of feeling along the mantelpiece for the tinder-box, when he became aware of a dim light moving about the room. He turned round quickly and then s that it was a bat—a most uncanny and abnormal bat that seemed to give out a greenish ghostly light—flitting round and round his bed. On this, remembering the bat in the cavern, he rushed out of the room in the very devil of a fright. Presently he returned with one of the servants and a couple of candles; but the bat had disappeared.

“From that time onward, the luminous bat haunted Gilbert, appearing in dark rooms, on staircases and passages and corridors, until his nerves were all on end and he did not dare to move about the house at night without a candle or a lantern. But that was not the worst. Exactly two months after the murder the next stage of the haunting began. He had retired to his bedroom and was just about to get into bed when he remembered that he had left his watch in the little dressing-room that adjoined his chamber. With a candle in his hand he went to the dressing-room and flung open the door. And then he stopped dead and stood as if turned into stone; for, within a couple of yards of him, suspended in mid-air, was a man’s head hanging upside down.

“For some seconds he stood rooted to the spot, unable to move. Then he uttered a cry of horror and rushed back to his room and down to the hall. There was no doubt whose head it was, strange and horrible as it looked in that unnatural, inverted position; for he had seen it twice before in that very position hanging in the cavern. Evidently he had not got rid of Glynn.

“That night, and every night henceforward, he slept in his wife’s room. And all through the night he was conscious of a strange and dreadful impulse to rise and go down to the shore; to steal into the cavern and wait for the flowing tide. He lay awake, fighting against the invisible power that seemed to be drawing him to destruction, and by the morning the horrid impulse began to weaken. But he went about in terror, not daring to go near the shore and afraid to trust himself alone.

“A month passed. The effect of the apparition grew daily weaker and an abundance of lights in the house protected him from the visitation of the bat. Then, exactly three months after the murder, he saw the head again. This time it was in the library, where he had gone to fetch a book. He was standing by the book shelves and had just taken out a volume, when, as he turned away, there the hideous thing was, hanging in hat awful, grotesque posture, chin upwards and the scanty hair dropping down like wet fringe. Gilbert dropped the book that he was holding and fled from the room with a shriek; and all that night invisible hands seemed to be plucking at him to draw him away to where he voices of the waves were reverberating in the cavern.

“This second visitation affected him profoundly. He could not shake off that sinister impulse to steal away to the shore. He was a broken man, the victim of an abiding terror, clinging for protection to the very servants, creeping abroad with shaking limbs and an apprehensive eye towards the sea. And ever in his ears was the murmur of the surf and the hollow echoes of the cavern.

Already he had sought forgetfulness in drink; and sought it in vain. Now he took refuge in opiates. Every night, before retiring to the dreaded bed, he mingled laudanum with the brandy that brought him stupor if not repose. And brandy and opium began to leave their traces in the tremulous hand, the sallow cheek and the bloodshot eye. And so another month passed.

“As the day approached that would mark the fourth month, his terror of the visitation that he now anticipated reduced him to a state of utter prostration. Sleep—even drugged sleep—appeared that night to be out of the question, and he decided to sit up with his family, hoping by that means to escape the dreaded visitor. But it was a vain hope. Hour after hour he sat in his elbow chair by the fire, while his wife dozed in her chair opposite, until the clock in the hall struck twelve. He listened and counted the strokes of the bell, leaning back with his eyes closed. Half the weary night was gone. As the last stroke sounded and a deep silence fell on the house, he opened his eyes—and looked into the face of Glynn within a few inches of his own.

“For some moments he sat with dropped jaw and dilated eyes staring in silent horror at this awful thing; then with an agonised screech he slid from his chair into a heap on the floor.

“At noon on the following day he was missed from the house. A search was made in the grounds and in the neighbourhood, but he was nowhere to be found. At last some one thought of the cavern, of which he had spoken in his wild mutterings and a party of searchers made their way thither. And there they found him when the tide went out, lying on the wet sand with the brown sea-tangle wreathed about his limbs and the laudanum bottle—now full of sea water—by his side.

“With the death of Gilbert Lumley it seemed that the murdered man’s spirit was appeased. During the lifetime of Gilbert’s son, Thomas, the departed Glynn made no sign. But on his death and the succession of his son Arthur—then a middle-aged man—the visitations began again, and in the same order. At the end of the first month the luminous bat appeared; at the end of the second, the inverted head made its entry, and again at the third and the fourth months; and within twenty-four hours of the last visitation, the body of Arthur Lumley was found in the cavern. And so it has been from that time onward. One generation escapes untouched by the curse; but in the next, Glynn and the sea claim their own.”

“Is that true, so far as you know?” asked Thorndyke.

“I can’t say,” answered Brodribb. “I am now only quoting Walter Lumley’s infernal little book. But I remember that, in fact, Giles’ father was drowned. I understood that his boat capsized, but that may have been only a story to cover the suicide.

“Well now, I have given you the gruesome history from this book that poor Frank had the misfortune to find. You see that had had it all off by heart and had evidently read it again and again. Now I come to his own story, which he told me very quietly but with intense conviction and very evident forebodings.

“He found this damned book a few days after his arrival at Burling Court, and it was clear to him that, if the story was true, he was the next victim, since his predecessor, Giles, had been left in peace. And so it turned out. Exactly a month after his arrival, going up to his bedroom in the dark—no doubt expecting this apparition—as soon as he opened the door he saw a thing like a big glow-worm or firefly flitting round the room. It is evident that he was a good deal upset, for he rushed downstairs in a state of great agitation and fetched Price up to see it. But the strange thing was—though perhaps not so very strange, after all—that, although the thing was still there, flitting about the room, Price could see nothing. However, he pulled up the blind——the window was wide open—and the bat flopped out and disappeared.

“During the next month the bat reappeared several times, in the bedroom, in corridors and once in a garret, when it flew out as Frank opened the door.”

“What was he doing in the garret?” asked Thorndyke.

“He went up to fetch an ancient coffin-stool that Mrs. Price had seen there and was telling him about. Well, this went on until the end of the second month. And then came the second act. It seems that by some infernal stupidity, he was occupying the bedroom that had been used by Gilbert. Now on this night, as soon as he had gone up, he must needs pay a visit to the little dressing-room, which is now known as” Gilbert’s cabin”—so he tells me, for I was not aware of it—and where Gilbert’s cutlass, telescope, quadrant and the old navigator’s watch are kept.”

“Did he take a light with him?” inquired Thorndyke.

“I think not. There is a gas jet in the corridor and presumably he lit that. Then he opened the door of the cabin; and immediately he saw, a few feet in front of him, a man’s head, upside down, apparently hanging in mid-air. It gave him a fearful shock—the more so, perhaps, because he half expected it—and, as before, he ran downstairs, all of a tremble. Price had gone to bed but Mrs. Price came up with him, and he showed her the horrible thing which was still hanging in the middle of the dark room.

“But Mrs. Price could see nothing. She assured him that it was all his imagination; and in proof of it, she walked into the room, right through the head, as it seemed, and when she had found the matches, she lit the gas. Of course, there was nothing whatever in the room.

“Another month passed. The bat appeared at intervals and kept poor Frank’s nerves in a state of constant tension. On the night of the appointed day, as you will anticipate, Frank went again to Gilbert’s cabin, drawn there by an attraction that one can quite understand. And there, of course, was the confounded head as before. That was a fortnight ago. So, you see, the affair is getting urgent. Either there is some truth in this weird story—which I don’t believe for a moment—or poor old Frank is ripe for the asylum. But in any case something will have to be done.”

“You spoke just now,” said Thorndyke, “of some insanity in the family. What does it amount to, leaving these apparitions out of the question?”

“Well, a cousin of Frank’s committed suicide in an asylum.”

“And Frank’s parents?

“They were quite sane. The cousin was the son of Frank’s mother’s sister; and she was all right, too. But the boy’s father had to be put away.”

“Then,” said Thorndyke, “the insanity doesn’t seem to be in Frank’s family at all, in a medical sense. Legal inheritance and physiological inheritance do not follow the same lines. If his mother’s sister married a lunatic, he might inherit that lunatic’s property, but he could not inherit his insanity. There was no blood relationship.”

“No, that’s true,” Brodribb admitted, “though Frank certainly seems as mad as a hatter. But now, to come back to the holiday question, what do you say to a week or so at St. David’s?”

Thorndyke looked at me interrogatively. “What says my learned friend?” he asked.

“I say: Let us put up the shutters and leave Polton in charge,” I replied; and Thorndyke assented without a murmur.

Less than a week later, we were installed in the very comfortable rooms that Mr. Brodribb had found for us in the hamlet of St. David’s, within five minutes’ walk of the steep gap-way that led down to the beach. Thorndyke entered into the holiday with an enthusiasm that would have astonished the denizens of King Bench Walk. He explored the village, he examined the church, inside and out, he sampled all the footpaths with the aid of the Ordnance map, he foregathered with the fishermen on the beach and renewed his acquaintance with boat-craft, and he made a pilgrimage to the historic cavern—it was less than a mile along the shore—arid inspected its dark and chilly interior with the most lively curiosity.

We had not been at St. David’s twenty-four hours before we made the acquaintance of Frank Lumley. Mr. Brodribb saw to that. For the old solicitor was profoundly anxious about his client—he took his responsibilities very seriously, did Mr. Brodribb. His “family” clients were to him as his own kin, and their interests his own interests—and his confidence in Thorndyke’s wisdom was unbounded. We were very favourably impressed by the quiet, gentle, rather frail young man, and for my part, I found him, for a certifiable lunatic, a singularly reasonable and intelligent person. Indeed, apart from his delusions—or rather hallucinations—he seemed perfectly sane; for a somewhat eager interest in psychical and supernormal phenomena (of which he made no secret) is hardly enough to create a suspicion of a man’s sanity.

But he was clearly uneasy about his own mental condition. He realised that the apparitions might be the products of a disordered brain, though that not his own view of them; and he discussed them us in the most open and ingenuous manner.

“You don’t think,” Thorndyke suggested, “that these apparitions may possibly be natural appearances which you have misinterpreted or exaggerated in consequence of having read that very circumstantial story?”

Lumley shook his head emphatically. “It is impossible,” said he. “How could I? Take the case of the bat. I have seen it on several occasions quite distinctly. It was obviously a bat; but yet it seemed full of a ghostly, greenish light like that of a glow-worm. If it was not what it appeared, what was it? And then the head. There it was, perfectly clear and solid and real, hanging in mid-air within three or four feet of me. I could have touched it if I had dared.”

“What size did it appear?” asked Thorndyke.

Lumley reflected. “It was not quite life-size. I should say about two-thirds the size of an ordinary head.”

“Should you recognise the face if you saw it again?

“I can’t say,” replied Lumley. “You see, it was upside down. I haven’t a very clear picture of it—I mean as to what the face would have been like the right way up.”

“Was the room quite dark on both occasions?” Thorndyke asked.

“Yes, quite. The gas jet in the corridor is just above the door and does not let any light into the room.”

“And what is there opposite the door?”

“There is a small window, but that is usually kept shuttered nowadays. Under the window is a small folding dressing-table that belonged to Gilbert Lumley. He had it made when he came home from sea.”

Thus Lumley was quite lucid and coherent in his answers. His manner was perfectly sane; it was only the matter that was abnormal. Of the reality of the apparitions he had not the slightest doubt, and he never varied in the smallest degree in his description of their appearance. The fact that they had been invisible both to Mr. Price and his wife he explained by pointing out that the curse applied only to the direct descendants of Gilbert Lumley, and to those only in alternate generations.

After one of our conversations, Thorndyke expressed a wish to see the little manuscript book that had been the cause of all the trouble—or at least had been the forerunner; and Lumley promised to bring it to our rooms on the following afternoon. But then came an interruption to our holiday, not entirely unexpected; an urgent telegram from one of our solicitor friends asking consultation on an important and intricate case that had just been put into his hands, and making it necessary for us to go up to town by an early train on the following morning.

We sent a note to Brodribb, telling him that we should be away from St. David’s for perhaps a day or two, and on our way to the station he overtook us.

“I am sorry you have had to break your holiday,” he said; “but I hope you will be back before Thursday.”

“Why Thursday, in particular?” inquired Thorndyke.

“Because Thursday is the day on which that damned head is due to make its third appearance. It will be an anxious time. Frank hasn’t said anything, but I know his nerves are strung up to concert pitch.”

“You must watch him,” said Thorndyke. “Don’t let him out of your sight if you can help it.”

“That’s all very well,” said Brodribb, “but he isn’t a child, and I am not his keeper. He is the master of the house and I am just his guest. I can’t follow him about if he wants to be alone.”

“You mustn’t stand on politeness, Brodribb,” rejoined Thorndyke. “It will be a critical time and you must keep him in sight.”

“I shall do my best,” Brodribb said anxiously, “but I do hope you will be back by then.”

He accompanied us dejectedly to the platform and stayed with us until our train came in. Suddenly, just as we were entering our carriage, he thrust his hand into his pocket.

“God bless me!” he exclaimed, “I had nearly forgotten this book. Frank asked me to give it to you.” As he spoke, he drew out a little rusty calf-bound volume and handed it to Thorndyke. “You can look through it at your leisure,” said he, “and if you think it best to chuck the infernal thing out of the window, do so. I suspect poor Frank is none the better for conning it over perpetually as he does.”

I thought there was a good deal of reason in Brodribb’s opinion. If Lumley’s illusions were, as I suspected, the result of suggestion produced by reading the narrative, that suggestion would certainly tend to be reinforced by conning it over and over again. But the old lawyer’s proposal was hardly practicable.

As soon as the train had fairly started, Thorndyke proceeded to inspect the little volume; and his manner of doing so was highly characteristic. An ordinary person would have opened the book and looked through the contents, probably seeking out at once the sinister history of Gilbert Lumley.

Not so Thorndyke. His inspection began at the very beginning and proceeded systematically to deal with every fact that the book had to disclose. First he made an exhaustive examination of the cover; scrutinised the corners; inspected the bottom edges and compared them with the top edges; and compared the top and bottom head-caps. Then he brought out his lens and examined the tooling, which was simple in character and worked in “blind”—i.e. not gilt. He also inspected the head-bands through the glass, and then he turned his attention to the interior. He looked carefully at both end-papers, he opened the sections and examined the sewing-thread, he held the leaves up to the light and tested the paper by eye and by touch and he viewed the writing in several places through his lens. Finally he handed the book and the lens to me without remark.

It was a quaint little volume, with a curiously antique air, though it was but a century old. The cover was of rusty calf, a good deal rubbed, but not in bad condition; for the joints were perfectly sound; but then it had probably had comparatively little use. The paper—a laid paper with very distinct wire-lines but no watermark—had turned with age to a pale, creamy buff; the writing had faded to a warm brown, but was easily legible and very clearly and carefully written. Having noted these points, I turned over the leaves until I came to the story of Gilbert Lumley and the ill-fated Glynn, which I read through attentively, observing that Mr. Brodribb’s notes had given the whole substance of the narrative with singular completeness.

“This story,” I said, as I handed the book back to Thorndyke, “strikes me as rather unreal and unconvincing. One doesn’t see how Walter Lumley got his information.”

“No,” agreed Thorndyke. “It is on the plane of fiction. The narrator speaks in the manner of a novelist with complete knowledge of events and actions which were apparently known only to the actors.”

“Do you think it possible that Walter Lumley was simply romancing?”

“I think it quite possible, and in fact very probable that the whole narrative is fictitious,” he replied. “We shall have to go into that question later on. For the present, I suppose, we had better give our attention to the case that we have in hand at the moment.”

The little volume was accordingly put away, and for the rest of the journey our conversation was occupied with the matter of the consultation that formed our immediate business. As this, however, had no connection with the present history, I need make no further reference to it beyond stating that it kept us both busy for three days and that we finished with it on the evening of the third.

“Do you propose to go down to St. David’s tonight or tomorrow?” I asked, as we let ourselves into our chambers.

“Tonight,” replied Thorndyke. “This is Thursday, you know, and Brodribb was anxious that we should be back some time today. I have sent him a telegram saying that we shall go down by the train that arrives about ten o’clock. So if he wants us, he can meet us it the station or send a message.”

“I wonder,” said I, “if the apparition of Glynn’s head will make its expected visitation tonight.”

“It probably will if there is an opportunity,” Thorndyke replied. “But I hope that Brodribb will manage to prevent the opportunity from occurring. And, talking of Lumley, as we have an hour to spare, we may as well finish our inspection of his book. I snipped off a corner of one of the leaves and gave it to Polton to boil up in weak caustic soda. It will be ready for examination by now.”

“You don’t suspect that the book has been faked, do you?” said I.

“I view that book with the deepest suspicion,” he replied, opening a drawer and producing the little volume. “Just look at it, Jervis. Look at the cover, for instance.”

“Well,” I said, turning the book over in my hand, “the cover looks ancient enough to me; typical old, rusty calf with a century’s wear on it.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt that it is old calf,” said he; “just the sort of leather that you could skin off the cover of an old quarto or folio. But don’t you see that the signs of wear are all in the wrong places? How does a book wear in use? Well, first there are the bottom edges, which rub on the shelf. Then the corners, which are the thinnest leather and the most exposed. Then the top head-cap, which the finger hooks into in pulling the book from the shelf. Then the joint or hinge, which wears through from frequent opening and shutting. The sides get the least wear of all. But in this book, the bottom edges, the corners, the top head-cap and the joints are perfectly sound. They are not more worn than the sides; and the tooling is modern in character. It looks quite fresh and the tool-marks are impressed on the marks of wear instead of being themselves worn. The appearances suggest to me a new binding with old leather.

“Then look at the paper. It professes to be discoloured by age. But the discoloration of the leaves of an old book occurs principally at the edges, where the paper has become oxidised by exposure to the air. The leaves of this book are equally discoloured all over. To me they suggest a bath of weak tea rather than old age.

“Again, there is the writing. Its appearance is that of faded writing done with the old-fashioned writing ink—made with iron sulphate and oak-galls. But it doesn’t look quite the right colour. However, we can easily test that. If it is old iron-gall ink, a drop of ammonium sulphide will turn it black. Let us take the book up to the laboratory and try it—and we had better have a “control” to compare it with.”

He ran his eye along the book-shelves and took down a rusty-looking volume of Humphry Clinker, the end-paper of which bore several brown and faded signatures.

Here is a signature dated 1803,” said he. “That will be near enough,” and with the two books in his hand he led the way upstairs to the laboratory. Here he took down the ammonium sulphide bottle, and dipping up a little of the liquid in a fine glass tube, opened the cover of Humphry Clinker and carefully deposited a tiny drop on the figure 3 in the date. Almost immediately the ghostly brown began to darken until it at length became jet black. Then, in the same way, he opened Walter Lumley’s manuscript book and on the 9 of the date, 1819, he deposited a drop of the solution. But this time there was no darkening of the pale brown writing; on the contrary, it faded rapidly to a faint and muddy violet.

“It is not an iron ink,” said Thorndyke, and it looks suspiciously like an aniline brown. But let us see what the paper is made of. Have you boiled up that fragment, Polton?”

“Yes, sir,” answered our laboratory assistant, “and I’ve washed the soda out of it, so it’s all ready.”

He produced a labelled test-tube containing a tiny corner of paper floating in water, which he carefully emptied into a large watch-glass. From this Thorndyke transferred the little pulpy fragment to a microscope slide and, with a pair of mounted needles, broke it up into its constituent fibres. Then he dropped on it a drop of aniline stain, removed the surplus with blotting-paper, added a drop of glycerine and put on it a large cover-slip.

“There, Jervis,” said he, handing me the slide, “let us have your opinion on Walter Lumley’s paper.”

I placed the slide on the stage of the microscope and proceeded to inspect the specimen. But no exhaustive examination was necessary. The first glance settled the matter.

“It is nearly all wood,” I said. “Mechanical wood fibre, with some esparto, a little cotton and a few linen fibres.”

“Then,” said Thorndyke, “it is a modern paper. Mechanical wood-pulp—prepared by Keller’s process—was first used in paper-making in 1840. ‘Chemical wood-pulp’ came in later; and esparto was not used until 1860. So we can say with confidence that this paper was not made until more than twenty years after the date that is written on it. Probably it is of quite recent manufacture.”

“In that case,” said I, “this book is a counterfeit—presumably fraudulent.”

“Yes. In effect it is a forgery.”

“But that seems to suggest a conspiracy.”

It does,” Thorndyke agreed; “especially if it is considered in conjunction with the apparitions. The suggestion is that this book was prepared for the purpose of inducing a state of mind favourable to the acceptance of supernatural appearances. The obvious inference is that the apparitions themselves were an imposture produced for fraudulent purposes. But it is time for us to go.”

We shook hands with Polton, and, having collected our suitcases from the sitting-room, set forth for the station.

During the journey down I reflected on the new turn that Frank Lumley’s affairs had taken. Apparently, Brodribb had done his client an injustice. Lumley was not so mad as the old lawyer had supposed. He was merely credulous and highly suggestible. The “hallucinations” were real phenomena which he had simply misinterpreted. But who was behind these sham illusions? And what was it all about? I tried to open the question with Thorndyke; but though he was willing to discuss the sham manuscript book and the technique of its production, he would commit himself to nothing further.

On our arrival at St. David’s, Thorndyke looked up and down the platform and again up the station approach. “No sign of Brodribb or any messenger,” he remark ‘so we may assume that all is well at Burling Court up to the present. Let us hope that Brodribb’s presence has had an inhibitory effect on the apparitions.”

Nevertheless, it was evident that he was not quite easy in his mind. During supper he appeared watchful and preoccupied, and when, after the meal, he proposed a stroll down to the beach, he left word with our landlady as to where he was to be found if he should be wanted.

It was about a quarter to eleven when we arrived at the shore, and the tide was beginning to run out. The beach was deserted with the exception of a couple of fishermen who had apparently come in with the tide and who were making their boat secure for the before going home. Thorndyke approached them, addressing the older fisherman, remarked: “That is a big, powerful boat. Pretty fast, too, isn’t she?”

“Ay, sir,” was the reply; “fast and weatherly, she is. What we calls a galley-punt. Built at Deal for the hovelling trade—salvage, you know, sir—but there ain’t no hovelling nowadays, not to speak of.”

“Are you going out tomorrow?” asked Thorndyke.

“Not as I knows of, sir. Was you thinking of a bit of fishing?”

“If you are free,” said Thorndyke, “I should like to charter the boat for tomorrow. I don’t know what time I shall be able to start, but if you will stand by ready to put off at once when I come down we can count the waiting as sailing.”

“Very well, sir,” said the fisherman; “the boat’s yours for the day tomorrow. Any time after six, or earlier, if you like, if you come down here you’ll find me and my mate standing by with a stock of bait and the boat ready to push off.”

“That will do admirably,” said Thorndyke; and the morrow’s programme being thus settled, we wished the fishermen good-night and walked slowly back to our lodgings, where, after a final pipe, we turned in.

On the following morning, just as we were finishing a rather leisurely breakfast, we saw from our window our friend Mr. Brodribb hurrying down the street towards our house. I ran out and opened the door, and as he entered I conducted him into our sitting-room. From his anxious and flustered manner it was obvious that something had gone wrong, and his first words con firmed the sinister impression.

“I’m afraid we’re in for trouble, Thorndyke,” said he. “Frank is missing.”

“Since when?” asked Thorndyke.

“Since about eight o’clock this morning. He is nowhere about the house and he hasn’t had any breakfast.”

“When was he last seen?” Thorndyke asked. “And where?”

“About eight o’clock, in the breakfast-room. Apparently he went in there to say “good-bye” to the Prices—they have gone on a visit for the day to Folkestone and were having an early breakfast so as to catch the eight-thirty train. But he didn’t have breakfast with them. He just went in and wished them a pleasant journey and then it appears that he went out for a stroll in the grounds. When I came down to breakfast at half-past eight, the Prices had gone and Frank hadn’t come in. The maid sounded the gong, and as Frank still did not appear, she went out into the grounds to look for him; and presently I went out myself. But he wasn’t there and he wasn’t anywhere in the house. I don’t like the look of it at all. He is usually very regular and punctual at meals. What do you think we had better do, Thorndyke?”

My colleague looked at his watch and rang the bell.

I think, Brodribb,” said he, “that we must act on the obvious probabilities and provide against the one great danger that is known to us. Mrs. Robinson,” he added, addressing the landlady, who, had answered the bell in person, “can you let us have a jug of strong coffee at once?”

Mrs. Robinson could, and bustled away to prepare it, while Thorndyke produced from a cupboard a large vacuum flask.

I don’t quite follow you, Thorndyke,” said Mr. Brodribb. “What probabilities and what danger do you mean?”

“I mean that, up to the present, Frank Lumley has exactly reproduced in his experiences and his actions the experiences and actions of Gilbert Lumley as set forth in Walter Lumley’s narrative. The overwhelming probability is that he will continue to reproduce the story of Gilbert to the end. He probably saw the apparition for the third time last night, and is even now preparing for the final act.”

“Good God!” gasped Brodribb. “What a fool I am! You mean the cave? But we can never get there now. It will be high water in an hour and the beach at St. David’s Head will be covered already. Unless we can get a boat,” he added despairingly.

“We have got a boat,” said Thorndyke. “I chartered one last night.”

“Thank the Lord!” exclaimed Brodribb. “But you always think of everything—though I don’t know what you want that coffee for.”

“We may not want it at all,” said Thorndyke, as he poured the coffee, which the landlady had just brought, into the vacuum flask,” but on the other hand we may.”

He deposited the flask in a handbag, in which I observed a small emergency-case, and then turned to Brodribb.

“We had better get down to the beach now,” said he.

As we emerged from the bottom of the gap-way we saw our friends of the previous night laying a double line of planks across the beach from the boat to the margin of the surf; for the long galley-punt, with her load of ballast, was too heavy, over the shingle. They had just got the last plank laid as we reached the boat, and as they observed us they came running back with half a dozen of their mates.

“Jump aboard, gentlemen,” said our skipper, with a slightly dubious eye on Mr. Brodribb—for the boat’s gunwale was a good four feet above the beach. “We’ll have her afloat in a jiffy.”

We climbed in and hauled Mr. Brodribb in after us. The tall mast was already stepped—against the middle thwart in the odd fashion of galley-punts—and the great sail was hooked to the traveller and the tack-hook ready for hoisting. The party of boatmen gathered round and each took a tenacious hold of gunwale or thole. The skipper gave time with a jovial “Yo-ho!” his mates joined in with a responsive howl and heaved as one man. The great boat moved forward, and gathering way, slid swiftly along the greased planks towards the edge of the surf. Then her nose splashed into the sea; the skipper and his mate sprang in over the transom; the tall lug-sail soared up the mast and filled and the skipper let the rudder slide down its pintles and grasped the tiller.

“Did you want to go anywheres in particklar?” he inquired.

“We want to make for the big cave round St. David’s Head,” said Thorndyke, “and we want to get there well before high water.”

“We’ll do that easy enough, sir,” said the skipper “with this breeze. “Tis but about a mile and we’ve got three-quarters of an hour to do it in.”

He took a pull at the main sheet and, putting the helm down, brought the boat on a course parallel to the coast. Quietly but swiftly the water slipped past, one after another fresh headlands opened out till, in about a quarter of an hour, we were abreast of St. David’s Head with the sinister black shape of the cavern in full view over the port bow. Shortly afterwards the sail was lowered and our crew, reinforced by Thorndyke and me, took to the oars, pulling straight towards the shore with the cavern directly ahead.

As the boat grounded on the beach Thorndyke Brodribb and I sprang out and hurried across the sand and shingle to the gloomy and forbidding hole in white cliff. At first, coming out of the bright sunlight we seemed to be plunged in absolute darkness, and groped our way insecurely over the heaps of slippery sea-tangle that littered the floor. Presently our eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, and we could trace faintly the narrow, tunnel-like passage with its slimy green and the jagged roof nearly black with age. At the farther end it grew higher; and here I could see the small, dark bodies of bats hanging from the roof and clinging to the walls, and one or two fluttering blindly and noiselessly like large moths in the hollows of the vault above. But it was not the bats that engrossed my attention. Far away, at the extreme end, I could dimly discern the prostrate figure of a man lying motionless on a patch of smooth sand; a dreadful shape that seemed to sound the final note of tragedy to which the darkness, the clammy chill of the cavern and the ghostly forms of he bats had been a fitting prelude.

“My God!” gasped Brodribb, “we’re too late!” He broke into a shambling run and Thorndyke and I darted on ahead. The man was Frank Lumley, of course, and a glance at him gave us at least a ray of hope. He was lying in an easy posture with closed eyes and was still breathing, though his respiration was shallow and slow. Beside him on the sand lay a little bottle and near it a cork. I picked up the former and read on the label “Laudanum: Poison” and a local druggist’s name and address. But it was empty save for a few drops, the appearance and smell of which confirmed the label.

Thorndyke, who had been examining the unconscious man’s eyes with a little electric lamp, glanced at the bottle.

“Well,” said he, “we know the worst. That is a two-drachm phial, so if he took the lot his condition is not hopeless.”

As he spoke he opened the handbag, and taking out the emergency-case, produced from it a hypodermic syringe and a tiny bottle of atropine solution. I drew up Lumley’s sleeve while the syringe was filled and Thorndyke then administered the injection.

“It is opium poisoning, I suppose?” said I.

“Yes,” was the answer. “His pupils are like pin points; but his pulse is not so bad. I think we can safely move him down to the boat.”

Thereupon we lifted him, and with Brodribb supporting his feet, we moved in melancholy procession down the cave. Already the waves were lapping the beach at the entrance and even trickling in amongst the seaweed; and the boat, following the rising tide, had her bows within the cavern. The two fishermen, who were steadying the boat with their oars, greeted our appearance, carrying the body, with exclamations of astonishment. But they asked no questions, simply taking the unconscious man from us and laying him gently on the grating in the stern-sheets.

“Why, ’tis Mr. Lumley!” exclaimed the skipper.

“Yes,” said Thorndyke; and having given them a few words of explanation, he added: “I look to you to keep this affair to yourselves.”

To this the two men agreed heartily, and the boat having been pushed off and the sail hoisted, the skipper asked: “Do we sail straight back, sir?”

“Yes,” replied Thorndyke, “but we won’t land yet. Stand on and off opposite the gap-way.”

Already, as a result of the movement, the patient stupor appeared less profound. And now Thorndyke took definite measures to rouse him, shaking him gently and constantly changing his position. Presently Lumley drew a deep sighing breath, and opened his eyes for a moment. Then Thorndyke sat him up, and producing the vacuum-flask, made him swallow a few teaspoonful of coffee. This procedure was continued for over an hour while the boat cruised up and down opposite the landing-place half a mile or so from the shore. Constantly our patient relapsed into stuporous sleep, only to be roused again and given a sip of coffee.

At length he recovered so far as to be able to sit up—lurching from side to side as the boat rolled—and drowsily answer questions spoken loudly in his ears. A quarter of an hour later, as he still continued to improve, Thorndyke ordered the skipper to bring the boat to the landing-place.

“I think he could walk now,” said he, “and the exercise will rouse him more completely.”

The boat was accordingly beached and Lumley assisted to climb out; and though at first he staggered as if he would fall, after a few paces he was able to walk fairly steadily, supported on either side by me and Thorndyke. The effort of ascending the steep gap-way revived him further; and by the time we reached the gate of Burling Court—half a mile across the fields—he was almost able to stand alone.

But even when he had arrived home he was not allowed to rest, earnestly as he begged to be left in peace. First Thorndyke insisted on his taking a light meal, and then proceeded to question him as to the events of the previous night.

“I presume, Lumley,” said he, “that you saw the apparition of Glynn’s head?”

“Yes. After Mr. Brodribb had seen me to bed, I got up and went to Gilbert’s cabin. Something seemed to draw me to it. And as soon as I opened the door, there was the head hanging in the air within three feet of me. Then I knew that Glynn was calling me, and—well, you know the rest.”

“I understand,” said Thorndyke. “But now I want you to come to Gilbert’s cabin with me and show me exactly where you were and where the head was.”

Lumley was profoundly reluctant and tried to postpone the demonstration. But Thorndyke would listen to no refusal, and at last Lumley rose wearily and conducted his tormentor up the stairs, followed by Brodribb and me.

We went first to Lumley’s bedroom and from that into a corridor, into which some other bedrooms opened. The corridor was dimly lighted by a single window, and when Thorndyke had drawn the thick curtain over this, the place was almost completely dark. At one end of the corridor was the small, narrow door of the “cabin,” over which was a gas bracket. Thorndyke lighted the gas and opened the door and we then saw that the room was in total darkness, its only window being closely shuttered and the curtains drawn. Thorndyke struck a match and lit the gas and we then looked curiously about the little room.

It was a quaint little apartment, to which its antique furniture and contents gave an old-world air. An ancient hanger, quadrant and spy-glass hung on the wall, a large, dropsical-looking watch, inscribed “Thomas Tompion, Londini fecit,” reposed on a little velvet cushion in the middle of a small, black mahogany table by the window, and a couple of Cromwellian chairs stood against the wall. Thorndyke looked curiously at the table, which was raised on wooden blocks, and Lumley explained: “That was Gilbert’s dressing-table. He had it made for his cabin on board ship.”

“Indeed,” said Thorndyke. “Then Gilbert was a rather up-to-date gentleman. There wasn’t much mahogany furniture before 1720. Let us have a look at the interior arrangements.”

He lifted the watch, and having placed it on a chair, raised the lid of the table, disclosing a small wash basin, a little squat ewer and other toilet appliances. The table lid, which was held upright by a brass strut, held a rather large dressing-mirror enclosed in a projecting case.

“I wonder,” said I, “why the table was stood on those blocks.”

“Apparently,” said Thorndyke, “for the purpose of bringing the mirror to the eye-level of a person standing up.”

The answer gave Brodribb an idea. “I suppose, Frank,” said he, “it was not your own reflection in the mirror that you saw?”

“How could it be?” demanded Lumley. “The head was upside down, and besides, it was quite near to me.”

No, that’s true,” said Brodribb; and turning away from the table he picked up the old navigator’s watch “A queer old timepiece, this,” he remarked.

“Yes,” said Lumley; “but it’s beautifully made. Let me show you the inside.”

He took off the outer case and opened the inner one, exhibiting the delicate workmanship of the interior to Brodribb and me, while Thorndyke continued to pore over the inner fittings of the table. Suddenly my colleague said: “Just go outside, you three, and shut the door. I want to try an experiment.”

Obediently we all filed out and closed the door, waiting expectantly in the corridor. In a couple of minutes Thorndyke came out and before he shut the door I noticed that the little room was now in darkness. He walked us a short distance down the corridor and then, halting, said:

“Now, Lumley, I want you to go into the cabin and tell us what you see.”

Lumley appeared a little reluctant to go in alone, but eventually he walked towards the cabin and opened the door. Instantly he uttered a cry of horror, and closing the door, ran back to us, trembling, agitated, wild-eyed.

“It is there now!” he exclaimed. “I saw it distinctly.”

“Very well,” said Thorndyke. “Now you go and look, Brodribb.”

Mr. Brodribb showed no eagerness. With very obvious trepidation he advanced to the door and threw it open with a jerk. Then, with a sharp exclamation, he slammed it to, and came hurrying back, his usually pink complexion paled down to a delicate mauve.

“Horrible! Horrible!” he exclaimed. “What the devil is it, Thorndyke?”

A sudden suspicion flashed into my mind. I strode forward, and turning the handle of the door, pulled it open. And then I was not surprised that Brodribb had been startled. Within a yard of my face, clear, distinct and solid, was an inverted head, floating in mid-air in the pitch-dark room. Of course, being prepared for it, I saw at a glance what it was; recognised my own features, strangely and horribly altered as they were by their inverted position. But even now that I knew what it was, the thing had a most appalling, uncanny aspect.

“Now,” said Thorndyke, “let us go in and explode the mystery. Just stand outside the door, Jervis, while I demonstrate.”

He produced a sheet of white paper from his pocket, and smoothing it out, let our two friends into the room. First,” said he, holding the paper out flat at the eye-level, “you see on this paper a picture of Dr. Jervis’s head upside down.”

So there is,” said Brodribb; “like a magic-lantern picture.”

“Exactly like,” agreed Thorndyke; “and of exactly the same nature. Now let us see how it is produced.”

He struck a match and lit the gas; and instantly all our eyes turned towards the open dressing-table.

“But that is not the same mirror that we saw just now,” said Brodribb.

“No,” replied Thorndyke. “The frame is reversible on a sliding hinge and I have turned it round. On one side is the ordinary flat looking-glass which you saw before; on the other is this concave shaving-mirror. You observe that, if you stand close to it, you see your face the right way up and magnified; if you go back to the door, you see your head upside down and smaller.”

“But,” objected Lumley, “the head looked quite solid and seemed to be right out in the room.”

So it was, and is still. But the effect of reality is destroyed by the fact that you can now see the frame of the mirror enclosing the image, so that the head appears to be in the mirror. But in the dark, you could only see the image. The mirror was invisible.”

Brodribb reflected on this explanation. Presently he said: “I don’t think I quite understand it now.”

Thorndyke took a pencil from his pocket and began to draw a diagram on the sheet of paper that he still held.

“The figure that you see in an ordinary flat looking glass,” he explained,” is what is called a “virtual image.” It appears to be behind the mirror, but of course it is not there. It is an optical illusion. But the image from a concave mirror is in front of the mirror and is a real image like that of a magic-lantern or a camera, and, like them, inverted. This diagram will explain matters. Here is Lumley standing at the open door of the room. His figure is well lighted by the gas over the door (which, however, throws no light into the room) and is clearly reflected by the mirror, which throws forward a bright inverted image. But, as the room is dark and the mirror invisible, he sees only the image, which looks like—and in fact is—a real object standing in mid-air.”

“But why did I see only the head?” asked Lumley.

“Because the head occupied the whole of the mirror. If the mirror had been large enough you would have seen the full-length figure.”

Lumley reflected for a moment. “It almost looks if this had been arranged,” he said at length.

“Of course it has been arranged,” said Thorndyke “and very cleverly arranged, too. And now let us go and see if anything else has been arranged. Which is Mr. Price’s room?”

“He has three rooms, which open out of this corridor,” said Lumley; and he conducted us to a door at the farther end, which Thorndyke tried and found locked.

“It is a case for the smoker’s companion,” said he, producing from his pocket an instrument that went by that name, but which looked suspiciously like a lock-pick. At any rate, after one or two trials—which Mr. Brodribb watched with an appreciative smile—the bolt shot back and the door opened.

We entered what was evidently the bedroom, around which Thorndyke cast a rapid glance and then asked: “What are the other rooms?”

I think he uses them to tinker in,” said Lumley, “but I don’t quite know what he does in them. All three rooms communicate.”

We advanced to the door of communication and, finding it unlocked, passed through into the next room. Here, on a large table by the window, was a litter of various tools and appliances.

“What is that thing with the wooden screws?” Brodribb asked.

“A bookbinder’s sewing-press,” replied Thorndyke. “And here are some boxes of finishing tools. Let us look over them.”

He took up the boxes one after the other and inspected the ends of the tools—brass stamps for impressing the ornaments on book covers. Presently he lifted out two, a leaf and a flower. Then he produced from his coat pocket the little manuscript book, and laying it on the table, picked up from the floor a little fragment of leather. Placing this also on the table, he pressed two of the tools on it, leaving a clear impression of a leaf and a flower. Finally he laid the scrap of leather on the book, when it was obvious that the leaf and flower were identical replicas of the leaves and flowers which formed the decoration of the book cover.

“This is very curious,” said Lumley. “They seem to be exactly alike.”

“They are exactly alike,” said Thorndyke. “I affirm that the tooling on that book was done with these tools, and the leaves sewn on that press.”

“But the book is a hundred years old,” objected Lumley.

Thorndyke shook his head. “The leather is old,” said he, “but the book is new. We have tested the paper and found it to be of recent manufacture. But now let us see what is in that little cupboard. There seem to be some bottles there.”

He ran his eye along the shelves, crowded with bottles and jars of varnish, glair, oil, cement and other material.

“Here,” he said, taking down a small bottle of dark-coloured powder, “is some aniline brown. That probably produced the ancient and faded writing. But this is more illuminating—in more senses than one.” He picked out a little, wide-mouthed bottle labelled “Radium Paint for the hands and figures of luminous watches.”

“Ha!” exclaimed Brodribb; “a very illuminating discovery, as you say.”

“And that,” said Thorndyke, looking keenly round the room,” seems to be all there is here. Shall we take a glance at the third room?”

We passed through the communicating doorway and found ourselves in a small apartment practically unfurnished and littered with trunks, bags and various lumber. As we stood looking about us, Thorndyke sniffed suspiciously.

“I seem to detect a sort of mousy odour,” said he, glancing round inquisitively. “Do you notice it, Jervis?”

I did; and with the obvious idea in my mind began I to prowl round the room in search of the source, Suddenly my eye lighted on a smallish box, in the top of which a number of gimlet-holes had been bored. I raised the lid and peered in. The interior was covered with filth and on the bottom lay a dead bat.

We all stood for a few seconds looking in silence at the little corpse. Then Thorndyke closed the box and tucked it under his arm.

“This completes the case, I think,” said he. “What time does Price return?”

He is expected home about seven o’clock,” said Lumley. Then he added with a troubled expression: “I don’t understand all this. What does it mean?”

It is very simple,” replied Thorndyke. “You have a sham ancient book containing an evidently fabulous story of supernatural events; and you have a series of appliances and arrangements for producing illusions which seem to repeat those events. The book was planted where it was certain to be found and read, and the illusions began after it was known that it actually had been read. It is a conspiracy.”

“But why?” demanded Lumley. “What was the object?”

“My dear Frank,” said Brodribb, “you seem forget that Price is the next of kin and the heir to your estate on your death.”

Lumley’s eyes filled. He seemed overcome with grief and disgust. “It is incredible,” he murmured huskily. “The baseness of it is beyond belief.”

Price and his wife arrived home at about seven o’clock. A meal had been prepared for them, and when they had finished, a servant was sent in to ask Mr. Price to speak with Mr. Brodribb in the study. There we all awaited him, Lumley being present by his own wish; and on the table were deposited the little book, the scrap of leather, the two finishing tools, the pot of radium paint and the box containing the dead bat. Presently Price entered, accompanied by his wife; and at the sight of the objects on the table they both turned deathly pale. Mr. Brodribb placed chairs for them, and when they were seated he began in a dry, stern voice:

“I have sent for you, Mr. Price, to give you certain information. These two gentlemen, Dr. Thorndyke and Dr. Jervis, are eminent criminal lawyers whom I have commissioned to make investigations and to advise me in this matter. Their investigations have disclosed the existence of a forged manuscript, a dead bat, a pot of luminous paint and a concave mirror. I need not enlarge on those discoveries. My intention is to prosecute you and your wife for conspiracy to procure the suicide of Mr. Frank Lumley. But, at Mr. Lumley’s request, I have consented to delay the proceedings for forty-eight hours. During that period you will be at liberty to act as you think best.”

For some seconds there was a tense silence. The two crestfallen conspirators sat with their eyes fixed on the floor, and Mrs. Price choked down a half-hysterical sob. Then they rose; and Price, without looking at any of us, said in a low voice: “Very well. Then I suppose we had better clear out.”

“And the best thing, too,” remarked Brodribb, when they had gone; “for I doubt if we could have carried our bluff into court.”

On the wall of our sitting-room in the Temple there hang, to this day, two keys. One is that of the postern gate of Burling Court, and the other belongs to the suite of rooms that were once occupied by Mr. Lewis Price; and they hang there, by Frank Lumley’s wish, as a token that Burling Court is a country home to which we have access at all hours and seasons as tenants in virtue of an inalienable right.

THE MYSTERIOUS VISITOR (1925)

“So,” said Thorndyke, looking at me reflectively, “you are a full-blown medical practitioner with a practice of your own. How the years slip by! It seems but the other day that you were a student, gaping at me from the front bench of the lecture theatre.”

“Did I gape?” I asked incredulously.

“I use the word metaphorically,” said he, “to denote ostentatious attention. You always took my lecture very seriously. May I ask if you have ever found them of use in your practice?”

“I can’t say that I have ever had any very thrilling medico-legal experiences since that extraordinary cremation case that you investigated—the case of Septimus Maddock, you know. But that reminds me that there is a little matter that I meant to speak to you about. It is of no interest, but I just wanted your advice, though it even my business, strictly speaking. It concerns a patient of mine, a man named Crofton, who has disappeared rather unaccountably.”

“And do you call that a case of no medico-legal interest?” demanded Thorndyke.

“Oh, there’s nothing in it. He just went away for a holiday and he hasn’t communicated with his friends very recently. That is all. What makes me a little uneasy is that there is a departure from his usual habits—he is generally a fairly regular correspondent—that seems a little significant in view of his personality. He is markedly neurotic and his family history is by means what one would wish.”

“That is an admirable thumb-nail sketch, Jardine,” said Thorndyke “but it lacks detail. Let us have a full-size picture.”

“Very well,” said I, “but you mustn’t let me bore you. To begin with Crofton: he is a nervous, anxious, worrying sort of fellow, everlastingly fussing about money affairs, and latterly this tendency has been getting worse. He fairly got the jumps about his financial position; felt that he was steadily drifting into bankruptcy and couldn’t get that out of his mind. It was all bunkum. I am more or less a friend of the family, and I know that there was nothing to worry about. Mrs. Crofton assured me that, although they were a trifle hard up, they could rub along quite safely.

“As he seemed to be getting the hump worse and worse, I advised him to go away for a change and stay in a boarding-house where he would see some fresh faces. Instead of that, he elected to go down to a bungalow that he has at Seasalter, near Whitstable, and lets out in the season. He proposed to stay by himself and spend his time in sea-bathing and country walks. I wasn’t very keen on this, for solitude was the last thing that he wanted. There was a strong family history of melancholia and some unpleasant rumours of suicide. I didn’t like his being alone at all. However, another friend of the family, Mrs. Crofton’s brother in fact, a chap named Ambrose, offered to go down and spend a weekend with him to give him a start, and afterwards to run down for an afternoon whenever he was able. So off he went with Ambrose on Friday, the sixteenth of June, and for a time all went well. He seemed to be improving in health and spirits and wrote to his wife regularly two or three times a week. Ambrose went down as often as he could to cheer him up, and the last time brought back the news that Crofton thought of moving on to Margate for a further change. So, of course, he didn’t go down to the bungalow again.

“Well, in due course, a letter came from Margate; it had been written at the bungalow, but the postmark was Margate and bore the same date—the sixteenth of July—as the letter itself. I have it with me. Mrs. Crofton sent it for me to see and I haven’t returned it yet. But there is nothing of interest in it beyond the statement that he was going on to Margate by the next train and would write again when he had found rooms there. That was the last that was heard of him. He never wrote and nothing is known of his movements excepting that he left Seasalter and arrived at Margate. This is the letter.”

I handed it to Thorndyke, who glanced at the mark and then laid it on the table for examination later. “Have any inquiries been made?” he asked.

“Yes. His photograph has been sent to the Margate police, but, of course—well, you know what Margate like in July. Thousands of strangers coming and gong every day. It is hopeless to look for him in that crowd and it is quite possible that he isn’t there now. But his disappearance is most inopportune, for a big legacy hats just fallen in, and, naturally, Mrs. Crofton is frantically anxious to let him know. It is a matter of about thirty thousand pounds.”

“Was this legacy expected?” asked Thorndyke.

“No. The Croftons knew nothing about it. They didn’t know that the old lady—Miss Shuler—had made a will or that she had very much to leave; and they didn’t know that she was likely to die, or even that she was ill. Which is rather odd; for she was ill for a month or two and, as she suffered from a malignant abdominal tumour, it was known that she couldn’t recover.”

“When did she die?”

“On the thirteenth of July.”

Thorndyke raised his eyebrows. “Just three days before the date of this letter,” he remarked; “so that if he should never reappear, this letter will be the sole evidence that he survived her. It is an important document. It may come to represent a value of thirty thousand pounds.”

“It isn’t so important as it looks,” said I. “Miss Shuler’s will provides that if Crofton should die before the estatrix, the legacy should go to his wife. So whether he is alive or not, the legacy is quite safe. But we must hope that he is alive, though I must confess to some little anxiety on his account.”

Thorndyke reflected a while on this statement. Presently he asked: “Do you know if Crofton has made a will?”

“Yes, he has,” I replied; “quite recently. I was one of the witnesses and I read it through at Crofton’s request. It was full of the usual legal verbiage, but it might have been stated in a dozen words. He leaves practically everything to his wife, but instead of saying so it enumerates the property item by item.”

“It was drafted, I suppose, by the solicitor?”

“Yes; another friend of the family named Jobson, and he is the executor and residuary legatee.”

Thorndyke nodded and again became deeply reflective. Still meditating, he took up the letter, and as he inspected it, I watched him curiously and not without a certain secret amusement. First he looked over the envelope, back and front. Then he took from his pocket powerful Coddington lens and with this examined the flap and the postmark. Next, he drew out the letter, held ii up to the light, then read it through and finally examined various parts of the writing through his lens. “Well,” I asked, with an irreverent grin, “I should think you have extracted the last grain of meaning from it.”

He smiled as he put away his lens and handed the letter back to me.

“As this may have to be produced in proof of survival,” said he,” it had better be put in a place of safety. I notice that he speaks of returning later to the bungalow. I take it that it has been ascertained that he did not return there?”

“I don’t think so. You see, they have been waiting for him to write. You think that some one ought—”

I paused; for it began to be borne in on me that Thorndyke was taking a somewhat gloomy view of the case.

“My dear Jardine,” said he, “I am merely following your own suggestion. Here is a man with an inherited tendency to melancholia and suicide who has suddenly disappeared. He went away from an empty house and announced his intention of returning to it later. As that house is the only known locality in which he could be sought, it is obvious that it ought to have been examined. And even if he never came back there, the house might contain some clues to his present whereabouts.”

This last sentence put an idea into my mind which I was a little shy of broaching. What was a clue to Thorndyke might be perfectly meaningless to an ordinary person. I recalled his amazing interpretations of most commonplace facts in the mysterious Maddock case and the idea took fuller possession. At length I said tentatively: “I would go down myself if I felt competent. To morrow is Saturday, and I could get a colleague to look after my practice; there isn’t much doing just now. But when you speak of clues, and when I remember what duffer I was last time—I wish it were possible for you to have a look at the place.”

To my surprise, he assented almost with enthusiasm.

“Why not?” said he. “It is a weekend. We can put up at the bungalow, I suppose, and have a little gipsy holiday. And there are undoubtedly points of interest in the case. Let us go down tomorrow. We can lunch in the train and have the afternoon before us. You had better get a key from Mrs. Crofton, or, if she hasn’t got one, an authority to visit the house. We may want that if we have to enter without a key. And we go alone, of course.”

I assented joyfully. Not that I had any expectations as to what we might learn from our inspection. But something in Thorndyke’s manner gave me the impression that he had extracted from my account of the case some significance that was not apparent to me.

The bungalow stood on a space of rough ground a little way behind the sea-wall, along which we walked towards it from Whitstable, passing on our way a ship-builder’s yard and a slipway, on which a collier brigantine was hauled up for repairs. There were one or two other bungalows adjacent, but a considerable distance apart, and we looked at them as we approached to make out the names painted on the gates.

“That will probably be the one,” said Thorndyke, indicating a small building enclosed within a wooden fence and provided, like the others, with a bathing hut just above high-water mark. Its solitary, deserted aspect and lowered blinds supported his opinion, and when we reached the gate, the name “Middlewick” painted on it settled the matter.

“The next question is,” said I, “how the deuce we are going to get in? The gate is locked, and there is no bell. Is it worth while to hammer at the fence?”

“I wouldn’t do that,” replied Thorndyke. “The place is pretty certainly empty or the gate wouldn’t be locked. We shall have to climb over unless there is a back gate unlocked, so the less noise we make the better.”

We walked round the enclosure, but there was no other gate, nor was there any tree or other cover to disguise our rather suspicious proceedings.

“There’s no help for it, Jardine,” said Thorndyke, “so here goes.”

He put his green canvas suitcase on the ground, grasped the top of the fence with both hands and went over like a harlequin. I picked up the case and handed it over to him, and, having taken a quick glance round, followed my leader.

“Well,” I said,” here we are. And now, how are we to get into the house?”

“We shall have to pick a lock if there is no door open, or else go in by a window. Let us take a look round.”—We walked round the house to the back door, but found it not only locked, but bolted top and bottom, as Thorndyke ascertained with his knifeblade. The windows were all casements and all fastened with their catches.

“The front door will be the best,” said Thorndyke. “It can’t be bolted unless he got out by the chimney and I think my ‘smoker’s companion’ will be able to cope with an ordinary door-lock. It looked like a common builder’s fitting.”

As he spoke, we returned to the front of the house and he produced the ‘smoker’s companion’ from his pocket (I don’t know what kind of smoker it was designed to accompany). The lock was apparently a simple affair, for the second trial with the ‘companion’ shot back the bolt, and when I turned the handle, the door opened. As a precaution, I called out to inquire if there was anybody within, and then, as there was no answer, we entered, walking straight into the living-room, as there was no hall or lobby.

A couple of paces from the threshold we halted to look round the room, and on me the aspect of the place produced a vague sense of discomfort. Though it was early in a bright afternoon, the room was almost completely dark, for not only were the blinds lowered, but the curtains were drawn as well.

“It looks,” said I, peering about the dim and gloomy apartment with sun-dazzled eyes, “as if he had gone away at night. He wouldn’t have drawn the curtains in the daytime.”

“One would think not,” Thorndyke agreed; “but it doesn’t follow.”

He stepped to the front window and drawing back the curtains pulled up the blind, revealing a half-curtain of green serge over the lower part of the window. As the bright daylight flooded the room, he stood with his back to the window looking about with deep attention, letting his eyes travel slowly over the walls, the furniture, and especially the floor. Presently he stooped to pick up a short match-end which lay just under the table opposite the door, and as he looked at it thoughtfully, he pointed to a couple of spots of candle grease on the linoleum near the table. Then he glanced at the mantelpiece and from that to an ash-bowl on the table.

These are only trifling discrepancies,” said he, “but they are worth noting. You see,” he continued in response to my look of inquiry, “that this room is severely trim and orderly. Everything seems to be in place. The matchbox, for instance, has its fixed receptacle above the mantelpiece, and there is a bowl for the burnt matches, regularly used, as its contents show. Yet there is a burnt match thrown on the floor, although the bowl is on the table quite handy. And the match, you notice, is not of the same kind as those in the box over the mantelpiece, which is a large Bryant and May, or as the burnt matches in the bowl which have evidently come from it. But if you look in the bowl,” he continued, picking it up, “you will see two burnt matches of this same kind—apparently the small size Bryant and May—one burnt quite short and one only half burnt. The suggestion is fairly obvious, but, as I say, there is a slight discrepancy.”

I don’t know,” said I, “that either the suggestion or the discrepancy is very obvious to me.”

He walked over to the mantelpiece and took the match box from its case.

“You see,” said he, opening it, “that this box is nearly full. It has an appointed place and it was in that place. We find a small match, burnt right out, under the table opposite the door, and two more in the bowl under the hanging lamp. A reasonable inference is that some one came in in the dark and struck a match as he entered. That match must have come from a box that he brought with him in his pocket. It burned out and he struck another, which also burned out while he was raising the chimney of the lamp, and he struck a third to light the lamp. But if that person was Crofton, why did he need to strike a match to light the room when the matchbox was in its usual place; and why did he throw the match-end on the floor?”

“You mean that the suggestion is that the person was not Crofton; and I think you are right. Crofton doesn’t carry matches in his pocket. He uses wax vestas and carries them in a silver case.”

“It might possibly have been Ambrose,” Thorndyke suggested.

“I don’t think so,” said I. “Ambrose uses a petrol lighter.”

Thorndyke nodded. “There may be nothing in it,” said he, “but it offers a suggestion. Shall we look over the rest of the premises?”

He paused for a moment to glance at a small key board on the wall on which one or two keys were hanging, each distinguished by a little ivory label and by the name written underneath the peg; then he opened a door in the corner of the room. As this led into the kitchen, I closed it and opened an adjoining one which gave access to a bedroom.

“This is probably the extra bedroom,” he remarked as we entered. “The blinds have not been drawn down, and there is a general air of trimness that suggests the tidy up of an unoccupied room. And the bed looks if it had been out of use.”

After an attentive look round, he returned to the living room and crossed to the remaining door. As he opened it, we looked into a nearly dark room, both the windows being covered by thick serge curtains.

“Well,” he observed, when he had drawn back the curtains and raised the blinds, “there is nothing painfully tidy here. That is a very roughly-made bed, and the blanket is outside the counterpane.”

He looked critically about the room and especially the bedside table.

“Here are some more discrepancies,” said he. “There are two candlesticks, in one of which the candle has burned itself right out, leaving a fragment of wick. There are five burnt matches in it, two large ones from the box by its side and three small ones, of which two are mere stumps. The second candle is very much guttered, and I think “—he lifted it out of the socket—” yes, it has been used out of the candlestick. You see that the grease has run down right to the bottom and there is a distinct impression of a thumb—apparently a left thumb—made while the grease was warm. Then you notice the mark on the table of a tumbler which had contained some liquid that was not water, but there is no tumbler. However, it may be an old mark, though it looks fresh.”

It is hardly like Crofton to leave an old mark on the table,” said I. “He is a regular old maid. We had better see if the tumbler is in the kitchen.”

“Yes,” agreed Thorndyke. “But I wonder what he was doing with that candle. Apparently he took it out-of-doors, as there is a spot on the floor of the living-room; and you see that there are one or two spots on the floor here.” He walked over to a chest of drawers near the door and was looking into a drawer which he had pulled out, and which I could see was full of clothes, when I observed a faint smile spreading over his face. “Come round here, Jardine,” he said in a low voice, “and take a peep through the crack of the door.”

I walked round, and, applying my eye to the crack, looked across the living-room at the end window. Above the half-curtain I could distinguish the unmistakable top of a constabulary helmet.

“Listen,” said Thorndyke. “They are in force.”

As he spoke, there came from the neighbourhood of the kitchen a furtive scraping sound, suggestive of a pocket knife persuading a window-catch. It was followed by the sound of an opening window and then of a stealthy entry. Finally, the kitchen door opened softly, some one tiptoed across the living-room and a burly police-sergeant appeared, framed in the bedroom doorway.

“Good afternoon, sergeant,” said Thorndyke, with a genial smile.

“Yes, that’s all very well,” was the response, “but the question is, who might you be, and what might you be doing in this house?”

Thorndyke briefly explained our business, and, when, we had presented our cards and Mrs. Crofton’s written authority, the sergeant’s professional stiffness vanished like magic.

“It’s all right, Tomkins,” he sang out to an invisible myrmidon. “You had better shut the window and go out by the front door. You must excuse me, gentlemen,” he added; “but the tenant of the next bungalow cycled down and gave us the tip. He watched you through his glasses and saw you pick the front-door lock. It did look a bit queer, you must admit.”

Thorndyke admitted it freely with a faint chuckle, and we walked across the living-room to the kitchen. Here, the sergeant’s presence seemed to inhibit comments, but I noticed that my colleague cast a significant glance at a frying-pan that rested on a Primus stove. The congealed fat in it presented another “discrepancy,” for I could hardly imagine the fastidious Crofton going away and leaving it in that condition.

Noting that there was no unwashed tumbler in evidence, I followed my friend back to the living-room, where he paused with his eye on the key-board.

“Well,” remarked the sergeant, “if he ever did come back here, it’s pretty clear that he isn’t here now. You’ve been all over the premises, I think?”

“All excepting the bathing-hut,” replied Thorndyke; and, as he spoke, he lifted the key so labelled from its hook.

The sergeant laughed softly. “He’s not very likely to have taken up quarters there,” said he. “Still, there nothing like being thorough. But you notice that the key of the front door and that of the gate have both been taken away, so we can assume that he has taken himself away too.”

“That is a reasonable inference,” Thorndyke admitted; “but we may as well make our survey complete.”

With this he led the way out into the garden and to the gate, where he unblushingly produced the ‘smoker’s companion’ and insinuated its prongs into the keyhole.

“Well, I’m sure!” exclaimed the sergeant as the lock clicked and the gate opened. “That’s a funny sort of tool; and you seem quite handy with it, too. Might I have a look at it?”

He looked at it so very long and attentively, when Thorndyke handed it to him, that I suspected him of an intention to infringe the patent. By the time he had finished his inspection we were at the bottom of the bank below the sea-wall and Thorndyke had inserted the key into the lock of the bathing-hut. As the sergeant returned the ‘companion’ Thorndyke took it and pocketed it then he turned the key and pushed the door open; and the officer started back with a shout of amazement.

It was certainly a grim spectacle that we looked in on. The hut was a small building about six feet square, devoid of any furniture or fittings, excepting one or two pegs high up the wall. The single, unglazed window was closely shuttered, and on the bare floor in the farther corner a man was sitting, leaning back into the corner, with his head dropped forward on his breast. The man was undoubtedly Arthur Crofton. That much I could say with certainty, notwithstanding the horrible changes wrought by death and the lapse of time. “But,” I added when I had identified the body, “I should have said that he had been dead more than a fortnight. He must have come straight back from Margate and done this. And that will probably be the missing tumbler,” I concluded, pointing to one that stood on the floor close to the right hand of the corpse.

“No doubt,” replied Thorndyke, somewhat abstractedly. He had been looking critically about the interior of the hut, and now remarked: “I wonder why he did not shoot the bolt instead of locking himself in; and what has become of the key? He must have taken it out of the lock and put it in his pocket.”

He looked interrogatively at the sergeant, who having no option but to take the hint, advanced with an expression of horrified disgust and proceeded very gingerly to explore the dead man’s clothing.

“Ah!” he exclaimed at length, “here we are.” He drew from the waistcoat pocket a key with a small ivory label attached to it. “Yes, this is the one. You see, it is marked “Bathing-hut.”

He handed it to Thorndyke, who looked at it attentively, and even with an appearance of surprise, and then, producing an indelible pencil from his pocket, wrote on the label, “Found on body.”

The first thing,” said he, “is to ascertain it fits the lock.”

“Why, it must,” said the sergeant, “if he locked himself in with it.”

“Undoubtedly,” Thorndyke agreed, “but that is the point. It doesn’t look quite similar to the other one.”

He drew out the key which we had brought from the house and gave it to me to hold. Then he tried the key from the dead man’s pocket; but it not only did not fit, it would not even enter the keyhole.

The sceptical indifference faded suddenly from the sergeant’s face. He took the key from Thorndyke, having tried it with the same result, stood up and stared, round-eyed, at my colleague.

“Well!” he exclaimed. “This is a facer! It’s the wrong key!”

“There may be another key on the body,” said Thorndyke. “It isn’t likely, but, you had better make sure.”

The sergeant showed no reluctance this time. He searched the dead man’s pockets thoroughly and produced a bunch of keys. But they were all quite small keys, none of them in the least resembling that of the hut door. Nor, I noticed, did they include those of the bungalow door or the garden gate. Once more the officer drew himself up and stared at Thorndyke.

“There’s something rather fishy about this affair,” said he.

“There is,” Thorndyke agreed. “The door was certainly locked; and as it was not locked from within, it must have been locked from without. Then that key—the wrong key—was presumably placed in the dead man’s pocket by some other person. And there are some other suspicious facts. A tumbler has disappeared from the bedside table, and there is a tumbler here. You notice one or two spots of candle-grease on the floor here, and it looks as if a candle had been stood in that corner near the door. There is no candle here now; but in the bedroom there is a candle which has been carried without a candle stick and which, by the way, bears an excellent impression of a thumb. The first thing to do will be to take the deceased’s fingerprints. Would you mind fetching my case from the bedroom, Jardine?”

I ran back to the house (not unobserved by the gentleman in the next bungalow) and, catching up the case, carried it down to the hut. When I arrived there I found Thorndyke holding the tumbler delicately in his gloved left hand while he examined it against the light with the aid of his lens. He handed the latter to me and observed.

“If you look at this carefully, Jardine, you will see a very interesting thing. There are the prints of two different thumbs—both left hands, and therefore of different persons. You will remember that the tumbler stood by the right hand of the body and that the table, which bore the mark of a tumbler, was at the left-hand side of the bed.”

When I had examined the thumb-prints he placed the tumbler carefully on the floor and opened his “research-case,” which was fitted as a sort of portable laboratory. From this he took a little brass box containing an ink-tube, a tiny roller and some small cards, and, using the box-lid as an inking plate, he proceeded methodically to take the dead man’s fingerprints, writing the particulars on each card.

“I don’t quite see what you want with Crofton’s fingerprints,” said I. “The other man’s would be more to the point.”

“Undoubtedly,” Thorndyke replied. “But we have to prove that they are another man’s—that they are not Crofton’s. And there is that print on the candle. That is a very important point to settle; and as we have finished here, we had better go and settle it at once.”

He closed his case, and, taking up the tumbler with his gloved hand, led the way back to the house, the sergeant following when he had locked the door. We proceeded directly to the bedroom, where Thorndyke took the candle from its socket and, with the aid of his lens, compared it carefully with the two thumb-prints on the card, and then with the tumbler.

“It is perfectly clear,” said he. “This is a mark of a left thumb. It is totally unlike Crofton’s and it appears to be identical with the strange thumb-print on the tumbler. From which it seems to follow that the stranger took the candle from this room to the hut and brought it back. But he probably blew it out before leaving the house and lit it again in the hut.”

The sergeant and I examined the cards, the candle and the tumbler, and then the former asked: “I suppose you have no idea whose thumb-print that might be? You don’t know, for instance, of anyone who might have had any motive for making away with Mr. Crofton?

“That,” replied Thorndyke, “is rather a question for the coroner’s jury.”

“So it is,” the sergeant agreed. “But there won’t be much question about their verdict. It is a pretty clear case of wilful murder.”

To this Thorndyke made no reply excepting to give some directions as to the safe-keeping of the candle and tumbler; and our proposed “gipsy holiday” being now evidently impossible, we took our leave of the sergeant—who already had our cards—and wended back to the station.

“I suppose,” said I, “we shall have to break the news to Mrs. Crofton.”

That is hardly our business,” he replied. “We can leave that to the solicitor or to Ambrose. If you know the lawyer’s address, you might send him a telegram, arranging a meeting at eight o’clock tonight. Give no particulars. Just say “Crofton found,” but mark the telegram “urgent” so that he will keep the appointment.”

On reaching the station, I sent off the telegram, and very soon afterwards the London train was signalled. It turned out to be a slow train, which gave us ample time to discuss the case and me ample time for reflection. And, in fact, I reflected a good deal; for there was a rather uncomfortable question in my mind—the very question that the sergeant had raised and that Thorndyke had obviously evaded. Was there anyone who might have had a motive for making away with Crofton? It was an awkward question when one remembered the great legacy that had just fallen in and the terms of Miss Shuler’s will; which expressly provided that, if Crofton died before his wife, the legacy should go to her. Now, Ambrose was the wife’s brother; and Ambrose had been in the bungalow alone with Crofton, and nobody else was known to have been there at all. I meditated on these facts uncomfortably and would have liked to put the case to Thorndyke; but his reticence, his evasion of the sergeant’s question and his decision to communicate with the solicitor rather than with the family showed pretty clearly what was in his mind and that he did not wish to discuss the matter.

Promptly at eight o’clock, having dined at a restaurant, we presented ourselves at the solicitor’s house and were shown into the study, where we found Mr. Jobson seated at a writing-table. He looked at Thorndyke with some surprise, and when the introductions had been made, said somewhat dryly: “We may take it that Dr. Thorndyke is in some way connected with our rather confidential business?”

“Certainly,” I replied. “That is why he is here.”

Jobson nodded. “And how is Crofton?” he asked, “and where did you dig him up?”

“I am sorry to say,” I replied, “that he is dead. It is a dreadful affair. We found his body locked in the bathing-hut. He was sitting in a corner with a tumbler on the floor by his side.”

“Horrible! Horrible!” exclaimed the solicitor. “He ought never to have gone there alone. I said so at the time. And it is most unfortunate on account of the insurance, though that is not a large amount. Still the suicide clause, you know—”

“I doubt whether the insurance will be affected,” said Thorndyke. “The coroner’s finding will almost certainly be wilful murder.”

Jobson was thunderstruck. In a moment his face grew livid and he gazed at Thorndyke with an expression of horrified amazement.

“Murder!” he repeated incredulously. “But you said he was locked in the hut. Surely that is clear proof of suicide.”

“He hadn’t locked himself in, you know. There was no key inside.”

“Ah!” The solicitor spoke almost in a tone relief. “But, perhaps—did you examine his pockets?”

“Yes; and we found a key labelled ‘Bathing hut.’ But it was the wrong key. It wouldn’t go into the lock. There is no doubt whatever that the door was locked from the outside.”

“Good God!” exclaimed Jobson, in a faint voice. “It does look suspicious. But still, I can’t believe—It seems quite incredible.”

“That may be,” said Thorndyke, “but it is all perfectly clear. There is evidence that a stranger entered the bungalow at night and that the affair took place in the bedroom. From thence the stranger carried the body down to the hut and he also took a tumbler and a candle from the bedside table. By the light of the candle—which was stood on the floor of the hut in a corner—he arranged the body, having put into its pocket a key from the board in the living-room. Then he locked the hut, went back to the house, put the key on its peg and the candle in its candlestick. Then he locked up the house and the garden gate and took the keys away with him.”

The solicitor listened to this recital in speechless amazement. At length he asked: “How long ago do you suppose this happened?”

“Apparently on the night of the fifteenth of this month,” was the reply.

“But,” objected Jobson, “he wrote home on the sixteenth.”

“He wrote,” said Thorndyke,” on the sixth. Somebody put a one in front of the six and posted the letter at Margate on the sixteenth. I shall give evidence to that effect at the inquest.”

I was becoming somewhat mystified. Thorndyke’s dry, stern manner—so different from his usual suavity—and the solicitor’s uncalled-for agitation, seemed to hint at something more than met the eye. I watched Jobson as he lit a cigarette—with a small Bryant and May match, which he threw on the floor—and listened expectantly for his next question. At length he asked: “Was there any sort of—er—clue as to who this stranger might be?”

“The man who will be charged with the murder? Oh, yes. The police have the means of identifying him with absolute certainty.”

“That is, if they can find him,” said Jobson.

“Naturally. But when all the very remarkable facts have transpired at the inquest, that individual will probably come pretty clearly into view.”

Jobson continued to smoke furiously with his eyes fixed on the floor, as if he were thinking hard. Presently he asked, without looking up: “Supposing they do find this man. What then? What evidence is there that he murdered Crofton?”

“You mean direct evidence?” said Thorndyke. “I can’t say, as I did not examine the body; but the circumstantial evidence that I have given you would be enough to convict unless there were some convincing explanation other than murder. And I may say,” he added, “that if the suspected person has a plausible explanation to offer, he would be well advised to produce it before he is charged. A voluntary statement has a good deal more weight than the same statement made by a prisoner in answer to a charge.”

There was an interval of silence, in which I looked bewilderment from Thorndyke’s stern visage to the pale face of the solicitor. At length the latter rose abruptly and, after one or two quick strides up and down the room, halted by the fireplace, and, still avoiding Thorndyke’s eye, said, somewhat brusquely, though in a low, husky voice: “I will tell you how it happened. I went down to Seasalter, as you said, on the night of the fifteenth, on the chance of finding Crofton at the bungalow. I wanted to tell him of Miss Shuler’s death and of the provisions her will.”

“You had some private information on that subject, I presume?” said Thorndyke.

“Yes. My cousin was her solicitor and he kept me informed about the will.”

“And about the state of her health?”

“Yes. Well, when I arrived at the bungalow, it was in darkness. The gate and the front door were unlocked, so I entered, calling out Crofton’s name. As no one answered, I struck a match and lit the lamp. Then I went into the bedroom and struck a match there; and by its light I could see Crofton lying on the bed, quite still. I spoke to him, but he did not answer or move. Then I lighted a candle on his table; and now I could see what I had already guessed, that he was dead, and that he had been dead some time—probably more than a week.

“It was an awful shock to find a dead man in this solitary house, and my first impulse was to rush out and give the alarm. But when I went into the living-room, I happened to see a letter lying on writing-table and noticed that it was in his own hand and addressed to his wife. Unfortunately, I had the curiosity to take it out of the unsealed envelope and read it. It was dated the sixth and stated his intention of going to Margate for a time and then coming back to the bungalow.

“Now, the reading of that letter exposed me to an enormous temptation. By simply putting a one in front of the six and thus altering the date from the sixth to the sixteenth and posting the letter at Margate, I stood to gain thirty thousand pounds. I saw that at a glance. But I did not decide immediately to do it. I pulled down the blinds, drew the curtains and locked up the house while I thought it over. There seemed to be practically no risk, unless someone should come to the bungalow and notice that the state of the body did not agree with the altered date on the letter. I went back and looked at the dead man. There was a burnt-out candle by his side and a tumbler containing the dried-up remains of some brown liquid. He had evidently poisoned himself. Then it occurred to me that, if I put the body and the tumbler in some place where they were not likely to be found for some time, the discrepancy between the condition of the body and the date of the letter would not be noticed.

“For some time I could think of no suitable place, but at last I remembered the bathing-hut. No one would look there for him. If they came to the bungalow and didn’t find him there, they would merely conclude that he had not come back from Margate. I took the candle and the key from the key-board and went down to the hut; but there was a key in the door already, so I brought the other key back and put it in Crofton’s pocket, never dreaming that it might not be the duplicate. Of course, I ought to have tried it in the door.

“Well, you know the rest. I took the body down about two in the morning, locked up the hut, brought away the key and hung it on the board, took the counterpane off the bed, as it had some marks on it, and re-made the bed with the blanket outside. In the morning I took the train to Margate, posted the letter, after altering the date, and threw the gate-key and that of the front door into the sea.

“That is what really happened. You may not believe me; but I think you will as you have seen the body and will realise that I had no motive for killing Crofton before the fifteenth, whereas Crofton evidently died before that date.”

“I would not say ‘evidently,’ said Thorndyke; “but, as the date of his death is the vital point in your defence, you would be wise to notify the coroner of the importance of the issue.”

* * * *

“I don’t understand this case,” I said, as we walked homewards (I was spending the evening with Thorndyke). “You seemed to smell a rat from the very first. And I don’t see how you spotted Jobson. It is a mystery to me.”

It wouldn’t be if you were a lawyer,” he replied. “The case against Jobson was contained in what you told me at our first interview. You yourself commented on the peculiarity of the will that he drafted for Crofton. The intention of the latter was to leave all his property to his wife. But instead of saying so, the will specified each item of property, and appointed a residuary legatee, which was Jobson himself. This might have appeared like mere legal verbiage; but when Miss Shuler’s legacy was announced, the transaction took on a rather different aspect. For this legacy was not among the items specified in the will. Therefore it did not go to Mrs. Crofton. It would be included in the residue of the estate and would go to the residuary legatee.”

“The deuce it would!” I exclaimed.

“Certainly; until Crofton revoked his will or made a fresh one. This was rather suspicious. It suggested that Jobson had private information as to Miss Shuler’s will and had drafted Crofton’s will in accordance with it; and as she died of malignant disease, her doctor must have known for some time that she was dying and it looked as if jobson had information on that point, too. Now the position of affairs that you described to me was this:

“Crofton, a possible suicide, had disappeared, and had made no fresh will.

“Miss Shuler died on the thirteenth, leaving thirty thousand pounds to Crofton, if he survived her, or if he did not, then to Mrs. Crofton. The important question then was whether Crofton was alive or dead; and if he was dead, whether he had died before or after the thirteenth. For if he died before the thirteenth the legacy went to Mrs. Crofton, but if he died after that date the legacy went to Jobson.

“Then you showed me that extraordinarily opportune letter dated the sixteenth. Now, seeing that that date was worth thirty thousand pounds to Jobson, I naturally scrutinised it narrowly. The letter was written with ordinary blue-black ink. But this ink, even in the open, takes about a fortnight to blacken completely. In a closed envelope it takes considerably longer. On examining this date through a lens, the one was very perceptibly bluer than the six. It had therefore been added later. But for what reason? And by whom?

“The only possible reason was that Crofton was dead and had died before the thirteenth. The only person who had any motive for making the alteration was Jobson. Therefore, when we started for Seasalter I already felt sure that Crofton was dead and that the letter had been posted at Margate by Jobson. I had further no doubt that Crofton’s body was concealed somewhere on the premises of the bungalow. All that I had to do was to verify those conclusions.”

“Then you believe that Jobson has told us the truth?”

“Yes. But I suspect that he went down there with the deliberate intention of making away with Crofton before he could make a fresh will. The finding of Crofton’s body must have been a fearful disappointment, but I must admit that he showed considerable resource in dealing with the situation; and he failed only by the merest chance. I think his defence against the murder charge will be admitted; but, of course, it will involve plea of guilty to the charge of fraud in connection with the legacy.”

Thorndyke’s forecast turned out to be correct. Jobson was acquitted of the murder of Arthur Crofton, but is at present “doing time” in respect of the forged letter and the rest of his too-ingenious scheme.

THE D’ARBLAY MYSTERY (1926) [Part 1]

CHAPTER I

The Pool in the Wood

There are certain days in our lives which, as we recall them, seem to detach themselves from the general sequence as forming the starting-point of a new epoch. Doubtless, if we examined them critically, we should find them to be but links in a connected chain. But in a retrospective glance their continuity with the past is unperceived, and we see them in relation to the events which followed them rather than to those which went before.

Such a day is that on which I look back through a vista of some twenty years; for on that day I was, suddenly and without warning, plunged into the very heart of a drama so strange and incredible that in the recital of its events I am conscious of a certain diffidence and hesitation.

The picture that rises before me as I write is very clear and vivid. I see myself, a youngster of twenty-five, the owner of a brand-new medical diploma, wending my way gaily down Wood Lane, Highgate, at about eight o’clock on a sunny morning in early autumn. I was taking a day’s holiday, the last I was likely to enjoy for some time, for on the morrow I was to enter on the duties of my first professional appointment. I had nothing in view today but sheer, delightful idleness. It is true that a sketch-book in one pocket and a box of collecting-tubes in another suggested a bare hint of purpose in the expedition; but primarily it was a holiday, a pleasure jaunt, to which art and science were no more than possible sources of contributory satisfaction.

At the lower end of the Lane was the entrance to Churchyard Bottom Wood, then open and unguarded save by a few hurdles (it has since been enclosed and renamed ‘Queen’s Wood’). I entered and took my way along the broad, rough path, pleasantly conscious of the deep silence and seeming remoteness of this surviving remnant of the primeval forest of Britain, and letting my thoughts stray to the great plague-pit in the haunted bottom that gave the wood its name. The foliage of the oaks was still unchanged, despite the waning of the year. The low-slanting sunlight spangled it with gold and made rosy patterns on the path, where lay a few prematurely-fallen leaves; but in the hollows among the undergrowth traces of the night-mists lingered, shrouding tree-bole, bush and fern in a mystery of gauzy blue.

A turn of the path brought me suddenly within a few paces of a girl who was stooping at the entrance to a side track and seemed to be peering into the undergrowth as if looking for something. As I appeared, she stood up and looked round at me with a startled, apprehensive manner that caused me to look away and pass as if I had not seen her. But the single glance had shown me that she was a strikingly handsome girl—indeed, I should have used the word ‘beautiful’—that she seemed to be about my own age, and that she was evidently a lady.

The apparition, pleasant as it was, set me speculating as I strode forward. It was early for a girl like this to be afoot in the woods, and alone, too. Not so very safe, either, as she had seemed to realize, judging by the start that my approach seemed to have given her. And what could it be that she was looking for? Had she lost something at some previous time and come to search for it before anyone was about? It might be so. Certainly she was not a poacher, for there was nothing to poach, and she hardly had the manner or appearance of a naturalist.

A little farther on I struck into a side-path which led, as I knew, in the direction of a small pond. That pond I had had in my mind when I put the box of collecting-tubes in my pocket, and I now made my way to it as directly as the winding track would let me; but still, it was not the pond or its inmates that occupied my thoughts, but the mysterious maiden whom I had left peering into the undergrowth. Perhaps if she had been less attractive I might have given her less consideration. But I was twenty-five; and if a man at twenty-five has not a keen and appreciative eye for a pretty girl, there must be something radically wrong with his mental make-up.

In the midst of my reflections I came out into a largish opening in the wood, at the centre of which, in a slight hollow, was the pond—a small oval piece of water, fed by the trickle of a tiny stream, the continuation of which carried away the overflow towards the invisible valley. Approaching the margin, I brought out my box of tubes, and uncorking one, stooped and took a trial dip. When I held the glass tube against the light and examined its contents through my pocket-lens, I found that I was in luck. The ‘catch’ included a green hydra, clinging to a rootlet of duckweed, several active water-fleas, a scarlet water-mite and a beautiful sessile rotifer. Evidently this pond was a rich hunting-ground.

Delighted with my success, I corked the tube, put it away and brought out another, with which I took a fresh dip. This was less successful; but the naturalist’s ardour and the collector’s cupidity being thoroughly aroused, I persevered, gradually enriching my collection and working my way slowly round the margin of the pond, forgetful of everything—even of the mysterious maiden—but the objects of my search: indeed, so engrossed was I with my pursuit of the minute denizens of this watery world that I failed to observe a much larger object which must have been in view most of the time. Actually, I did not see it until I was right over it. Then, as I was stooping to clear away the duckweed for a fresh dip, I found myself confronted by a human face; just below the surface and half-concealed by the pondweed.

It was a truly appalling experience. Utterly unprepared for this awful apparition, I was so overcome by astonishment and horror that I remained stooping, with motion arrested, as if petrified, staring at the thing in silence and hardly breathing. The face was that of a man of about fifty or a little more; a handsome, refined, rather intellectual face with a moustache and Vandyke beard and surmounted by a thickish growth of iron-grey hair. Of the rest of the body little was to be seen, for the duckweed and water-crowfoot had drifted over it, and I had no inclination to disturb them. Recovering somewhat from the shock of this sudden and fearful encounter, I stood up and rapidly considered what I had better do. It was clearly not for me to make any examination or meddle with the corpse in any way; indeed, when I considered the early hour and the remoteness of this solitary place, it seemed prudent to avoid the possibility of being seen there by any chance stranger. Thus reflecting, with my eyes still riveted on the pallid, impassive face, so strangely sleeping below the glassy surface and conveying to me somehow a dim sense of familiarity, I pocketed my tubes and, turning back, stole away along the woodland track, treading lightly, almost stealthily, as one escaping from the scene of a crime.

Very different was my mood, as I retraced my steps, from that in which I had come. Gone was all my gaiety and holiday spirit. The dread meeting had brought me into an atmosphere of tragedy, perchance even of something more than tragedy. With death I was familiar enough—death as it comes to men, prefaced by sickness or even by injury. But the dead man who lay in that still and silent pool in the heart of the wood had come there by none of the ordinary chances of normal life. It seemed barely possible that he could have fallen in by mere misadventure, for the pond was too shallow and its bottom shelved too gently for accidental drowning to be conceivable. Nor was the strange, sequestered spot without significance. It was just such a spot as might well be chosen by one who sought to end his life—or another’s.

I had nearly reached the main path when an abrupt turn of the narrow track brought me once more face to face with the girl whose existence I had till now forgotten. She was still peering into the dense undergrowth as if searching for something; and again, on my sudden appearance, she turned a startled face towards me. But this time I did not look away. Something in her face struck me with a nameless fear. It was not only that she was pale and haggard, that her expression betokened anxiety and even terror. As I looked at her I understood in a flash the dim sense of familiarity of which I had been conscious in the pallid face beneath the water. It was her face that it had recalled.

With my heart in my mouth, I halted, and, taking off my cap, addressed her.

“Pray pardon me; you seem to be searching for something. Can I help you in any way or give you any information?”

She looked at me a little shyly and, as I thought, with slight distrust, but she answered civilly enough though rather stiffly: “Thank you, but I am afraid you can’t help me. I am not in need of any assistance.”

This, under ordinary circumstances, would have brought the interview to an abrupt end. But the circumstances were not ordinary, and, as she made as if to pass me, I ventured to persist.

“Please,” I urged, “don’t think me impertinent, but would you mind telling me what you are looking for? I have a reason for asking, and it isn’t curiosity.”

She reflected for a few moments before replying and I feared that she was about to administer another snub. Then, without looking at me, she replied:

“I am looking for my father.” (and at these words my heart sank). “He did not come home last night. He left Hornsey to come home and he would ordinarily have come by the path through the wood. He always came that way from Hornsey. So I am looking through the wood in case he missed his way, or was taken ill, or—”

Here the poor girl suddenly broke off, and, letting her dignity go, burst into tears. I huskily murmured a few indistinct words of condolence, but, in truth, I was little less affected than she was. It was a terrible position, but there was no escape from it. The corpse that I had just seen was almost certainly her father’s corpse. At any rate, the question whether it was or was not had to be settled now, and settled by me—and her. That was quite clear; but yet I could not screw my courage up to the point of telling her. While I was hesitating, however, she forced the position by a direct question.

“You said just now that you had a reason for asking what I was searching for. Would it be—?” She paused and looked at me inquiringly as she wiped her eyes.

I made a last, frantic search for some means of breaking the horrid news to her. Of course there was none. Eventually I stammered:

“The reason I asked was—er—the fact is that I have just seen the body of a man lying—”

“Where?” she demanded. “Show me the place!”

Without replying, I turned and began quickly to retrace my steps along the narrow track. A few minutes brought me to the opening in which the pond was situated, and I was just beginning to skirt the margin, closely followed by my companion, when I heard her utter a low, gasping cry. The next moment she had passed me and was running along the bank towards a spot where I could now see the toe of a boot just showing through the duckweed. I stopped short and watched her with my heart in my throat. Straight to the fatal spot she ran, and for a moment stood on the brink, stooping over the weedy surface. Then, with a terrible, wailing cry she stepped into the water.

Instantly, I ran forward and waded into the pond to her side. Already she had her arms round the dead man’s neck and was raising the face above the surface. I saw that she meant to bring the body ashore, and, useless as it was, it seemed a natural thing to do. Silently I passed my arms under the corpse and lifted it; and as she supported the head, we bore it through the shallows and up the bank, where I laid it down gently in the high grass.

Not a word had been spoken, nor was there any question that need be asked. The pitiful tale told itself only too plainly. As I stood looking with swimming eyes at the tragic group, a whole history seemed to unfold itself—a history of love and companionship, of a happy, peaceful past made sunny by mutual affection, shattered in an instant by the hideous present, with its portent of a sad and lonely future. She had sat down on the grass and taken the dead head on her lap, tenderly wiping the face with her handkerchief, smoothing the grizzled hair and crooning or moaning words of endearment into the insensible ears. She had forgotten my presence; indeed, she was oblivious of everything but the still form that bore the outward semblance other father.

Some minutes passed thus. I stood a little apart, cap in hand, more moved than I had ever been in my life, and, naturally enough, unwilling to break in upon a grief so overwhelming and, as it seemed to me, so sacred. But presently it began to be borne in on me that something had to be done. The body would have to be removed from this place, and the proper authorities ought to be notified. Still, it was some time before I could gather courage to intrude on her sorrow, to profane her grief with the sordid realities of everyday life. At last I braced myself up for the effort and addressed her.

“Your father,” I said gently—I could not refer to him as ‘the body’—“will have to be taken away from here; and the proper persons will have to be informed of what has happened. Shall I go alone, or will you come with me? I don’t like to leave you here.”

She looked up at me and, to my relief, answered me with quiet composure: “I can’t leave him here all alone. I must stay with him until he is taken away. Do you mind telling whoever ought to be told,”—like me, she instinctively avoided the word ‘police’—“and making what arrangements are necessary?”

There was nothing more to be said, and loath as I was to leave her alone with the dead, my heart assented to her decision. In her place, I should have had the same feeling. Accordingly, with a promise to return as quickly as I could, I stole away along the woodland track. When I turned to take a last glance at her before plunging into the wood, she was once more leaning over the head that lay in her lap, looking with fond grief into the impassive face and stroking the dank hair.

My intention had been to go straight to the police-station, when I had ascertained its whereabouts, and make my report to the officer in charge. But a fortunate chance rendered this proceeding unnecessary, for, at the moment when I emerged from the top of Wood Lane, I saw a police officer, mounted on a bicycle—a road patrol, as I assumed him to be—approaching along the Archway Road. I hailed him to stop, and as he dismounted and stepped on to the footway, I gave him a brief account of the finding of the body and my meeting with the daughter of the dead man. He listened with calm, businesslike interest, and, when I had finished, said: “We had better get the body removed as quickly as possible. I will run along to the station and get the wheeled stretcher. There is no need for you to come. If you will go back and wait for us at the entrance to the wood, that will save time. We shall be there within a quarter of an hour.”

I agreed gladly to this arrangement, and when I had seen him mount his machine and shoot away along the road, I turned back down the Lane and re-entered the wood. Before taking up my post, I walked quickly down the path and along the track to the opening by the pond. My new friend was sitting just as I had left her, but she looked up as I emerged from the track and advanced towards her. I told her briefly what had happened, and was about to retire when she asked: “Will they take him to our house?”

“I am afraid not,” I replied. “There will have to be an inquiry by the coroner, and until that is finished, his body will have to remain in the mortuary.”

“I was afraid it might be so,” she said with quiet resignation; and as she spoke she looked down with infinite sadness at the waxen face in her lap. A good deal relieved by her reasonable acceptance of the painful necessities, I turned back and made my way to the rendezvous at the entrance to the wood.

As I paced to and fro on the shady path, keeping a lookout up the Lane, my mind was busy with the tragedy to which I had become a party. It was a grievous affair. The passionate grief which I had witnessed spoke of no common affection. On one life at least this disaster had inflicted irreparable loss, and there were probably others on whom the blow had yet to fall. But it was not only a grievous affair; it was highly mysterious. The dead man had apparently been returning home at night in a customary manner and by a familiar way. That he could have strayed by chance from the open, well-worn path into the recesses of the wood was inconceivable, while the hour and the circumstances made it almost as incredible that he should have been wandering in the wood by choice. And again, the water in which he had been lying was quite shallow, so shallow as to rule out accidental drowning as an impossibility.

What could the explanation be? There seemed to be but three possibilities, and two of them could hardly be entertained. The idea of intoxication I rejected at once. The girl was evidently a lady, and her father was presumably a gentleman who would not be likely to be wandering abroad drunk; nor could a man who was sober enough to have reached the pond have been so helpless as to be drowned in its shallow waters. To suppose that he might have fallen into the water in a fit was to leave unexplained the circumstance of his being in that remote place at such an hour. The only possibility that remained was that of suicide, and I could not but admit that some of the appearances seemed to support that view. The solitary place—more solitary still at night—was precisely such as an intending suicide might be expected to seek; the shallow water presented no inconsistency; and when I recalled how I had found his daughter searching the wood with evident foreboding of evil, I could not escape the feeling that the dreadful possibility had not been entirely unforeseen.

My meditations had reached this point when, as I turned once more towards the entrance and looked up the Lane, I saw two constables approaching, trundling a wheeled stretcher, while a third man, apparently an inspector, walked by its side. As the little procession reached the entrance and I turned back to show the way, the latter joined me and began at once to interrogate me. I gave him my name, address and occupation, and followed this with a rapid sketch of the facts as known to me, which he jotted down in a large notebook, and he then said:

“As you are a doctor, you can probably tell me how long the man had been dead when you first saw him.”

“By the appearance and the rigidity,” I replied, “I should say about nine or ten hours; which agrees pretty well with the account his daughter gave of his movements.”

The inspector nodded. “The man and the young lady,” said he, “are strangers to you, I understand. I suppose you haven’t picked up anything that would throw any light on the affair?”

“No,” I answered; “I know nothing but what I have told you.”

“Well,” he remarked, “it’s a queer business. It is a queer place for a man to be in at night, and he must have gone there of his own accord. But there, it is no use guessing. It will all be thrashed out at the inquest.”

As he reached this discreet conclusion, we came out into the opening and I heard him murmur very feelingly, “Dear, dear! Poor thing!” The girl seemed hardly to have changed her position since I had last seen her, but she now tenderly laid the dead head on the grass and rose as we approached; and I saw with great concern that her skirts were soaked almost from the waist downwards.

The officer took off his cap and as he drew near looked down gravely but with an inquisitive eye at the dead man. Then he turned to the girl and said in a singularly gentle and deferential manner:

“This is a very terrible thing, miss. A dreadful thing. I assure you that I am more sorry for you than I can tell; and I hope you will forgive me for having to intrude on your sorrow by asking questions. I won’t trouble you more than I can help.”

“Thank you,” she replied quietly. “Of course I realize your position. What do you want me to tell you?”

“I understand,” replied the inspector, “that this poor gentleman was your father. Would you mind telling me who he was and where he lived and giving me your own name and address?”

“My father’s name,” she answered, “was Julius D’Arblay. His private address was Ivy Cottage, North Grove, Highgate. His studio and workshop, where he carried on the profession of a modeller, is in Abbey Road, Hornsey. My name is Marion D’Arblay and I lived with my father. He was a widower and I was his only child.”

As she concluded, with a slight break in her voice, the inspector shook his head and again murmured, “Dear, dear!” as he rapidly entered her answers in his notebook. Then, in a deeply apologetic tone, he asked:

“Would you mind telling what you know as to how this happened?”

“I know very little,” she replied. “As he did not come home last night, I went to the studio quite early this morning to see if he was there. He sometimes stayed there all night when he was working very late. The woman who lives in the adjoining house and looks after the studio, told me that he had been working late last night, but that he left to come home soon after ten. He always used to come through the wood, because it was the shortest way and the most pleasant. So when I learned that he had started to come home, I came to the wood to see if I could find any traces of him. Then I met this gentleman and he told me that he had seen a dead man in the wood and—” Here she suddenly broke down and, sobbing passionately, flung out her hand towards the corpse.

The inspector shut his note—book, and murmuring some indistinct words of sympathy, nodded to the constables, who had drawn up the stretcher a few paces away and lifted off the cover. On this silent instruction, they approached the body and, with the inspector’s assistance and mine, lifted it on to the stretcher without removing the latter from its carriage. As they picked up the cover, the inspector turned to Miss D’Arblay and said gently but finally: “You had better not come with us. We must take him to the mortuary, but you will see him again after the inquest, when he will be brought to your house if you wish it.”

She made no objection; but as the constables approached with the cover, she stooped over the stretcher and kissed the dead man on the forehead.

Then she turned away, the cover was placed in position, the inspector and the constables saluted reverently, and the stretcher was wheeled away along the narrow track.

For some time after it had gone, we stood in silence at the margin of the pond with our eyes fixed on the place where it had disappeared. I considered in no little embarrassment what was to be done next. It was most desirable that Miss D’Arblay should be got home as soon as possible, and I did not at all like the idea of her going alone, for her appearance, with her drenched skirts and her dazed and rather wild expression, was such as to attract unpleasant attention. But I was a total stranger to her and I felt a little shy of pressing my company on her. However, it seemed a plain duty, and, as I saw her shiver slightly, I said: “You had better go home now and change your clothes. They are very wet. And you have some distance to go.”

She looked down at her soaked dress and then she looked at me.

“You are rather wet, too,” she said. “I am afraid I have given you a great deal of trouble.”

“It is little enough that I have been able to do,” I replied. “But you must really go home now; and if you will let me walk with you and see you safely to your house, I shall be much more easy in my mind.”

“Thank you,” she replied. “It is kind of you to offer to see me home, and I am glad not to have to go alone.”

With this, we walked together to the edge of the opening and proceeded in single file along the track to the main path, and so out into Wood Lane, at the top of which we crossed the Archway Road into Southwood Lane. We walked mostly in silence, for I was unwilling to disturb her meditations with attempts at conversation, which could only have seemed banal or impertinent. For her part, she appeared to be absorbed in reflections the nature of which I could easily guess, and her grief was too fresh for any thought of distraction. But I found myself speculating with profound discomfort on what might be awaiting her at home. It is true that her own desolate state as an orphan without brothers or sisters had its compensation in that there was no wife to whom the dreadful tidings had to be imparted, nor any fellow-orphans to have their bereavement broken to them. But there must be someone who cared; or if there were not, what a terrible loneliness would reign in that house!

“I hope,” I said as we approached our destination, “that there is someone at home to share your grief and comfort you a little.”

“There is,” she replied. “I was thinking of her and how grievous it will be to have to tell her—an old servant and a dear friend. She was my mother’s nurse when the one was a child and the other but a young girl. She came to our house when my mother married and has managed our home ever since. This will be a terrible shock to her, for she loved my father dearly—everyone loved him who knew him. And she has been like a mother to me since my own mother died. I don’t know how I shall break it to her.”

Her voice trembled as she concluded and I was deeply troubled to think of the painful homecoming that loomed before her; but still it was a comfort to know that her sorrow would be softened by sympathy and loving companionship, not heightened by the empty desolation that I had feared.

A few minutes more brought us to the little square—which, by the way, was triangular—and to a pleasant little old-fashioned house, on the gate of which was painted the name, ‘Ivy Cottage.’ In the bay window on the ground-floor I observed a formidable-looking elderly woman, who was watching our approach with evident curiosity; which, as we drew nearer and the state of our clothing became visible, gave place to anxiety and alarm. Then she disappeared suddenly, to reappear a few moments later at the open door, where she stood viewing us both with consternation and me in particular with profound disfavour.

At the gate Miss D’Arblay halted and held out her hand. “Good-bye,” she said. “I must thank you some other time for all your kindness,” and with this she turned abruptly and, opening the gate, walked up the little paved path to the door where the old woman was waiting.

CHAPTER II

A CONFERENCE WITH DR. THORNDYKE

The sound of the closing door seemed, as it were, to punctuate my experiences and to mark the end of a particular phase. So long as Miss D’Arblay was present, my attention was entirely taken up by her grief and distress, but now that I was alone I found myself considering at large the events of this memorable morning. What was the meaning of this tragedy? How came this man to be lying dead in that pool? No common misadventure seemed to fit the case. A man may easily fall into deep water and be drowned; may step over a quay-side in the dark or trip on a mooring-rope or ring-bolt. But here there was nothing to suggest any possible accident. The water was hardly two feet deep where the body was lying and much less close to the edge. If he had walked in in the dark, he would simply have walked out again. Besides, how came he there at all? The only explanation that was intelligible was that he went there with the deliberate purpose of making away with himself.

I pondered this explanation and found myself unwilling to accept it, notwithstanding that his daughter’s presence in the wood, her obvious apprehension and her terrified searching among the underwood, seemed to hint at a definite expectation on her part. But yet that possibility was discounted by what his daughter had told me of him. Little as she had said, it was clear that he was a man universally beloved. Such men, in making the world a pleasant place for others, make it pleasant for themselves. They are usually happy men; and happy men do not commit suicide. Yet, if the idea of suicide were rejected, what was left? Nothing but an insoluble mystery.

I turned the problem over again and again as I sat on the top of the tram (where I could keep my wet trousers out of sight), not as a matter of mere curiosity but as one in which I was personally concerned. Friendships spring up into sudden maturity under great emotional stress. I had known Marion D’Arblay but an hour or two, but they were hours which neither of us would ever forget; and in that brief space she had become to me a friend who was entitled, as of right, to sympathy and service. So, as I revolved in my mind the mystery of this man’s death, I found myself thinking of him not as a chance stranger but as the father of a friend; and thus it seemed to devolve upon me to elucidate the mystery, if possible.

It is true that I had no special qualifications for investigating an obscure case of this kind, but yet I was better equipped than most young medical men. For my hospital, St. Margaret’s, though its medical school was but a small one, had one great distinction; the chair of Medical Jurisprudence was occupied by one of the greatest living authorities on the subject. Dr. John Thorndyke. To him and his fascinating lectures my mind naturally turned as I ruminated on the problem; and presently, when I found myself unable to evolve any reasonable suggestion, the idea occurred to me to go and lay the facts before the great man himself.

Once started, the idea took full possession of me, and I decided to waste no time but to seek him at once. This was not his day for lecturing at the hospital, but I could find his address in our school calendar; and as my means, though modest, allowed of my retaining him in a regular way, I need have no scruples as to occupying his time. I looked at my watch. It was even now but a little past noon. I had time to change and get an early lunch and still make my visit while the day was young.

A couple of hours later found me walking slowly down the pleasant, tree-shaded footway of King’s Bench Walk in the Inner Temple, looking up at the numbers above the entries. Dr. Thorndyke’s number was 5A, which I presently discovered inscribed on the keystone of a fine, dignified brick portico of the seventeenth century, on the jamb whereof was painted his name as the occupant of the ‘1st pair.’ I accordingly ascended the first pair and was relieved to find that my teacher was apparently at home; for a massive outer door, above which his name was painted, stood wide open, revealing an inner door, furnished with a small, brilliantly-burnished brass knocker, on which I ventured to execute a modest rat-tat. Almost immediately the door was opened by a small, clerical-looking gentleman who wore a black linen apron—and ought, from his appearance, to have had black gaiters to match—and who regarded me with a look of polite inquiry.

“I wanted to see Dr. Thorndyke,” said I, adding discreetly, “on a matter of professional business.”

The little gentleman beamed on me benevolently. “The doctor,” said he, “has gone to lunch at his club, but he will be coming in quite shortly. Would you like to wait for him?”

“Thank you,” I replied, “I should, if you think I shall not be disturbing him.”

The little gentleman smiled—that is to say, the multitudinous wrinkles that covered his face arranged themselves into a sort of diagram of geniality. It was the crinkliest smile that I have ever seen, but a singularly pleasant one.

“The doctor,” said he, “is never disturbed by professional business. No man is ever disturbed by having to do what he enjoys doing.”

As he spoke, his eyes turned unconsciously to the table, on which stood a microscope, a tray of slides and mounting material and a small heap of what looked like dressmaker’s cuttings.

“Well,” I said, “don’t let me disturb you, if you are busy.”

He thanked me very graciously, and, having installed me in an easy-chair, sat down at the table and resumed his occupation, which apparently consisted in isolating fibres from the various samples of cloth and mounting them as microscopic specimens. I watched him as he worked, admiring his neat, precise, unhurried methods and speculating on the purpose of his proceedings: whether he was preparing what one might call museum specimens, to be kept for reference, or whether these preparations were related to some particular case. I was considering whether it would be admissible for me to ask a question on the subject when he paused in his work, assuming a listening attitude, with one hand—holding a mounting-needle—raised and motionless.

“Here comes the doctor,” said he.

I listened intently and became aware of footsteps, very faint and far away, and only barely perceptible. But my clerical friend—who must have bad the auditory powers of a watch-dog—had no doubts as to their identity, for he began quietly to pack all his material on the tray. Meanwhile the footsteps drew nearer, they turned in at the entry and ascended the ‘first pair,’ by which time my crinkly-faced acquaintance had the door open. The next moment Dr. Thorndyke entered and was duly informed that ‘a gentleman was waiting to see’ him.

“You under-estimate my powers of observation, Polton,” he informed his subordinate, with a smile. “I can see the gentleman distinctly with my naked eye. How do you do, Gray?” and he shook my hand cordially.

“I hope I haven’t come at the wrong time, sir,” said I. “If I have, you must adjourn me. But I want to consult you about a rather queer case.”

“Good,” said Thorndyke. “There is no wrong time for a queer case. Let me hang up my hat and fill my pipe and then you can proceed to make my flesh creep.”

He disposed of his hat, and when Mr. Polton had departed with his tray of material, he filled his pipe, laid a note-block on the table and invited me to begin; whereupon I gave him a detailed account of what had befallen me in the course of the morning, to which he listened with close attention, jotting down an occasional note, but not interrupting my narrative. When I had finished, he read through his notes and then said:

“It is, of course, evident to you that all the appearances point to suicide. Have you any reasons, other than those you have mentioned, for rejecting that view?”

“I am afraid not,” I replied gloomily. “But you have always taught us to beware of too ready acceptance of the theory of suicide in doubtful cases.”

He nodded approvingly. “Yes,” he said, “that is a cardinal principle in medico-legal practice. All other possibilities should be explored before suicide is accepted. But our difficulty in this case is that we have hardly any of the relevant facts. The evidence at the inquest may make everything clear. On the other hand, it may leave things obscure. But what is your concern with the case? You are merely a witness to the finding of the body. The parties are all strangers to you, are they not?”

“They were,” I replied. “But I feel that someone ought to keep an eye on things for Miss D’Arblay’s sake, and circumstances seem to have put the duty on me. So, as I can afford to pay any costs that are likely to be incurred, I proposed to ask you to undertake the case—on a strict business footing, you know, sir.”

“When you speak of my undertaking the case,” said he, “what is it that is in your mind? What do you want me to do in the matter?”

“I want you to take an measures that you may think necessary,” I replied, “to ascertain definitely, if possible, how this man came by his death.”

He reflected a while before answering. At length he said: “The examination of the body will be conducted by the person whom the coroner appoints, probably the police surgeon. I will write to the coroner for permission to be present at the post-mortem examination. He will certainly make no difficulties. I will also write to the police surgeon, who is sure to be quite helpful. If the post-mortem throws no light on the case—in fact, in any event—I will instruct a first-class shorthand writer to attend at the inquest and make a verbatim report of the evidence, and you, of course, will be present as a witness. That, I think, is about all that we can do at present. When we have heard all the evidence, including that furnished by the body itself, we shall be able to judge whether the case calls for further investigation. How will that do?”

“It is all that I could wish,” I answered, “and I am most grateful to you, sir, for giving your time to the case. I hope you don’t think I have been unduly meddlesome.”

“Not in the least,” he replied warmly. “I think you have shown a very proper spirit in the way you have interpreted your neighbourly duties to this poor, bereaved girl, who, apparently, has no one else to watch over her interests. And I take it as a compliment from an old pupil that you should seek my help.”

I thanked him again, very sincerely, and had risen to take my leave, when he held up his hand.

“Sit down, Gray, if you are not in a hurry,” said he. “I hear the pleasant clink of crockery. Let us follow the example of the eminent Mr. Pepys—though it isn’t always a safe thing to do—and taste of the ‘China drinke called Tee’ while you tell me what you have been doing since you went forth from the fold.”

It struck me that the sense of hearing was uncommonly well developed in this establishment, for I had heard nothing; but a few moments later the door opened very quietly and Mr. Polton entered with a tray on which was a very trim, and even dainty, tea-service, which he set out, noiselessly and with a curious neatness of hand, on a small table placed conveniently between our chairs.

“Thank you, Polton,” said Thorndyke. “I see you diagnosed my visitor as a professional brother.”

Polton crinkled benevolently and admitted that he ‘thought the gentleman looked like one of us,’ and with this he melted away, closing the door behind him without a sound.

“Well,” said Thorndyke, as he handed me my tea-cup, “what have you been doing with yourself since you left the hospital?”

“Principally looking for a job,” I replied; “and now I’ve found one—a temporary job, though I don’t know how temporary. Tomorrow I take over the practice of a man named Cornish in Mecklenburgh Square. Cornish is a good deal run down and wants to take a quiet holiday on the East Coast. He doesn’t know how long he will be away. It depends on his health; but I have told him that I am prepared to stay as long as he wants me to. I hope I shan’t make a mess of the job, but I know nothing of general practice.”

“You will soon pick it up,” said Thorndyke; “but you had better get your principal to show you the ropes before he goes, particularly the dispensing and book-keeping. The essentials of practice you know, but the little practical details have to be learnt, and you are doing well to make your first plunge into professional life in a practice that is a going concern. The experience will be valuable when you make a start on your own account.”

On this plane of advice and comment our talk proceeded until I thought that I had stayed long enough, when I once more rose to depart. Then, as we were shaking hands, Thorndyke reverted to the object of my visit.

“I shall not appear in this case unless the coroner wishes me to,” said he. “I shall consult with the official medical witness and he will probably give our joint conclusions in his evidence—unless we should fail to agree, which is very unlikely. But you will be present, and you had better attend closely to the evidence of all the witnesses and let me have your account of the inquest as well as the shorthand writer’s report. Good-bye, Gray. You won’t be far away if you should want my help or advice.”

I left the precincts of the temple in a much more satisfied frame of mind. The mystery which seemed to me to surround the death of Julius D’Arblay would be investigated by a supremely competent observer, and I need not further concern myself with it. Perhaps there was no mystery at all. Possibly the evidence at the inquest would supply a simple explanation. At any rate, it was out of my hands and into those of one immeasurably more capable, and I could now give my undivided attention to the new chapter of my life that was to open on the morrow.

CHAPTER III

The Doctor’s Revelations

It was in the evening of the very day on which I took up my duties at number 61 Mecklenburgh Square that the little blue paper was delivered summoning me to attend at the inquest on the following day. Fortunately, Dr. Cornish’s practice was not of a highly strenuous type, and the time of year tended to a small visiting-list, so that I had no difficulty in making the necessary arrangements. In fact, I made them so well that I was the first to arrive at the little building in which the inquiry was to be held and was admitted by the caretaker to the empty room. A few minutes later, however, the inspector made his appearance, and while I was exchanging a few words with him, the jury began to straggle in, followed by the reporters, a few spectators and witnesses, and finally the coroner, who immediately took his place at the head of the table and prepared to open the proceedings.

At this moment I observed Miss D’Arblay standing hesitatingly in the doorway and looking into the room as if reluctant to enter. I at once rose and went to her, and as I approached, she greeted me with a friendly smile and held out her hand; and then I perceived, lurking just outside, a tall, black-apparelled woman, whose face I recognized as that which I had seen at the window.

“This,” said Miss D’Arblay, presenting me, “is my friend Miss Boler, of whom I spoke to you. This, Arabella, dear, is the gentleman who was so kind to me on that dreadful day.”

I bowed deferentially and Miss Boler recognized my existence by a majestic inclination, remarking that she remembered me. As the coroner now began his preliminary address to the jury, I hastened to find three chairs near the table, and having inducted the ladies into two of them, took the third myself, next to Miss D’Arblay. The coroner and the jury now rose and went out to the adjacent mortuary to view the body, and during their absence I stole an occasional critical glance at my fair friend.

Marion D’Arblay was, as I have said, a strikingly handsome girl. The fact seemed now to dawn on me afresh, as a new discovery; for the harrowing circumstances of our former meeting had so preoccupied me that I had given little attention to her personality. But now, as I looked her over anxiously to see how the grievous days had dealt with her, it was with a sort of surprised admiration that I noted the beautiful, thoughtful face, the fine features and the wealth of dark, gracefully disposed hair. I was relieved, too, to see the change that a couple of days had wrought. The wild, dazed look was gone. Though she was pale and heavy-eyed and looked tired and infinitely sad, her manner was calm, quiet and perfectly self-possessed.

“I am afraid,” said I, “that this is going to be rather a painful ordeal for you.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “it is all very dreadful. But it is a dreadful thing in any case to be bereft in a moment of the one whom one loves best in all the world. The circumstances of the loss cannot make very much difference. It is the loss itself that matters. The worst moment was when the blow fell—when we found him. This inquiry and the funeral are just the drab accompaniments that bring home the reality of what has happened.”

“Has the inspector called on you?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “He had to, to get the particulars, and he was so kind and delicate that I am not in the least afraid of the examination by the coroner. Everyone has been kind to me, but none so kind as you were on that terrible morning.”

I could not see that I had done anything to call for so much gratitude, and I was about to enter a modest disclaimer when the coroner and the jury returned and the inspector approached somewhat hurriedly.

“It will be necessary,” said he, “for Miss D’Arblay to see the body—just to identify deceased, a glance will be enough. And, as you are a witness, Doctor, you had better go with her to the mortuary. I will show you the way.”

Miss D’Arblay rose without any comment or apparent reluctance and we followed the inspector to the adjoining mortuary, where, having admitted us, he stood outside awaiting us. The body lay on the slate-topped table, covered with a sheet excepting the face, which was exposed and was undisfigured by any traces of the examination. I watched my friend a little nervously as we entered the grim chamber, fearful that this additional trial might be too much for her self-control. But she kept command of herself, though she wept quietly as she stood beside the table looking down on the still, waxen-faced figure. After standing thus for a few moments, she turned away with a smothered sob, wiped her eyes and walked out of the mortuary.

When we re-entered the court-room, we found our chairs moved up to the table and the coroner waiting to call the witnesses. As I had expected, my name was the first on the list, and on being called, I took my place by the table near to the coroner and was duly sworn.

“Will you give us your name, occupation and address?” the coroner asked.

“My name is Stephen Gray,” I replied. “I am a medical practitioner and my temporary address is 61 Mecklenburgh Square, London.”

“When you say your ‘temporary address’ you mean—?”

“I am taking charge of a medical practice at that address. I shall be there six weeks or more.”

“Then that will be your address for our purposes. Have you viewed the body that is now lying in the mortuary, and, if so, do you recognize it?”

“Yes. It is the body which I saw lying in a pond in Churchyard Bottom Wood on the morning of the 16th—last Tuesday.”

“Can you tell us how long deceased had been dead when you first saw the body?”

“I should say he had been dead nine or ten hours.”

“Will you relate the circumstances under which you discovered the body?”

I gave a circumstantial account of the manner in which I made the tragic discovery, to which not only the jury but also the spectators listened with eager interest. When I had finished my narrative, the coroner asked: “Did you observe anything which led you, as a medical man, to form any opinion as to the cause of death?”

“No,” I replied. “I saw no injuries or marks of violence or anything which was not consistent with death by drowning.”

This concluded my evidence, and when I had resumed my seat, the name of Marion D’Arblay was called by the coroner, who directed that a chair should be placed for the witness. When she had taken her seat, he conveyed to her, briefly but feelingly, his own and the jury’s sympathy.

“It has been a terrible experience for you,” he said, “and we are most sorry to have to trouble you in your great affliction, but you will understand that it is unavoidable.”

“I quite understand that,” she replied, “and I wish to thank you and the jury for your kind sympathy.”

She was then sworn, and having given her name and address, proceeded to answer the questions addressed to her, which elicited a narrative of the events substantially identical with that which she had given to the inspector and which I have already recorded.

“You have told us,” said the coroner, “that when Dr. Gray spoke to you, you were searching among the bushes. Will you tell us what was in your mind—what you were searching for and what induced you to make that search?”

“I was very uneasy about my father,” she replied. “He had not been home that night and he had not told me that he intended to stay at the studio—as he sometimes did when he was working very late. So, in the morning I went to the studio in Abbey Road to see if he was there; but the caretaker told me that he had started for home about ten o’clock. Then I began to fear that something had happened to him, and as he always came home by the path through the wood, I went there to see if—if anything had happened to him.”

“Had you in your mind any definite idea as to what might have happened to him?”

“I thought he might have been taken ill or have fallen down dead. He once told me that he would probably die quite suddenly. I believe that he suffered from some affection of the heart, but he did not like speaking about his health.”

“Are you sure that there was nothing more than this in your mind?”

“There was nothing more. I thought that his heart might have failed and that he might have wandered, in a half-conscious state, away from the main path and fallen dead in one of the thickets.”

The coroner pondered this reply for some time. I could not see why, for it was plain and straightforward enough. At length he said, very gravely and with what seemed to me unnecessary emphasis: “I want you to be quite frank and open with us. Miss D’Arblay. Can you swear that there was no other possibility in your mind than that of sudden illness?”

She looked at him in surprise, apparently not understanding the drift of the question. As to me, I assumed that he was endeavouring delicately to ascertain whether deceased was addicted to drink. “I have told you exactly what was in my mind,” she replied.

“Have you ever had any reason to suppose, or to entertain the possibility, that your father might take his own life?”

“Never,” she answered emphatically. “He was a happy, even-tempered man, always interested in his work and always in good spirits. I am sure he would never have taken his own life.”

The coroner nodded with a rather curious air of satisfaction, as if he were concurring with the witness’s statement. Then he asked in the same grave, emphatic manner:

“So far as you know, had your father any enemies?”

“No,” she replied confidently. “He was a kindly, amiable man who disliked nobody, and everyone who knew him loved him.”

As she uttered this panegyric (and what prouder testimony could a daughter have given?), her eyes filled, and the coroner looked at her with deep sympathy but yet with a somewhat puzzled expression.

“You are sure,” he said gently, “that there was no one whom he might have injured—even inadvertently—or who bore him any grudge or ill-will?”

“I am sure,” she answered, “that he never injured or gave offence to anyone, and I do not believe that there was any person in the whole world who bore him anything but goodwill.”

The coroner noted this reply, and as he entered it in the depositions, his face bore the same curious puzzled or doubtful expression. When he had written the answer down, he asked: “By the way, what was the deceased’s occupation?”

“He was a sculptor by profession, but in late years he worked principally as a modeller for various trades—pottery manufacturers, picture-frame makers, carvers and the makers of high-class wax figures for shop windows.”

“Had he any assistants or subordinates?”

“No. He worked alone. Occasionally I helped him with his moulds when he was very busy or had a very large work on hand; but usually he did everything himself. Of course, he occasionally employed models.”

“Do you know who those models were?”

“They were professional models. The men, I think, were all Italians and some of the women were, too. I believe my father kept a list of them in his address book.”

“Was he working from a model on the night of his death?”

“No. He was making the moulds for a porcelain statuette.”

“Did you ever hear that he had any kind of trouble with his models?”

“Never. He seemed always on the best of terms with them and he used to speak of them most appreciatively.”

“What sort of persons are professional models? Should you say they are a decent, well-conducted class?”

“Yes. They are usually most respectable, hard-working people; and, of course, they are sober and decent in their habits or they would be of no use for their professional duties.”

The coroner meditated on these replies with a speculative eye on the witness. After a short pause, he began along another line.

“Did deceased ever carry about with him property of any considerable value?”

“Never, to my knowledge.”

“No jewellery, plate or valuable material?”

“No. His work was practically all in plaster or wax. He did no goldsmith’s work and he used no precious material.”

“Did he ever have any considerable sums of money about him?”

“No. He received all his payments by cheque and he made his payments in the same way. His habit was to carry very little money on his person—usually not more than one or two pounds.”

Once more the coroner reflected profoundly. It seemed to me that he was trying to elicit some fact—I could not imagine what—and was failing utterly. At length, after another puzzled look at the witness, he turned to the jury and inquired if any of them wished to put any questions; and when they had severally shaken their heads, he thanked Miss D’Arblay for the clear and straightforward way in which she had given her evidence and released her.

While the examination had been proceeding, I had allowed my eyes to wander round the room with some curiosity, for this was the first time that I had ever been present at an inquest. From the jury, the witnesses in waiting and the reporters—among whom I tried to identify Dr. Thorndyke’s stenographer—my attention was presently transferred to the spectators. There were only a few of them, but I found myself wondering why there should be any. What kind of person attends as a spectator at an ordinary inquest such as this appeared to be? The newspaper reports of the finding of the body were quite unsensational and promised no startling developments. Finally, I decided that they were probably local residents who had some knowledge of the deceased and were just indulging their neighbourly curiosity.

Among them my attention was particularly attracted by a middle-aged woman who sat near me—at least I judged her to be middle-aged, though the rather dense black veil that she wore obscured her face to a great extent. Apparently she was a widow, and advertised the fact by the orthodox, old-fashioned ‘weeds.’ But I could see that she had white hair and wore spectacles. She held a folded newspaper on her knee, apparently dividing her attention between the printed matter and the proceedings of the court. She gave me the impression of having come in to spend an idle hour, combining a somewhat perfunctory reading of the paper with a still more perfunctory attention to the rather gruesome entertainment that the inquest afforded.

The next witness called was the doctor who had made the official examination of the body; on whom the—presumed—widow bestowed a listless, incurious glance and then returned to her newspaper. He was a youngish man, though his hair was turning grey, with a quiet but firm and confident manner and a very clear, pleasant voice. The preliminaries having been disposed of, the coroner led off with the question:

“You have made an examination of the body of the deceased?”

“Yes. It is that of a well-proportioned, fairly muscular man of about sixty, quite healthy with the exception of the heart one of the valves of which—the mitral valve—was incompetent and allowed some leakage of blood to take place.”

“Was the heart affection sufficient to account for the death of deceased?”

“No. It was quite a serviceable heart. There was good compensation—that is to say, there was extra growth of muscle to make up for the leaky valve. So far as his heart was concerned, deceased might have lived for another twenty years.”

“Were you able to ascertain what actually was the cause of death?”

“Yes. The cause of death was aconitine poisoning.”

At this reply a murmur of astonishment arose from the jury, and I heard Miss D’Arblay suddenly draw in her breath. The spectators sat up on their benches, and even the veiled lady was so far interested as to look up from her paper.

“How had the poison been administered?” the coroner asked.

“It had been injected under the skin by means of a hypodermic syringe.”

“Can you give an opinion as to whether the poison was administered to deceased by himself or by some other person?”

“It could not have been injected by deceased himself,” the witness replied. “The needle-puncture was in the back, just below the left shoulder-blade. It is, in my opinion, physically impossible for anyone to inject with a hypodermic syringe into his own body in that spot. And, of course, a person who was administering an injection to himself would select the most convenient spot—such as the front of the thigh. But apart from the question of convenience, the place in which the needle-puncture was found was actually out of reach.” Here the witness produced a hypodermic syringe, the action of which he demonstrated with the aid of a glass of water; and having shown the impossibility of applying it to the spot that he had described, passed the syringe round for the jury’s inspection.

“Have you formed any opinion as to the purpose for which this drug was administered in this manner?”

“I have no doubt that it was administered for the purpose of causing the death of deceased.”

“Might it not have been administered for medicinal purposes?”

“That is quite inconceivable. Leaving out of consideration the circumstances—the time and place where the administration occurred—the dose excludes the possibility of medicinal purposes. It was a lethal dose. From the tissues round the needle—puncture we recovered the twelfth of a grain of aconitine. That alone was more than enough to cause death. But a quantity of the poison had been absorbed, as was shown by the fact that we recovered a recognizable trace from the liver.”

“What is the medicinal dose of aconitine?”

“The maximum medicinal dose is about the four-hundredth of a grain, and even that is not very safe. As a matter of fact, aconitine is very seldom used in medical practice. It is a dangerous drug and of no particular value.”

“How much aconitine do you suppose was injected?”

“Not less than the tenth of a grain—that is, about forty times the maximum medicinal dose. Probably more.”

“There can, I suppose, be no doubt as to the accuracy of the facts that you have stated as to the nature and quantity of the poison?”

“There can be no doubt whatever. The analysis was made in my presence by Professor Woodford of St. Margaret’s Hospital after I had removed the tissues from the body in his presence. He has not been called because, in accordance with the procedure under Coroners Law, I am responsible for the analysis and the conclusions drawn from it.”

“Taking the medical facts as known to you, are you able to form an opinion as to what took place when the poison was administered?”

“That,” the witness replied, “is a matter of inference or conjecture. I infer that the person who administered the poison thrust the needle violently into the back of the deceased, intending to inject the poison into the chest. Actually, the needle struck a rib and bent up sharply, so that the contents of the syringe were delivered just under the skin. Then I take it that the assailant ran away—probably towards the pond—and deceased pursued him. Very soon the poison would take effect, and then deceased would have fallen. He may have fallen into the pond, or more probably was thrown in. He was alive when he fell into the pond, as is proved by the presence of water in the lungs; but he must then have been insensible and in a dying condition, for there was no water in the stomach, which proves that the swallowing reflex had already ceased.”

“Your considered opinion, then, based on the medical facts ascertained by you, is, I understand, that deceased died from the effects of a poison injected into his body by some other person with homicidal intent?”

“Yes; that is my considered opinion, and I affirm that the facts do not admit of any other interpretation.”

The coroner looked towards the jury. “Do any of you gentlemen wish to ask the witness any questions?” he inquired; and when the foreman had replied that the jury were entirely satisfied with the doctor’s explanations, he thanked the witness, who thereupon retired. The medical witness was succeeded by the inspector, who made a short statement respecting the effects found on the person of deceased. They comprised a small sum of money—under two pounds—a watch, keys and other articles, none of them of any appreciable value, but such as they were, furnishing evidence that at least petty robbery had not been the object of the attack.

When the last witness had been heard, the coroner glanced at his notes and then proceeded to address the jury.

“There is little, gentlemen,” he began, “that I need say to you. The facts are before you and they seem to admit of only one interpretation. I remind you that, by the terms of your oath, your finding must be ‘according to the evidence.’ Now, the medical evidence is quite dear and definite. It is to the effect that deceased met his death by poison administered violently by some other person; that is, by homicide. Homicide is the killing of a human being, and it may or may not be criminal. But if the homicidal act is done with the intent to kill, if that intention has been deliberately formed—that is to say, if the homicidal act has been premeditated—then that homicide is wilful murder.

“Now, the person who killed the deceased came to the place where the act was done provided with a solution of a very powerful and uncommon vegetable poison. He was also provided with a very special appliance—to wit, a hypodermic syringe—for injecting it into the body. The fact that he was furnished with the poison and the appliance creates a strong presumption that he came to this place with the deliberate intention of killing the deceased. That is to say, this fact constitutes strong evidence of premeditation.

“As to the motive for this act, we are completely in the dark; nor have we any evidence pointing to the identity of the person who committed that act. But a coroner’s inquest is not necessarily concerned with motives, nor is it our business to fix the act on any particular person. We have to find how and by what means the deceased met his death; and for that purpose we have clear and sufficient evidence. I need say no more, but will leave you to agree upon your finding.”

There was a brief interval of silence when the coroner had finished speaking. The jury whispered together for a few seconds; then the foreman announced that they had agreed upon their verdict.

“And what is your decision, gentlemen?” the coroner asked.

“We find,” was the reply, “that deceased met his death by wilful murder, committed by some person unknown.”

The coroner bowed. “I am in entire agreement with you, gentlemen,” said he. “No other verdict was possible; and I am sure you will join with me in the hope that the wretch who committed this dastardly crime may be identified and in due course brought to justice.”

This brought the proceedings to an end. As the court rose, the spectators filed out of the building and the coroner approached Miss D’Arblay to express once more his deep sympathy with her in her tragic bereavement. I stood apart with Miss Boler, whose rugged face was wet with tears, but set in a grim and wrathful scowl.

“Things have taken a terrible turn,” I ventured to observe.

She shook her head and uttered a sort of low growl. “It won’t bear thinking of,” she said gruffly. “There is no possible retribution that would meet the case. One has thought that some of the old punishments were cruel and barbarous; but if I could lay my hands on the villain that did this—” She broke off, leaving the conclusion to my imagination, and in an extraordinarily different voice, said: “Come, Miss Marion; let us get out of this awful place.”

As we walked away slowly and in silence, I looked at Miss D’Arblay, not without anxiety. She was very pale, and the dazed expression that her face had borne on the fatal day of the discovery had, to some extent, reappeared. But now the signs of bewilderment and grief were mingled with something new. The rigid face, the compressed lips and lowered brows spoke of a deep and abiding wrath.

Suddenly she turned to me and said, abruptly, almost harshly: “I was wrong in what I said to you before the inquiry. You remember that I said the circumstances of the loss could make no difference; but they make a whole world of difference. I had supposed that my dear father had died as he had thought he would die; that it was the course of Nature, which we cannot rebel against. Now I know, from what the doctor said, that he might have lived on happily for the full span of human life but for the malice of this unknown wretch. His life was not lost; it was stolen—from him and from me.”

“Yes,” I said somewhat lamely. “It is a horrible affair.”

“It is beyond bearing!” she exclaimed. “If his death had been natural, I would have tried to resign myself to it. I would have tried to put my grief away. But to think that his happy, useful life has been snatched from him, that he has been torn from us who loved him, by the deliberate act of this murderer—it is unendurable. It will be with me every hour of my life until I die. And every hour I shall call on God for justice against this wretch.”

I looked at her with a sort of admiring surprise. A quiet, gentle girl as I believed her to be at ordinary times, now, with her flushed cheeks, her flashing eyes and ominous brows, she reminded me of one of the heroines of the French Revolution. Her grief seemed to be merged in a longing for vengeance.

While she had been speaking. Miss Boler had kept up a running accompaniment in a deep, humming bass. I could not catch the words—if there were any—but was aware only of a low, continuous bourdon. She now said with grim decision: “God will not let him escape. He shall pay the debt to the uttermost farthing.” Then, with sudden fierceness, she added: “If I should ever meet with him, I could kill him with my own hand.”

After this, both women relapsed into silence, which I was loath to interrupt. The circumstances were too tragic for conversation. When we reached their gate. Miss D’Arblay held out her hand and once again thanked me for my help and sympathy.

“I have done nothing,” said I, “that any stranger would not have done, and I deserve no thanks. But I should like to think that you will look on me as a friend, and if you should need any help will let me have the privilege of being of use to you.”

“I look on you as a friend already,” she replied; “and I hope you will come and see us sometimes—when we have settled down to our new conditions of life.”

As Miss Boler seemed to confirm this invitation, I thanked them both and took my leave, glad to think that I had now a recognized status as a friend and might pursue a project which had formed in my mind even before we had left the court-house.

The evidence of the murder, which had fallen like a thunderbolt on us all, had a special significance for me; for I knew that Dr. Thorndyke was behind this discovery, though to what extent I could not judge. The medical witness was an obviously capable man, and it might be that he would have made the discovery without assistance. But a needle-puncture in the back is a very inconspicuous thing. Ninety-nine doctors in a hundred would almost certainly have overlooked it, especially in the case of a body apparently ‘found drowned’ and seeming to call for no special examination beyond the search for gross injuries. The revelation was very characteristic of Thorndyke’s methods and principles. It illustrated in a most striking manner the truth which he was never tired of insisting on: that it is never safe to accept obvious appearances, and that every case, no matter how apparently simple and commonplace, should be approached with suspicion and scepticism and subjected to the most rigorous scrutiny. That was precisely what had been done in this case; and thereby an obvious suicide had been resolved into a cunningly-planned and skilfully-executed murder. It was quite possible that, but for my visit to Thorndyke, those cunning plans would have succeeded and the murderer have secured the cover of a verdict of ‘death by misadventure’ or ‘suicide while temporarily insane.’ At any rate, the results had justified me in invoking Dr. Thorndyke’s aid; and the question now arose whether it would be possible to retain him for the further investigation of the case.

This was the project that had occurred to me as I listened to the evidence and realized how completely the unknown murderer had covered up his tracks. But there were difficulties. Thorndyke might consider such an investigation outside his province. Again, the costs involved might be on a scale entirely beyond my means. The only thing to be done was to call on Thorndyke and hear what he had to say on the subject, and this I determined to do on the first opportunity. And having formed this resolution, I made my way back by the shortest route to Mecklenburgh Square, where the evening consultations were now nearly due.

CHAPTER IV

MR. BENDELOW

There are certain districts in London the appearance of which conveys to the observer the impression that the houses, and indeed the entire streets, have been picked up second-hand. There is in their aspect a grey, colourless, mouldy quality, reminiscent, not of the antique shop, but rather of the marine-store dealers; a quality which even communicates itself to the inhabitants, so that one gathers the impression that the whole neighbourhood was taken as a going concern.

It was on such a district that I found myself looking down from the top of an omnibus a few days after the inquest (Dr. Cornish’s brougham being at the moment under repairs and his horse ‘out to grass’ during the slack season), being bound for a street in the neighbourhood of Hoxton—Market Street by name—which abutted, as I had noticed when making out my route, on the Regent’s Canal. The said route I had written out, and now, in the intervals of my surveys of the unlovely prospect, I divided my attention between it and the note which had summoned me to these remote regions.

Concerning the latter I was somewhat curious, for the envelope was addressed, not to Dr. Cornish but to ‘Dr. Stephen Gray.’ This was really quite an odd circumstance. Either the writer knew me personally or was aware that I was acting as locum tenens for Cornish. But the name—James Morris—was unknown to me, and a careful inspection of the index of the ledger had failed to bring to light anyone answering to the description. So Mr. Morris was presumably a stranger to my principal also. The note, which had been left by hand in the morning, requested me to call ‘as early in the forenoon as possible,’ which seemed to hint at some degree of urgency. Naturally, as a young practitioner, I speculated with interest, not entirely unmingled with anxiety, on the possible nature of the case, and also on the patient’s reason for selecting a medical attendant whose residence was so inconveniently far away.

In accordance with my written route, I got off the omnibus at the corner of Shepherdess Walk, and pursuing that pastoral thoroughfare for some distance, presently plunged into a labyrinth of streets adjoining it and succeeded most effectually in losing myself. However, inquiries addressed to an intelligent fish-vendor elicited a most lucid direction and I soon found myself in a little, drab street which justified its name by giving accommodation to a row of stationary barrows loaded with what looked like the ‘throw-outs’ from a colossal spring-clean. Passing along this kerb-side market and reflecting (like Diogenes, in similar circumstances) how many things there were in the world that I did not want, I walked slowly up the street looking for number 23—my patient’s number—and the canal which I had seen on the map. I located them both at the same instant, for number 23 turned out to be the last house on the opposite side, and a few yards beyond it the street was barred by a low wall, over which, as I looked, the mast of a sailing-barge came into view and slowly crept past. I stepped up to the wall and looked over. Immediately beneath me was the towing-path, alongside which the barge was now bringing up and beginning to lower her mast, apparently to pass under a bridge that spanned the canal a couple of hundred yards farther along.

From these nautical manoeuvres I transferred my attention to my patient’s house—or at least, so much of it as I could see, for number 23 appeared to consist of a shop with nothing over it. There was, however, in a wall which extended to the canal wall, a side door with a bell and knocker, so I inferred that the house was behind the shop and that the latter had been built on a formerly existing front garden. The shop itself was somewhat reminiscent of the stalls down the street, for though the fascia was newly painted (with the inscription J. Morris, Dealer in Antiques), the stock-in-trade exhibited in the window was in the last stage of senile decay. It included, I remember, a cracked Toby jug, a mariner’s sextant of an obsolete type a Dutch clock without hands, a snuff-box, one or two planter statuettes, an invalid punchbowl, a shiny, dark and inscrutable oil-painting and a plaster mask, presumably the death-mask of some celebrity whose face was unknown to me.

My examination of this collection was brought to a sudden end by the apparition of a face above the half-blind of the glazed shop-door, the face of a middle-aged woman who seemed to be inspecting me with malevolent interest. Assuming—rather too late—a brisk, professional manner, I opened the shop-door, thereby setting a bell jangling within, and confronted the owner of the face.

“I am Dr. Gray,” I began to explain.

“Side-door,” she interrupted brusquely. “Ring the bell and knock.”

I backed out hastily and proceeded to follow the directions, giving a tug at the bell and delivering a flourish on the knocker. The hollow reverberations of the latter almost suggested an empty house, but my vigorous pull at the bell-handle produced no audible result, from which I inferred—wrongly, as afterwards appeared—that it was out of repair.

After waiting quite a considerable time, I was about to repeat the performance when I heard sounds within; and then the door was opened, to my surprise, by the identical sour-faced woman whom I had seen in the shop. As her appearance and manner did not invite conversation, and as she uttered no word, I followed her in silence through a long passage, or covered way, which ran parallel to the side of the shop and presumably crossed the site of the garden. It ended at a door which opened into the hall proper; a largish square space into which the doors of the ground-floor rooms opened. It contained the main staircase and was closed in at the farther end by a heavy curtain which extended from wall to wall.

We proceeded in this funereal manner up the stairs to the first floor on the landing of which my conductress halted and for the first time broke the silence.

“You will probably find Mr. Bendelow asleep or dozing,” she said in a rather gruff voice. “If he is, there is no need for you to disturb him.”

“Mr. Bendelow!” I exclaimed. “I understood that his name was Morris.”

“Well, it isn’t,” she retorted. “It is Bendelow. My name is Morris and so is my husband’s. It was he who wrote to you.”

“By the way,” said I, “how did he know my name? I am acting for Dr. Cornish, you know.”

“I didn’t know,” said she, “and I don’t suppose he did. Probably the servant told him. But it doesn’t matter. Here you are, and you will do as well as another. I was telling you about Mr. Bendelow. He is in a pretty bad way. The specialist whom Mr. Morris took him to—Dr. Artemus Cropper—said he had cancer of the bilorus, whatever that is—”

“Pylorus,” I corrected.

“Well, pylorus, then, if you prefer it,” she corrected impatiently. “At any rate, whatever it is, he’s got cancer of it; and as I said before, he is in a pretty bad way. Dr. Cropper told us what to do, and we are doing it. He wrote out full directions as to diet—I will show them to you presently—and he said that Mr. Bendelow was to have a dose of morphia if he complained of pain—which he does, of course; and that, as there was no chance of his getting better, it didn’t matter how much morphia he had. The great thing was to keep him out of pain. So we give it to him twice a day—at least, my husband does—and that keeps him fairly comfortable. In fact he sleeps most of the time and is probably dozing now; so you are not likely to get much out of him, especially as he is rather hard of hearing even when he is awake. And now you had better come in and have a look at him.”

She advanced to the door of a room and opened it softly, and I followed in a somewhat uncomfortable frame of mind. It seemed to me that I had no function but that of a mere figure-head. Dr. Cropper, whom I knew by name as a physician of some reputation, had made the diagnosis and prescribed the treatment, neither of which I, as a mere beginner, would think of contesting. It was an unsatisfactory, even an ignominious position, from which my professional pride revolted, but apparently it had to be accepted.

Mr. Bendelow was a most remarkable-looking man. Probably he had always been, but now the frightful emaciation (which strongly confirmed Cropper’s diagnosis) had so accentuated his original peculiarities that he had the appearance of some dreadful, mirthless caricature. Under the influence of the remorseless disease, every shrinkable structure had shrunk to the vanishing-point, leaving the unshrinkable skeleton jutting out with a most horrible and grotesque effect. His great hooked nose, which must always have been strikingly prominent, stuck out now, thin and sharp, like the beak of some bird of prey. His heavy beetling brows, which must always have given to his face a frowning sullenness, now overhung sockets which had shrunk away into mere caverns. His naturally-high cheekbones were now not only prominent but exhibited the details of their structure as one sees them in a dry skull. Altogether, his aspect was at once pitiable and forbidding. Of his age I could form no estimate. He might have been a hundred. The wonder was that he was still alive; that there was yet left in that shrivelled body enough material to enable its mechanism to continue its functions.

He was not asleep, but was in that somnolent, lethargic state that is characteristic of the effects of morphia. He took no notice of me when I approached the bed, nor even when I spoke his name somewhat loudly.

“I told you you wouldn’t get much out of him,” said Mrs. Morris, looking at me with a sort of grim satisfaction. “He doesn’t have a great deal to say to any of us nowadays.”

“Well,” said I, “there is no need to rouse him, but I had better just examine him, if only as a matter of form. I can’t take the case entirely on hearsay.”

“I suppose not,” she agreed. “You know best. Do what you think necessary, but don’t disturb him more than you can help.”

It was not a prolonged examination. The first touch of my fingers on the shrunken abdomen made me aware of the unmistakable hard mass and rendered further exploration needless. There could be no doubt as to the nature of the case or of what the future held in store. It was only a question of time, and a short time at that.

The patient submitted to the examination quite passively, but he seemed to be fully aware of what was going on, for he looked at me in a sort of drunken, dreamy fashion but without any sign of interest in my proceedings. When I had finished, I looked him over again, trying to reconstitute him as he might have been before this deadly disease fastened on him. I observed that he seemed to have a fair crop of hair of a darkish iron-grey. I say seemed because the greater part of his head was covered by a skull-cap of black silk; but a fringe of hair straying from under it on to the forehead suggested that he was not bald. His teeth, too, which were rather conspicuous, were natural teeth and in good preservation. In order to confirm this fact, I stooped and raised his lip the better to examine them. But at this point Mrs. Morris intervened.

“There, that will do,” she said impatiently. “You are not a dentist, and his teeth will last as long as he will want them. If you have finished, you had better come with me and I will show you Dr. Cropper’s prescriptions. Then you can tell me if you have any further directions to give.”

She led the way out of the room, and when I had made a farewell gesture to the patient (of which he took no notice) I followed her down the stairs to the ground-floor, where she ushered me into a small, rather elegantly furnished room. Here she opened the top of a bureau and from one of the little drawers took an open envelope, which she handed to me. It contained one or two prescriptions for occasional medicines and a sheet of directions relative to the diet and general management of the patient, including the administration of morphia. The latter read, under the general heading, ‘Simon Bendelow, Esq.’:

As the case progresses, it will probably be necessary to administer morphine regularly, but the amount given should, if possible, be restricted to 14 gr. Morph. Sulph. not more than twice a day, but, of course, the hopeless prognosis and probable early termination of the case make some latitude admissible.

Although I was in complete agreement with the writer, I was a little puzzled by these documents. They were signed ‘Artemus Cropper, MD,’ but they were not addressed to any person by name. They appeared to have been given to Mr. Morris, in whose possession they now were; but the use of the word ‘morphine’ instead of the more familiar ‘morphia’ and the general technical phraseology seemed inappropriate to directions addressed to lay persons. As I returned them I remarked:

“These directions read as if they had been intended for the information of a medical man.”

“They were,” she replied. “They were meant for the doctor who was attending Mr. Bendelow at the time. When we moved to this place, I got them from him to show to the new doctor. You are the new doctor.”

“Then you haven’t been here very long?”

“No,” she replied. “We have only just moved in. And that reminds me that our stock of morphia is running out. Could you bring a fresh tube of the tabloids next time you call? My husband left an empty tube for me to give you to remind you what size the tabloids are. He gives Mr. Bendelow the injections.”

“Thank you,” said I, “but I don’t want the empty tube. I read the prescription and shan’t forget the dose. I will bring a new tube tomorrow—that is, if you want me to call every day. It seems hardly necessary.”

“No, it doesn’t,” she agreed. “I should think twice a week would be quite enough. Monday and Thursday would suit me best; if you could manage to come about this time I should be sure to be in. My time is rather taken up, as I haven’t a servant at present.”

It was a bad arrangement. Fixed appointments are things to avoid in medical practice. Nevertheless I agreed to it—subject to unforeseen obstacles—and was forthwith conducted back along the covered way and launched into the outer world with a farewell which it would be inadequate to describe as unemotional.

As I turned away from the door I cast a passing glance at the shop-window; and once again I perceived a face above the half-blind. It was a man’s face this time; presumably the face of Mr. Morris. And like his wife, he seemed to be ‘taking stock of me.’ I returned the attention and carried away with me the instantaneous mental photograph of a man in that unprepossessing transitional state between being clean-shaved and wearing a beard which is characterized by a sort of grubby prickliness that disfigures the features without obscuring them. His stubble was barely a week old, but as his complexion and hair were dark the effect was very untidy and disreputable. And yet, as I have said, it did not obscure the features. I was even able, in that momentary glance, to note a detail which would probably have escaped a non-medical eye: the scar of a hare-lip which had been very neatly and skilfully mended and which a moustache would probably have concealed altogether.

I did not, however, give much thought to Mr. Morris. It was his dour-faced wife with her gruff, overbearing manner who principally occupied my reflections. She seemed to have divined in some way that I was but a beginner—perhaps my youthful appearance gave her the hint—and to have treated me with almost open contempt. In truth, my position was not a very dignified one. The diagnosis of the case had been made for me, the treatment had been prescribed for me and was being carried out by other hands than mine. My function was to support a kind of legal fiction that I was conducting the case, but principally to supply the morphia (which a chemist might have refused to do) and, when the time came, to sign the death-certificate. It was an ignominious role for a young and ambitious practitioner and my pride was disposed to boggle at it. But yet there was nothing to which I could object. The diagnosis was undoubtedly correct and the treatment and management of the case exactly such as I should have prescribed. Finally, I decided that my dissatisfaction was principally due to the unattractive personality of Mrs. Morris; and with this conclusion I dismissed the case from my mind and let my thoughts wander into more agreeable channels.

CHAPTER V

INSPECTOR FOLLETT’S DISCOVERY

To a man whose mind is working actively, walking is a more acceptable mode of progression than riding in a vehicle. There is a sort of reciprocity between the muscles and the brain—possibly due to the close association of the motor and psychical centres—whereby the activity of the one appears to act as a stimulus to the other. A sharp walk sets the mind working; and, conversely, a state of lively reflection begets an impulse to bodily movement.

Hence, when I had emerged from Market Street and set my face homewards, I let the omnibuses rumble past unheeded. I knew my way now. I had but to retrace the route by which I had come and, preserving my isolation amidst the changing crowd, let my thoughts keep pace with my feet. And I had, in fact, a good deal to think about—a general subject for reflection which arranged itself around two personalities, Miss D’Arblay and Dr. Thorndyke.

To the former I had written suggesting a call on her, ‘subject to the exigencies of the service,’ on Sunday afternoon, and had received a short but cordial note definitely inviting me to tea. So that matter was settled and really required no further consideration, though it did actually occupy my thoughts for an appreciable part of my walk. But that was mere self-indulgence, the preliminary savouring of an anticipated pleasure. My cogitations respecting Dr. Thorndyke were, on the other hand, somewhat troubled. I was eager to invoke his aid in solving the hideous mystery which his acuteness had (I felt convinced) brought into view. But it would probably be a costly business and my pecuniary resources were not great. To apply to him for services of which I could not meet the cost was not to be thought of. The too-common meanness of sponging on a professional man was totally abhorrent to me.

But what was the alternative? The murder of Julius D’Arblay was one of those crimes which offer the police no opportunity; at least, so it seemed to me. Out of the darkness this fiend had stolen to commit this unspeakable atrocity, and into the darkness he had straightway vanished, leaving no trace of his identity nor any hint of his diabolical motive. It might well be that he had vanished for ever; that the mystery of the crime was beyond solution. But if any solution was possible, the one man who seemed capable of discovering it was John Thorndyke.

This conclusion, to which my reflections led again and again, committed me to the dilemma that either this villain must be allowed to go his way unmolested, if the police could find no clue to his identity—a position that I utterly refused to accept—or that the one supremely skilful investigator should be induced, if possible, to take up the inquiry. In the end I decided to call on Thorndyke and frankly lay the facts before him, but to postpone the interview until I had seen Miss D’Arblay and ascertained what view the police took of the case and whether any new facts had transpired.

The train of reflection which brought me to this conclusion had brought me also, by way of Pentonville, to the more familiar neighbourhood of Clerkenwell; and I had just turned into a somewhat squalid by-street which seemed to bear in the right direction, when my attention was arrested by a brass plate affixed to the door of one of those hybrid establishments, intermediate between a shop and a private house, known by the generic name of open surgery. The name upon the plate—Dr. Solomon Usher—awakened certain reminiscences. In my freshman days there had been a student of that name at our hospital; a middle-aged man (elderly, we considered him, seeing that he was near upon forty) who, after years of servitude as an unqualified assistant, had scraped together the means of completing his curriculum. I remembered him very well: a facetious, seedy, slightly bibulous but entirely good-natured man, invincibly amiable (as he had need to be), and always in the best of spirits. I recalled the quaint figure that furnished such rich material for our school-boy wit: the solemn spectacles, the ridiculous side-whiskers, the chimney-pot hat, the formal frock-coat (too often decorated with a label secretly pinned to the coat-tail and bearing some such inscription as ‘This style 10s. 6d.’ or other scintillations of freshman humour), and, looking over the establishment, decided that it seemed to present a complete congruity with that well-remembered personality. But the identification was not left to mere surmise, for even as my eye roamed along a range of stoppered bottles that peeped over the wire blind, the door opened and there he was, spectacles, side-whiskers, top-hat and frock-coat, all complete, plus an oedematous-looking umbrella.

He did not recognise me at first—naturally, for I had changed a good deal more than he had in the five or six years that had slipped away—but inquired gravely if I wished to see him. I replied that it had been the dearest wish of my heart, now at length gratified. Then, as I grinned in his face, my identity suddenly dawned on him.

“Why, it’s Gray!” he exclaimed, seizing my hand. “God bless me, what a surprise! I didn’t know you. Getting quite a man. Well, I am delighted to see you. Come in and have a drink.”

He held the door open invitingly, but I shook my head.

“No, thanks,” I replied. “Not at this time in the day.”

“Nonsense,” he urged. “Do you good. I’ve just had one myself. Can’t say more than that, excepting that I am ready to have another. Won’t you really? Pity. Should never waste an opportunity. Which way are you going?”

It seemed that we were going the same way for some distance and we accordingly set off together.

“So you’ve flopped out of the nest,” he remarked, looking me over—“at least, so I judge by the adult clothes that you are wearing. Are you in practice in these parts?”

“No,” I replied; “I am doing a locum. Only just qualified, you know.”

“Good,” said he. “A locum’s the way to begin. Try your prentice hand on somebody else’s patients and pick up the art of general practice, which they don’t teach you at the hospital.”

“You mean book-keeping and dispensing and the general routine of the day’s work?” I suggested.

“No, I don’t,” he replied. “I mean practice; the art of pleasing your patients and keeping your end up. You’ve got a lot to learn, my boy. Experientia does it. Scientific stuff is all very well at the hospital, but in practice it is experience, gumption, tact, knowledge of human nature, that counts.”

“I suppose a little knowledge of diagnosis and treatment is useful?” I suggested.

“For your own satisfaction, yes,” he admitted; “but for practical purposes, a little knowledge of men and women is a good deal better. It isn’t your scientific learning that brings you kudos, nor is it out-of-the-way cases. It is just common sense brought to bear on common ailments. Take the case of an aurist. You think that he lives by dealing with obscure and difficult middle and internal ear cases. Nothing of the kind. He lives on wax. Wax is the foundation of his practice. Patient comes to him as deaf as a post. He does all the proper jugglery—tuning-fork, otoscope, speculum and so on, for the moral effect. Then he hikes out a good old plug of cerumen and the patient hears perfectly. Of course, he is delighted. Thinks a miracle has been performed. Goes away convinced that the aurist is a genius; and so he is if he has managed the case properly. I made my reputation here on a fish-bone.”

“Well, a fish-bone isn’t always so very easy to extract,’ said I.

“It isn’t,” he agreed. “Especially if it isn’t there.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you about it,” he replied. “A chappie here got a fish-bone stuck in his throat. Of course it didn’t stay there. They never do. But the prick in his soft palate did, and he was convinced that the bone was still there. So he sent for a doctor. Doctor came, looked in his throat. Couldn’t see any fish-bone and, like a fool, said so. Tried to persuade the patient that there was no bone there. But the chappie said it was his throat and he knew better. He could feel it there. So he sent for another doctor and the same thing happened. No go. He had four different doctors and they hadn’t the sense of an infant among them. Then he sent for me.

“Now, as soon as I heard how the land lay, I nipped into the surgery and got a fish-bone that I keep there in a pillbox for emergencies, stuck it into the jaws of a pair of throat-forceps, and off I went. ‘Show me whereabouts it is,’ says I, handing him a probe to point with. He showed me the spot and nearly swallowed the probe. ‘All right,’ said I. ‘I can see it. Just shut your eyes and open your mouth wide and I will have it out in a jiffy.’ I popped the forceps into his mouth, gave a gentle prod with the point on the soft palate, patient hollered out, ‘Hoo!’ I whisked out the forceps and held them up before his eyes with the fish-bone grasped in their jaws.

“‘Ha!’ says he. ‘Thank Gawd! What a relief! I can swallow quite well now.’ And so he could. It was a case of suggestion and counter-suggestion. Imaginary fish-bone cured by imaginary extraction. And it made my local reputation. Well, good-bye, old chap. I’ve got a visit to make here. Come in one evening and smoke a pipe with me. You know where to find me. And take my advice to heart. Never go to extract a fish-bone without one in your pocket; and it isn’t a bad thing to keep a dried earwig by you. I do. People will persist in thinking they’ve got one in their ears. So long. Look me up soon,” and with a farewell flourish of the umbrella, he turned to a shabby street-door and began to work the top bell-pull as if it were the handle of an air-pump.

I went on my way, not a little amused by my friend’s genial cynicism, nor entirely uninstructed. For ‘there is a soul of truth in things erroneous,’ as the philosopher reminds us; and if the precepts of Solomon Usher did not sound the highest note of professional ethics, they were based on a very solid foundation of worldly wisdom.

When, having finished my short round of visits, I arrived at my temporary home, I was informed by the housemaid in a mysterious whisper that a police officer was waiting to see me. “Name of Follett,” she added. “He’s waiting in the consulting-room.”

Proceeding thither, I found my friend, the Highgate inspector, standing with one eye closed before a card of test-types that hung on the wall. We greeted one another cordially and then, as I looked at him inquiringly, he produced from his pocket without remark an official envelope, from which he extracted a coin, a silver pencil-case and a button. These objects he laid on the writing-table and silently directed my attention to them. A little puzzled by his manner, I picked up the coin and examined it attentively. It was a Charles the Second guinea, dated 1663, very clean and bright and in remarkably perfect preservation. But I could not see that it was any concern of mine.

“It is a beautiful coin,” I remarked; “but what about it?”

“It doesn’t belong to you, then?” he asked.

“No. I wish it did.”

“Have you ever seen it before?”

“Never, to my knowledge.”

“What about the pencil-case?”

I picked it up and turned it over in my fingers. “No,” I said, “it is not mine and I have no recollection of ever having seen it before.”

“And the button?”

“It is apparently a waistcoat button,” I said after having inspected it, “which seems to belong to a tweed waistcoat; and judging by the appearance of the thread and the wisp of cloth that it still holds, it must have been pulled off with some violence. But it isn’t off my waistcoat, if that is what you want to know.”

“I didn’t much think it was,” he replied, “but I thought it best to make sure. And it didn’t come from poor Mr. D’Arblay’s waistcoat, because I have examined that and there is no button missing. I showed these things to Miss D’Arblay and she is sure that none of them belonged to her father. He never used a pencil-case—artists don’t, as a rule—and as to the guinea, she knew nothing about it. If it was her father’s, he must have come by it immediately before his death; otherwise she felt sure he would have shown it to her, seeing that they were both interested in anything in the nature of sculpture.”

“Where did you get these things?” I asked.

“From the pond in the wood,” he replied. “I will tell you how I came to find them—that is, if I am not taking up too much of your time.”

“Not at all,” I assured him; and even as I spoke, I thought of Solomon Usher. He wouldn’t have said that. He would have anxiously consulted his engagement-book to see how many minutes he could spare. However, Inspector Follett was not a patient, and I wanted to hear his story. So having established him in the easy-chair, I sat down to listen.

“The morning after the inquest,” he began, “an officer of the CID came up to get particulars of the case and see what was to be done. Well, as soon as I had told him all I knew and shown him our copy of the depositions, it was pretty clear to me that he didn’t think there was anything to be done but wait for some fresh evidence. Mind you, Doctor, this is in strict confidence.”

“I understand that. But if the Criminal Investigation Department doesn’t investigate crime, what the deuce is the good of it?”

“That is hardly a fair way of putting it,” he protested. “The people at Scotland Yard have got their hands pretty full and they can’t spend their time in speculating about cases in which there is no evidence. They can’t create evidence; and you can see for yourself that there isn’t the ghost of a clue to the identity of the man who committed this murder. But they are keeping the case in mind, and meanwhile we have got to report any new facts that may turn up. Those were our instructions, and when I heard them I decided to do a bit of investigating on my own, with the superintendent’s permission, of course.

“Well, I began by searching the wood thoroughly, but I got nothing out of that excepting Mr. D’Arblay’s hat, which I found in the undergrowth not far from the main path.

“Then I thought of dragging the pond; but I decided that, as it was only a small pond and shallow, it would be best to empty it and expose the bottom completely. So I dammed up the little stream that feeds it and deepened the outflow, and very soon I had it quite empty excepting a few small puddles. And I think it was well worth the trouble. These things don’t tell us much, but they may be useful one day for identification. And they do tell us something. They suggest that this man was a collector of coins; and they make it fairly clear that there was a struggle in the pond before Mr. D’Arblay fell down.”

“That is, assuming that the things belonged to the murderer,” I interposed. “There is no evidence that they did.”

“No, there isn’t,” he admitted; “but if you consider the three things together, they suggest a very strong probability. Here is a waistcoat button violently pulled off, and here are two things such as would be carried in a waistcoat pocket and might fall out if the waistcoat were dragged at violently when the wearer was stooping over a fallen man and struggling to avoid being pulled down with him. And then there is this coin. Its face-value is a guinea, but it must be worth a good deal more than that. Do you suppose anybody would leave a thing of that kind in a shallow pond from which it could be easily recovered with a common landing-net? Why, it would have paid to have had the pond dragged or even emptied. But, as I say, that wouldn’t have been necessary.”

“I am inclined to think you are right. Inspector,” said I, rather impressed by the way in which he had reasoned the matter out; “but even so, it doesn’t seem to me that we are much more forward. The things don’t point to any particular person.”

“Not at present,” he rejoined. “But a fact is a fact and you can never tell in advance what you may get out of it. If we should get a hint of any other kind pointing to some particular person, these things might furnish invaluable evidence connecting that person with the crime. They may even give a clue now to the people at the CID, though that isn’t very likely.”

“Then you are going to hand them over to the Scotland Yard people?”

“Certainly. The CID are the lions, you know. I’m only a jackal.”

I was rather sorry to hear this, for the idea had floated into my mind that I should have liked Thorndyke to see these waifs, which, could they have spoken, would have had much to tell. To me they conveyed nothing that threw any light on the ghastly events of that night of horror. But to my teacher, with his vast experience and his wonderful power of analysing evidence, they might convey some quite important significance.

I reflected rapidly on the matter. It would not be wise to say anything to the inspector about Thorndyke, and it was quite certain that a loan of the articles would not be entertained. Probably a description of them would be enough for the purpose; but still I had a feeling that an inspection of them would be better. Suddenly I had a bright idea and proceeded cautiously to broach it.

“I should rather like to have a record of these things,” said I, “particularly of the coin. Would you object to my taking an impression of it in sealing-wax?”

Inspector Follett looked doubtful. “It would be a bit irregular,” he said. “It is a bit irregular for me to have shown it to you, but you are interested in the case, and you are a responsible person. What did you want the impression for?”

“Well,” I said, “we don’t know much about that coin. I thought I might be able to pick up some further information. Of course, I understand hat what you have told me is strictly confidential. I shouldn’t go showing the thing about, or talking. But I should like to have the impression to refer to, if necessary.”

“Very well,” said he. “On that understanding, I have no objection. But see that you don’t leave any wax on the coin, or the CID people will be asking questions.”

With this permission, I set about the business gleefully, determined to get as good an impression as possible. From the surgery I fetched an ointment slab, a spirit-lamp, a stick of sealing-wax, a tea-spoon, some powder-papers, a bowl of water and a jar of vaseline. Laying a paper on the slab, I put the coin on it and traced its outline with a pencil. Then I broke off a piece of sealing-wax, melted it in the tea-spoon and poured it out carefully into the marked circle so that it formed a round, convex button of the right size. While the wax was cooling to the proper consistency, I smeared the coin with vaseline and wiped the excess off with my handkerchief. Then I carefully laid it on the stiffening wax and made steady pressure. After a few moments, I cautiously lifted the paper and dropped it into the water, leaving it to cool completely. When, finally, I turned it over under water, the coin dropped away by its own weight.

“It is a beautiful impression,” the inspector remarked, as he examined it with the aid of my pocket-lens, while I prepared to operate on the reverse of the coin. “As good as the original. You seem rather a dab at this sort of thing, Doctor. I wonder if you would mind doing another pair for me?”

Of course, I complied gladly; and when the inspector departed a few minutes later he took with him a couple of excellent wax impressions to console him for the necessity of parting with the original.

As soon as he was gone, I proceeded to execute a plan that had already formed in my mind. First, I packed the two wax impressions very carefully in lint and bestowed them in a tin tobacco—box, which I made up into a neat parcel and addressed it to Dr. Thorndyke. Then I wrote him a short letter giving him the substance of my talk with Inspector Follett and asking for an appointment early in the following week to discuss the situation with him. I did not suppose that the wax impressions would convey, even to him, anything that would throw fresh light on this extraordinarily obscure crime. But one never knew. And the mere finding of the coin might suggest to him some significance that I had overlooked. In any case, the new incident gave me an excuse for reopening the matter with him.

I did not trust the precious missive to the maid, but as soon as the letter was written I took it and the parcel in my own hands to the post, dropping the letter into the box but giving the parcel the added security of registration. This business being thus dispatched, my mind was free to occupy itself with pleasurable anticipations of the projected visit to Highgate on the morrow and to deal with whatever exigencies might arise in the course of the Saturday-evening consultations.

CHAPTER VI

MARION D’ARBLAY AT HOME

Most of us have, I imagine, been conscious at times of certain misgivings as to whether the Progress of which we hear so much has done for us all that it is assumed to have done, whether the undoubted gain of advancing knowledge has not a somewhat heavy counterpoise of loss. We moderns are accustomed to look upon a world filled with objects that would have made our forefathers gasp with admiring astonishment, and we are accordingly a little puffed up by our superiority. But the museums and galleries and ancient buildings sometimes tell a different tale. By them we are made aware that the same ‘rude forefathers’ were endowed with certain powers and aptitudes that seem to be denied to the present generation.

Some such reflections as these passed through my mind as I sauntered about the ancient village of Highgate, having arrived in the neighbourhood nearly an hour too early. Very delightful the old village was to look upon, and so it had been even when the mellow red brick was new and the plaster on the timber houses was but freshly laid; when the great elms were saplings and the stage-wagon with its procession of horses rumbled along the road which now resounds to the thunder of the electric tram. It was not Time that had made beautiful its charming old houses and pleasant streets and closes, but fine workmanship guided by unerring taste.

At four o’clock precisely, by the chime of the church dock, I pushed open the gate of Ivy Cottage, and as I walked up the flagged path, read the date, 1709, on a stone tablet let into the brickwork. I had no occasion to knock, for my approach had been observed, and as I mounted the threshold the door opened and Miss D’Arblay stood in the opening.

“Miss Boler saw you coming up the Grove,” she explained, as we shook hands. “It is surprising how much of the outer world you can see from a bay window. It is as good as a watch-tower.” She disposed of my hat and stick and then preceded me into the room to which the window appertained, where, beside a bright fire. Miss Boler was at the moment occupied with a brilliantly-burnished copper kettle and a silver teapot. She greeted me with an affable smile and as much of a bow as was possible under the circumstances, and then proceeded to make the tea with an expression of deep concentration.

“I do like punctual people,” she remarked, placing the teapot on a carved wooden stand. “You know where you are with them. At the very moment when you turned the corner, sir, Miss Marion finished buttering the last muffin and the kettle boiled over. So you won’t have to wait a moment.”

Miss D’Arblay laughed softly. “You speak as if Dr. Gray had staggered into the house in a famished condition, roaring for food,” said she.

“Well,” retorted Miss Boler, “you said ‘tea at four o’clock,’ and at four o’clock the tea was ready and Dr. Gray was here. If he hadn’t been, he would have had to eat leathery muffins, that’s all.”

“Horrible!” exclaimed Miss D’Arblay. “One doesn’t like to think of it; and there is no need to as it hasn’t happened. Remember that this is a gate-legged table, Dr. Gray, when you sit down. They are delightfully picturesque, but exceedingly bad for the knees of the unwary.”

I thanked her for the warning and took my seat with due caution. Then Miss Boler poured out the tea and uncovered the muffins with the grave and attentive air of one performing some ceremonial rite.

As the homely, simple meal proceeded, to an accompaniment of desultory conversation on everyday topics, I found myself looking at the two women with a certain ill-defined surprise. Both were garbed in unobtrusive black, and both, in moments of repose, looked somewhat tired and worn. But in their manner and the subjects of their conversation they were astonishingly ordinary and normal. No stranger, looking at them and listening to their talk, would have dreamed of the tragedy that overshadowed their lives. But so it constantly happens. We go into a house of mourning and are almost scandalized by its cheerfulness, forgetting that whereas to us the bereavement is the one salient fact, to the bereaved there is the necessity of taking up afresh the threads of their lives. Food must be prepared even while the corpse lies under the roof, and the common daily round of duty stands still for no human affliction.

But, as I have said, in the pauses of the conversation when their faces were in repose, both women looked strained and tired. Especially was this so in the case of Miss D’Arblay. She was not only pale, but she had a nervous, shaken manner which I did not like. And as I looked anxiously at the delicate, pallid face, I noticed, not for the first time, several linear scratches on the cheek and a small cut on the temple.

“What have you been doing to yourself?” I asked. “You look as if you have had a fall.”

“She has,” said Miss Boler in an indignant tone. “It is a marvel that she is here to tell the tale. The wretches!”

I looked at Miss D’Arblay in consternation. “What wretches?” I asked.

“Ah! indeed!” growled Miss Boler. “I wish I knew. Tell him about it. Miss Marion.”

“It was really rather a terrifying experience,” said Miss D’Arblay, “and most mysterious. You know Southwood Lane and the long, steep hill at the bottom of it?” I nodded, and she continued: “I have been going down to the studio every day on my bicycle, just to tidy up, and of course I went by Southwood Lane. It is really the only way. But I always put on the brake at the top of the hill and go down quite slowly because of the cross—roads at the bottom. Well, three days ago I started as usual and ran down the Lane pretty fast until I got on the hill. Then I put on the brake; and I could feel at once that it wasn’t working.”

“Has your bicycle only one brake?” I asked.

“It had. I am having a second one fixed now. Well, when I found that the brake wasn’t acting, I was terrified. I was already going too fast to jump off, and the speed increased every moment. I simply flew down the hill, faster and faster, with the wind whistling about my ears and the trees and houses whirling past like express trains. Of course, I could do nothing but steer straight down the hill; but at the bottom there was the Archway Road with the trams and buses and wagons. I knew that if a tram crossed the bottom of the Lane as I reached the road, it was practically certain death. I was horribly frightened.

“However, mercifully the Archway Road was clear when I flew across it, and I steered to run on down Muswell Hill Road, which is nearly in a line with the Lane. But suddenly I saw a steam roller and a heavy cart, side by side and taking up the whole of the road. There was no room to pass. The only possible thing was to swerve round, if I could, into Wood Lane. And I just managed it. But Wood Lane is pretty steep, and I flew down it faster than ever. That nearly broke down my nerve; for at the bottom of the Lane is the wood—the horrible wood that I can never even think of without a shudder. And there I seemed to be rushing towards it to my death.”

She paused and drew a deep breath, and her hand shook so that the cup which it held rattled on the saucer.

“Well,” she continued, “down the Lane I flew with my heart in my mouth and the entrance to the wood rushing to meet me. I could see that the opening in the hurdles was just wide enough for me to pass through, and I steered for it. I whizzed through into the wood and the bicycle went bounding down the steep, rough path at a fearful pace until it came to a sharp turn; and then I don’t quite know what happened. There was a crash of snapping branches and a violent shock, but I must have been partly stunned, for the next thing that I remember is opening my eyes and looking stupidly at a lady who was stooping over me. She had seen me fly down the Lane and had followed me into the wood to see what happened to me. She lived in the Lane and she very kindly took me to her house and cared for me until I was quite recovered; and then she saw me home and wheeled the bicycle.”

“It is a wonder you were not killed outright!” I exclaimed.

“Yes,” she agreed, “it was a narrow escape. But the odd thing is that, with the exception of these scratches and a few slight bruises, I was not hurt at all; only very much shaken. And the bicycle was not damaged a bit.”

“By the way,” said I, “what had happened to the brake?”

“Ah!” exclaimed Miss Boler. “There you are. The villains!”

Miss D’Arblay laughed softly. “Ferocious Arabella!” said she. “But it is really a most mysterious affair: Naturally, I thought that the wire of the brake had snapped. But it hadn’t. It had been cut.”

“Are you quite sure of that?” I asked.

“Oh, there is no doubt at all,” she replied. “The man at the repair shop showed it to me. It wasn’t merely cut in one place. A length of it had been cut right out. And I can tell within a few minutes when it was done; for I had been riding the machine in the morning and I know the brake was all right then. But I left it for a few minutes outside the gate while I went into the house to change my shoes, and when I came out, I started on my adventurous journey. In those few minutes someone must have come along and just snipped the wire through in two places and taken away the piece.”

“Scoundrel!” muttered Miss Boler; and I agreed with her most cordially.

“It was an infamous thing to do,” I exclaimed, “and the act of an abject fool. I suppose you have no idea or suspicion as to who the idiot might be?”

“Not the slightest,” Miss D’Arblay replied. “I can’t even guess at the kind of person who would do such a thing. Boys are sometimes very mischievous, but this is hardly like a boy’s mischief.”

“No,” I agreed; “it is more like the mischief of a mentally defective adult; the sort of half-baked larrikin who sets fire to a rick if he gets the chance.”

Miss Boler sniffed. “Looks to me more like deliberate malice,” said she.

“Mischievous acts usually do,” I rejoined; “but yet they are mostly the outcome of stupidity that is indifferent to consequences.”

“And it is of no use arguing about it,” said Miss D’Arblay, “because we don’t know who did it or why he did it, and we have no means of finding out. But I shall have two brakes in future and I shall test them both every time I take the machine out.”

“I hope you will,” said Miss Boler; and this closed the topic so far as conversation went, though I suspect that, in the interval of silence that followed, we all continued to pursue it in our thoughts. And to all of us, doubtless, the mention of Churchyard Bottom Wood had awakened memories of that fatal morning when the pool gave up its dead. No reference to the tragedy had yet been made, but it was inevitable that the thoughts which were at the back of all our minds should sooner or later come to the surface. They were in fact brought there by me, though unintentionally; for, as I sat at the table, my eyes had strayed more than once to a bust—or rather a head, for there were no shoulders—which occupied the centre of the mantelpiece. It was apparently of lead and was a portrait, and a very good one, of Miss D’Arblay’s father. At the first glance I had recognized the face which I had first seen through the water of the pool. Miss D’Arblay, who was sitting facing it, caught my glance and said: “You are looking at that head of my dear father. I suppose you recognized it?”

“Yes, instantly. I should take it to be an excellent likeness.”

“It is,” she replied; “and that is something of an achievement in a self-portrait in the round.”

“Then he modelled it himself?”

“Yes, with the aid of one or two photographs and a couple of mirrors. I helped him by taking the dimensions with callipers and drawing out a scale. Then he made a wax cast and a fireproof mould and we cast it together in type-metal, as we had no means of melting bronze. Poor Daddy! How proud he was when we broke away the mould and found the casting quite perfect!”

She sighed as she gazed fondly on the beloved features, and her eyes filled. Then, after a brief silence, she turned to me and asked:

“Did Inspector Follett call on you? He said he was going to.”

“Yes; he called yesterday to show me the things that he had found in the pond. Of course they were not mine, and he seemed to have no doubt—and I think he is right—that they belonged to the—to the—”

“Murderer,” said Miss Boler.

“Yes. He seemed to think that they might furnish some kind of clue, but I am afraid he had nothing very clear in his mind. I suppose that coin suggested nothing to you?”

Miss D’Arblay shook her head. “Nothing,” she replied. “As it is an ancient coin, the man may be a collector or a dealer—”

“Or a forger,” interposed Miss Boler.

“Or a forger. But no such person is known to us. And even that is mere guess-work.”

“Your father was not interested in coins, then?”

“As a sculptor, yes, and more especially in medals and plaquettes. But not as a collector. He had no desire to possess; only to create. And so far as I know, he was not acquainted with any collectors. So this discovery of the inspector’s, so far from solving the mystery, only adds a fresh problem.”

She reflected for a few moments with knitted brows; then, turning to me quickly, she asked: “Did the inspector take you into his confidence at all? He was very reticent with me, though most kind and sympathetic. But do you think that he, or the others, are taking any active measures?”

“My impression,” I answered reluctantly, “is that the police are not in a position to do anything. The truth is that this villain seems to have got away without leaving a trace.”

“That is what I feared,” she sighed. Then with sudden passion, though in a quiet, suppressed voice, she exclaimed: “But he must not escape! It would be too hideous an injustice. Nothing can bring back my dear father from the grave; but if there is a God of Justice, this murderous wretch must be called to account and made to pay the penalty of his crime.”

“He must,” Miss Boler assented in deep, ominous tones, “and he shall; though God knows how it is to be done.”

“For the present,” said I, “there is nothing to be done but to wait and see if the police are able to obtain any fresh information; and meanwhile to turn over every circumstance that you can think of; to recall the way your father spent his time, the people he knew and the possibility in each case that some cause of enmity may have arisen.”

“That is what I have done,” said Miss D’Arblay. “Every night I lie awake, thinking, thinking; but nothing comes of it. The thing is incomprehensible. This man must have been a deadly enemy of my father’s. He must have hated him with the most intense hatred; or he must have had some strong reason, other than mere hatred, for making away with him. But I cannot imagine any person hating my father and I certainly have no knowledge of any such person; nor can I conceive of any reason that any human creature could have had for wishing for my father’s death. I cannot begin to understand the meaning of what has happened.”

“But yet,” said I, “there must be a meaning. This man—unless he was a lunatic, which he apparently was not—must have had a motive for committing the murder. That motive must have had some background, some connexion with circumstances of which somebody has knowledge. Sooner or later those circumstances will almost certainly come to light and then the motive for the murder will come into view. But, once the motive is known, it should not be difficult to discover who could be influenced by such a motive. Let us, for the present, be patient and see how events shape; but let us also keep a constant watch for any glimmer of light, for any fact that may bear on either the motive or the person.”

The two women looked at me earnestly and with an expression of respectful confidence of which I knew myself to be wholly undeserving.

“It gives me new courage,” said Miss D’Arblay, “to hear you speak in that reasonable, confident tone. I was in despair, but I feel that you are right. There must be some explanation of this awful thing; and if there is, it must be possible to discover it. But we ought not to put the burden of our troubles on you, though you have been so kind.”

“You have done me the honour,” said I, “to allow me to consider myself your friend. Surely friends should help to bear one another’s burdens.”

“Yes,” she replied, “in reason; and you have given most generous help already. But we must not put too much on you. When my father was alive, he was my great interest and chief concern. Now that he is gone, the great purpose of my life is to find the wretch who murdered him and to see that justice is done. That is all that seems to matter to me. But it is my own affair. I ought not to involve my friends in it.”

“I can’t admit that,” said I. “The foundation of friendship is sympathy and service. If I am your friend, then what matters to you matters to me; and I may say that in the very moment when I first knew that your father had been murdered, I made the resolve to devote myself to the discovery and punishment of his murderer by any means that lay in my power. So you must count me as your ally as well as your friend.”

As I made this declaration—to an accompaniment of approving growls from Miss Boler—Marion D’Arblay gave me one quick glance and then looked down, and once more her eyes filled. For a few moments she made no reply, and when, at length, she spoke, her voice trembled.

“You leave me nothing to say,” she murmured, “but to thank you from my heart. But you little know what it means to us, who felt so helpless, to know that we have a friend so much wiser and stronger than ourselves.”

I was a little abashed, knowing my own weakness and helplessness, to find her putting so much reliance on me. However, there was Thorndyke in the background, and now I was resolved that, if the thing was in any way to be compassed, his help must be secured without delay.

A longish pause followed; and as it seemed to me that there was nothing more to say on this subject until I had seen Thorndyke, I ventured to open a fresh topic.

“What will happen to your father’s practice?” I asked. “Will you be able to get anyone to carry it on for you?”

“I am glad you asked that,” said Miss D’Arblay, “because, now that you are our counsellor, we can take your opinion. I have already talked the matter over with Arabella—with Miss Boler.”

“There’s no need to stand on ceremony,” the latter lady interposed. “Arabella is good enough for me.”

“Arabella is good enough for anyone,” said Miss D’Arblay. “Well, the position is this. The part of my father’s practice that was concerned with original work—pottery figures and reliefs and models for goldsmith’s work—will have to go. No one but a sculptor of his own class could carry that on. But the wax figures for the shop-windows are different. When he first started, he used to model the heads and limbs in clay and make plaster casts from which to make the gelatine moulds for the waxwork. But as time went on, these casts accumulated and he very seldom had need to model fresh beads or limbs. The old casts could be used over and over again. Now there is a large collection of plaster models in the studio-heads, arms, legs and faces, especially faces—and as I have a fair knowledge of the waxwork, from watching my father and sometimes helping him, it seemed that I might be able to carry on that part of the practice.”

“You think you could make the wax figures yourself?” I asked.

“Of course she could,” exclaimed Miss Boler. “She’s her father’s daughter. Julius D’Arblay was a man who could do anything he turned his hand to and do it well. And Miss Marion is just like him. She is quite a good modeller—so her father said; and she wouldn’t have to make the figures. Only the wax parts.”

“Then they are not wax all over?” said I.

“No,” answered Miss D’Arblay. “They are just dummies; wooden frameworks covered with stuffed canvas, with wax heads, busts and arms and shaped legs. That was just what poor Daddy used to hate about them. He would have liked to model complete figures.”

“And as to the business side. Could you dispose of them?”

“Yes, if I could do them satisfactorily. The agent who dealt with my father’s work has already written to me asking if I could carry on. I know he will help me so far as he can. He was quite fond of my father.”

“And you have nothing else in view?”

“Nothing by which I could earn a real living. For the last year or two I have worked at writing and illuminating—addresses, testimonials and church services when I could get them—and filled in the time writing special window-tickets. But that isn’t very remunerative, whereas the wax figures would yield quite a good living. And then,” she added, after a pause, “I have the feeling that Daddy would have liked me to carry on his work, and I should like it myself. He taught me quite a lot and I think he meant me to join him when he got old.”

As she had evidently made up her mind, and as her decision seemed quite a wise one, I concurred with as much enthusiasm as I could muster.

“I am glad you agree,” said she, “and I know Arabella does. So that is settled, subject to my being able to carry out the plan. And now, if we have finished, I should like to show you some of my father’s works. The house is full of them and so, even, is the garden. Perhaps we had better go there first before the light fails.”

As the treasures of this singularly interesting home were presented, one after another, for my inspection, I began to realize the truth of Miss Boler’s statement. Julius D’Arblay had been a remarkably versatile man. He had worked in all sorts of mediums and in all equally well. From the carved stone sundial and the leaden garden figures to the clock-case decorated with gilded gesso and enriched with delicate bronze plaquettes, all his works were eloquent of masterly skill and a fresh, graceful fancy. It seems to me little short of a tragedy that an artist of his ability should have spent the greater part of his time in fabricating those absurd, posturing effigies that simper and smirk so grotesquely in the enormous windows of Vanity Fair.

I had intended, in compliance with the polite conventions, to make this, my first visit, a rather short one; but a tentative movement to depart only elicited protests and I was easily persuaded to stay until the exigencies of Dr. Cornish’s practice seemed to call me. When at last I shut the gate of Ivy Cottage behind me and glanced back at the two figures standing in the lighted doorway, I had the feeling of turning away from a house with which, and its inmates, I had been familiar for years.

On my arrival at Mecklenburgh Square I found a note which had been left by hand earlier in the evening. It was from Dr. Thorndyke, asking me, if possible, to lunch with him at his chambers on the morrow. I looked over my visiting-list, and finding that Monday would be a light day—most of my days here were light days—I wrote a short letter accepting the invitation and posted it forthwith.

CHAPTER VII

THORNDYKE ENLARGES HIS KNOWLEDGE

“I am glad you were able to come,” said Thorndyke, as we took our places at the table. “Your letter was a shade ambiguous. You spoke of discussing the D’Arblay case, but I think you had something more than discussion in your mind.”

“You are quite right,” I replied. “I had it in my mind to ask if it would be possible for me to retain you—I believe that is the correct expression—to investigate the case, as the police seem to think there is nothing to go on; and if the costs would be likely to be within my means.”

“As to the costs,” said he, “we can dismiss them. I see no reason to suppose that there would be any costs.”

“But your time, sir—” I began.

He laughed derisively. “Do you propose to pay me for indulging in my pet hobby? No, my dear fellow, it is I who should pay you for bringing a most interesting and intriguing case to my notice. So your questions are answered. I shall be delighted to look into this case, and there will be no costs unless we have to pay for some special services. If we do, I will let you know.”

I was about to utter a protest, but he continued:

“And now, having disposed of the preliminaries, let us consider the case itself. Your very shrewd and capable inspector believes that the Scotland Yard people will take no active measures unless some new facts turn up. I have no doubt he is right, and I think they are right, too. They can’t spend a lot of time—which means public money—on a case in which hardly any data are available and which holds out no promise of any result. But we mustn’t forget that we are in the same boat. Our chances of success are infinitesimal. This investigation is a forlorn hope. That, I may say, is what commends it to me; but I want you to understand clearly that failure is what we have to expect.”

“I understand that,” I answered gloomily, but nevertheless rather disappointed at this pessimistic view. “There seems to be nothing whatever to go upon.”

“Oh, it isn’t so bad as that,” he rejoined. “Let us just run over the data that we have. Our object is to fix the identity of the man who killed Julius D’Arblay. Let us see what we know about him. We will begin with the evidence at the inquest. From that we learned: One. That he is a man of some education, ingenious, subtle, resourceful. This murder was planned with extraordinary ingenuity and foresight. The body was found in the pond with no tell-tale mark on it but an almost invisible pin-prick in the back. The chances were a thousand to one, or more, against that tiny puncture ever being observed; and if it had not been observed, the verdict would have been ‘found drowned’ or ‘found dead’ and the fact of the murder would never have been discovered.

“Two. We also learned that he has some knowledge of poisons. The common, vulgar poisoner is reduced to flypapers, weed-killer or rat-poison—arsenic or strychnine. But this man selects the most suitable of all poisons for his purpose and administers it in the most effective manner—with a hypodermic syringe.

“Three. We learned further that he must have had some extraordinarily strong reason for making away with D’Arblay. He made most elaborate plans, he took endless trouble—for instance, it must have been no easy matter to get possession of that quantity of aconitine (unless he were a doctor, which God forbid!). That strong reason—the motive, in fact—is the key of the problem. It is the murderer’s one vulnerable point, for it can hardly be beyond discovery; and its discovery must be our principal objective.”

I nodded, not without some self-congratulation as I recalled how I had made this very point in my talk with Miss D’Arblay.

“Those,” Thorndyke continued, “are the data that the inquest furnished. Now we come to those added by Inspector Follett.”

“I don’t see that they help us at all,” said I. “The ancient coin was a curious find, but it doesn’t appear to tell us anything new excepting that this man may have been a collector or a dealer. On the other hand, he may not. It doesn’t seem to me that the coin has any significance.”

“Doesn’t it really?” said Thorndyke, as he refilled my glass. “You are surely overlooking the very curious coincidence that it presents?”

“What coincidence is that?” I asked, in some surprise.

“The coincidence,” he replied, “that both the murderer and the victim should be, to a certain extent, connected with a particular form of activity. Here is a man who commits a murder and who at the time of committing it appears to have been in possession of a coin, which is not a current coin but a collector’s piece; and behold! the murdered man is a sculptor—a man who, presumably, was capable of making a coin, or at least the working model.”

“There is no evidence,” I objected, “that D’Arblay was capable of cutting a die. He was not a die-sinker.”

“There was no need for him to be,” Thorndyke rejoined. “Formerly, the medallist who designed the coin cut the die himself. But that is not the modern practice. Nowadays, the designer makes the model, first in wax and then in plaster, on a comparatively large scale. The model of a shilling may be three inches or more in diameter. The actual die-sinking is done by a copying machine which produces a die of the required size by mechanical reduction. I think there can be no doubt that D’Arblay could have modelled the design for a coin on the usual scale, say three or four inches in diameter.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “he certainly could, for I have seen some of his small relief work, some little plaquettes, not more than two inches long and most delicately and beautifully modelled. But still I don’t see the connexion, otherwise than as a rather odd coincidence.”

“There may be nothing more,” said he. “There may be nothing in it at all. But odd coincidences should always be noted with very special attention.”

“Yes, I realize that. But I can’t imagine what significance there could be in the coincidence.”

“Well,” said Thorndyke, “let us take an imaginary case, just as an illustration. Suppose this man to have been a fraudulent dealer in antiquities, and suppose him to have obtained enlarged photographs of a medal or coin of extreme rarity and of great value, which was in some museum or private collection. Suppose him to have taken the photographs to D’Arblay and commissioned him to model from them a pair of exact replicas in hardened plaster. From those plaster models he could, with a copying machine, produce a pair of dies with which he could strike replicas in the proper metal and of the exact size; and these could be sold for large sums to judiciously-chosen collectors.”

“I don’t believe D’Arblay would have accepted such a commission,” I exclaimed indignantly.

“We may assume that he would not, if the fraudulent intent had been known to him. But it would not have been, and there is no reason why he should have refused a commission merely to make a copy. Still, I am not suggesting that anything of the kind really happened. I am simply giving you an illustration of one of the innumerable ways in which a perfectly honest sculptor might be made use of by a fraudulent dealer. In that case, his honesty would be a source of danger to him, for if a really great fraud were perpetrated by means of his work, it would clearly be to the interest of the perpetrator to get rid of him. An honest and unconscious collaborator in a crime is apt to be a dangerous witness if questions arise.”

I was a good deal impressed by this demonstration. Here, it seemed to me, was something very like a tangible clue. But at this point Thorndyke again applied a cold douche.

“Still,” he said, “we are only dealing with generalities, and rather speculative ones. Our assumptions are subject to all sorts of qualifications. It is possible, for instance, though very improbable, that D’Arblay may have been murdered in error by a perfect stranger; that he may have walked into an ambush prepared for someone else. Again, the coin may not have belonged to the murderer at all, though that is also most improbable. But there are numerous possibilities of error; and we can eliminate them only by following up each suggested clue and seeking verification or disproof. Every new fact that we learn is a multiple gain. For as money makes money, so knowledge begets knowledge.”

“That is very true,” I answered dejectedly—for it sounded rather like a platitude; “but I don’t see any means of following up any of these clues.”

“We are going to follow up one of them after lunch, if you have time,” said he. As he spoke, he took from the table-drawer a paper packet and a jeweller’s leather case. “This,” he said, handing me the packet, “contains your sealing-wax moulds. You had better take care of them and keep the box with the marked side up to prevent the wax from warping. Here are a pair of casts in hardened plaster-’fictile ivory’ as it is called—which my assistant, Polton, has made.”

He opened the case and passed it to me, when I saw that it was lined with purple velvet and contained what looked like two old ivory replicas of the mysterious coin.

“Mr. Polton is quite an artist,” I said, regarding them admiringly. “But what are you going to do with these?”

“I had intended to take them round to the British Museum and show them to the Keeper of the Coins and Medals, or one of his colleagues. But I think I will just ask a few questions and hear what he says before I produce the casts. Have you time to come round with me?”

“I shall make time. But what do you want to know about the coin?”

“It is just a matter of verification,” he replied. “My books on the British coinage describe the Charles the Second guinea as having a tiny elephant under the bust on the obverse, to show that the gold from which it was minted came from the Guinea Coast.”

“Yes,” said I. “Well, there is a little elephant under the bust in this coin.”

“True,” he replied. “But this elephant has a castle on his back and would ordinarily be described as an elephant and castle, to distinguish him from the plain elephant which appeared on some coins. What I want to ascertain is whether there were two different types of guinea. The books make no mention of a second variety.”

“Surely they would have referred to it if there had been,” said I.

“So I thought,” he replied; “but it is better to make sure than to think.”

“I suppose it is,” I agreed without much conviction, “though I don’t see that, even if there were two varieties, that fact would have any bearing on what we want to know.”

“Neither do I,” he admitted. “But then you can never tell what a fact will prove until you are in possession of the fact. And now, as we seem to have finished, perhaps we had better make our way to the Museum.”

The Department of Coins and Medals is associated in my mind with an impassive-looking Chinese person in bronze who presides over the upper landing of the main staircase. In fact, we halted for a moment before him to exchange a final word.

“It will probably be best,” said Thorndyke, “to say nothing about this coin, or, indeed, about anything else. We don’t want to enter into any explanations.”

“No,” I agreed. “It is best to keep one’s own counsel,” and with this we entered the hall, where Thorndyke led the way to a small door and pressed the electric bell-push. An attendant admitted us, and when we had signed our names in the visitors’ book, he ushered us into the keeper’s room. As we entered, a keen-faced, middle-aged man who was seated at a table inspected us over his spectacles, and apparently recognizing Thorndyke, rose and held out his hand.

“Quite a long time since I have seen you,” he remarked after the preliminary greetings. “I wonder what your quest is this time.”

“It is a very simple one,” said Thorndyke. “I am going to ask you if you can let me look at a Charles the Second guinea dated 1663.”

“Certainly I can,” was the reply, accompanied by an inquisitive glance at my friend. “It is not a rarity, you know.”

He crossed the room to a large cabinet, and having run his eye over the multitudinous labels, drew out a small, very shallow drawer. With this in his hand, he returned, and picking a coin out of its circular pit, held it out to Thorndyke, who took it from him, holding it delicately by the edges. He looked at it attentively for a few moments, and then silently presented the obverse for my inspection. Naturally my eye at once sought the little elephant under the bust, and there it was, but there was no castle on its back.

“Is this the only type of guinea issued at that date?” Thorndyke asked.

“The only type—with or without the elephant, according to the source of the gold.”

“There was no variation or alternative form?”

“No.”

“I notice that this coin has a plain elephant under the bust; but I seem to have heard of a guinea, bearing this date, which had an elephant and castle under the bust. You are sure there was no such guinea?”

Our official friend shook his head as he took the coin from Thorndyke and replaced it in its cell. “As sure,” he replied, “as one can be of a universal negative.” He picked up the drawer and was just moving away towards the cabinet when there came a sudden change in his manner.

“Wait!” he exclaimed, stopping and putting down the drawer. “You are quite right. Only it was not an issue; it was a trial piece, and only a single coin was struck. I will tell you about it. There is a rather curious story hanging to that piece.

“This guinea, as you probably know, was struck from dies cut by John Roettier and was one of the first coined by the mill-and-screw process in place of the old hammer-and-pile method. Now, when Roettier had finished the dies, a trial piece was struck; and in striking that piece, the obverse die cracked right across, but apparently only at the last turn of the screw, for the trial piece was quite perfect. Of course Roettier had to cut a new die; and for some reason he made a slight alteration. The first die had an elephant and castle under the bust. In the second one he changed this to a plain elephant. So your impression was, so far, correct; but the coin, if it still exists, is absolutely unique.”

“Is it not known, then, what became of that trial piece?”

“Oh, yes—up to a point. That is the queerest part of the story. For a time it remained in the possession of the Slingsby family—Slingsby was the Master of the Mint when it was struck. Then it passed through the hands of various collectors and finally was bought by an American collector named Van Zellen. Now, Van Zellen was a millionaire and his collection was a typical millionaire’s collection. It consisted entirely of things of enormous value which no ordinary man could afford or of unique things of which nobody could possibly have a duplicate. It seems that he was a rather solitary man and that he spent most of his evenings alone in his museum, gloating over his possessions.

“One morning Van Zellen was found dead in the little study attached to the museum. That was about eighteen months ago. There was an empty champagne bottle on the table and a half-emptied glass, which smelt of bitter almonds, and in his pocket was an empty phial labelled Hydrocyanic Acid. At first it was assumed that he had committed suicide; but when, later, the collection was examined, it was found that a considerable part of it was missing. A clean sweep had been made of the gems, jewels and other portable objects of value, and, among other things, this unique trial guinea had vanished. Surely you remember the case?”

“Yes,” replied Thorndyke. “I do, now you mention it; but I never heard what was stolen. Do you happen to know what the later developments were?”

“There were none. The identity of the murderer was never discovered, and not a single item of the stolen property has ever been traced. To this day the crime remains an impenetrable mystery—unless you know something about it?,” and again our friend cast an inquisitive glance at Thorndyke.

“My practice,” the latter, plied, “does not extend to the United States. Their own very efficient investigators seem to be able to do all that is necessary. But I am very much obliged to you for having given us so much of your time, to say nothing of this extremely interesting information. I shall make a note of it; for American crime occasionally has its repercussions on this side.”

I secretly admired the adroit way in which Thorndyke had evaded the rather pointed question without making any actual misstatement. But the motive for the evasion was not very obvious to me. I was about to put a question on the subject, but he anticipated it, for, as soon as we were outside, he remarked with a chuckle: “It is just as well that we didn’t begin by exhibiting the casts. We could hardly have sworn our friend to secrecy, seeing that the original is undoubtedly stolen property.”

“But aren’t you going to draw the attention of the police to the fact?”

“I think not,” he replied. “They have got the original, and no doubt they have a list of the stolen property. We must assume that they will make use of their knowledge; but if they don’t, it may be all the better for us. The police are very discreet; but they do sometimes give the Press more information than I should. And what is told to the Press is told to the criminal.”

“And why not?” I asked. “What is the harm of his knowing?”

“My dear Gray!” exclaimed Thorndyke. “You surprise me. Just consider the position. This man aimed at being entirely unsuspected. That failed. But still his identity is unknown, and he is probably confident that it will never be ascertained. Then he is, so far, off his guard. There is no need for him to disappear or go into hiding. But let him know that he is being tracked and he will almost certainly take fresh precautions against discovery. Probably he will slip away beyond our reach. Our aim must be to encourage him in a feeling of perfect security; and that aim commits us to the strictest secrecy. No one must know what cards we hold or that we hold any; or even that we are taking a hand.”

“What about Miss D’Arblay?” I asked anxiously. “May I not tell her that you are working on her behalf?”

He looked at me somewhat dubiously. “It would obviously be better not to,” he said, “but that might seem a little unfriendly and unsympathetic.”

“It would be an immense relief to her to know that you are trying to help her, and I think you could trust her to keep your secrets.”

“Very well,” he conceded. “But warn her very thoroughly. Remember that our antagonist is hidden from us. Let us remain hidden from him, so far as our activities are concerned.”

“I will make her promise absolute secrecy,” I agreed; and then, with a slight sense of anti-climax, I added: “But we don’t seem to have so very much to conceal. This curious story of the stolen coin is interesting, but it doesn’t appear to get us any more forward.”

“Doesn’t it?” he asked. “Now, I was just congratulating myself on the progress that we had made; on the way in which we are narrowing down the field of inquiry. Let us trace our progress. When you found the body, there was no evidence as to the cause of death, no suspicion of any agent whatever. Then came the inquest demonstrating the cause of death and bringing into view a person of unknown identity but having certain distinguishing characteristics. Then Follett’s discovery added some further characteristics and suggested certain possible motives for the crime. But still there was no hint as to the person’s identity or position in life. Now we have good evidence that he is a professional criminal of a dangerous type, that he is connected with another crime and with a quantity of easily-identified stolen property. We also know that he was in America about eighteen months ago, and we can easily get exact information as to dates and locality. This man is no longer a mere formless shadow. He is in a definite category of possible persons.”

“But,” I objected, “the fact that he had the coin in his possession does not prove that he is the man who stole it.”

“Not by itself,” Thorndyke agreed. “But taken in conjunction with the crime, it is almost conclusive. You appear to be overlooking the striking similarity of the two crimes. Each was a violent murder committed by means of poison; and in each case the poison selected was the most suitable one for the purpose. The one, aconitine, was calculated to escape detection; the other, hydrocyanic acid—the most rapidly-acting of all poisons—was calculated to produce almost instant death in a man who was probably struggling and might have raised an alarm. I think we arc fairly justified in assuming that the murderer of Van Zellen was the murderer of D’Arblay. If that is so, we have two groups of circumstances to investigate, two tracks by which to follow him; and sooner or later, I feel confident, we shall be able to give him a name. Then, if we have kept our own counsel, and he is unconscious of the pursuit, we shall be able to lay our hands on him. But here we are at the Foundling Hospital. It is time for each of us to get back to the routine of duty.”

CHAPTER VIII

SIMON BENDELOW, DECEASED

It was near the close of my incumbency of Dr. Cornish’s practice—indeed, Cornish had returned on the previous evening—that my unsatisfactory attendance on Mr. Simon Bendelow came to an end. It had been a wearisome affair. In medical practice, perhaps even more than in most human activities, continuous effort calls for the sustenance of achievement. A patient who cannot be cured or even substantially relieved is of all patients the most depressing. Week after week I had made my fruitless visits, had watched the silent, torpid sufferer grow yet more shrivelled and wasted, speculating even a little impatiently on the possible duration of his long-drawn-out passage to the grave. But at last the end came.

“Good morning, Mrs. Morris,” I said as that grim female opened the door and surveyed me impassively, “and how is our patient today?”

“He isn’t our patient any longer,” she replied. “He’s dead.”

“Ha!” I exclaimed. “Well, it had to be, sooner or later. Poor Mr. Bendelow! When did he die?”

“Yesterday afternoon, about five,” she answered.

“H’m! If you had sent me a note, I could have brought the certificate. However, I can post it to you. Shall I go up and have a look at him?”

“You can if you like,” she replied. “But the ordinary certificate won’t be enough in his case. He is going to be cremated.”

“Oh, indeed,” said I, once more unpleasantly conscious of my inexperience. “What sort of certificate is required for cremation?”

“Oh, all sorts of formalities have to be gone through,” she answered. “Just come into the drawing-room and I will tell you what has to be done.”

She preceded me along the passage and I followed meekly, anathematizing myself for my ignorance, and my instructors for having sent me forth crammed with academic knowledge but with the practical business of my profession all to learn.

“Why are you having him cremated?” I asked, as we entered the room and shut the door.

“Because it is one of the provisions of his will,” she answered. “I may as well let you see it.”

She opened a bureau and took from it a foolscap envelope from which she drew out a folded document. This she first unfolded and then re-folded so that its concluding clauses were visible, and laid it on the flap of the bureau. Placing her finger on it, she said: “That is the cremation clause. You had better read it.”

I ran my eye over the clause, which read: “I desire that my body shall be cremated and I appoint Sarah Elizabeth Morris the wife of the aforesaid James Morris to be the residuary legatee and sole executrix of this my will.” Then followed the attestation clause, underneath which was the shaky but characteristic signature of Simon Bendelow, and opposite this the signatures of the witnesses, Anne Dewsnep and Martha Bonnington, both described as spinsters and both of a joint address which was hidden by the folding of the document.

“So much for that,” said Mrs. Morris, returning the will to its envelope; “and now as to the certificate. There is a special form for cremation which has to be signed by two doctors, and one of them must be a hospital doctor or a consultant. So I wrote off at once to Dr. Cropper, as he knew the patient, and I have had a telegram from him this morning saying that he will be here this evening at eight o’clock to examine the body and sign the certificate. Can you manage to meet him at that time?”

“Yes,” I replied, “fortunately I can, as Dr. Cornish is back.”

“Very well,” said she; “then in that case you needn’t go up now. You will be able to make the examination together. Eight o’clock, sharp, remember.”

With this she re-conducted me along the passage and—I had almost said ejected me; but she sped the parting guest with a business-like directness that was perhaps accounted for by the presence opposite the door of one of those grim parcels-delivery vans in which undertakers distribute their wares, and from which a rough—looking coffin was at the moment being hoisted out by two men.

The extraordinary promptitude of this proceeding so impressed me that I remarked: “They haven’t been long making the coffin.”

“They didn’t have to make it,” she replied. “I ordered it a month ago. It’s no use leaving things to the last moment.”

I turned away with somewhat mixed feelings. There was certainly a horrible efficiency about this woman. Executrix indeed! Her promptness in carrying out the provisions of the will was positively appalling. She must have written to Cropper before the breath was fairly out of poor Bendelow’s body, but her forethought in the matter of the coffin fairly made my flesh creep.

Dr. Cornish made no difficulty about taking over the evening consultations, in fact he had intended to do so in any case. Accordingly, after a rather early dinner, I made my way in leisurely fashion back to Hoxton, where, after all, I arrived fully ten minutes too soon. I realized my prematureness when I halted at the corner of Market Street to look at my watch; and as ten additional minutes of Mrs. Morris’s society offered no allurement, I was about to turn back and fill up the time with short walk when my attention was arrested by a mast which had just appeared above the wall at the end of the street. With its black—painted truck and halyard blocks and its long tricolour pennant, it looked like the mast of a Dutch schuyt or galliot, but I could hardly believe it possible that such a craft could make its appearance in the heart of London. All agog with curiosity, I hurried up the street and looked over the wall at the canal below; and there, sure enough, she was—a big Dutch sloop, broad-bosomed, massive and mediaeval, just such a craft as one may see in the pictures of old Vandervelde, painted when Charles the Second was king.

I leaned on the low wall and watched her with delighted interest as she crawled forward slowly to her berth, bringing with her, as it seemed, a breath of the distant sea and the echo of the surf murmuring on sandy beaches. I noted appreciatively her old-world air, her antique build, her gay and spotless paint and the muslin curtains in the little windows of her deck-house, and was, in fact, so absorbed in watching her that the late Simon Bendelow had passed completely out of my mind. Suddenly, however, the chiming of a clock recalled me to my present business. With a hasty glance at my watch, I tore myself away reluctantly, darted across the street and gave a vigorous pull at the bell.

Dr. Cropper had not yet arrived, but the deceased had not been entirely neglected, for when I had spent some five minutes staring inquisitively about the drawing-room into which Mrs. Morris had shown me, that lady returned, accompanied by two other ladies whom she introduced to me somewhat informally by the names of Miss Dewsnep and Miss Bonnington respectively. I recognized the names as those of the two witnesses to the will and inspected them with furtive curiosity, though, indeed, they were quite unremarkable excepting as typical specimens of the genus elderly spinster.

“Poor Mr. Bendelow!” murmured Miss Dewsnep, shaking her head and causing an artificial cherry on her bonnet to waggle idiotically. “How beautiful he looks in his coffin!”

She looked at me as if for confirmation, so that I was fain to admit that his beauty in this new setting had not yet been revealed to me.

“So peaceful,” she added, with another shake of her head, and Miss Bonnington chimed in with the comment, “Peaceful and restful.” Then they both looked at me and I mumbled indistinctly that I had no doubt he did; the fact being that the inmates of coffins are not in general much addicted to boisterous activity.

“Ah!” Miss Dewsnep resumed, “how little did I think when I first saw him, sitting up in bed so cheerful in that nice, sunny room in the house at—”

“Why not?” interrupted Mrs. Morris. “Did you think he was going to live for ever?”

“No, Mrs. Morris, ma’am,” was the dignified reply, “I did not. No such idea ever entered my head. I know too well that we mortals are all born to be gathered in at last as the—er—as the—”

“Sparks fly upwards,” murmured Miss Bonnington. “As the corn is gathered in at harvest-time,” Miss Dewsnep continued with slight emphasis. “But not to be cast into a burning fiery furnace. When I first saw him in the other house at—”

“I don’t see what objection you need have to cremation,” interrupted Mrs. Morris. “It was his own choice, and a good one, too. Look at those great cemeteries. What sense is there in letting the dead occupy the space that is wanted for the living?”

“Well,” said Miss Dewsnep, “I may be old-fashioned, but it does seem to me that a nice quiet funeral with plenty of flowers and a proper, decent grave in a churchyard is the natural end to a human life. That is what I look forward to, myself.”

“Then you are not likely to be disappointed,” said Mrs. Morris; “though I don’t quite see what satisfaction you expect to get out of your own funeral.”

Miss Dewsnep made no reply, and an interval of dismal silence followed. Mrs. Morris was evidently impatient of Dr. Cropper’s unpunctuality. I could see that she was listening intently for the sound of the bell, as she had been even while the conversation was in progress; indeed I had been dimly conscious all the while of a sense of tension and anxiety on her part. She had seemed to me to watch her two friends with a sort of uneasiness and to give a quite uncalled-for attention to their rather trivial utterances.

At length her suspense was relieved by a loud ringing of the bell. She started up and opened the door, but she had barely crossed the threshold when she suddenly turned back and addressed me.

“That will be Dr. Cropper. Perhaps you had better come out with me and meet him.”

It struck me as an odd suggestion, but I rose without comment and followed her along the passage to the street door, which we reached just as another loud peal of the bell sounded in the house behind us. She flung the door wide open and a small, spectacled man charged in and seized my hand, which he shook with violent cordiality.

“How do you do, Mr. Morris?” he exclaimed. “So sorry to keep you waiting, but I was unfortunately detained at a consultation.”

Here Mrs. Morris sourly intervened to explain who I was; upon which he shook my hand again and expressed his joy at making my acquaintance. He also made polite inquiries as to our hostess’s health, which she acknowledged gruffly over her shoulder as she preceded us along the passage; which was now pitch-dark and where Cropper dropped his hat and trod on it, finally bumping his head against the unseen wall in a frantic effort to recover it.

When we emerged into the dimly-lighted hall, I observed the two ladies peering inquisitively out of the drawing-room door. But Mrs. Morris took no notice of them, leading the way directly up the stairs to the room with which I was already familiar. It was poorly illuminated by a single gasbracket over the fireplace, but the light was enough to show us a coffin resting on three chairs and beyond it the shadowy figure of a man whom I recognized as Mr. Morris.

We crossed the room to the coffin, which was plainly finished with zinc fastenings, in accordance with the regulations of the crematorium authorities, and had let into the top what I first took to be a pane of glass, but which turned out to be a plate of clear celluloid. When we had made our salutations to Mr. Morris, Cropper and I looked in through the celluloid window. The yellow, shrunken face of the dead man, surmounted by the skull-cap which he had always worn, looked so little changed that he might still have been in the drowsy, torpid state in which I had been accustomed to see him. He had always looked so like a dead man that the final transition was hardly noticeable.

“I suppose,” said Morris, “you would like to have the coffin-lid taken off?”

“God bless my soul, yes!” exclaimed Cropper. “What are we here for? We shall want him out of the coffin, too.”

“Are you proposing to make a post-mortem?” I asked, observing that Dr. Cropper had brought a good-sized handbag. “It seems hardly necessary, as we both know what he died of.”

Cropper shook his head. “That won’t do,” said he. “You mustn’t treat a cremation certificate as a mere formality. We have got to certify that we have verified the cause of death. Looking at a body through a window is not verifying the cause of death. We should cut a pretty figure in a court of law if any question arose and we had to admit that we had certified without any examination at all. But we needn’t do much, you know. Just get the body out on the bed and a single small incision will settle the nature of the growth. Then everything will be regular and in order. I hope you don’t mind, Mrs. Morris,” he added suavely, turning to that lady.

“You must do what you think necessary,” she replied indifferently. “It is no affair of mine;” and with this she went out of the room and shut the door.

While we had been speaking, Mr. Morris, who apparently had kept a screw-driver in readiness for the possible contingency, had been neatly extracting the screws and now lifted off the coffin-lid. Then the three of us raised the shrivelled body—it was as light as a child’s—and laid it on the bed. I left Cropper to do what he thought necessary, and while he was unpacking his instruments I took the opportunity to have a good look at Mr. Morris, for it is a singular fact that in all the weeks of my attendance at this house I had never come into contact with him since that first morning when I had caught a momentary glimpse of him as he looked out over the blind through the glazed shop-door. In the interval his appearance had changed considerably for the better. He was no longer a merely unshaved man; his beard had grown to respectable length, and, so far as I could judge in the uncertain light, the hare-lip scar was completely concealed by his moustache.

“Let me see,” said Cropper, as he polished a scalpel on the palm of his hand, “when did you say Mr. Bendelow died?”

“Yesterday afternoon at about five o’clock,” replied Mr. Morris.

“Did he really?” said Cropper, lifting one of the limp arms and letting it drop on the bed. “Yesterday afternoon! Now, Gray, doesn’t that show how careful one should be in giving opinions as to the time that has elapsed since death? If I had been shown this body and asked how long the man had been dead, I should have said three or four days. There isn’t the least trace of rigor mortis left; and the other appearances—but there it is. You are never safe in giving dogmatic opinions.”

“No,” I agreed. “I should have said he had been dead more than twenty-four hours. But I suppose there is a good deal of variation.”

“There is,” he replied. “You can’t apply ‘averages to particular cases.”

I did not consider it necessary to take any active part in the proceedings. It was his diagnosis and it was for him to verify it. At his request Mr. Morris fetched a candle and held it as he was directed; and while these preparations were in progress I looked out of the window, which commanded a partial view of the canal. The moon had now risen and its light fell on the white-painted hull of the Dutch sloop, which had come to rest and made fast alongside a small wharf. It was quite a pleasant picture, strangely at variance with the squalid neighbourhood around. As I looked down on the little vessel, with the ruddy light glowing from the deck-house windows and casting shimmering reflections in the quiet water, the sight seemed to carry me far away from the sordid streets around into the fellowship of the breezy ocean and the far-away shores whence the little craft had sailed, and I determined, as soon as our business was finished, to seek some access to the canal and indulge myself with a quiet stroll in the moonlight along the deserted towing-path.

“Well, Gray,” said Cropper, standing up with the scalpel and forceps in his hands, “there it is, if you want to see it. Typical carcinoma. Now we can sign the certificates with a clear conscience. I’ll just put in a stitch or two and then we can put him back in his coffin. I suppose you have got the forms?”

“They are downstairs,” said Mr. Morris. “When we have got him back, I will show you the way down.”

This, however, was unnecessary, as there was only one staircase and I was not a stranger. Accordingly, when we had replaced the body, we took our leave of Mr. Morris and departed, and glancing back as I passed out of the door, I saw him driving in the screws with the ready skill of a cabinet-maker.

The filling up of the forms was a portentous business which was carried out in the drawing-room under the superintendence of Mrs. Morris and was watched with respectful interest by the two spinsters. When it was finished and I had handed the registration certificate to Mrs. Morris, Cropper gathered up the forms B and C and slipped them into a long envelope on which the Medical Referee’s address was printed.

“I will post this off tonight,” said he; “and you will send in Form A, Mrs. Morris, when you have filled it in.”

“I have sent it off already,” she replied.

“Good,” said Dr. Cropper. “Then that is all; and now I must run away. Can I put you down anywhere. Gray?”

“Thank you, no,” I replied. “I thought of taking a walk along the tow-path, if you can tell me how to get down to it, Mrs. Morris.”

“I can’t,” she replied. “But when Dr. Cropper has gone, I will run up and ask my husband. I daresay he knows.”

We escorted Cropper along the passage to the door, which he reached without mishap, and having seen him into his brougham, turned back to the hall, where Mrs. Morris ascended the stairs and I went into the drawing-room; where the two spinsters appeared to be preparing for departure. In a couple of minutes Mrs. Morris returned, and seeing both the ladies standing, said: “You are not going yet. Miss Dewsnep. You must have some refreshment before you go. Besides, I thought you wanted to see Mr. Bendelow again.”

“So we should,” said Miss Dewsnep. “Just a little peep, to see how he looks after—”

“I will take you up in a minute,” interrupted Mrs. Morris. “When Dr. Gray has gone.” Then addressing me, she said: “My husband says that you can get down to the tow-path through that alley nearly opposite. There is a flight of steps at the end which come right out on the path.”

I thanked her for the direction, and, having bidden farewell to the spinsters, was once more escorted along the passage and finally launched into the outer world.

CHAPTER IX

A STRANGE MISADVENTURE

Although I had been in harness but a few weeks, it was with a pleasant sense of freedom that I turned from the door and crossed the road towards the alley. My time was practically my own, for, though I was remaining with Dr. Cornish until the end of the week, he was now in charge and my responsibilities were at an end.

The alley was entered by an arched opening so narrow that I had never suspected it of being a public thoroughfare, and I now threaded it with my shoulders almost touching the walls. Whither it finally led I have no idea, for when I reached another arched opening in the left—hand wall and saw that this gave on a flight of stone steps, I descended the latter and found myself on the tow-path. At the foot of the steps I stood awhile and looked about me. The moon was nearly full and shone brightly on the opposite side of the canal, but the tow-path was in deep shadow, being flanked by a high wall, behind which were the houses of the adjoining streets. Looking back—that is, to my left—I could just make out the bridge and the adjoining buildings, all their unlovely details blotted out by the thin night-haze, which reduced them to mere flat shapes of grey. A little nearer, one or two spots of ruddy light with wavering reflections beneath them marked the cabin windows of the sloop, and her mast, rising above the grey obscurity, was clearly visible against the sky.

Naturally, I turned in that direction, sauntering luxuriously and filling my pipe as I went. Doubtless, by day the place was sordid enough in aspect—though it is hard to vulgarize a navigable waterway—but now, in the moonlit haze, the scene was almost romantic. And it was astonishingly quiet and peaceful. From above, beyond the high wall, the noises of the streets came subdued and distant like sounds from another world; but here there was neither sound nor movement. The tow-path was utterly deserted, and the only sign of human life was the glimmer of light from the sloop.

It was delightfully restful. I found myself treading the gravel lightly, not to disturb the grateful silence; and as I strolled along, enjoying my pipe, I let my thoughts ramble idly from one topic to another. Somewhere above me, in that rather mysterious house, Simon Bendelow was lying in his narrow bed, the wasted, yellow face looking out into the darkness through that queer little celluloid window, or perhaps Miss Dewsnep and her friend were even now taking their farewell peep at him. I looked up, but, of course, the house was not visible from the tow-path, nor was I now able to guess at its position.

A little farther and the hull of the sloop came clearly into view, and nearly opposite to it, on the tow-path, I could see some kind of shed or hut against the wall, with a derrick in front of it overhanging a little quay. When I had nearly reached the shed, I passed a door in the wall, which apparently communicated with some house in one of the streets above. Then I came to the shed, a small wooden building which probably served as a lighterman’s office, and I noticed that the derrick swung from one of the corner-posts. But at this moment my attention was attracted by sounds of mild revelry from across the canal. Someone in the sloop’s deck-house had burst into song.

I stepped out on to the little quay and stood at the edge, looking across at the homely curtained windows and wondering what the interior of the deck-house looked like at this moment. Suddenly my ear caught an audible creak from behind me. I was in the act of turning to see whence it came when something struck me a heavy, glancing blow on the arm, crashed to the ground and sent me flying over the edge of the quay.

Fortunately the water here as not more than four feet deep, and as I had plunged in feet first and am a good swimmer, I never lost control of myself. In a moment I was standing up with my head and shoulders out of water, not particularly alarmed, though a good deal annoyed and much puzzled as to what had happened. My first care was to recover my hat, which was floating forlornly close by, and the next was to consider how I should get ashore. My left arm was numb from the blow and was evidently useless for climbing. Moreover, the face of the quay was of smooth concrete, as was also the wall below the tow-path. But I remembered having passed a pair of boat-steps some fifty yards back and decided to make for them. I had thought of hailing the sloop, but as the droning song still came from the deck-house, it was clear that the Dutchmen had heard nothing, and I did not think it worth while to disturb them. Accordingly I set forth for the steps, walking with little difficulty over the soft, muddy bottom, keeping close to the side and steadying myself with my right hand, with which I could just reach the edge of the coping.

It seemed a long journey, for one cannot progress very fast over soft mud with the water up to one’s armpits; but at last I reached the steps and managed to scramble up on to the tow-path. There I stood for a moment or two irresolute. My first impulse was to hurry back as fast as I could and seek the Morris’s hospitality, for I was already chilled to the bone and felt as physically wretched as the proverbial cat in similar circumstances. But I was devoured by curiosity as to what had happened, and, moreover, I believed that I had dropped my stick on the quay. The latter consideration decided me, for it was a favourite stick, and I set out for the quay at a very different pace from that at which I had approached it the first time.

The mystery was solved long, before I arrived at the quay; at least it was solved in part. For the derrick, which had overhung the quay, now lay on the ground. Obviously it had fallen—and missed my head only by a matter of inches. But how had it come to fall? Again, obviously, the guy-rope had given way. As it could not have broken, seeing that the derrick was unloaded and the rope must have been strong enough to bear the last load, I was a good deal puzzled as to how the accident could have befallen. Nor was I much less puzzled when I had made my inspection. The rope was, of course, unbroken and its ‘fall’—the part below the pulley-blocks—passed into the shed through a window-like hole. This I could see as I approached, and also that a door in the end of the shed nearest to me was ajar. Opening it, I plunged into the dark interior, and partly by touch and partly by the faint glimmer that came in at the window, I was able to make out the state of affairs. Just below the hole through which the rope entered was a large cleat, on which the fall must have been belayed. But the cleat was vacant, the rope hung down from the hole and its end lay in an untidy raffle on the floor. It looked as if it had been cast off the cleat; but as there had apparently been no one in the shed, the only possible supposition was that the rope had been badly secured, that it had gradually worked loose and had at last slipped off the cleat. But it was difficult to understand how it had slipped right off.

I found my stick lying at the edge of the quay and close by it my pipe. Having recovered these treasures, I set off to retrace my steps along the tow-path, sped on my way by a jovial chorus from the sloop. A very few minutes brought me to the steps, which I ascended two at a time, and then, having traversed the alley, I came out sheepishly into Market Street. To my relief, I saw a light in Mr. Morris’s shop and could even make out a moving figure in the background. I hurried across, and, opening the glazed door, entered the shop, at the back of which Mr. Morris was seated at a bench filing some small object which was fixed in a vice. He looked round at me with no great cordiality, but suddenly observing my condition, he dropped his file on the bench and exclaimed:

“Good Lord, Doctor! What on earth have you been doing?”

“Nothing on earth,” I replied with a feeble grin, “but something in the water. I’ve been into the canal.”

“But what for?” he demanded.

“Oh, I didn’t go in intentionally,” I replied; and then I gave him a sketch of the incident, as short as I could make it, for my teeth were chattering and explanations were chilly work. However, he rose nobly to the occasion. “You’ll catch your death of cold!” he exclaimed, starting up. “Come in here and slip off your things at once while I go for some blankets.”

He led me into a little den behind the shop, and, having lighted a gas fire, went out by a back door. I lost no time in peeling off my dripping clothes, and by the time that he returned I was in the state in which I ought to have been when I took my plunge.

“Here you are,” said he. “Put on this dressing-gown and wrap yourself in the blankets. We’ll draw this chair up to the fire and then you will be all right for the present.”

I followed his directions, pouring out my thanks as well as my chattering teeth would let me.

“Oh, that’s all right,” said he. “If you will empty your pockets, the missus can put some of the things through the wringer and then they’ll soon dry. There happens to be a good fire in the kitchen, some advance cooking on account of the funeral. You can dry your hat and boots here. If anyone comes to the shop, you might just press that electric bell-push.”

When he had gone, I drew the Windsor arm-chair close to the fire and made myself as comfortable as I could, dividing my attention between my hat and my boots, which called for careful roasting, and the contents of the room. The latter appeared to be a sort of store for the reserve stock-in-trade and certainly this was a most amazing collection. I could not see a single article for which I would have given sixpence. The array on the shelves suggested that the shop had been stocked with the sweepings of all the stalls in Market Street, with those of Shoreditch High Street thrown in. As I ran my eye along the ranks of dial-less clocks, cracked fiddles, stopperless decanters and tattered theological volumes, I found myself speculating profoundly on how Mr. Morris made a livelihood. He professed to be a ‘dealer in antiques’ and there was assuredly no question as to the antiquity of the goods in this room. But there is little pecuniary value in the kind of antiquity that is unearthed from a dust-bin.

It was really rather mysterious. Mr. Morris was a somewhat superior man and he did not appear to be poor. Yet this shop did not seem capable of yielding an income that would have been acceptable to a rag-picker. And during the whole of the time in which I sat warming myself, there was not a single visitor to the shop. However, it was no concern of mine; and I had just reached this sage conclusion when Mr. Morris returned with my clothes.

“There,” he said, “they are very creased and disreputable but they are quite dry. They would have had to be cleaned and pressed in any case.”

With this he went out into the shop and resumed his filing while I put on the stiff and crumpled garments. When I was dressed, I followed him and thanked him effusively for his kind offices, leaving also a grateful message for his wife. He took my thanks rather stolidly, and having wished me ‘good night,’ picked up his file and fell to work again.

I decided to walk home; principally, I think, to avoid exhibiting myself in a public vehicle. But my self-consciousness soon wore off, and when, in the neighbourhood of Clerkenwell, I perceived Dr. Usher on the opposite side of the street, I crossed the road and touched his arm. He looked round quickly, and recognizing me, shook hands cordially. “What arc you doing on my beat at this time of night?” he asked. “You are not still at Cornish’s, are you?”

“Yes,” I answered, “but not for long. I have just made my last visit and signed the death certificate.”

“Good man,” said he. “Very methodical. Nothing like finishing a case up neatly. They didn’t invite you to the funeral, I suppose?”

“No,” I replied, “and I shouldn’t have gone if they had.”

“Quite right,” he agreed. “Funerals are rather outside medical practice. But you have to go sometimes. Policy, you know. I had to go to one a couple of days ago. Beastly nuisance it was. Chappie would insist on putting me down at my own door in the mourning coach. Meant well, of course, but it was very awkward. All the neighbours came to their shop-doors and grinned as I got out. Felt an awful fool, couldn’t grin back, you see. Had to keep up the farce to the end.”

“I don’t see that it was exactly a farce,” I objected.

“That is because you weren’t there,” he retorted. “It was the silliest exhibition you ever saw. Just think of it! The parson who ran the show actually got a lot of school-children to stand round the grave and sing a blooming hymn: something about gathering at the river—I expect you know the confounded doggerel.”

“Well, why not?” I protested. “I daresay the friends of the deceased liked it.”

“No doubt,” said he. “I expect they put the parson up to it. But it was sickening to hear those kids bleating that stuff. How did they know where he was?—an old rip with malignant disease of the pancreas, too!”

“Really, Usher,” I exclaimed, laughing at his quaint cynicism, “you are unreasonable. There are no pathological disqualifications for the better land, I hope.”

“I suppose not,” he agreed with a grin. “Don’t have to show a clean bill of health before they let you in. But it was a trying business, you must admit. I hate cant of that sort; and yet one had to pull a long face and join in the beastly chorus.”

The picture that his last words suggested was too much for my gravity. I laughed long and joyously. However, Usher was not offended; indeed I suspect that he appreciated the humour of the situation as much as I did. But he had trained himself to an outward solemnity of manner that was doubtless a valuable asset in his particular class of practice and he walked at my side with unmoved gravity, taking an occasional quick, critical look at me. When we came to the parting of our ways, he once more shook my hand warmly and delivered a little farewell speech.

“You’ve never been to see me. Gray. Haven’t had time, I suppose. But when you are free you might look me up one evening to have a smoke and a glass and talk over old times. There’s always a bit of grub going, you know.”

I promised to drop in before long, and he then added:

“I gave you one or two tips when I saw you last. Now I’m going to give you another. Never neglect your appearance. It’s a great mistake. Treat yourself with respect and the world will respect you. No need to be a dandy. But just keep an eye on your tailor and your laundress, especially your laundress. Clean collars don’t cost much, and they pay; and so does a trousers-press. People expect a doctor to be well turned out. Now, you mustn’t think me impertinent. We are old pals and I want you to get on. So long, old chap. Look me up as soon as you can,” and without giving me the opportunity to reply, he turned about and bustled off, swinging his umbrella and offering, perhaps, a not very impressive illustration of his own excellent precepts. But his words served as a reminder which caused me to pursue the remainder of my journey by way of side-streets neither too well lighted nor too much frequented.

As I let myself in with my key and closed the street-door, Cornish stepped out of the dining-room.

“I thought you were lost. Gray,” said he. “Where the deuce have you been all this time?” Then, as I came into the light of the hall-lamp, he exclaimed: “And what in the name of Fortune have you been up to?”

“I have had a wetting,” I explained. “I’ll tell you all about it presently.”

“Dr. Thorndyke is in the dining-room,” said he; “came in a few minutes ago to see you.” He seized me by the arm and ran me into the room, where I found Thorndyke methodically filling his pipe. He looked up as I entered and regarded me with raised eyebrows.

“Why, my dear fellow, you’ve been in the water!” he exclaimed. “But yet your clothes are not wet. What has been happening to you?”

“If you can wait a few minutes,” I replied, “while I wash and change, I will relate my adventures. But perhaps you haven’t time.”

“I want to hear all about it,” he replied, “so run along and be as quick as you can.”

I bustled up to my room, and having washed and executed a lightning change, came down to the dining-room, where I found Cornish in the act of setting out decanters and glasses.

“I’ve told Dr. Thorndyke what took you to Hoxton,” said he, “and he wants a full account of everything that happened. He is always suspicious of cremation cases, as you know from his lectures.”

“Yes, I remember his warnings,” said I. “But this was a perfectly commonplace, straightforward affair.”

“Did you go for your swim before or after the examination?” Thorndyke asked.

“Oh, after,” I replied.

“Then let us hear about the examination first,” said he.

On this I plunged into a detailed account of all that had befallen since my arrival at Market Street, to which Thorndyke listened, not only patiently but with the closest attention and even cross-examined me to elicit further details. Everything seemed to interest him, from the construction of the coffin to the contents of Mr. Morris’s shop. When I had finished, Cornish remarked:

“Well, it is a queer affair. I don’t understand that rope at all. Ropes don’t uncleat themselves. They may slip, but they don’t come right off the cleat. It looks more as if some mischievous fool had cast it off for a joke.”

“But there was no one there,” said I. “The shed was empty when I examined it and there was not a soul in sight on the tow-path.”

“Could you see the shed when you were in the water?” Thorndyke asked.

“No. My head was below the level of the tow-path. But if anyone had run out and made off, I must have seen him on the path when I came out. He couldn’t have got out of sight in the time. Besides, it is incredible that even a fool should play such a trick as that.”

“It is,” he agreed. “But every explanation seems incredible. The only plain fact is that it happened. It is a queer business altogether; and not the least queer feature in the case is your friend Morris. Hoxton is an unlikely place for a dealer in antiques, unless he should happen to deal in other things as well—things, I mean, of ambiguous ownership.”

“Just what I was thinking,” said Cornish. “Sounds uncommonly like a fence. However, that is no business of ours.”

“No,” agreed Thorndyke, rising and knocking out his pipe. “And now I must be going. Do you care to walk with me to the bottom of Doughty Street, Gray?”

I assented at once, suspecting that he had something to say to me that he did not wish to say before Cornish. And so it turned out; for as soon as we were outside he said:

“What I really called about was this: it seems that we have done the police an injustice. They were more on the spot than we gave them credit for. I have learned—and this is in the strictest confidence—that they took that coin round to the British Museum for the expert’s report. Then a very curious fact came to light. That coin is not the original which was stolen. It is an electrotype in gold, made in two halves very neatly soldered together and carefully worked on the milled edge to hide the join. That is extremely important in several respects. In the first place it suggests an explanation of the otherwise incredible circumstance that it was being carried loose in the waistcoat pocket. It had probably been recently obtained from the electrotyper. That suggests the question, is it possible that D’Arblay might have been that electrotyper? Did he ever work the electrotype process? We must ascertain whether he did.”

“There is no need,” said I. “It is known to me as a fact that he did. The little plaquettes that I took for castings are electrotypes, made by himself. He worked the process quite a lot and was very skilful in finishing. For instance, he did a small bust of his daughter in two parts and brazed them together.”

“Then, you see. Gray,” said Thorndyke, “that advances us considerably. We now have a plausible suggestion as to the motive and a new field of investigation. Let us suppose that this man employed D’Arblay to make electrotype copies of certain unique objects with the intention of disposing of them to collectors. The originals, being stolen property, would be almost impossible to dispose of with safety, but a copy would not necessarily incriminate the owner. But when D’Arblay had made the copies, he would be a dangerous person, for he would know who had the originals. Here, to a man whom we know to be a callous murderer, would be a sufficient reason for making away with D’Arblay.”

“But do you think that D’Arblay would have undertaken such a decidedly fishy job? It seems hardly like him.”

“Why not?” demanded Thorndyke. “There was nothing suspicious about the transaction. The man who wanted the copies was the owner of the originals, and D’Arblay would not know or suspect that they were stolen.”

“That is true,” I admitted. “But you were speaking of a new field of investigation.”

“Yes. If a number of copies of different objects have been made, there is a fair chance that some of them have been disposed of. If they have and can be traced, they will give us a start along a new line which may bring us in sight of the man himself. Do you ever see Miss D’Arblay now?”

“Oh, yes,” I replied. “I am quite one of the family at Highgate. I have been there every Sunday lately.”

“Have you!” he exclaimed with a smile. “You are a pretty locum tenens. However, if you are quite at home there you can make a few discreet inquiries. Find out, if you can, whether any electros had been made recently and, if so, what they were and who was the client. Will you do that?”

I agreed readily, only too glad to take an active part in the investigation; and having by this time reached the end of Doughty Street, I took leave of Thorndyke and made my way back to Cornish’s house.

THE D’ARBLAY MYSTERY (1926) [Part 2]

CHAPTER X

MARION’S PERIL

The mist, which had been gathering since the early afternoon, began to thicken ominously as I approached Abbey Road, Hornsey, from Crouch End station, causing me to quicken my pace so that I might make my destination before the fog closed in; for this was my first visit to Marion D’Arblay’s studio and the neighbourhood was strange to me. And in fact I was none too soon; for hardly had I set my hand on the quaint bronze knocker above the plate inscribed Mr. J. D’Arblay,—when the adjoining houses grew pale and shadowy and then vanished altogether.

My elaborate knock—in keeping with the distinguished knocker—was followed by soft, quick footsteps, the sound whereof set my heart ticking in double-quick time; the door opened and there stood Miss D’Arblay, garbed in a most alluring blue smock or pinafore, with sleeves rolled up to the elbow, with a smile of friendly welcome on her comely face and looking so sweet and charming that I yearned then and there to take her in my arms and kiss her. This, however, being inadmissible, I shook her hand warmly and was forthwith conducted through the outer lobby into the main studio, where I stood looking about me with amused surprise. She looked at me inquiringly as I emitted an audible chuckle.

“It is a queer-looking place,” said I; “something between a miracle-shrine hung with votive offerings from sufferers who have been cured of sore heads and arms and legs and a meat emporium in a cannibal district.”

“It is nothing of the kind!” she exclaimed indignantly. “I don’t mind the votive offerings, but I reject the cannibal meat-market as a gross and libellous fiction. But I suppose it does look rather queer to a stranger.”

“To a what?” I demanded fiercely.

“Oh, I only meant a stranger to the place, of course, and you know I did. So you needn’t be cantankerous.”

She glanced smilingly round the studio and for the first time, apparently, the oddity of its appearance dawned on her, for she laughed softly and then turned a mischievous eye on me as I gaped about me like a bumpkin at a fair. The studio was a very large and lofty room or hall with a partially-glazed roof and a single large window just below the skylight. The walls were fitted partly with rows of large shelves and the remainder with ranks of pegs. From the latter hung row after row of casts of arms, hands, legs and faces—especially faces—while the shelves supported a weird succession of heads, busts and a few half-length but armless figures. The general effect was very strange and uncanny, and what made it more so was the fact that all the heads presented perfectly smooth, bare craniums.

“Are artists’ models usually bald?” I inquired, as I noted this latter phenomenon.

“Now you are being foolish,” she replied—“wilfully and deliberately foolish. You know very well that all these heads have got to be fitted with wigs, and you couldn’t fit a wig to a head that already had a fine covering of plaster curls. But I must admit that it rather detracts from the beauty of a girl’s head if you represent it without hair. The models used to hate it when they were shown with heads like old gentlemen’s, and so did poor Dad—in fact he usually rendered the hair in the clay, just sketchily, for the sake of the model’s feelings and his own and took it off afterwards with a wire tool. But there is the kettle boiling over. I must make the tea.”

While this ceremony was being performed, I strolled round the studio and inspected the casts, more particularly the heads and faces. Of these latter the majority were obviously modelled, but I noticed quite a number with closed eyes, having very much the appearance of death-masks. When we had taken our places at the little table near the great gas-ring, I inquired what they were.

“They do look rather cadaverous, don’t they?” she said as she poured out the tea, “but they are not death-masks. They are casts from living faces, mostly from the faces of models, but my father always used to take a cast from anyone who would let him. They are quite useful to work from, though, of course, the eyes have to be put in from another cast or from life.”

“It must be rather an unpleasant operation:” I said “having the plaster poured all over the face. How does the victim manage to breathe?”

“The usual plan is to put little quills or tubes into the nostrils. But my father could keep the nostrils free without any tubes. He was a very skilful moulder; and then he always used the best plaster, which sets very quickly, so that it only took a few minutes.”

“And how are you getting on; and what were you doing when I came in?”

“I am getting on quite well,” she replied. “My work has been passed as satisfactory and I have three new commissions. When you came in I was just getting ready to make a mould for a head and shoulders. After tea I shall go on with it and you shall help me. But tell me about yourself. You have finished with Dr. Cornish, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I am a gentleman at large for the time being; but that won’t do. I shall have to look out for another job.”

“I hope it will be a London job,” she said. “Arabella and I would feel quite lonely if you went away, even for a week or two. We both look forward so much to our little family gathering on Sunday afternoon.”

“You don’t look forward to it as much as I do,” I said warmly. “It is difficult for me to realize that there was ever a time when you were not a part of my life. And yet we are quite new friends.”

“Yes,” she said; “only a few weeks old. But I have the same feeling. I seem to have known you for years; and as for Arabella, she speaks of you as if she had nursed you from infancy. You have a very insinuating way with you.”

“Oh, don’t spoil it by calling me insinuating!” I protested.

“No, I won’t,” she replied. “It was the wrong word. I meant sympathetic. You have the gift of entering into other people’s troubles and feeling them as if they were your own; which is a very precious gift—to the other people.”

“Your troubles are my own,” said I, “since I have the privilege to be your friend. But I have been a happier man since I shared them.”

“It is very nice of you to say that,” she murmured with a quick glance at me and just a faint heightening of colour; and then for a while neither of us spoke.

“Have you seen Dr. Thorndyke lately?” she asked, when she had refilled our cups, and thereby, as it were, punctuated our silence.

“Yes,” I answered. “I saw him only a night or two ago. And that reminds me that I was commissioned to make some inquiries. Can you tell me if your father ever did any electrotype work for outsiders?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “He used latterly to electrotype most of his own work instead of sending it to the bronze-founders, but it is hardly likely that he would do electros for outsiders. There are firms who do nothing else, and I know that, when he was busy, he used to send his own work to them. But why do you ask?”

I related to her what Thorndyke had told me and pointed out the importance of ascertaining the facts, which she saw at once.

“As soon as we have finished tea,” she said, “we will go and look over the cupboard where the electro moulds were kept—that is, the permanent ones. The gelatine moulds for works in the round couldn’t be kept. They were melted down again. But the water-proofed-plaster moulds were stored away in this cupboard, and the gutta-percha ones too until they were wanted to soften down to make new moulds. And even if the moulds were destroyed. Father usually kept a cast.”

“Would you be able to tell by looking through the cupboard?” I asked.

“Yes. I should know a strange mould, of course, as I saw all the original work that he did. Have we finished? Then let us go and settle the question now.”

She produced a bunch of keys from her pocket and crossed the studio to a large, tall cupboard in a corner. Selecting a key, she inserted it and was trying vainly to turn it when the door came open. She looked at it in surprise and then turned to me with a somewhat puzzled expression.

“This is really very curious,” she said. “When I came here this morning I found the outer door unlocked. Naturally I thought I must have forgotten to lock it, though that would have been an extraordinary oversight. And now I find this door unlocked. But I distinctly remember locking it before going away last night, when I had put back the box of modelling wax. What do you make of that?”

“It looks as if someone had entered the studio last night with false keys or by picking the lock. But why should they? Perhaps the cupboard will tell. You will know if it has been disturbed.”

She ran her eyes along the shelves and said at once: “It has been. The things are all in disorder and one of the moulds is broken. We had better take them all out and see if anything is missing—so far as I can judge, that is, for the moulds were just as my father left them.”

We dragged a small work-table to the cupboard and emptied the shelves one by one. She examined each mould as we took it out, and I jotted down a rough list at her dictation. When we had been through the whole collection and rearranged the moulds on the shelves—they were mostly plaques and medallions—she slowly read through the list and reflected for a few moments. At length she said:

“I don’t miss anything that I can remember. But the question is, were there any moulds or casts that I did not know about? I am thinking of Dr. Thorndyke’s question. If there were any, they have gone, so that question cannot be answered.”

We looked at one another gravely and in both our minds was the same unspoken question: Who was it that had entered the studio last night?

We had just closed the cupboard and were moving away when my eye caught a small object half-hidden in the darkness under the cupboard itself—the bottom of which was raised by low feet about an inch and a half from the floor. I knelt down and passed my hand into the shallow space and was just able to hook it out. It proved to be a fragment of a small plaster mould, saturated with wax and black-leaded on the inside. Miss D’Arblay stooped over it eagerly and exclaimed: “I don’t know that one. What a pity it is such a small piece. But it is certainly part of a coin.”

“It is part of the coin,” said I. “There can be no doubt of that. I examined the cast that Mr. Polton made and I recognize this as the same. There is the lower part of the bust, the letters CA—the first two letters of Carolus—and the tiny elephant and castle. That is conclusive. This is the mould from which that electrotype was made. But I had better hand it to Dr. Thorndyke to compare with the cast that he has.”

I carefully bestowed the fragment in my tobacco pouch, as the safest place for the time being, and meanwhile Miss D’Arblay looked fixedly at me with a very singular expression.

“You realize,” she said in a hushed voice, “what this means. He was in here last night.”

I nodded. The same conclusion had instantly occurred to me, and a very uncomfortable one it was. There was something very sinister and horrid in the thought of that murderous villain quietly letting himself into this studio and ransacking its hiding-places in the dead of the night. So unpleasantly suggestive was it that, for a time, neither of us spoke a word, but stood looking blankly at one another in silent dismay. And in the midst of the tense silence there came a knock at the door.

We both started as if we had been struck. Then Miss D’Arblay, recovering herself quickly, said, “I had better go,” and hurried down the studio to the lobby.

I listened nervously, for I was a little unstrung. I heard her go into the lobby and open the outer door. I heard a low voice, apparently asking a question; the outer door closed and then came a sudden scuffling sound and a piercing shriek. With a shout of alarm, I raced down the studio, knocking over a chair as I ran, and darted into the lobby just as the outer door slammed.

For a moment I hesitated. Miss D’Arblay had shrunk into a corner and stood in the semi-darkness with both her hands pressed tightly to her breast. But she called out excitedly, “Follow him! I am not hurt!,” and on this I wrenched open the door and stepped out.

But the first glance showed me that pursuit was hopeless. The fog had now become so dense that I could hardly see my own feet. I dared not leave the threshold for fear of not being able to find my way back. Then she would be alone—and he was probably lurking close by even now.

I stood irresolutely, stock-still, listening intently. The silence was profound. All the natural noises of a populous neighbourhood seemed to be smothered by the dense blanket of dark yellow vapour. Not a sound came to my ear, no stealthy foot—fall, no rustle of movement. Nothing but stark silence.

Uneasily I crept back until the open doorway showed as a dim rectangle of shadow; crept back and peered fearfully into the darkness of the lobby. She was still standing in the corner—an upright smudge of deeper darkness in the obscurity. But even as I looked the shadowy figure collapsed and slid noiselessly to the floor.

In an instant the pursuit was forgotten and I darted into the lobby, shutting the outer door behind me, and dropped on my knees at her side. Where she had fallen a streak of light came in from the studio, and the sight that it revealed turned me sick with terror. The whole front of her smock, from the breast downwards, was saturated with blood, both her hands were crimson and gory, and her face was dead-white to the lips.

For an instant I was paralysed with horror. I could see no movement of breathing, and the white face with its parted lips and half-closed eyes was as the face of the dead. But when I dared to search for the wound, I was a little reassured, for, closely as I scrutinized it, the gory smock showed no sign of a cut excepting on the blood-stained right sleeve. And now I noticed a deep gash on the left hand, which was still bleeding freely, and was probably the source of the blood which had soaked the smock. There seemed to be no vital wound.

With a deep breath of relief, I hastily tore my handkerchief into strips and applied the improvised bandage tightly enough to control the bleeding. Then with the scissors from my pocket-case, which I now carried from habit, I laid open the blood-stained sleeve. The wound on the arm, just above the elbow was quite shallow; a glancing wound which tailed off upwards into a scratch. A turn of the remaining strip of bandage secured it for the time being, and this done, I once more explored the front of the smock, pulling its folds tightly apart in search of the dreaded cut. But there was none; and now, the bleeding being controlled, it was safe to take measures of restoration. Tenderly—and not without effort—I lifted her and carried her into the studio, where was a shabby but roomy couch, on which poor D’Arblay had been accustomed to rest when he stayed for the night. On this I laid her, and fetching some water and a towel, dabbed her face and neck. Presently she opened her eyes and heaved a deep sigh, looking at me with a troubled, bewildered expression and evidently only half-conscious. Suddenly her eye caught the great blood-stain on her smock and her expression grew wild and terrified. For a few moments she gazed at me with eyes full of horror; then, as the memory other dreadful experience rushed back on her, she uttered a little cry and burst into tears, moaning and sobbing almost hysterically.

I rested her head on my shoulder, and tried to comfort her; and she, poor girl, weak and shaken by the awful shock, clung to me, trembling, and wept passionately with her face buried in my breast. As for me, I was almost ready to weep, too, if only from sheer relief and revulsion from my late terrors.

“Marion darling!” I murmured into her ear as I stroked her damp hair. “Poor dear little woman! It was horrible. But you mustn’t cry any more now. Try to forget it, dearest.”

She shook her head passionately. “I can never do that,” she sobbed. “It will haunt me as long as I live. Oh! and I am so frightened, even now. What a coward I am!”

“Indeed you are not!” I exclaimed. “You are just weak from loss of blood. Why did you let me leave you, Marion?”

“I didn’t think I was hurt, and I wasn’t particularly frightened then, and I hoped that if you followed him, he might be caught. Did you see him?”

“No. There is a thick fog outside. I didn’t dare to leave the threshold. Were you able to see what he was like?”

She shuddered and choked down a sob. “He is a dreadful-looking man,” she said; “I loathed him at the first glance—a beetle-browed, hook-nosed wretch with a face like that of some horrible bird of prey. But I couldn’t see him very distinctly, for it is rather dark in the lobby and he wore a wide-brimmed hat, pulled down over his brows.”

“Would you know him again? And can you give a description of him that would be of use to the police?”

“I am sure I should know him again,” she said with a shudder. “It was a face that one could never forget. A hideous face! The face of a demon! I can see it now and it will haunt me, sleeping and waking, until I die.”

Her words ended with a catch of the breath and she looked piteously into my face with wide, terrified eyes. I took her trembling hand and once more drew her head to my shoulder.

“You mustn’t think that, dear,” said I. “You are all unstrung now, but these terrors will pass. Try to tell me quietly just what this man was like. What was his height for instance?”

“He was not very tall. Not much taller than me. And he was rather slightly built.”

“Could you see whether he was dark or fair?”

“He was rather dark. I could see a shock of hair sticking out from under his hat and he had a moustache with turned-up ends and a beard—a rather short beard.”

“And now as to his face. You say he had a hooked nose?”

“Yes, a great, high-bridged nose like the beak of some horrible bird. And his eyes seemed to be deepset under heavy brows with bushy eyebrows. The face was rather thin with high cheekbones—a fierce, scowling, repulsive face.”

“And the voice? Should you know that again?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “He spoke in quite a low tone, rather indistinctly. And he said only a few words—something about having come to make some inquiries about the cost of a wax model. Then he stepped into the lobby and shut the outer door, and immediately, without another word, he seized my right arm and struck at me. But I saw the knife in his hand and, as I called out, I snatched at it with my left hand, so that it missed my body and I felt it cut my right arm. Then I got hold of his wrist. But he had heard you coming and wrenched himself free. The next moment he had opened the door and rushed out, shutting it behind him.”

She paused and then added in a shaking voice: “If you had not been here—if I had been alone—”

“We won’t think of that, Marion. You were not alone; and you will never be again in this place. I shall see to that.”

At this she gave a little sigh of satisfaction, and looked into my face with the pallid ghost of a smile. “Then I shan’t be frightened any more,” she murmured; and closing her eyes she lay for a while, breathing quietly as if asleep. She looked very delicate and frail with her waxen checks and the dark shadows under her eyes, but still I noted a faint tinge of colour stealing back into her lips. I gazed down at her with fond anxiety, as a mother might look at a sleeping child that had just passed the crisis of a dangerous illness. Of the bare chance that had snatched her from imminent death I would not allow myself to think. The horror of that moment is too fresh for the thought to be endurable. Instead I began to occupy myself with the practical question as to how she was to be got home. It was a long way to North Grove—some two miles, I reckoned—too far for her to walk in her present weak state; and then there was the fog. Unless it lifted it would be impossible for her to find her way; and I could give her no help, as I was a stranger to this locality. Nor was it by any means safe; for our enemy might still be lurking near, waiting for the opportunity that the fog would offer.

I was still turning over these difficulties when she opened her eyes and looked up at me a little shyly.

“I’m afraid I’ve been rather a baby,” she said, “but I am much better now. Hadn’t I better get up?”

“No,” I answered. “Lie quiet and rest. I am trying to think bow you are to be got home. Didn’t you say something about a caretaker?”

“Yes; a woman in the little house next door, which really belongs to the studio. Daddy used to leave the key with her at night so that she could clean up. But I just fetch her in when I want her help. Why do you ask?”

“Do you think she could get a cab us?”

“I am afraid not. There is no cab-stand anywhere near here. But I think I could walk, unless the fog is too thick. Shall we go and see what it is like?”

“I will go,” said I, rising. But she clung to my arm.

“You are not to go alone,” she said, in sudden alarm. “He may be there still.”

I thought it best to humour her and accordingly helped her to rise. For a few moments she seemed rather unsteady on her feet, but soon she was able to walk, supported by my arm, to the studio door, which I opened, and through which wreaths of vapour drifted in. But the fog was perceptibly thinner; and even as I was looking across the road at the now faintly visible houses, two spots of dull yellow light appeared up the road and my ear caught the muffled sound of wheels. Gradually the lights grew brighter and at length there stole out of the fog the shadowy form of a cab with a man leading the horse at a slow walk. Here seemed a chance to escape from our dilemma.

“Go in and shut the door while I speak to the cabman,” said I. “He may be able to take us. I shall give four knocks when I come back.”

She was unwilling to let me go, but I gently pushed her in and shut the door and then advanced to meet the cab. A few words set my anxieties at rest, for it appeared that the cabman had to set down a fare a little way along the street and was very willing to take a return fare, on suitable terms. As any terms would have been suitable to me under the circumstances, the cabman was able to make a good bargain and we parted with mutual satisfaction and a cordial au revoir. Then I steered back along the fence to the studio door, on which I struck four distinct knocks and announced myself vocally by name. Immediately the door opened and a hand drew me in by the sleeve.

“I am so glad you have come back,” she whispered. “It was horrid to be alone in the lobby even for a few minutes. What did the cabman say?”

I told her the joyful tidings and we at once made ready for our departure. In a minute or two the welcome glare of the cab-lamps reappeared, and when I had locked up the studio and pocketed the key I helped her into the rather ramshackle vehicle.

I don’t mind admitting that the cabman’s charges were extortionate; but I grudged him never a penny. It was probably the slowest journey that I had ever made, but yet the funereal pace was all too swift. Half-ashamed as I was to admit it to myself, this horrible adventure was bearing sweet fruit to me in the unquestioned intimacy that had been born in the troubled hour. Little enough was said; but I sat happily by her side, holding her uninjured hand in mine (on the pretence of keeping it warm), blissfully conscious that our sympathy and friendship had grown to something sweeter and more precious.

“What are we to say to Arabella?” I asked. “I suppose she will have to be told?”

“Of course she will,” replied Marion; “you shall tell her. But,” she added in a lower tone, “you needn’t tell her everything—I mean what a baby I was and how you had to comfort and soothe me. She is as brave as a lion and she thinks I am, too. So you needn’t undeceive her too much.”

“I needn’t undeceive her at all,” said I, “because you are;” and we were still arguing this weighty question when the cab drew up at Ivy Cottage. I sent the cabman off rejoicing, and then escorted Marion up the path to the door, where Miss Boler was waiting, having apparently heard the cab arrive.

“Thank goodness!” she exclaimed. “I was wondering how on earth you would manage to get home.” Then she suddenly observed Marion’s bandaged hand and uttered an exclamation of alarm.

“Miss Marion has cut her hand rather badly,” I explained. “We won’t talk about it just now. I will tell you everything presently when you have put her to bed. Now I want some stuff to make dressings and bandages.”

Miss Boler looked at me suspiciously, but made no comment. With extraordinary promptitude she produced a supply of linen, warm water and other necessaries, and then stood by to watch the operation and give assistance.

“It is a nasty wound,” I said, as I removed the extemporized dressing, “but not so bad as I feared. There will be no lasting injury.”

I put on the permanent dressing and then exposed the wound on the arm, at the sight of which Miss Boler’s eyebrows went up. But she made no remark, and when a dressing had been put on this, too, she took charge of the patient to conduct her up to the bedroom.

“I shall come up and see that she is all right before I go,” said I; “and meanwhile, no questions, Arabella.”

She cast a significant look at me over her shoulder and departed with her arm about the patient’s waist.

The rites and ceremonies above-stairs were briefer than I had expected—perhaps the promised explanations had accelerated matters. At any rate, in a very few minutes Miss Boler bustled into the room and said: “You can go up now, but don’t stop to gossip. I am bursting with curiosity.”

Thereupon, I ascended to my lady’s chamber, which I entered as diffidently and reverently as though such visits were not the commonplace of my professional life. As I approached the bed, she heaved a little sigh of content and murmured:

“What a fortunate girl I am! To be petted and cared for and pampered in this way! Arabella is a perfect angel; and you. Dr. Gray—”

“Oh, Marion!” I protested. “Not Dr. Gray.”

“Well, then, Stephen,” she corrected with a faint blush.

“That is better. And what am I?”

“Never mind,” she replied, very pink and smiling. “I expect you know. If you don’t, ask Arabella when you go down.”

“I expect she will do most of the asking,” said I. “And I have strict orders not to stop to gossip, so let me see the bandages and then I must go.”

I made my inspection, without undue hurry, and having seen that all was well, I took her hand.

“You are to stay here until I have seen you tomorrow morning, and you are to be a good girl and try not to think of unpleasant things.”

“Yes; I will do everything that you tell me.”

“Then I can go away happy. Good night, Marion.”

“Good night, Stephen.”

I pressed her hand and felt her fingers close on mine. Then I turned away and, with only a moment’s pause at the door for a last look at the sweet, smiling face, descended the stairs to confront the formidable Arabella.

Of my cautious statement and her keen cross-examination I will say nothing. I made the proceedings as short as was decent, for I wanted, if possible, to take counsel with Thorndyke. On my explaining this, the brevity of my account was condoned, and even my refusal of food.

“But remember, Arabella,” I said as she escorted me to the gate, “she has had a very severe shock. The less you say to her about the affair for the present, the quicker will be her recovery.”

With this warning I set forth through the rapidly-thinning fog to catch the first conveyance that I could find to bear me southward.

CHAPTER XI

Arms and the Man

The fog had thinned to a mere haze when the porter admitted me at the Inner Temple Gate, so that, as I passed the Cloisters and looked through into Pump Court, I could see the lighted windows of the residents’ chambers at the far end. The sight of them encouraged me to hope that the chambers in King’s Bench Walk might throw out a similar hopeful gleam. Nor was I disappointed; and the warm glow from the windows of number 5A sent me tripping up the stairs profoundly relieved though a trifle abashed at the untimely hour of my visit.

The door was opened by Thorndyke, himself, who instantly cut short my apologies.

“Nonsense, Gray!” he exclaimed, shaking my hand. “It is no interruption at all. On the contrary: how beautiful upon the staircase are the feet of him that bringeth—well, what sort of tidings?”

“Not good, I am afraid, sir.”

“Well, let us have them. Come and sit by the fire.” He drew up an easy-chair, and having installed me in it and taken a critical look at me, invited me to proceed. I accordingly proceeded bluntly to inform him that an attempt had been made to murder Miss D’Arblay.

“Ha!” he exclaimed. “These are bad tidings indeed! I hope she is not injured in any way.”

I reassured him on this point and gave him the details as to the patient’s condition, and he then asked:

“When did the attempt occur and how did you hear of it?”

“It happened this evening and I was present.”

“You were present!” he repeated, gazing at me in the utmost astonishment. “And what became of the assailant?”

“He vanished into the fog,” I replied.

“Ah, yes. The fog. I had forgotten that. But now let us drop this question and answer method. Give me a narrative from the beginning with the events in their proper sequence. And omit nothing, no matter how trivial.”

I took him at his word—up to a certain point. I described my arrival at the studio, the search in the cupboard, the sinister interruption, the attack and the unavailing attempt at pursuit. As to what befell thereafter I gave him a substantially complete account—with certain reservations—up to my departure from Ivy Cottage.

“Then you never saw the man at all?”

“No; but Miss D’Arblay did;” and here I gave him such details of the man’s appearance as I had been able to gather from Marion.

“It is quite a vivid description,” he said as he wrote down the details; “and now shall we have a look at that piece of the mould?”

I disinterred it from my tobacco-pouch and handed it to him. He glanced at it and then went to a cabinet, from a drawer in which he produced the little case containing Polton’s casts of the guinea and a box which he placed on the table and opened. From it he took a lump of moulding-wax and a bottle of powdered French chalk. Pinching off a piece of the wax, he rolled it into a ball, dusted it lightly with the chalk powder and pressed it with his thumb into the mould. It came away on his thumb bearing a perfect impression of the inside of the mould.

“That settles it,” said he, taking the obverse cast from the case and laying it on the table beside the wax ‘squeeze.’ “The squeeze and the cast are identical. There is now no possible doubt that the electrotype guinea that was found in the pond was made by Julius D’Arblay. Probably it had been delivered by him to the murderer on the very evening of his death. So we are undoubtedly dealing with that same man. It is a most alarming situation.”

“It would be alarming if it were any other man,” I remarked.

“No doubt,” he agreed. “But there is something very special about this man. He is a criminal of a type that is almost unknown here, but is not uncommon in South European and Slav countries. You find him, too, in the United States, principally among the foreign-born or alien population. He is not a normal human being. He is an inveterate murderer, to whom a human life does not count at all. And this type of man continually grows more and more dangerous, for two reasons: first, the murder habit becomes more confirmed with each crime; second, there is virtually no penalty for the succeeding murders, for the first one entails the death-sentence and fifty murders can involve no more. This man killed Van Zellen as a mere incident of a robbery. Then he appears to have killed D’Arblay to secure his own safety, and he is now attempting to kill Miss D’Arblay, apparently for the same reason. And he will kill you and he will kill me if our existence is inconvenient or dangerous to him. We must bear that in mind and take the necessary measures.”

“I can’t imagine,” said I, “what motive he can have for wanting to kill Miss D’Arblay.”

“Probably he believes that she knows something that would be dangerous to him—something connected with those moulds, or perhaps something else. We are rather in the dark. We don’t know for certain what it was he came to look for when he entered the studio, or whether or not he found what he wanted. But to return to the danger. It is obvious that he knows the Abbey Road district well, for he found his way to the studio in the fog. He may be living close by. There is no reason why he should not be. His identity is quite unknown.”

“That is a horrid thought!” I exclaimed.

“It is,” he agreed; “but it is the assumption that we have to act upon. We must not leave a loophole unwatched. He mustn’t get another chance.”

“No,” I concurred warmly; “he certainly must not—if we can help it. But it is an awful position. We carry that poor girl’s life in our hands, and there is always the possibility that we may be caught off our guard, just for a moment.”

He nodded gravely. “You are quite right. Gray. An awful responsibility rests on us. I am very unhappy about this poor young lady. Of course, there is the other side—but at present we are concerned with Miss D’Arblay’s safety.”

“What other side is there?” I demanded.

“I mean,” he replied, “that if we can hold out, this man is going to deliver himself into our hands.”

“What makes you think that?” I asked eagerly.

“I recognize a familiar phenomenon,” he replied. “My large experience and extensive study of crimes against the person have shown me that in the overwhelming majority of cases of obscure crime the discovery has been brought about by the criminal’s own efforts to make himself safe. He is constantly trying to hide his tracks—and making fresh ones. Now, this man is one of those criminals who won’t let well alone. He kills Van Zellen and disappears, leaving no trace. He seems to be quite safe. But he is not satisfied. He can’t keep quiet. He kills D’Arblay; he enters the studio, he tries to kill Miss D’Arblay: all to make himself more safe. And every time he moves, he tells us something fresh about himself. If we can only wait and watch, we shall have him.”

“What has he told us about himself this time?” I asked. “We won’t go into that now, Gray. We have other business on hand. But you know all that I know as to the facts. If you will turn over those facts at your leisure, you will find that they yield some very curious and striking inferences.”

I was about to press the question when the door opened and Mr. Polton appeared on the threshold. Observing me, he crinkled benevolently and then, in answer to Thorndyke’s inquiring glance, said: “I thought I had better remind you, sir, that you have not had any supper.”

“Dear me, Polton,” Thorndyke exclaimed, “now you mention it, I believe you are right. And I suspect that Dr. Gray is in the same case. So we place ourselves in your hands. Supper and pistols are what we want.”

“Pistols, sir!” exclaimed Polton, opening his eyes to an unusual extent and looking at us suspiciously.

“Don’t be alarmed, Polton,” Thorndyke chuckled. “It isn’t a duel. I just want you to go over our stock of pistols and ammunition.”

At this I thought I detected a belligerent gleam in Polton’s eye, but even as I looked, he was gone. Not for long, however. In a couple of minutes he was back with a large handbag, which he placed on the table and again retired. Thorndyke opened the bag and took out quite a considerable assortment of weapons—single pistols, revolvers and automatics—which he laid out on the table, each with its box of appropriate cartridges.

“I hate fire-arms!” he exclaimed as he viewed the collection distastefully. “They are dangerous things, and when it comes to business they are scurvy weapons. Any poltroon can pull a trigger. But we must put ourselves on equal terms with our opponent, who is certain to be provided. Which will you have? I recommend this Baby Browning for portability. Have you had any practice?”

“Only target practice. But I am a fair shot with a revolver. I have never used an automatic.”

“We will go over the mechanism after supper,” said he. “Meanwhile, I hear the approach of Polton and am conscious of a voracious interest in what he is bringing. When did you feed last?”

“I had tea at the studio about half past four.”

“My poor Gray!” he exclaimed, “you must be starving. I ought to have asked you sooner. However, here comes relief.” He opened a folding table by the fire just as Polton entered with the tray, on which I was gratified to observe a good-sized dish-cover and a claret-jug. Polton rapidly laid the little table and then, whisking off the cover, retired with a triumphant crinkle.

“You have a regular kitchen upstairs, I presume,” said I as we took our seats at the table, “as well as a laboratory? And a pretty good cook, too, to judge by the results.”

Thorndyke chuckled. “The kitchen and the laboratory are one,” he replied, “and Polton is the cook. An uncommonly good cook, as you suggest, but his methods are weird. These cutlets were probably grilled in the cupel furnace, but I have known him to do a steak with the brazing-jet. There is nothing conventional about Polton. But whatever he does, he does to a finish, which is fortunate, because I thought of calling in his aid in our present difficulty.”

I looked at him inquiringly and he continued: “If Miss D’Arblay is to go on with her work, which she ought to, as it is her livelihood, she must be guarded constantly. I had considered applying to Inspector Follett, and we may have to later; but for the present it will be better for us to keep our own counsel and play our own hand. We have two objects in view. First—and paramount—is the necessity of securing Miss D’Arblay’s safety. But, second, we want to lay our hands on this man, not to frighten him away, as we might do if we put the police on his track. When once we have him, her safety is secured for ever; whereas if he were merely scared away he would be an abiding menace. We have got to catch him, and at present he is catchable. Secure in his unknown identity, he is lurking within reach, ready to strike, but also ready to be pounced upon when we are ready to pounce. Let us keep him confident of his safety while we are gathering up the clues.”

“Hm! yes,” I assented, without much enthusiasm. “What is it that you propose to do?”

“Somebody,” he replied, “must keep watch over Miss D’Arblay from the moment when she leaves her house until she returns to it. How much time—if any—can you give up to this duty?”

“My whole time,” I answered promptly. “I shall let everything else go.”

“Then,” said he, “I propose that you and Polton relieve one another on duty. It will be better than for you to be there all the time.”

I saw what he meant and agreed at once. The conventions must be respected as far as possible.

“But,” I suggested, “isn’t Polton rather a light-weight—if it should come to a scrap, I mean?”

“Don’t undervalue small men, even physically,” he replied. “They are commonly better built than big men and more enduring and energetic. Polton is remarkably strong and he has the pluck of a bulldog. But we must see how he is placed as regards work.”

The question was put to him and the position of affairs explained when he came down to clear the table; whereupon it appeared (from his own account) that he was absolutely without occupation of any kind and pining for something to do. Thorndyke laughed incredulously but did not contest this outrageous and barefaced untruth, merely remarking:

“I am afraid it will be rather an idle time for you.”

“Oh, no, it won’t, sir,” Polton assured him emphatically. “I’ve always wanted to learn something about sculptor’s moulding and wax-casting, but I’ve never had a chance. Now I shall have. And that opportunity isn’t going to be wasted.”

Thorndyke regarded his assistant with a twinkling eye. “So it was mere self-seeking that made you so enthusiastic,” said he. “But you are quite a good moulder already.”

“Not a sculptor’s moulder, sir,” replied Polton; “and I know nothing about waxwork. But I shall, before I have been there many days.”

“I am sure you will,” said Thorndyke. “Miss D’Arblay will have an apprentice and journeyman in one. You will be able to give her quite a lot of help; which will be valuable just now while her hand is disabled. When do you think she will be able to go back to work, Gray?”

“I can’t say. Not tomorrow certainly. Shall I send you a report when I have seen her?”

“Do,” he replied; “or better still, come in tomorrow evening and give me the news. So, Polton, we shall want you for another day or so.”

“Ah!” said Polton, “then I shall be able to finish that recording-clock before I go;” upon which Thorndyke and I laughed aloud and Polton, his mendacity thus unmasked, retired with the tray, crinkling but unabashed.

The short remainder of the evening—or rather, of the night—was spent in the study of the mechanism and mode of use of automatic pistol. When I finally bestowed the ‘Baby,’ fully loaded, in my hip-pocket and rose to go, Thorndyke sped me on my way with a few words of warning and advice.

“Be constantly on your guard. Gray. You are going to make a bitter enemy of a man who knows no scruples; indeed, you have done so already, and something tells me that he is aware of it. Avoid all solitary or unfrequented places. Keep to main thoroughfares and well-lighted streets and maintain a vigilant lookout for any suspicious appearances. You have said truly that we carry Miss D’Arblay’s life in our hands. But to preserve her life we must preserve our own; which we should probably prefer to do in any case. Don’t get jumpy—I don’t much think you will; but keep your attention alert and your weather eyelid lifting.”

With these encouraging words and a hearty handshake, he let me out and stood watching me as I descended the stairs.

CHAPTER XII

A DRAMATIC DISCOVERY

About eleven o’clock in the forenoon of the third day after the terrible events of that unforgettable night of the great fog, Marion and I drew up on our bicycles opposite the studio door. She was now outwardly quite recovered, excepting as to her left hand, but I noticed that, as I inserted the key into the door, she cast a quick, nervous glance up and down the road; and as we passed through the lobby, she looked down for one moment at the great bloodstain on the floor and then hastily averted her face.

“Now,” I said, assuming a brisk, cheerful tone, “we must get to work. Mr. Polton will be here in half an hour and we must be ready to put his nose on the grindstone at once.”

“Then your nose will have to go on first,” she replied with a smile, “and so will mine, with two raw apprentices to teach and an important job waiting to be done. But, dear me! what a lot of trouble I am giving!”

“Nothing of the kind, Marion,” I exclaimed; “you are a public benefactor. Polton is delighted at the chance to come here and enlarge his experience, and as for me—”

“Well? As for you?” She looked at me half-shyly, half-mischievously. “Go on. You’ve stopped at the most interesting point.”

“I think I had better not,” said I. “We don’t want the forewoman to get too uppish.”

She laughed softly, and when I had helped her out of her overcoat and rolled up the sleeve of her one serviceable arm, I went out to the lobby to stow away the bicycles and lock the outer door. When I returned, she had got out from the cupboard a large box of flaked gelatine and a massive spouted bucket which she was filling at the sink.

“Hadn’t you better explain to me what we are going to do?” I asked.

“Oh, explanations are of no use,” she replied. “You just do as I tell you and then you will know all about it. This isn’t a school; it’s a workshop. When we have got the gelatine in to soak, I will show you how to make a plaster case.”

“It seems to me,” I retorted, “that my instructress has graduated in the academy of Squeers. “W-i-n-d-e-r, winder; now go and clean one. Isn’t that the method?”

“Apprentices are not allowed to waste time in wrangling,” she rejoined severely. “Go and put on one of Daddy’s blouses and I will set you to work.”

This practical method of instruction justified itself abundantly. The reasons for each process emerged at once as soon as the process was completed. And it was withal a pleasant method, for there is no comradeship so sympathetic as the comradeship of work, nor any which begets so wholesome and friendly an intimacy. But though there were playful and frivolous interludes—as when the forewoman’s working hand became encrusted with clay and had to be cleansed with a sponge by the apprentice—we worked to such purpose that by the time Mr. Polton was due, the plaster bust (of which a wax replica had to be made) was firmly fixed on the work-table on a clay foundation and surrounded by a carefully-levelled platform of clay, in which it was embedded to half its thickness. I had just finished smoothing the surface when there came a knock at the outer door; on which Marion started violently and clutched my arm. But she recovered in a moment and exclaimed in a tone of vexation:

“How silly I am! Of course it is Mr. Polton.”

It was. I found him on the threshold in rapt contemplation of the knocker and looking rather like an archdeacon on tour. He greeted me with a friendly crinkle, and I then conducted him into the studio and presented him to Marion, who shook his hand warmly and thanked him so profusely for coming to her aid that he was quite abashed. However, he did not waste time in compliments, but, producing an apron from his handbag, took off his coat, donned the apron, rolled up his sleeves and beamed inquiringly at the bust.

“We are going to make a plaster case for the gelatine mould, Mr. Polton,” Marion explained, and proceeded to a few preliminary directions, to which the new apprentice listened with respectful attention. But she had hardly finished when he fell to work with a quiet, unhurried facility that filled me with envy. He seemed to know where to find everything. He discovered the waste paper with which to cover the model to prevent the clay from sticking to it, he pounced on the clay-bin at the first shot, and when he had built up the shape for the case, found the plaster-bin, mixing-bowl and spoon as if he had been born and bred in the workshop, stopping only for a moment to test the condition of the gelatine in the bucket.

“Mr. Polton,” Marion said after watching him for a while, “you are an impostor—a dreadful impostor. You pretend to come here as an improver, but you really know all about gelatine moulding; now, don’t you?”

Polton admitted apologetically that he “had done a little in that way. But,” he added, in extenuation, “I have never done any work in wax. And talking of wax, the doctor will be here presently.”

“Dr. Thorndyke?” Marion asked.

“Yes, miss. He had some business in Holloway, so he thought he would come on here to make your acquaintance and take a look at the premises.”

“All the same,” Mr. Polton’ said I, “I don’t quite see the connexion between Dr. Thorndyke and wax.”

He crinkled with a slightly embarrassed air and explained that he must have been thinking of something that the doctor had said to him; but his explanations were cut short by a knock at the door.

“That is his knock,” said Polton; and he and I together proceeded to open the door, when I inducted the distinguished visitor into the studio and presented him to the presiding goddess. I noticed that each of them inspected the other with some curiosity and that the first impressions appeared to be mutually satisfactory, though Marion was at first a little overawed by Thorndyke’s impressive personality.

“You mustn’t let me interrupt your work,” the latter said, when the preliminary politenesses had been exchanged. “I have just come to fill in Dr. Gray’s outline sketches with details of my own observing. I wanted to see you—to convert a name into an actual person, to see the studio for the same reason, and to get as precise a description as possible of the man whom we are trying to identify. Will it distress you to recall his appearance?”

She had turned a little pale at the mention of her late assailant, but she answered stoutly enough: “Not at all; besides, it is necessary.”

“Thank you,” said he; “then I will read out the description that I had from Dr. Gray and we will see if you can add anything to it.”

He produced a notebook from which he read out the particulars that I had given him, at the conclusion of which he looked at her inquiringly.

“I think that is all that I remember,” she said. “There was very little light and I really only glanced at him.”

Thorndyke looked at her reflectively. “It is a fairly full description,” said he. “Perhaps the nose is a little sketchy. You speak of a hooked nose with a high bridge. Was it a curved nose of the Jewish type, or a squarer Roman nose?”

“It was rather square in profile; a Wellington nose, but with a rather broad base. Like a vulture’s beak, and very large.”

“Was it actually a hook-nose—I mean, had it a drooping tip?”

“Yes; the tip projected downwards and it was rather sharp—not bulbous.”

“And the chin? Should you call it a pronounced or a retreating chin?”

“Oh, it was quite a projecting chin, rather of the Wellington type.”

Thorndyke reflected once more, then, having jotted down the answers to his questions, he closed the book and returned it to his pocket.

“It is a great thing to have a trained eye,” he remarked. “In your one glance you saw more than an ordinary person would have noted in a leisurely inspection in a good light. You have no doubt that you would know this man again if you should meet him?”

“Not the slightest,” she replied with a shudder. “I can see him now, if I shut my eyes.”

“Well,” he rejoined, with a smile, “I wouldn’t recall that unpleasant vision too often, if I were you. And now, may I, without disturbing you further, just take a look round the premises?”

“But, of course. Dr. Thorndyke,” she replied. “Do exactly what you please.”

With this permission he drew away and stood for some moments letting a very reflective eye travel round the interior; and meanwhile I watched him curiously and wondered what he had really come for. His first proceeding was to walk slowly round the studio and examine closely, one by one, all the casts which hung on pegs. Next, in the same systematic manner, he inspected all the shelves, mounting a chair to examine the upper ones. It was after scrutinizing one of the latter that he turned towards Marion and asked:

“Have you moved these casts lately. Miss D’Arblay?”

“No,” she replied, “so far as I know, they have not been touched for months.”

“Someone has moved them within the last day or two,” said he. “Apparently the nocturnal explorer went over the shelves as well as the cupboard.”

“I wonder why?” said Marion. “There were no moulds on the shelves.”

Thorndyke made no rejoinder, but as he stood on the chair he once more ran his eye round the studio. Suddenly he stepped down from the chair, picked it up, carried it over to the tall cupboard and once more mounted it. His stature enabled him easily to look over the cornice on to the top of the cupboard and it was evident that something there had attracted his attention.

“Here is a derelict of some sort,” he announced, “which certainly has not been moved for some months.” As he spoke, he reached over the cornice into the enclosed space and lifted out an excessively grimy plaster mask, from which he blew the thick coating of dust, and then stood for a while looking at it thoughtfully.

“A striking face, this,” he remarked, “but not attractive. It rather suggests a Russian or Polish Jew. Do you recognize the person, Miss D’Arblay?”

He stepped down from the chair and handed the mask to Marion, who had advanced to look at it and who now held it in her hand, regarding it with a frown of perplexity.

“This is very curious,” she said. “I thought I knew all the casts that have been made here. But I have never seen this one before, and I don’t know the face. I wonder who he was. It doesn’t look like an English face, but I should hardly have taken it for the face of a Jew, with that rather small and nearly straight nose.”

“The East-European Jews are not a very pure breed,” said Thorndyke. “You will see many a face of that type in Whitechapel High Street and the Jewish quarters hard by.”

At this point, deserting the work-table, I came and looked over Marion’s shoulder at the mask which she was holding at arm’s length. And then I got a surprise of the most singular kind, for I recognized the face at a glance.

“What is it, Gray?” asked Thorndyke, who had apparently observed my astonishment.

“This is a most extraordinary coincidence!” I exclaimed. “Do you remember my speaking to you about a certain Mr. Morris?”

“The dealer in antiques?” he queried.

“Yes. Well, this is his face.”

He regarded me for some moments with a strangely intent expression. Then he asked: “When you say that this is Morris’s face, do you mean that it resembles his face or that you identify it positively?”

“I identify it positively. I can swear to the identity. It isn’t a face that one would forget. And if any doubt were possible, there is this hare-lip scar, which you can see quite plainly on the cast.”

“Yes, I noticed that. And Morris has a hare-lip scar, has he?”

“Yes; and in the same position and of the same character. I think you can take it as a fact that this cast was undoubtedly taken from Morris’s face.”

“Which,” said Thorndyke, “is a really important fact and one that is worth looking into.”

“In what way is it important?” I asked.

“In this respect,” he answered. “This man, Morris, is unknown to Miss D’Arblay; but he was not unknown to her father. Here we have evidence that Mr. D’Arblay had dealings with people of whom his daughter had no knowledge. The circumstances of the murder made it clear that there must be such people; but here we have proof of their existence and we can give to one of them a local habitation and a name. And you will notice that this particular person is a dealer in curios and possibly in more questionable things. There is just a hint that he may have had some rather queer acquaintances.”

“He seemed to have had rather a fancy for plaster masks,” I remarked. “I remember that he had one in his shop window.”

“Did your father make many life or death-masks as commissions, Miss D’Arblay?” Thorndyke asked.

“Only one or two, so far as I know,” she replied. “There is very little demand for portrait masks nowadays. Photography has superseded them.”

“That is what I should have supposed,” said he. “This would be just a chance commission. However, as it establishes the fact that this man Morris was in some way connected with your father, I think I should like to have a record of his appearance. May I take this mask away with me to get a photograph of it made? I will take great care of it and let you have it back safely.”

“Certainly,” replied Marion; “but why not keep it, if it is of any interest to you? I have no use for it.”

“That is very good of you,” said he, “and if you will give me some rag and paper to wrap it in, I will take myself off and leave you to finish your work in peace.”

Marion took the cast from him and, having procured some rag and paper, began very carefully to wrap it up. While she was thus engaged, Thorndyke stood letting his eye travel once more round the studio.

“I see,” he remarked, “that you have quite a number of masks moulded from life or death. Do I understand that they were not commissions?”

“Very few of them were,” Marion replied. “Most of them were taken from professional models, but some from acquaintances whom my father bribed with the gift of a duplicate mask.”

“But why did he make them? They could not have been used for producing wax faces for the show figures, for you could hardly turn a shop-window into a waxwork exhibition with lifelike portraits of real persons.”

“No,” Marion agreed; “that wouldn’t do at all. These masks were principally used for reference as to details of features when my father was modelling a head in clay. But he did sometimes make moulds for the wax from these masks, only he obliterated the likeness, so that the wax face was not a portrait.”

“By working on the wax, I suppose?”

“Yes; or more usually by altering the mask before making the mould. It is quite easy to alter a face. Let me show you.”

She lifted one of the masks from its peg and laid it on the table.

“You see,” she said, “that this is the face of a young girl-one of my father’s models. It is a round, smooth, smiling face with a very short, weak chin and a projecting upper lip. We can change all that in a moment.”

She took up a lump of clay, and pinching off a pellet, laid it on the right cheekbone and spread it out. Having treated the other side in the same manner, she rolled an elongated pellet with which she built up the lower lip. Then, with a larger pellet, she enlarged the chin downwards and forwards, and having added a small touch to each of the eyebrows, she dipped a sponge in thick clay-water, or ‘slip,’ and dabbed the mask all over to bring it to a uniform colour.

“There,” she said, “it is very rough, but you see what I mean.”

The result was truly astonishing. The weak, chubby, girlish face had been changed by these few touches into the strong, coarse face of a middle—aged woman.

“It really is amazing!” I exclaimed. “It is a perfectly different face. I wouldn’t have believed that such a thing was possible.”

“It is a most striking and interesting demonstration,” said Thorndyke. “But yet I don’t know that we need be so surprised. If we consider that of all the millions of persons in this island alone, each one has a face which is different from any other and yet that all those faces are made up of the same anatomical parts, we realize that the differences which distinguish one face from another must be excessively subtle and minute.”

“We do,” agreed Marion, “especially when we are modelling a portrait bust and the likeness won’t come, although every part appears to be correct and all the measurements seem to agree. A true likeness is an extraordinarily subtle and exact piece of work.”

“So I have always thought,” said Thorndyke. “But I mustn’t delay you any longer. May I have my precious parcel?”

Marion hastily put the finishing touches to the not very presentable bundle and handed it to him with a smile and a bow. He then took his leave of her and I escorted him to the door, where he paused for a moment as we shook hands.

“You are bearing my advice in mind, I hope. Gray,” he said.

“As to keeping clear of unfrequented places? Yes, I have been very careful in that respect, and I never go abroad without the pistol. It is in my hip-pocket now. But I have seen no sign of anything to justify so much caution. I doubt if our friend is even aware of my existence, and in any case, I don’t see that he has anything against me, excepting as Miss D’Arblay’s watch-dog.”

“Don’t be too sure, Gray,” he rejoined earnestly. “There may be certain little matters that you have overlooked. At any rate, don’t relax your caution. Give all unfrequented places a wide berth and keep a bright lookout.”

With this final warning, he turned away and strode off down the road, while I re-entered the studio just in time to see Polton mix the first bowl of plaster, as Marion, having washed the clay from the transformed mask, dried it and rehung it on its peg.

CHAPTER XIII

A NARROW ESCAPE

The statement that I had made to Thorndyke was perfectly true in substance; but it was hardly as significant in fact as the words implied. I had, it is true, in my journeyings abroad, restricted myself to well-beaten thoroughfares. But then I had had no occasion to do otherwise. Until Polton’s arrival on the scene my time had been wholly taken up in keeping a watch on Marion; and so it would have continued if I had followed my own inclination. But at the end of the first day’s work she intervened resolutely.

“I am perfectly ashamed,” she said, “to occupy the time of two men, both of whom have their own affairs to attend to, though I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for sacrificing yourselves.”

“We are acting under the doctor’s orders, miss,” said Polton, thereby, in his opinion, closing the subject.

“You mean Dr. Thorndyke’s?” said Marion, not realizing—or not choosing to realize—that, to Polton, there was no other doctor in the world who counted.

“Yes, miss. The doctor’s orders must be carried out.”

“Of course they must,” she agreed warmly, “since he has been so very good as to take all this trouble about my safety. But there is no need for both of you to be here together. Couldn’t you arrange to take turns on duty—alternate days or a half-day each? I hate the thought that I am wasting the whole of both your times.”

I did not look on the suggestion with favour, for I was reluctant to yield up to any man—even to Polton—the privilege of watching over the safety of one who was so infinitely dear to me. Nor was Polton much less unwilling to agree, for he loathed to leave a piece of work uncompleted. However, Marion refused to accept our denials (as is the way of women), and the end of it was that Polton and I had to arrange our duties in half-day shifts, changing over at the end of each week, the first spell allotting the mornings to me and the latter half of the day—with the duty of seeing Marion home—to him.

Thus, during each of the following six working days, I found myself with the entire afternoon and evening free. The former I usually spent at the hospital, but in the evenings, feeling too unsettled for study, I occupied myself very pleasantly with long walks through the inexhaustible streets, extending my knowledge of the town and making systematic explorations of such distant regions as Mile End, Kingsland, Dalston, Wapping and the Borough.

One evening I bethought me of my promise to look in on Usher. I did not find myself yearning for his society, but a promise is a promise. Accordingly, when I had finished my solitary dinner, I set forth from my lodgings in Camden Square and made a bee-line for Clerkenwell; so far, that is to say, as was possible, while keeping to the wider streets. For in this respect, I followed Thorndyke’s instructions to the letter, though, as to the other matter—that of keeping a bright lookout—I was less attentive, my mind being much more occupied with thoughts of Marion (who would, just now, be on her way home under Polton’s escort) than with any considerations of my own personal safety. Indeed, to tell the truth, I was inclined to be more than a little sceptical as to the need for these extraordinary precautions.

I found Usher in the act of bowing out the last of the ‘evening consultations’ and was welcomed by him with enthusiasm.

“Delighted to see you, old chap!” he exclaimed, shaking my hand warmly. “It is good of you to drop in on an old fossil like me. Didn’t much think you would. I suppose you don’t often come this way?”

“No,” I replied. “It is rather off my beat. I’ve finished with Hoxton—for the present, at any rate.”

“So have I,” said Usher, “since poor old Crile went off to the better land.”

“Crile?” I repeated. “Who was he?”

“Don’t you remember me telling you about his funeral, when they had those Sunday-school kids yowling hymns round the grave? That was Mr. Crile—Christian name, Jonathan.”

“I remember, but I didn’t realize that he was a Hoxton aristocrat.”

“Well, he was. Fifty-two Field Street was his earthly abode. I used to remember it by the number of weeks in the year. And glad enough I was when he hopped off his perch, for his confounded landlady, a Mrs. Pepper, would insist on fixing the times for my visits, and deuced inconvenient times, too. Between four and six on Tuesdays and Fridays. I hate patients who turn your visits into appointments. Upsets your whole visiting-list.”

“It seems to be the fashion in Hoxton,” I remarked. “I had to make my visits at appointed times, too. It would have been frightfully inconvenient if I had been busy. Is it often done?”

“They will always do it if you let ’em. Of course it is a convenience to a woman who doesn’t keep a servant, to know what time the doctor is going to call; but it doesn’t do to give way to ’em.”

I assented to this excellent principle, noting, however, that he seemed to have “given way to ’em” all the same.

As we had been talking, we had gradually drifted from the surgery up a flight of stairs to a shabby, cosy little room on the first floor, where a cheerful fire was burning and a copper kettle on a trivet purred contentedly and breathed forth little clouds of steam. Usher inducted me into a large easy-chair, the depressed seat of which suggested its customary use by an elephant of sedentary habits, and produced from a cupboard a spirit-decanter, a high-shouldered Dutch gin-bottle, a sugar-basin and a couple of tumblers and sugar-crushers.

“Whisky or Hollands?” he demanded, and as curiosity led me to select the latter, he commented: “That’s right, Gray. Good stuff, Hollands. Touches up the cubical epithelium—what! I am rather partial to a drop of Hollands.”

It was no empty profession. The initial dose made me open my eyes; and that was only a beginning. In a twinkling, as it seemed, his tumbler was empty and the collaboration of the bottle and the copper kettle was repeated. And so it went on for nearly an hour, until I began to grow quite uneasy, though without any visible cause, so far as Usher was concerned. He did not turn a hair (he hadn’t very many to turn for that matter, but I speak figuratively). The only effect that I could observe was an increasing fluency of speech with a tendency to discursiveness; and I must admit that his conversation was highly entertaining. But his evident intention to ‘make a night of it’ set me planning to make my escape without appearing to slight his hospitality. How I should have managed it, unaided by the direct interposition of Providence, I cannot guess; for his conversation had now taken the form of an interminable sentence punctuated by indistinguishable commas; but in the midst of this steadily-flowing stream of eloquence the outer silence was rent by the sudden jangling of a bell.

Usher stopped short, stared at me solemnly, deliberately emptied his tumbler and stood up.

“Night bell, ol’ chappie,” he explained. “Got to go out. But don’t you disturb yourself. Be back in a few minutes. Soon polish ’em off.”

“I’ll walk round with you as far as your patient’s house,” said I, “and then I shall have to get home. It is past ten and I have a longish walk to Camden Square.”

He was disposed to argue the point, but another violent jangling cut his protests short and lent him hurrying down the stairs with me close at his heels. A couple of minutes later we were out in the street, following in the wake of a hurrying figure; and, looking at Usher as he walked sedately at my side, with his top-hat, his whiskers and his inevitable umbrella, I had the feeling that all those jorums of Hollands had been consumed in vain. In appearance, in manner, in speech and in gait he was just his normal self, with never a hint of any change from the status quo ante bellum.

Our course led us into the purlieus of St. John Street Road, where we presently turned into a narrow, winding and curiously desolate little street, along which we proceeded for a few hundred yards, when our ‘fore-runner’ halted at a door into which he inserted a latch-key. When we arrived at the open door, inside which a shadowy figure was lurking, Usher stopped and held out his hand.

“Good night, old chap,” he said. “Sorry you can’t come back with me. If you keep straight on and turn to the left at the cross-roads, you will come out presently into the King’s Cross Road. Then you’ll know your way. So long.”

He turned into the dark passage, the door was closed and I went on my way.

The little meandering street was singularly silent and deserted; and its windings cut off the light from the scanty street-lamps, so that stretches of it were in almost total darkness. As I strode forward the echoes of my footfalls resounded with hollow reverberations which smote my ear—and ought have smitten my conscience—causing me to wonder, with grim amusement, what Thorndyke would have said if he could have seen me thus setting his instructions at defiance. Indeed, I was so far sensible of the impropriety of my being in such a place at such an hour that I was about to turn to take a look back along the street; but at the very moment that I halted within a few feet of a street-lamp, something struck the brim of my hat with a sharp, weighty blow like the stroke of a hammer, and I heard a dull thud from the lamp-post.

In an instant I spun round, mighty fierce, whipping out my pistol, cocking it and pointing it down the street as I raced back towards the spot from whence the missile had appeared to come. There was not a soul in sight nor any sound of movement, and the shallow doorways seemed to offer no possible hiding-place. But some thirty yards back I came suddenly on a narrow opening like an empty doorway but actually the entrance to a covered alley not more than three feet wide and as dark as a pocket. This was evidently the ambush (which I had passed, like a fool, without observing it), and I halted beside it, with my pistol still pointed, listening intently and considering what I had better do. My first impulse had been to charge into the alley, but a moment’s reflection showed the futility of such a proceeding. Probably my assailant had made off by some well-known outlet; but in any case it would be sheer insanity for me to plunge into that pitch-dark passage. For if he were still lurking there, he would be invisible to me, whereas I should be a clear silhouette against the dim light of the street. Moreover, I had seen no one and I could not shoot at any chance stranger whom I might find there. Reluctantly, I recognized that there was nothing for it but to retreat cautiously and be more careful in future.

My retirement would have looked an odd proceeding to an observer, if there had been one, for I had to retreat crab-wise in order that I might keep the entrance of the alley covered with my pistol and yet see where I was going. When I reached the lamp-post, I scanned the area of lighted ground beneath it, and, almost at the first glance, perceived an object like a largish marble lying in the road. It proved, when I picked it up, to be a leaden ball, like an old-fashioned musket-ball, with one flattened side, which had prevented it from rolling away from the spot where it had fallen. I dropped it into my pocket and resumed my masterly retreat until, at length, the cross-roads came into view. Then I quickened my pace, and as I reached the corner, put away my pistol after slipping in the safety-catch.

Once more out in the lighted and frequented main streets, my thoughts were free to turn over this extraordinary experience. But I did not allow them to divert me from a very careful lookout. All my scepticism was gone now. I realized that Thorndyke had not been making mere vague guesses, but that he had clearly foreseen that something of this kind would probably happen. That was, to me, the most perplexing feature of this incomprehensible affair.

I turned it over in my mind again and again and could make nothing of it. I could see no adequate reason why this man should want to make away with me. True, I was Marion’s protector, but that—even if he were aware of it—did not seem an adequate reason. Indeed, I could not see why he was seeking to make away with her—nor, even, was it clear to me that there had been a reasonable motive for murdering her father. But as to myself, I seemed to be out of the picture altogether. The man had nothing to fear from me or to gain by my death.

That was how it appeared to me; and yet I saw plainly that I must be mistaken. There must be something behind all this—something that was unknown to me but was known to Thorndyke. What could it be? I found myself unable to make any sort of guess. In the end, I decided to call on Thorndyke the following evening, report the incident and see if I could get any enlightenment from him.

The first part of this programme I carried out successfully enough, but the second presented more difficulties.

Thorndyke was not a very communicative man, and a perfectly impossible one to pump. What be chose to tell, he told freely; and beyond that, no amount of ingenuity could extract the faintest shadow of a hint.

“I am afraid I am disturbing you, sir,” I said in some alarm, as I noted a portentous heap of documents on the table.

“No,” he replied. “I have nearly finished, and I shall treat you as a friend and keep you waiting while I do the little that is left.” He turned to his papers and took up his pen, but paused to cast one of his quick, penetrating glances at me.

“Has anything fresh happened?” he asked.

“Our unknown friend has had a pot at me,” I answered. “That is all.”

He laid down his pen and, leaning back in his chair, demanded particulars. I gave him an account of what had happened on the preceding night, and taking the leaden ball from my pocket, laid it on the table. He picked it up, examined it curiously and then placed it on the letter-balance.

“Just over half an ounce,” he said. “It is a mercy it missed your head. With that weight and the velocity indicated by the flattening, it would have dropped you insensible with a fractured skull.”

“And then he would have come along and put the finishing touches, I suppose. But I wonder how he shot the thing. Could he have used an air-gun?”

Thorndyke shook his head. “An air-gun that would discharge a ball of that weight would make quite a loud report, and you say you heard nothing. You are quite sure of that, by the way?”

“Perfectly. The place was as silent as the grave.”

“Then he must have used a catapult; and an uncommonly efficient weapon it is in skilful hands, and as portable as a pistol. You mustn’t give him another chance, Gray.”

“I am not going to if I can help it. But what the deuce does the fellow want to pot at me for? It is a most mysterious thing. Do you understand what it is all about, sir?”

“I do not,” he replied. “My knowledge of the facts of this case is nearly all second-hand knowledge, derived from you. You know all that I know and probably more.”

“That is all very well, sir,” said I; “but you foresaw that this was likely to happen. I didn’t. Therefore you must know more about the case than I do.”

He chuckled softly. “You are confusing knowledge and inference,” said he. “We had the same facts, but our inferences were not the same. It is just a matter of experience. You haven’t squeezed out of the facts as much as they are capable of yielding. Come, now, Gray; while I am finishing my work, you shall look over my notes of this case, and then you should take a sort of bird’s-eye view of the whole case and see if anything new occurs to you. And you must add to those notes that this man has been at the enormous trouble of stalking you continuously, that he shadowed you to Usher’s, that he waited patiently for you to come out, that he followed you most skillfully and took instant advantage of the first opportunity that you gave him. You might also note that he did not elect to overtake you and make a direct attack on you as he did on Miss D’Arblay. Note those facts and consider what their significance may be. And now just go through this little dossier. It won’t take you many minutes.”

He took out of a drawer a small portfolio, on the cover of which was written ‘J. D’Arblay, decd.’ Passing it to me, he returned to his documents.

I opened it and found it to contain a number of separate abstracts, each duly headed with its descriptive title, and an envelope marked “Photographs.” Glancing over the abstracts, I saw that they dealt respectively with J. D’Arblay, the Inquest, the Van Zellen Case, Miss D’Arblay, Dr. Gray and Mr. Morris; the last containing, somewhat to my surprise, all the details that I had given Thorndyke respecting that rather mysterious person together with an account of my dealings with him and cross-references to the abstract bearing my name. It was all very complete and methodical, but none of the abstracts contained any information that was new to me. If this represented all the facts at were known to Thorndyke, then he was no better informed than I was. But he had evidently got a great deal more out of the information than I had.

Returning the abstracts with some disappointment to the portfolio, I turned to the photographs, and then I got a very thorough surprise. There were only three, and the first two were of no great interest, one representing the two casts of the guinea and the other the plaster mask of Morris. But the third fairly took away my breath. It was a very bad photograph, apparently an enlargement from a rather poor snap-shot portrait; but, bad as it was, it gave a very vivid presentment of one of the most evil-looking faces that I have ever looked on: a lean, bearded face with high cheekbones, with heavy, frowning brows that overhung deep-shadowed, hollow eye-sockets and an almost grotesquely large nose, thin, curved and sharp, that jutted out like a great predatory beak.

I stared at the photograph in speechless amazement. At the first glance I had been struck by the perfect way in which this crude portrait realized Marion’s description of the man who had tried to murder her. But that was not all. There was another resemblance which I now perceived with even more astonishment; indeed it was so incredible that the perception of it reduced me to something like stupefaction. I sat for fully a minute with the portrait in my hand and my thoughts surging confusedly in a vain effort to grasp the meaning of this extraordinary likeness; then, happening to glance up at Thorndyke, I found him quietly regarding me with undisguised interest.

“Well?” he said, as he caught my eye.

“Who is he?” I demanded, holding up the photograph.

“That is what I want to know,” he replied. “The photograph came to me without any description. The identity of the subject is unknown. Who do you think he is?”

“To begin with,” I answered, “he exactly corresponds in appearance with Miss D’Arblay’s description of her would-be murderer. Don’t you think so?”

“I do,” he replied. “The correspondence seems complete in every detail, so far as I can judge. That was why I secured the photograph. But the actual resemblance will have to be settled by her. I suggest that you take the portrait and let her see it; but you had better not show it to her pointedly for identification. It would be better to put it in some place where she will see it without previous suggestion or preparation. But you said just now ‘to begin with.’ Was there anything else that struck you about this photograph?”

“Yes,” I answered, “there was—a most amazing thing. You remember my telling you about the patient I attended in Morris’s house?”

“The man who died of gastric cancer and was eventually cremated?”

“Yes. His name was Bendelow. Well, this photograph might have been a portrait of Bendelow, taken with a beard and moustache before the disease got hold of him. Excepting for the emaciation and the beard—Bendelow was clean-shaved—I should think it would be quite an excellent likeness of him.”

Thorndyke made no immediate reply or comment, but sat quite still, looking at me with a very singular expression. I could see that he was thinking rapidly and intensely, but I suspected that his thoughts were in a good deal less confusion than mine had been.

“It is,” he remarked at length, “as you say, a most amazing affair. The face is no ordinary face. It would be difficult to mistake it, and one would have to go far to find another with which it could be confused. Still, one must not forget the possibility of a chance resemblance. Nature doesn’t take out letters-patent even for a human face. But I will ask you, Gray, to write down and send to me all that you know about the late Mr. Bendelow, including all the details of your attendance on him, dead and alive.”

“I will,” said I, “though it is difficult to imagine what connexion he could have had with the D’Arblay case.”

“It seems incredible that he could have had any,” Thorndyke agreed. “But at present we are collecting facts, and we must note everything impartially. It is a fatal mistake to select your facts in accordance with the apparent probabilities. By the way, if Bendelow was like this photograph, he must have corresponded pretty exactly with Miss D’Arblay’s very complete and lucid description. I wonder why you did not realize that at the time.”

“That is what I have been wondering. But I suppose it was the beard and the absence of any kind of association between Bendelow and the D’Arblays.”

“Probably,” he agreed. “A beard and moustache alter very greatly even a striking face like this. Incidentally, it illustrates the superiority of a picture over a verbal description for purposes of identification. No mere description will enable you to visualize correctly a face which you have never seen. I shall be curious to hear what Miss D’Arblay has to say about this photograph.”

“I will let you know without delay,” said I; and then, as he seemed to have completed his work and put the documents aside, I made a final effort to extract some definite information from him.

“It is evident,” I said, “that the body of facts in your notes has conveyed a good deal more to you than it has to me.”

“Probably,” he agreed. “If it had not, I should seem to have profited little by years of professional practice.”

“Then,” I said persuasively, “may I ask, if you have formed a really satisfactory theory as to who this man is and why he murdered D’Arblay?”

Thorndyke reflected for a few moments and then replied:

“My position. Gray, is this: I have arrived at a very definite theory as to the motive of the murder, and a most extraordinary motive it is. But there are one or two points that I do not understand. There are some links missing from the chain of evidence. So with the identity of the man. We know pretty certainly that he is the murderer of Van Zellen and we know what he is like to look at; but we can’t give him a name and a definite personality. There are links missing there, too. But I have great hopes of finding those missing links. If I find them, I shall have a complete case against this man and I shall forthwith set the law in motion. I can’t tell you more than that at present; but I repeat that you are in possession of all the facts and that if you think over all that has happened and ask yourself what it can mean, though you will not arrive at a complete solution any more than I have, you will at least begin to see the light.”

This was all that I could get out of him, and as it was growing late I presently rose to take my departure. He walked with me as far as the Middle Temple Gate and stood outside the wicket watching me as I strode away westward.

CHAPTER XIV

The Haunted Man

When I arrived at the studio on the following afternoon I found the door open and Polton waiting just inside with his hat and overcoat on and his bag in his hand.

“I am glad you are punctual, sir,” he said, with his benevolent smile. “I wanted to get back to the chambers in good time today. It won’t matter tomorrow, which is fortunate, as you may be late.”

“Why may I be late tomorrow?” I asked.

“I have a message for you from the doctor,” he replied. “It is about what you were discussing last night. He told me to tell you that he is expecting a visit from an officer of the Criminal Investigation Department and he would like you to be present, if it would be convenient. About half past ten, sir.”

“I will certainly be there,” said I.

“Thank you, sir,” said he. “And the doctor told me to warn you, in case you should arrive after the officer, not to make any comment on anything that may be said, or to seem to know anything about the subject of the interview.”

“This is very mysterious, Polton,” I remarked.

“Why, not particularly, sir,” he replied. “You see, the officer is coming to give certain information, but he will try to get some for himself if he can. But he won’t get anything out of the doctor, and the only way for you to prevent his pumping you is to say nothing and appear to know nothing.”

I laughed at his ingenuous wiliness. “Why,” I exclaimed, “you are as bad as the doctor, Polton. A regular Machiavelli.”

“I never heard of him,” said Polton, “but most Scotchmen are pretty close. Oh, and there is another little matter that I wanted to speak to you about—on my own account this time. I gathered from the doctor, in confidence, that someone has been following you about. Now, sir, don’t you think it would be very useful to be able to see behind you without turning your head?”

“By jove!” I exclaimed. “It would indeed! Capital! I never thought of it. I will have a supplementary eye fixed in the back of my head without delay.”

Polton crinkled deprecatingly. “No need for that, sir,” said he. “I have invented quite a lot of different appliances for enabling you to see behind you—reflecting spectacles and walking-sticks with prisms in the handle and so on. But for use at night I think this will answer your purpose best.”

He produced from his pocket an object somewhat like a watchmaker’s eyeglass, and having fixed it in his eye to show me how it worked, handed it to me with the request that I would try it. I did so and was considerably surprised at the efficiency of the appliance; for it gave me a perfectly dear view of the street almost directly behind me.

“I am very much obliged to you, Polton,” I said enthusiastically. “This is a most valuable gift, especially under the present circumstances.”

He was profoundly gratified “I think you will find it useful, sir,” he said. “The doctor uses these things sometimes, and so do I if the occasion arises. You see, sir, if you are being shadowed, it is a fatal thing to turn round and look behind you. You never get a chance of seeing what the stalker is like, and you put him on his guard.”

I saw this clearly enough and once more thanked him for his timely gift. Then, having shaken his hand and sped him on his way, I entered the lobby and shut the outer door, at the same time transferring Thorndyke’s photograph from my letter-case to my jacket-pocket. When I passed through into the studio, I found Marion putting the finishing touches to a plaster case. She greeted me with a smile as I entered and then plunged her hand once more into the bowl of rapidly-thickening plaster, whereupon I took the opportunity to lay the photograph on a side-bench as I walked towards the table on which she was working.

“Good afternoon, Marion,” said I.

“Good afternoon, Stephen,” she responded, adding, “I can’t shake hands until I have washed,” and held out her emplastered hands in evidence.

“That will be too late,” said I, and as she looked up at me inquiringly, I stooped and kissed her.

“You are very resourceful,” she remarked with a smile and a warm blush, as she scooped up another handful of plaster; and then, as if to cover her slight confusion, she asked: “What was all that solemn pow-wow about with Mr. Polton? And why did he wait for you at the door in that suspicious manner? Had he some secret message for you?”

“I don’t know whether it was intended to be secret,” I answered, “but it isn’t going to be so far as you are concerned;” and I repeated to her the substance of Thorndyke’s message, to which she listened with an eagerness that rather surprised me, until her further inquiries explained it.

“This sounds rather encouraging,” she said; “as if Dr. Thorndyke had been making some progress in his investigations. I wonder if he has. Do you think he really knows much more than we do?”

“I am sure he does,” I replied, “but how much more, I cannot guess. He is extraordinarily close. But I have a feeling that the end is not so very far off. He seems to be quite hopeful of laying his hand on this villain.”

“Oh! I hope you are right, Stephen,” she exclaimed. “I have been getting so anxious. There has seemed to be no end to this deadlock. And yet it can’t go on indefinitely.”

“What do you mean, Marion?” I asked.

“I mean,” she answered, “that you can’t go on wasting your time here and letting your career go. Of course, it is delightful to have you here. I don’t dare to think what the place will be like without you. But it makes me wretched to think how much you are sacrificing for me.”

“I am not really sacrificing anything,” said I. “On the contrary, I am spending my time most profitably in the pursuit of knowledge and most happily in a sweet companionship which I wouldn’t exchange for anything in the world.”

“It is very nice of you to say that,” she said, “but still, I shall be very relieved when the danger is over and you are free.”

“Free!” I exclaimed. “I don’t want to be free. When my apprenticeship has run out I am coming on as journeyman. And now I had better get my blouse on and start work.”

I went to the further end of the studio, and taking the blouse down from its peg; proceeded to exchange it for my coat. Suddenly I was startled by a sharp cry, and turning round, beheld Marion stooping over the photograph with an expression of the utmost horror.

“Where did this come from?” she demanded, turning a white, terror-stricken face on me.

“I put it there, Marion,” I answered somewhat sheepishly, hurrying to her side. “But what is the matter? Do you know the man?”

“Do I know him?” she repeated. “Of course I do. It is he—the man who came here that night.”

“Are you quite sure?” I asked. “Are you certain that it is not just a chance resemblance?”

She shook her head emphatically. “It is he, Stephen. I can swear to him. It is no mere resemblance. It is a likeness, and a perfect one, though it is such a bad photograph. But where did you get it? And why didn’t you show it to me when you came in?”

I told her how I came by it and explained Thorndyke’s instructions. “Then,” she said, “Dr. Thorndyke knows who the man is.”

“He says he doesn’t, and he was very close and rather obscure as to how the photograph came into his possession.”

“It is very mysterious,” said she, with another terrified glance at the photograph. Then suddenly she snatched it up and, with averted face, held it out to me. “Put it away, Stephen,” she entreated. “I can’t bear the sight of that horrible face. It brings back afresh all the terrors of that awful night.”

I hastily returned the photograph to my letter-case, and taking her arm, led her back to the work-table. “Now,” I said, “let us forget it and get on with our work;” and I proceeded to turn the case over and fix it in the new position with lumps of clay. For a little while she watched me in silence, and I could see by her pallor that she was still suffering from the shock of that unexpected encounter. But presently she picked up a scraper and joined me in trimming up the edges of the case, cutting out the ‘key-ways’ and making ready for the second half; and by degrees her colour came back and the interest of the work banished her terrors.

We were, in fact, extremely industrious. We not only finished the case—it was an arm from the shoulder which was to be made—cut the pouring-holes and varnished the inside with knotting, but we filled one half with the melted gelatine which was to form the actual mould in which the wax would be cast. This brought the day’s work to an end, for nothing more could be done until the gelatine had set—a matter of at least twelve hours.

“It is too late to begin anything fresh,” said Marion. “You had better come and have supper with me and Arabella.”

I agreed readily enough to this proposal, and when we had tidied up in readiness for the morning’s work, we set forth at a brisk pace—for it was a cold evening—towards Highgate, gossiping cheerfully as we went. By the time we reached Ivy Cottage eight o’clock was striking and ‘the village’ was beginning to settle down for the night. The premature quiet reminded me that the adjacent town would presently be settling down, too, and that I should do well to start for home before the streets had become too deserted.

Nevertheless, so pleasantly did the time slip away in the cosy sitting-room with my two companions that it was close upon half past ten when I rose to take my departure. Marion escorted me to the door, and as I stood in the hall buttoning up my overcoat she said:

“You needn’t worry if you are detained tomorrow. We shall be making the wax cast of the bust and I am certain Mr. Polton won’t leave the studio until it is finished, whether you are there or not. He is perfectly mad on waxwork. He wormed all the secrets of the trade out of me the very first time we were alone and he is extraordinarily quick at learning. But I can’t imagine what use the knowledge will be to him.”

“Perhaps he thinks of starting an opposition establishment,” I suggested, “or he may have an eye to a partnership. But if he has, he will have a competitor, and one with a prior claim. Good night, dear child. Save some of the waxwork for me tomorrow.”

She promised to restrain Polton’s enthusiasm as far as possible and, wishing me ‘good night,’ held out her hand, but submitted without demur to being kissed; and I took my departure in high spirits, more engrossed with the pleasant leave-taking than with the necessity of keeping a bright lookout.

I was nearing the bottom of the High Street when the prevailing quiet recalled me to the grim realities of my position, and I was on the point of stopping to take a look round when I bethought me of Polton’s appliance and also of that cunning artificer’s advice not to put a possible Stalker on his guard. I accordingly felt in my pocket, and having found the appliance carefully fixed it in my eye without altering my pace. The first result was a collision with a lamp—post, which served to remind me of the necessity of keeping both eyes open. The instrument was, in fact, not very easy to use while walking and it took me a minute or two to learn how to manage it. Presently, however, I found myself able to divide my attention between the pathway in front and the view behind, and then it was that I became aware of a man following me at a distance of about a hundred yards. Of course, there was nothing remarkable or suspicious in this, for it was a main thoroughfare and by no means deserted at this comparatively early tour. Nevertheless, I kept the man in view, noting that he wore a cloth cap and a monkey-jacket, that he carried no stick or umbrella and that when I slightly slackened my pace he did not seem to overtake me. As this suggested that he was accommodating his pace to mine, I decided to put the matter to the test by giving him an opportunity to pass me at the next side-turning.

At this moment the Roman Catholic church came into view and I recalled that at its side a narrow lane—Dartmouth Park Hill—ran down steeply between high fences towards Kentish Town. Instantly I decided to turn into the lane—which bent sharply to the left behind the church—walk a few yards down it and then return slowly. If my follower were a harmless stranger, he would then have passed on down Highgate Hill, whereas if he were stalking me I should meet him at the entrance to the lane and could then see what he was like.

But I was not very well satisfied with this plan, for the obvious manoeuvre would show him that he was suspected, and as I approached the church, a better plan suggested itself.

On one side by the entrance to the lane were some low railings and a gate with large brick piers. In a moment I had vaulted over the railings and taken up a position behind one of the piers, where I stood motionless, listening intently. Very soon I caught the sound of distinctly rapid footsteps, which suddenly grew louder as my follower came opposite the entrance to the lane, and louder still as, without a moment’s hesitation, he turned into it.

From my hiding-place in the deep shadow of the pier I could safely peep out into the wide space at the entrance of the lane, and as this space was well lighted by a lamp I was able to get an excellent view of my follower. And very much puzzled I was therewith. Naturally I had expected to recognize the man whose photograph I had in my pocket. But this was quite a different type of man. It is true that he was shortish and rather slightly built and that he had a beard: but there the resemblance ended. His face, which I could see plainly by the lamp-light, so far from being of an aquiline or vulturine cast, was rather of the blunt and bibulous type. The short, though rather bulbous nose made up in colour what it lacked in size, and its florid tint extended into the cheek on either side in the form of what dermatologists call acne rosacea.

I say that his appearance puzzled me; but it was not his appearance alone. For the latter showed that he was a stranger to me and suggested that he was going down the lane on his lawful occasions; but his movements did not support that suggestion. He had turned into the lane and passed my hiding-place at a very quick walk. But just as he reached the sharp turn he slackened his pace, stepping lightly, and then stopped for a moment, listening intently and peering forward into the darkness of the lane. At length he started again and disappeared round the corner, and by the sound of his retreating footsteps I could tell that he was once more putting on the pace.

I listened until these sounds had nearly died away and was just about to emerge from my shelter when I became aware of footsteps approaching from the opposite direction, and as I did not choose to be seen in the act of climbing the railings, I decided to remain perdu until this person had passed. These footsteps, too, had a distinctly hurried sound, a fact which I noted with some surprise; but I was a good deal more surprised when the newcomer turned sharply into the entrance, walked swiftly past my ambush, and then, as he approached the corner, suddenly slowed down, advancing cautiously on tiptoe, and finally halted to listen and stare into the obscurity of the lane.

I peered out at this new arrival with an amazement that I cannot describe. Like the first man, he was a complete stranger to me: a tallish, athletic-looking man of about thirty-five, not ill-looking and having something of a military air; fair-complexioned with a sandy moustache but otherwise clean-shaved, and dressed in a suit of thick tweed with no overcoat. I could see these details clearly by the light of the lamp; and even as I was noting them, he disappeared round the corner and I could hear him walking quickly but lightly down the lane.

As soon as he was gone I looked out from my hiding-place and listened attentively. There was no one in sight nor could I hear anyone approaching. I accordingly came forth and, quickly climbing over the railings, stood for a few moments irresolute. The obviously reasonable thing to do was to make off down Highgate Hill as fast as I could and take the first conveyance that I could get homeward. But the appearance of that second man had inflamed me with curiosity. What was he here for? Was he shadowing me or was he in pursuit of the other man? Either supposition was incredible, but one of them must be true. The end of it was that curiosity got the better of discretion and I, too, started down the lane, walking as fast as I could and treading as lightly as circumstances permitted.

The second man was some considerable distance ahead, for his footsteps came to me but faintly, and I did not seem to be gaining on him; and I took it that his speed was a fair measure of that of the man in front. Keeping thus within hearing of my quarry, I sped on, turning over the amazing situation in my bewildered mind. The first man was a mystery to me, though apparently not to Thorndyke. Who could he be, and why on earth was he taking this prodigious amount of trouble to get rid of a harmless person like myself? For there could be no mistake as to the magnitude of the efforts that he was making. He must have waited outside the studio, followed Marion and me to her home and there kept a patient vigil of over two hours, waiting for me to come out. It was a stupendous labour. And what was it all about? I could not form the most shadowy guess; while as to the other man, the very thought of him reduced me to a state of hopeless bewilderment.

As my reflections petered out to this rather nebulous conclusion, I halted for a moment to listen for the footsteps ahead. They were still audible, though they sounded somewhat farther away. But now I caught the sound of other footsteps, approaching from behind. Someone else was coming down the lane. Of course, there was nothing surprising in that circumstance, for, after all, this was a public thoroughfare, little frequented as it was, especially after dark. Nevertheless, something in the character of those footsteps put me on the qui vive. For this man, too, was walking quickly—very quickly—and with a certain stealthiness, as if he had rubber-soled boots and, like the rest of us, were making as little noise as possible.

I walked on at my previous rapid pace, keeping my ears cocked now both fore and aft; and as I went, my mind surged with wild speculations. Could it be that I had yet another follower? The thing was becoming grotesque. My bewilderment began to mingle with a spice of grim amusement; but still I listened, not without anxiety, to those foot-steps from behind, which seemed to be growing rapidly more distinct. Whoever this newcomer might be, he was no mean walker, for he was overtaking me apace; and this fact gave a pretty broad hint as to his size and strength.

I looked back from time to time, but without stopping or slackening my pace, trying to pierce the deep obscurity of the narrow, closed-in lane. But it was a dark winter’s night, and the high fences shut out even the glimmer from the murky sky. It was not until the approaching footfalls sounded quite near that I was able, at length, to make out a smear of deeper darkness on the general obscurity. Then I drew out my pistol and, withdrawing the safety-catch, put my hand, grasping it, into my overcoat pocket. Having thus made ready for possible contingencies, I watched the black shape emerge from the darkness until it developed into a tall, portly man, bearing down on me with long, swinging strides, when I halted and drew back against the fence to let him pass.

But he had no intention of passing. As he came up to me, he, too, halted, and, looking into my face with undissembled curiosity, he addressed me in a brusque though not uncivil tone.

“Now, sir, I must ask you to explain what is going on.”

“What do you mean?” I demanded.

“I’ll tell you,” he replied. “I saw you, a little time ago, climb over the railings and hide behind a gate-post. Then I saw a man come up in a deuce of a hurry, and turn into the lane. I saw him stop and listen for a moment and then bustle off down the hill. Close on this fellow’s heels comes another man, also in a devil of a hurry. He turns into the lane, too, and suddenly he pulls up and creeps forward on tiptoe like a cat on hot bricks. He stops and listens, too; and then off he goes down the lane like a lamplighter. Then out you come from behind the gate-post, over the railings you climb, and then you creep up to the corner and listen, and then off you go down the lane like another lamplighter. Now, sir, what’s it all about?”

“I assume,” said I, repressing a strong tendency to giggle, “that you have some authority for making these inquiries?”

“I have, sir,” he replied. “I am a police officer on plain-clothes duty. I happened to be at the corner of Hornsey Lane when I saw you coming down the High Street walking in a queer sort of way as if you couldn’t see where you were going. So I drew back into the shadow and had a look at you. Then I saw you nip into the lane and climb over the railings, so I waited to see what was going to happen next. And then those other two came along. Well, now, I ask you again, sir, what’s going on? What is it all about?”

“The fact is,” I said a little sheepishly, “I thought the first man was following me, so I hid just to see what he was up to.”

“What about the second man?”

“I don’t know anything about him.”

“What do you know about the first man?”

“Nothing, except that he certainly was following me.”

“Why should he be following you?”

“I can’t imagine. He is a stranger to me and so is the other man.”

“Hm!” said the officer, regarding me with a distrustful eye. “Damn funny affair. I think you had better walk up to the station with me and give us a few particulars about yourself.”

“I will with pleasure,” said I. “But I am not altogether a stranger there. Inspector Follett knows me quite well. My name is Gray—Dr. Gray.”

The officer did not reply for a few moments. He seemed to be listening to something. And now my ear caught the sound of footsteps approaching hurriedly from down the lane. As they drew near, my friend peered into the darkness and muttered in an undertone:

“Will that be one of ’em coming back?” He listened again for a moment or two and then, resuming his inquiries, said aloud: “You say Inspector Follett knows you. Well, perhaps you had better come and see Inspector Follett.”

As he finished speaking, he again listened intently, and his mouth opened slightly. I suspect my own did, too. For the footsteps had ceased. There was now a dead silence in the lane.

“That chap has stopped to listen,” my new friend remarked in a low voice. “We had better see what his game is. Come along, sir;” and with this he strode off at a pace that taxed my powers to keep up with him.

But at the very moment that he started, the footsteps became audible again, only now they were obviously retreating; and straining my ears I caught the faint sound of other and more distant footfalls, also retreating, so far as I could judge, and in the same hurried fashion.

For a couple of minutes the officer swung along like a professional pedestrian and I struggled on just behind him, perspiring freely and wishing that I could shed my overcoat. Still, despite our efforts, there was no sign of our gaining on the men ahead. My friend evidently realized this, for he presently growled over his shoulder: “This won’t do,” and forthwith broke into a run.

Instantly this acceleration communicated itself to the men in front. The rhythm of both sets of footfalls showed that our fore-runners were literally justifying that description of them; and as both had necessarily given up any attempt to move silently, the sounds of their retreat were borne to us quite distinctly. And from those sounds, the unsatisfactory conclusion emerged that they were drawing ahead pretty rapidly. My friend the officer was, as I have said, an uncommonly fine walker. But he was no runner. His figure was against him. He was fully six feet in height and he had a presence. He could have walked me off my legs; but when it came to running I found myself ambling behind him with such ease that I was able to get out my pistol and, after replacing the safety-catch, stow the weapon in my hip-pocket out of harm’s way.

However, if my friend was no sprinter he was certainly a stayer, for he lumbered on doggedly until the lane entered the new neighbourhood of Dartmouth Park; and here it was that the next act opened. We had just passed the end of the first of the streets when I saw a surprisingly agile policeman dart out from a shady corner and follow on in our wake in proper Lilliebridge style. I immediately put on a spurt and shot past my companion, and a few moments later, sounds of objurgation arose from behind. I stopped at once and turned back just in time to hear an apologetic voice exclaim:

“I’m sure I beg your pardon, Mr. Plonk. I didn’t reckernize you in the dark.”

“No, of course you wouldn’t,” replied the plain-clothes officer. “Did you see two men run past here just now?”

“I did,” answered the constable; “one after the other, and both running as if the devil was after them. I was halfway up the street, but I popped down to have a look at them, and when I got to the corner I heard you coming. So I just kept out of sight and waited for you.”

“Quite right too,” said Mr. Plonk. “Well, I don’t see or hear anything of those chaps now.”

“No,” agreed the constable, “and you are not likely to. There’s a regular maze of new streets about here. You can take it that they’ve got clear away.”

“Yes, I’m afraid they have,” said Plonk. “Well, it can’t be helped and there’s nothing much in it. Good night, constable.”

He moved off briskly, not wishing, apparently, to discuss the affair, and in a few minutes we came to the wide crossroads. Here he halted and looked me over by the light of a street-lamp. Apparently the result was satisfactory, for he said: “It’s hardly worth while to take you all the way back to the station at this time of night. Where do you live?”

I told him Camden Square and offered a card in corroboration.

“Then you are pretty close home,” said he, inspecting my card. “Very well, doctor. I’ll speak to Inspector Follett about this affair, and if you have any further trouble of this sort you had better let us know. And you had better let us have a description of the men in any case.”

I promised to send him the particulars on the following day, and we then parted with mutual good wishes, he making his way towards Holloway Road and I setting my face homeward by way of the Brecknock Road and keeping an uncommonly sharp lookout as I went.

CHAPTER XV

THORNDYKE PROPOSES A NEW MOVE

On the following morning, in order to make sure of arriving before the detective officer, I presented myself at King’s Bench Walk a good half-hour before I was due. The door was opened by Thorndyke himself, and as we shook hands, he said: “I am glad you have come early. Gray. No doubt Polton explained the programme to you, but I should like to make our position quite clear. The officer who is coming here presently is Detective-Superintendent Miller of the Criminal Investigation Department. He is quite an old friend and he is coming at my request to give me certain information. But, of course, he is a detective officer, with his own duties to his department, and an exceedingly shrewd, capable man. Naturally, if he can pick up any crumbs of information from us, he will, and I don’t want him to learn more, at present, than I choose to tell him.”

“Why do you want to keep him in the dark?” I asked.

“Because,” he replied, “we are doing quite well, and I want to get the case complete before I call in the police. If I were to tell him all I know and all I think, he might get too busy and scare our man away before we have enough evidence to justify an arrest. As soon as the investigation is finished and we have such evidence as will secure a conviction, I shall turn the case over to him; meanwhile, we keep our own counsel. Your role this morning will be that of listener. Whatever happens, make no comment. Act as if you knew nothing that is not of public knowledge.”

I promised to follow his directions to the letter, though I could not get rid of the feeling that all this secrecy was somewhat futile. Then I began to tell him of my experiences of the previous night, to which he listened at first with grave interest, but with growing amusement as the story developed. When I came to the final chase and the pursuing policeman, he leaned back in his chair and laughed heartily.

“Why,” he exclaimed, wiping his eyes, “it was a regular procession! It only wanted a string of sausages and a harlequin to bring it up to pantomime form.”

“Yes,” I admitted with a grin, “It was a ludicrous affair. But it was a mighty mysterious affair too. You see, neither of the men was the man I had expected. There must be more people in this business than we had supposed. Have you any idea who these men can be?”

“It isn’t much use making vague guesses,” he replied. “The important point to note is that this incident, farcical as it turned out, might easily have taken a tragical turn; and the moral is that, for the present, you can’t be too careful in keeping out of harm’s way.”

It was obvious to me that he was evading my question; that those two sinister strangers were not the mystery to him that they were to me, and I was about to return to the charge with a more definitely pointed question when an elaborate flourish on the little brass knocker of the inner door announced a visitor.

The tall, military-looking man whom Thorndyke admitted was evidently the superintendent, as I gathered from the mutual greetings. He looked rather hard at me until Thorndyke introduced me, which he did with characteristic reticence.

“This is Dr. Gray, Miller, you may remember his name. It was he who discovered the body of Mr. D’Arblay.”

“Yes, I remember,” said the superintendent, shaking my hand unemotionally and still looking at me with a slightly dubious air.

“He is a good deal interested in the case,” Thorndyke continued, “not only professionally, but as a friend of the family—since the catastrophe.”

“I see,” said the superintendent, taking a final inquisitive look at me and obviously wondering why the deuce I was there. “Well, there is nothing of a very secret nature in what I have to tell you, and I suppose you can rely on Dr. Gray to keep his own counsel and ours.”

“Certainly,” replied Thorndyke. “He quite understands that our talk is confidential, even if it is not secret.”

The officer nodded, and having been inducted into an easy-chair, by the side of which a decanter, a siphon and a box of cigars had been placed, settled himself comfortably, lit a cigar, mixed himself a modest refresher and drew from his pocket a bundle of papers secured with red tape.

“You asked me. Doctor,” he began, “to give you all particulars up to date of the Van Zellen case. Well, I can do that without difficulty, as the case—or at least what is left of it—is in my hands. The circumstances of the actual crime I think you know already, so I will take up the story from that point.

“Van Zellen, as you know, was found dead in his room, poisoned with prussic acid, and a quantity of very valuable portable properly was missing. It was not dear whether the murderer had let himself in with false keys or whether Van Zellen had let him in; but the place hadn’t been broken into. The job had been done with remarkable skill, so that not a trace of the murderer was left. Consequently, all that was left for the police to do was to consider whether they knew of anyone whose methods agreed with those of this murderer.

“Well, they did know of such a person, but they had nothing against him but suspicion. He had never been convicted of any serious crime, though he had been in chokee once or twice for receiving. But there had been a number of cases of robbery with murder—or rather murder with robbery; for this man seemed to have committed the murder as a preliminary precaution—and they were all of this kind: a solitary crime, very skilfully carried out by means of poison. There was never any trace of the criminal; but gradually the suspicions of the police settled down on a rather mysterious individual of the name of Bendelow—Simon Bendelow. Consequently, when the Van Zellen crime came to light, they were inclined to put it on this man Bendelow, and they began making fresh inquiries about him. But presently it transpired that someone had seen a man, on the morning of the crime, coming away from the neighbourhood of Van Zellen’s house just about the time when the murder must have been committed.”

“Was there anything to connect him with the crime?” Thorndyke asked.

“Well, there was the time—the small hours of the morning—and the man was carrying a good-sized handbag which seemed to be pretty heavy and which would have held the stuff that was missing. But the most important point was the man’s appearance. He was described as a smallish man, clean-shaven, with a big hooked nose and very heavy eyebrows set close down over his eyes.

“Now, this put Bendelow out of it as the principal suspect, because the description didn’t fit him at all,” (here I caught Thorndyke’s eye for an instant and was warned afresh, and not unnecessarily, to make no comment); “but,” continued the superintendent, “it didn’t put him out altogether. For the man whom the description did fit—and it fitted him to a T—was a fellow named Crile—Jonathan Crile—who was a pal of Bendelow’s and was known to have worked with him as a confederate in the receiving business and had been in prison once or twice. So the police started to make inquiries about Crile, and before long they were able to run him to earth. But that didn’t do them much good, for it turned out that Crile wasn’t in New York at all. He was in Philadelphia; and it was clearly proved that he had been there on the day of the murder, on the day before and the day after. So they seemed to have drawn a blank; but they were still a bit suspicious of Mr. Crile, who seems to have been as downy a bird as his friend Bendelow, and of the other chappie, too. But they hadn’t a crumb of evidence against either.

“So there the matter stands. A complete deadlock. There was nothing to be done; for you can’t arrest a man on mere suspicion with not a single fact to support it. But the police kept their eye on both gents, so far as they could, and presently they got a chance. Bendelow made a slip—or at any rate they said he did. It was a little trumpery affair, something in the receiving line, and of no importance at all. Probably a faked charge, too. But they thought that if they could get him arrested they might be able to squeeze something out of him—the police in America can do things that we aren’t allowed to. So they tried to pounce on him. But Mr. Bendelow was a slippery customer and he got wind of their intentions just in time. When they got into his rooms they found that he had left—in a deuce of a hurry, too, and only a few minutes before they arrived. They searched the place, but found nothing incriminating, and they tried to get on Bendelow’s track, but they didn’t succeed. He had managed to get dear away, and Crile seemed to have disappeared, too.

“Well, that seemed to be the end of the affair. Both of these crooks had made off without leaving a trace, and the police—having no evidence—didn’t worry any more about them. And so things went on for about a year, until the Van Zellen case had been given up and nearly forgotten. Then something happened quite recently that gave the police a fresh start.

“It appears that there was a fire in the house in which Bendelow’s rooms were and a good deal of damage was done, so that they had to do some rebuilding; and in the course of the repairs the builder’s men found, hidden under the floor-boards, a small parcel containing part of the Van Zellen swag. There was nothing of real value; just coins and medals and seal-rings and truck of that kind. But the things were all identified by means of Van Zellen’s catalogue, and, of course, the finding of them in what had been Bendelow’s rooms put the murder pretty clearly on to him.

“On this, as you can guess, the police and the detective agencies got busy. They searched high and low for the missing man, but for a long time they could pick up no traces of him. At last they discovered that he and Crile had taken a passage, nearly a year ago, on a tramp-steamer bound for England. Thereupon they sent a very smart, experienced detective over to work at the case in conjunction with our own detective department.

“But we didn’t have much to do with it. The American—Wilson was his name—had all the particulars, with the prison photographs and fingerprints of both the men, and he made most of the inquiries himself. However, there were two things that we did for him. We handed over to him the Van Zellen guinea and the particulars of the D’Arblay murder; and we were able to inform him that his friend Bendelow was dead.”

“How did you find that out?” Thorndyke asked.

“Oh, quite by chance. One of our men happened to be at Somerset House looking up some details of a will when in the list of wills he came across the name of Simon Bendelow, which he had heard from Wilson himself. He at once got out the will, copied out the address of the executrix and the names and addresses of the witnesses and handed them over to Wilson, who was mightily taken aback, as you may suppose. However, he wasn’t taking anything for granted. He set off instantly to look up the executrix—a Mrs. Morris. But there he got another disappointment; for the Morrises had gone away and no one knew where they had gone.”

“I take it,” said Thorndyke, “that probate of the will had been granted.”

“Yes; everything in that way had been finished up. Well, on this, Wilson set off in search of the witnesses, and he had better luck this time. They were two elderly spinsters who lived together in a house in Turnpike Lane, Hornsey. They didn’t know much about Bendelow, for they had only made his acquaintance after he had taken to his bed. They were introduced to him by his friend and landlady, Mrs. Morris, who used to take them up to his room to talk to him and cheer him up a bit. However, they knew all about his death, for they had seen him in his coffin and they followed him to the Ilford Crematorium.”

“Ha!” said Thorndyke. “So he was cremated.”

“Yes,” chuckled the superintendent with a sly look at Thorndyke. “I thought that would make you prick up your ears, Doctor. Yes, there were no half-measures for Mr. Bendelow. He had gone literally to ashes. But it was all right, you know. There couldn’t have been any hanky-panky. These two ladies had not only seen him in his coffin; they actually had a last look at him through a little celluloid window in the coffin-lid, just before the coffin was passed through into the cremation furnace.”

“And there was no doubt as to his identity?”

“None whatever. Wilson showed the old ladies his photograph and they recognized him instantly; picked his photograph out of a dozen others.”

“Where was Bendelow living when they made his acquaintance?”

“Not far from their house: in Abbey Road, Hornsey. But the Morrises moved afterwards to Market Street, Hoxton, and that is where he died and where the will was signed.”

“I suppose Wilson ascertained the cause of death?”

“Oh, yes. The old ladies told him that. But he went to Somerset House and got a copy of the death-certificate. I haven’t got that, as he took it back with him; but the cause of death was cancer of the pylorus—that’s some part of the gizzard, I believe, but you’ll know all about it. At any rate, there was no doubt on the subject, as the two doctors made a post-mortem before they signed the death-certificate. It was all perfectly plain and straightforward.

“Well, so much for Mr. Bendelow. When Wilson had done with him, he turned his attention to Crile. And then he really did get a proper shake-up. When he was at Somerset House, looking up Bendelow’s death-certificate, it occurred to him just to run his eye down the list and make sure that Crile was still in the land of the living. And there, to his astonishment, he found Crile’s name. He was dead, too! And not only was he dead: he, also, had died of cancer—it was the pancreas this time, another part of the gizzard—and he had died at Hoxton, too, and he had died just four days before Bendelow. The thing was ridiculous. It looked like a conspiracy. But here again everything was plain and above-board. Wilson got a copy of the certificate and called on the doctor who had signed it, a man named Usher. Of course, Dr. Usher remembered all about the case as it had occurred quite recently. There was not a shadow of doubt that Crile was dead. Usher had helped to put him in his coffin and had attended at his funeral; and he, too, had no difficulty in picking out Crile’s photograph, and he had no doubt at all as to what Crile died of. So there it was. Queer as it was, there was no denying the plain facts. Those two crooks had slipped through the fingers of the law, so far as it was possible to see.

“But I must admit that I was not quite satisfied; the circumstances were so remarkably odd. I told Wilson so, and I advised him to look further into the matter. I reminded him of the D’Arblay murder and the finding of that guinea, but he said that the murder was our affair; that the men he had come to look for were dead and that was all that concerned him. So back he went to New York, taking with him the death-certificates and the two photographs with the certificates of recognition on the backs of them. But he left the notes of the case with me, on the chance that they might be useful to me, and the two sets of fingerprints, which certainly don’t seem likely to be of much use under the circumstances.”

“You never know,” said Thorndyke, with an enigmatical smile.

The superintendent gave him a quick, inquisitive look and agreed. “No, you don’t; especially when you are dealing with Dr. John Thorndyke.” He pulled out his watch and, staring at it anxiously, exclaimed: “What a confounded nuisance! I’ve got an appointment at the Law Courts in five minutes. It is quite a small matter. Won’t take me more than half an hour. May I come back when I have finished? I should like to hear what you think of this extraordinary story.”

“Come back, by all means,” said Thorndyke, “and I will turn over the facts in my mind while you are gone. Probably some suggestion may present itself in the interval.”

He let the officer out, and when the hurried footsteps had died away on the stairs, he dosed the door and turned to me with a smile.

“Well, Gray,” he said, “what do you think of that? Isn’t it a very pretty puzzle for a medical jurist?”

“It is a hopeless tangle to me,” I replied. “My brain is in a whirl. You can’t dispute the facts and yet you can’t believe them. I don’t know what to make of the affair.”

“You note the fact that, whoever may be dead, there is somebody alive—very much alive; and that that somebody is the murderer of Julius D’Arblay.”

“Yes, I realize that. But obviously he can’t be either Crile or Bendelow. The question is, who is he?”

“You note the link between him and the Van Zellen murder—I mean the electrotype guinea?”

“Yes; there is evidently some connexion, but I can’t imagine what it can be. By the way, you noticed that the American police had got muddled about the personal appearance of these two men. The description of that man who was seen coming away from Van Zellen’s house, and who was said to be quite unlike Bendelow, actually fitted him perfectly. They had evidently made a mistake of some kind.”

“Yes, I noticed that. But the description may have fitted Crile better. We must get into touch with this man Usher. I wonder if he will be the Usher who used to attend at St. Margaret’s.”

“He is; and I am in touch with him already. In fact, he was telling me about this very patient, Jonathan Crile.”

“Indeed! Can you remember the substance of what he told you?”

“I think so. It wasn’t very thrilling;” and here I gave him, as well as I could remember them, the details with which Usher had entertained me of his attendance on the late Jonathan Crile, his dealings with the landlady, Mrs. Pepper, and the incidents of the funeral, including Usher’s triumphant return in the mourning-coach. It seemed a dull and trivial story, but Thorndyke listened to it with the keenest interest, and when I had finished, he asked:

“He didn’t happen to mention where Crile lived, I suppose?”

“Yes, curiously enough, he did. The address, I remember, was 52 Field Street, Hoxton.”

“Ha!” said Thorndyke. “You are a mine of information, Gray.”

He rose, and taking down from the bookshelves Philip’s Atlas of London, opened it and pored over one of the maps. Then, replacing the atlas, he go out his notes of the D’Arblay case and searched for a particular entry. It was evidently quite a short one, for when he had found it he gave it but a single glance and closed the portfolio. Then, returning to the bookshelves, he took out the Post Office Directory and opened it at the ‘Streets’ section. Here, also, his search was but a short one, though it appeared to be concerned with two separate items; for having examined one, he turned to a different part of the section to find the other. Finally he closed the unwieldy volume, and having replaced it on the shelf, turned and once more looked at me inquiringly.

“Reflecting on what Miller has told us,” he said, “does anything suggest itself to you? Any sort of hypothesis as to what the real facts may be?”

“Nothing whatever,” I replied. “The confusion that was already in my mind is only the worse confounded. But that is not your case, I take it?”

“Not entirely,” he admitted. “The fact is that I had already formed a hypothesis as to the motives and circumstances which lay behind the murder of Julius D’Arblay and I find this new matter not inconsistent with it. But that hypothesis may, nevertheless, turn out to be quite wrong when we put it to the test of further investigation.”

“You have some further investigation in view, then?”

“Yes. I am going to make a proposal to Superintendent Miller—and here he comes, before his time; by which I judge that he, also, is keen on the solution of this puzzle.”

Thorndyke’s opinion seemed to be justified, for the superintendent entered all agog and opened the subject at once.

“Well, Doctor, I suppose you have been thinking over Wilson’s story? How does it strike you? Have you come to any conclusion?”

“Yes,” replied Thorndyke. “I have come to the conclusion that I can’t accept that story at its face-value as representing the actual facts.”

Miller laughed with an air of mingled amusement and vexation. “That is just my position,” said he. “The story seems incredible, but yet you can’t raise any objection. The evidence in support of it is absolutely conclusive at every point. There isn’t a single weak spot in it—at least I haven’t found one. Perhaps you have?” And here he looked at Thorndyke with eager inquiry in his eyes.

“I won’t say that,” Thorndyke replied. “But I put it to you, Miller, that the alleged facts that are offered are too abnormal to be entertained. We cannot accept that string of coincidences. It must be obvious to you that there is a fallacy somewhere and that the actual facts are not what they seem.”

“Yes, I feel that myself,” rejoined Miller. “But what are we to do? How are we to find the flaw in the evidence, if there is one? Can you see where to look for it? I believe you can.”

“I think there is one point which ought to be verified,” said Thorndyke. “The identification of Crile doesn’t strike me as perfectly convincing.”

“How does his case differ from Bendelow’s?” Miller demanded.

“In two respects,” was the reply. “First, Bendelow was identified by two persons who had known him well for some time and who gave a circumstantial account of his illness, his death and the disposal of his body; and second, Bendelow’s remains have been cremated and are therefore, presumably, beyond our reach for purposes of identification.”

“Well,” Miller objected, “Crile isn’t so very accessible, being some few feet under ground.”

“Still, he is there; and he has been buried only a few weeks. It would be possible to exhume the body and settle the question of his identity once for all.”

“Then you are not satisfied with Dr. Usher’s identification?”

“No. Usher saw him only after a long, wasting illness, which must have altered his appearance very greatly; whereas the photograph was taken when Crile was in his normal health. It couldn’t have been so very like Usher’s patient.”

“That’s true,” said Miller; “and I remember that Usher wasn’t so very positive, according to Wilson. But he agreed that it seemed to be the same man, and all the other facts seemed to point to the certainty that it was really Crile. Still, you are not satisfied? It’s a pity Wilson took the photograph back with him.”

“The photograph is of no consequence,” said Thorndyke. “You have the fingerprints—properly authenticated fingerprints, actually taken from the man in the presence of witnesses. After this short time it will be possible to get perfectly recognizable fingerprints from the body, and those fingerprints will settle the identity of Usher’s patient beyond any possible doubt.”

The superintendent scratched his chin thoughtfully. “It’s a bit of a job to get an exhumation order,” said he. “Before I raise the question with the Commissioner, I should like to have a rather more definite opinion from you. Do you seriously doubt that the man in that coffin is Jonathan Crile?”

“It is my opinion,” replied Thorndyke—“of course, I may be wrong, but it is my considered opinion that the Crile who is in that coffin is not the Crile whose fingerprints are in your possession.”

“Very well. Doctor,” said Miller, rising and picking up his hat, “that is good enough for me. I won’t ask you for your reasons, because I know you won’t give them. But I have known you long enough to feel sure that you wouldn’t give a definite opinion like that unless you had got something pretty solid to go on. And I don’t think we shall have any difficulty about the exhumation order after what you have said.”

With this the superintendent took his leave, and very shortly afterwards Thorndyke carried me off to lunch at his club before dismissing me to take up my duties at the studio.

CHAPTER XVI

A Surprise for the Superintendent

It appeared that Thorndyke was correct in his estimate of the superintendent’s state of mind, for that officer managed to dispose in a very short time of the formalities necessary for the obtaining of an exhumation licence from the Home Office. It was less than a week after the interview that I have recorded when I received a note from Thorndyke asking me to join him and Miller at King’s Bench Walk on the following morning at the unholy hour of half past six. He offered to put me up for the night at his chambers, but I declined this hospitality, not wishing to trouble him unnecessarily; and after a perfunctory breakfast by gaslight, a ride on an early tram and a walk through the dim, lamplit streets, I entered the Temple just as the subdued notes of an invisible clock-bell announced a quarter past six. On my arrival at Thorndyke’s chambers, I observed a roomy hired carriage drawn up at the entry, and ascending the stairs, found the Doctor and Miller ready to start, each provided with a good-sized handbag.

“This is a queer sort of function,” I remarked, as we took our way down the stairs—“a sort of funeral the wrong way about.”

“Yes,” Thorndyke agreed; “it is what Lewis Carroll would have called an unfuneral—and very appropriately too. I didn’t give you any particulars in my note, but you understand the object of this expedition?”

“I assume that we are going to resurrect the late Jonathan Crile,” I replied. “It isn’t very dear to me what I have to do with the business, as I never knew Mr. Crile, though I am delighted to have this rather uncommon experience. But I should have thought that Usher would be the proper person to accompany you.”

“So the superintendent thought,” said Thorndyke, “and quite rightly; so I have arranged to pick up Usher and take him with us. He will be able to identify the body as that of his late patient, and you and I will help the superintendent to take the fingerprints.”

“I am taking your word for it, Doctor,” said Miller, “that the fingerprints will be recognizable; and that they will be the wrong ones.”

“I don’t guarantee that,” Thorndyke replied; “but still, I shall be surprised if you get the right ones.”

Miller nodded with an air of satisfaction, and nothing more was said on the subject until we drew up before Dr. Usher’s surgery. That discreet practitioner was already waiting at the open door and at once took his place in the carriage, watched curiously by observers from adjacent windows.

“This is a rum go,” he remarked, diffusing a vinous aroma into the atmosphere of the carriage. “I really did think I had paid my last visit to Mr. Crile. But there’s no such thing as certainty in this world.” He chuckled softly and continued: “A bit different this journey from the last. No hat-bands this time and no Sunday-school children. Lord! when I think of those kids piping round the open grave, and that our dear departed brother was wanted by the police so badly that they are actually going to dig him up, it makes me smile—it does indeed.”

In effect, it made him cackle; and as Miller had not heard the account of the funeral, it was repeated for his benefit in great detail. Then the anecdotal ball was set rolling in a fresh direction by one or two questions from Thorndyke, with the result that the entire history of Usher’s attendance on the deceased, including the misdeeds of Mrs. Pepper, was retailed with such a wealth of circumstance that the narration lasted until we stopped at the cemetery gate.

Our arrival was not unexpected, for, as we got out of the carriage, two gentlemen approached the entrance and one of them unlocked a gate to admit us. He appeared to be the official in charge of the cemetery, while the other, to whom he introduced us, was no less a person than Dr. Garroll, the Medical Officer of Health.

“The Home Office licence,” the latter explained, “directs that the removal shall be carried out under my supervision and to my satisfaction—very necessary in a populous neighbourhood like this.”

“Very necessary,” Thorndyke agreed gravely.

“I have provided a supply of fresh ground-lime, according to the directions,” Dr. Garroll continued, “and as a further precaution, I have brought with me a large formalin spray. That, I think, would satisfy all sanitary requirements.”

“It certainly should be sufficient,” Thorndyke agreed, “to meet the requirements of the present case. Has the excavation been commenced yet?”

“Oh, yes,” replied the cemetery official. “It was started quite early and has been carried down nearly to the full depth; but I thought that the coffin had better not be uncovered until you arrived. I have had a canvas screen put up round the grave so that the proceedings may be quite private. We can send the labourers outside before we unscrew the coffin-lid. You said, Superintendent, that you were anxious to avoid any kind of publicity; and I have warned the men to say nothing to anyone about the affair.”

“Quite right,” said Miller. “We don’t want this to get into the papers, in case—well, in any case.”

“Exactly, sir,” agreed the official, who was evidently bursting with curiosity himself. “Exactly. Here is the screen. If you will step inside, the excavation can be proceeded with.”

We passed inside the screen, where we found four men reposefully contemplating a coil of stout rope, a basket, attached to another rope, and a couple of spades. The grave yawned in the middle of the enclosure, flanked on one side by the mound of newly-dug earth and on the other by a tub of lime and a Winchester quart bottle fitted with a spray nozzle and large rubber bellows.

“You can get on with the digging now,” said the official; whereupon one of the men was let down into the grave, together with a spade and the basket, and set to work briskly. Then Dr. Garroll directed one of the other men to sprinkle in a little lime; which he did, with a pleased smile and so little discretion that the man below was seen to stop digging, and after looking up indignantly, take off his cap, shake it violently and ostentatiously dust his shoulders with it.

When about a dozen basketfuls of earth had been hoisted up, a hollow, woody sound accompanying the thrusts of the spade announced that the coffin had been reached. Thereupon more lime was sprinkled in, and Dr. Garroll, picking up the formalin bottle, sprayed vigorously into the cavity until a plaintive voice from below—accompanied by an unnaturally loud sneeze—was heard to declare that “he’d ’ave brought his umbrella if he’d knowed he was goin’ to be squirted at.” A few minutes’ more work exposed the coffin and enabled us to read the confirmatory inscription on the plate. Then the rope slings were let down and with some difficulty worked into position by the excavator below; who, when he had completed his task, climbed to the surface and grasped one end of a sling in readiness to haul on it.

“It’s a good deal easier letting ’em down than hoisting ’em up,” Usher remarked, as a final shower of lime descended and the men began to haul; “but poor old Crile oughtn’t to take much lifting. There was nothing of him but skin and bone.”

However this might be, it took the united efforts of the four men to draw the coffin up to the surface and slew it round clear of the yawning grave. But at last this was accomplished and it was lifted, for convenience of inspection, on to one of the mounds of newly-dug earth.

“Now,” said the presiding official, “you men had better go outside and wait down at the end of the path until you are wanted again,”—an order that was received with evident disfavour and complied with rather sulkily. As soon as they were gone, our friend produced a couple of screw-drivers, with which he and Miller proceeded in a very workmanlike manner to extract the screws, while Dr. Garroll enveloped them in a cloud of spray and Thorndyke, Usher and I stood apart to keep out of range. It was not a long process; indeed, it came to an end sooner than I had expected, for the first intimation that I received of its completion was a loud exclamation (consisting of the single word “Snakes!”) in the voice of Superintendent Miller. I turned quickly and saw that officer standing with the raised coffin-lid in his hand, staring into the interior with a look of perfectly indescribable amazement. Instantly I rushed forward and looked into the coffin; and then I was no less amazed. For in place of the mortal remains of the late Jonathan Crile was a portly sack oozing sawdust from a hole in its side, through which coyly peeped a length of thick lead pipe.

For a sensible time we all stood in breathless silence gazing down at that incredible sack. Suddenly Miller looked up eagerly at Thorndyke, whose sphinx-like countenance showed the faintest shadow of a smile. “You knew this coffin was empty. Doctor,” said he.

Thorndyke shook his head. “If I had known,” he replied, “I should have told you.”

“Well, you suspected that it was empty.”

“Yes,” Thorndyke admitted; “I don’t deny that.”

“I wonder why you did and why it never occurred to me.”

“It did not occur to you, perhaps, because you were not in possession of certain suggestive facts which are known to me. Still, if you consider that the circumstances surrounding the alleged deaths of these two men were so incredible as to make us both feel certain that there was some fallacy or deception in regard to the apparent facts, you will see that this was a very obvious possibility. Two men were alleged to have died, and one of them was certainly cremated. It followed that either the other man had died, as alleged, or that his funeral was a mock funeral. There was no other alternative. You must admit that, Miller.”

“I do, I do,” the superintendent replied ruefully. “It is always like this. Your explanations are so obvious when you have given them, and yet no one thinks of them but yourself. All the same, this isn’t so very obvious, even now. There are some extraordinary discrepancies that have yet to be explained. But we can discuss them on the way back. The question now is, what is to be done with this coffin?”

“The first thing to be done,” replied Thorndyke, “is to screw on the lid. Then we can leave the cemetery authorities to deal with it. But those men must be sworn to absolute secrecy. That is vitally important, for if this exhumation should get reported in the press, we should probably lose the whole advantage of this discovery.”

“Yes, by Jove!” the superintendent agreed emphatically. “It would be a disaster. At present the late Mr. Crile is at large, perfectly happy and secure and entirely off his guard. We can just follow him up at our leisure and take him unawares. But if he got wind of this, he would be out of reach in a twinkling—that is, if he is alive, which I suppose—” And here the superintendent suddenly paused, with knitted brows.

“Exactly,” said Thorndyke. “The advantage of surprise is with us and we must keep it at all costs. You realize the position,” he added, addressing the cemetery official and the Medical Officer.

“Perfectly,” the latter replied—a little glumly, I thought, “and you may rely on us both to do everything that we can to keep the affair secret.”

With this we all emerged from the screen and walked back slowly towards the gate, and as we went, I strove vainly to get my ideas into some kind of order. But the more I considered the astonishing event which had just happened, the more incomprehensible did it appear. And yet I saw plainly that it could not really be incomprehensible since Thorndyke had actually arrived at its probability in advance. The glaring discrepancies and inconsistencies which chased one another through my mind could not be real. They must be susceptible of reconciliation with the observed facts. But by no effort was I able to reconcile them.

Nor, evidently, was I alone the subject of these difficulties and bewilderments. The superintendent walked with corrugated brows and an air of profound cogitation, and even Usher—when he could detach his thoughts from the juvenile choir at the funeral—was obviously puzzled. In fact it was he who opened the discussion as the carriage moved off.

“This job,” he observed with conviction, “is what the sporting men would call a fair knock-out. I can’t make head nor tail of it. You talk of the late Mr. Crile being at large and perfectly happy. But the late Mr. Crile died of cancer of the pancreas. I attended him in his illness. There was no doubt about the cancer, though I wouldn’t swear to the pancreas. But he died of cancer all right. I saw him dead; and what is more, I helped to put him into that coffin. What do you say to that, Dr. Thorndyke?”

“What is there to say?” was the elusive reply, “You are a competent observer and your facts are beyond dispute. But inasmuch as Mr. Crile was not in that coffin when we opened it, the unavoidable inference is that after you had put him in, somebody else must have taken him out.”

“Yes, that is clear enough,” rejoined Usher. “But what has become of him? The man was dead, that I am ready to swear to. But where is he?”

“Yes,” said Miller. “That is what is bothering me. There has evidently been some hanky-panky. But I can’t follow it. It isn’t as though we were dealing with a supposititious body. There was a real dead man. That isn’t disputed—at least, I take it that it isn’t.”

“It certainly is not disputed by me,” said Thorndyke.

“Then what the deuce became of him? And why, in the name of blazes, was he taken out of the coffin? That’s what I want to know. Can you tell me. Doctor? But there! What is the good of asking you? Of course you know all about it! You always do. But it is the old story. You have got the ace of trumps up your sleeve, but you won’t bring it out until it is time to take the trick. Now, isn’t that the position, Doctor?”

Thorndyke’s impassive face softened with a faint, inscrutable smile.

“We hold a promising hand. Miller,” he replied quietly; “but if the ace is there, it is you who will have the satisfaction of playing it. And I hope to see you put it down quite soon.”

Miller grunted. “Very well,” said he. “I can see that I am not going to get any more out of you than that; so I must wait for you to develop your plans. Meanwhile I am going to ask Dr. Usher for a signed statement.”

“Yes, that is very necessary,” said Thorndyke. “You two had better go on together and set down Gray and me in the Kingsland Road, where he and I have some other business to transact.”

I glanced at him quickly as he made this astonishing statement, for we had no business there, or anywhere else that I knew of. But I said nothing. My recent training had not been in vain.

A few minutes later, near to Dalston Junction, he stopped the carriage, and having made our adieux, we got out. Then Thorndyke strode off down the Kingsland Road, but presently struck off westward through a bewildering maze of seedy suburban streets and shabby squares in which I was as completely lost as if I had been dropped into the midst of the Sahara.

“What is the nature of the business that we are going to transact?” I ventured to ask as we turned yet another corner.

“In the first place,” he replied, “I wanted to hear what conclusions you had reached in view of this discovery at the cemetery.”

“Well, that won’t take long,” I said, with a grin. “They can be summed up in half a dozen words: I have come to the conclusion that I am a fool.”

He laughed good-humouredly. “There is no harm in thinking that,” he said, “provided you are not right—which you are not. But did that empty coffin suggest no new ideas to you?”

“On the contrary,” I replied, “it scattered the few ideas that I had. I am in the same condition as Superintendent Miller—an inextricable muddle.”

“But,” he objected, “you are not in the same position as the superintendent. If he knew all that you and I know, he wouldn’t be in a muddle at all. What is your difficulty?”

“Primarily the discrepancies about this man Crile. There seems to be no possible doubt that he died. But apparently he was never buried; and you and Miller seem to believe that he is still alive. Further, I don’t see what business Crile is of ours at all.”

“You will see that presently,” said he, “and meanwhile you must not confuse Miller’s beliefs with mine. However,” he added as we crossed a bridge over a canal—presumably the Regent’s Canal—“we will adjourn the discussion for the moment. Do you know what street that is ahead of us?”

“No,” I answered; “I have never been here before, so far as I know.”

“That is Field Street,” said he.

“The street that the late Mr. Crile lived in?”

“Yes,” he answered; and as we passed on into the street from the foot of the bridge, he added, pointing to a house on our left hand, “And that is the residence of the late Mr. Crile—empty, and to let, as you observe.”

As we walked past I looked curiously at the house, with its shabby front and its blank, sightless windows, its desolate condition emphasized by the bills which announced it; but I made no remark until we came to the bottom of the street, when I recognized the cross-roads as the one along which I used to pass on my way to the Morrises’ house. I mentioned the fact to Thorndyke, and he replied: “Yes. That is where we are going now. We are going to take a look over the premises. That house also is empty, and I have got a permit from the agent to view it and have been entrusted with the keys.”

In a few minutes we turned into the familiar little thoroughfare, and as we took our way past its multitudinous stalls and barrows I speculated on the object of this exploration. But it was futile to ask questions, seeing that I had but to wait a matter of minutes or the answer to declare itself. Soon we reached the house and halted for a moment to look through the glazed door into the empty shop. Then Thorndyke inserted the key into the side-door and pushed it open.

There is always something a little melancholy in the sight of an empty house which one has known in its occupied state. Nothing, indeed, could be more cheerless than the Morris household; yet it was with a certain feeling of depression that I looked down the long passage (where Cropper had bumped his head in the dark) and heard the clang of the closing door. This was a dead house—a mere empty shell. The feeble life that I had known in it was no more. So I reflected as I walked slowly down the passage at Thorndyke’s side, recalling the ungracious personalities of Mrs. Morris and her husband and the pathetic figure of poor Mr. Bendelow.

When from the passage we came out into the hall, the sense of desolation was intensified; for here not only the bare floor and vacant walls proclaimed the untenanted state of the house. The big curtain that had closed in the end of the hall and to a great extent furnished it was gone, leaving the place very naked and chill. Incidentally, its disappearance revealed a feature of whose existence I had been unaware.

“Why,” I exclaimed, “they had a second street-door. I never saw that. It was hidden by a curtain. But it can’t open into Market Street.”

“It doesn’t,” replied Thorndyke. “It opens on Field Street.”

“On Field Street!” I repeated in surprise. “I wonder why they didn’t let me in that way. It is really the front of the house.”

“I think,” answered Thorndyke, “that if you open the door and look out, you will understand why you were admitted at the back.”

I unbolted the door and, opening it, stepped out on the wide threshold and looked up and down the street. Thorndyke was right. The thoroughfare was undoubtedly Field Street, down which we had passed only a few minutes ago, and close by, on the right hand, was the canal bridge. Strongly impressed with the oddity of the affair, I turned to re-enter, and as I turned I glanced up at the number on the door. As my eye lighted on it, I uttered a cry of astonishment. For the number was fifty-two!

“But this is amazing!” I exclaimed, re-entering the hall—where Thorndyke stood watching me with quiet amusement—and shutting the door. “It seems that Usher and I were actually visiting at the same house!”

“Evidently,” said he.

“But it almost looks as if we were visiting the same patient!”

“There can be practically no doubt that you were,” he agreed. “It was on that assumption that I induced Miller to apply for the exhumation order; and the empty coffin seems to confirm it completely.”

I was thunderstruck; not only by the incredible thing that had happened, but by Thorndyke’s uncanny knowledge of all the circumstances.

“Then,” I said, after a pause, “if Usher and I were attending the same man, we were both attending Bendelow.”

“That is certainly what the appearances suggest,” he agreed.

“It was undoubtedly Bendelow who was cremated,” said I.

“All the circumstances seem to point to that conclusion,” he admitted, “unless you can think of any that point in the opposite direction.”

“I cannot,” I replied. “Everything points in the same direction. The dead man was seen and identified as Bendelow by those two ladies. Miss Dewsnep and Miss Bonnington; and they not only saw him here, but they actually saw him in his coffin just before it was passed through into the crematorium. And there is no doubt that they knew Bendelow by sight, for you remember that they recognized the photograph of him that the American detective showed them.”

“Yes,” he admitted, “that is so. But their identification is a point that requires further investigation. And it is a vitally important point. I have my own hypothesis as to what took place, but that hypothesis will have to be tested; and that test will be what the logicians would call the Experimentum Crucis. It will settle one way or the other whether my theory of this case is correct. If my hypothesis as to their identification is true, there will be nothing left to investigate. The case will be complete and ready to turn over to Miller.”

I listened to this statement in complete bewilderment. Thorndyke’s reference to the case conveyed nothing definite to me. It was all so involved that I had almost lost count of the subjects of our investigation.

“When you speak of ‘the case’,” said I, “what case are you referring to?”

“My dear Gray!” he protested. “Do you not realize that we are trying to discover who murdered Julius D’Arblay?”

“I thought you were,” I answered; “but I can’t connect this new mystery with his death in any way.”

“Never mind,” said he. “When the case is completed, we will have a general elucidation. Meanwhile there is something else that I have to show you before we go. It is through this side-door.”

He led me out into a large neglected garden and along a wide path that was all overgrown with weeds. As we went I tried to collect and arrange my confused ideas, and suddenly a new discrepancy occurred to me. I proceeded to propound it.

“By the way, you are not forgetting that the two alleged deaths were some days apart? I saw Bendelow dead on a Monday. He had died on the preceding afternoon. But Crile’s funeral had already taken place a day or two previously.”

“I see no difficulty in that,” Thorndyke replied. “Crile’s funeral occurred, as I have ascertained, on a Saturday. You saw Bendelow alive for the last time on Thursday morning. Usher was sent for and saw Crile dead on Thursday evening, he having evidently died—with or without assistance—soon after you left. Of course, the date of death given to you was false, and you mention in your notes of the case that both you and Cropper were surprised at the condition of the body. The previous funeral offers no difficulty, seeing that we know that the coffin was empty. This is what I thought you might be interested to see.”

He pointed to a flight of stone steps, at the bottom of which was a wooden gate set in the wall that enclosed the garden. I looked at the steps—a little vacantly, I am afraid—and inquired what there was about them that I was expected to find of interest.

“Perhaps,” he replied, “you will see better if we open the gate.”

We descended the steps and he inserted a key into the gate, drawing my attention to the fact that the lock had been oiled at no very distant date and was in quite good condition. Then he threw the gate open and we both stepped out on to the tow-path of the canal. I looked about me in considerable surprise, for we were within a few yards of the hut with the derrick and the little wharf from which I had been flung into the canal.

“I remember this gate,” said I—“in fact, I think I mentioned it to you in my account of my adventure here. But I little imagined that it belonged to the Morrises’ house. It would have been a short way in, if I had known. But I expect it was locked at the time.”

“I expect it was,” Thorndyke agreed, and thereupon turned and re-entered. We passed once more down the long passage, and came out into Market Street, when Thorndyke locked the door and pocketed the key.

“That is an extraordinary arrangement,” I remarked; “one house having two frontages on separate streets.”

“It is not a very uncommon one,” Thorndyke replied. “You see how it comes about. A house fronting on one street has a long back garden extending to another street which is not yet fully built on. As the new street fills up, a shop is built at the end of the garden. A small house may be built in connexion with it and cut off from the garden or the shop may be connected with the original house, as in this instance. But in either case, the shop belongs to the new street and has its own number. What are you going to do now?”

“I am going straight on to the studio,” I replied.

“You had better come and have an early lunch with me first,” said he. “There is no occasion to hurry. Polton is there and you won’t easily get rid of him, for I understand that Miss D’Arblay is doing the finishing work on a wax bust.”

“I ought to see that, too,” said I.

He looked at me with a mischievous smile. “I expect you will have plenty of opportunities in the future,” said he, “whereas Polton must make hay while the sun shines. And, by the way, he may have something to tell you. I have instructed him to make arrangements with those two ladies, Miss Dewsnep and her friend, to go into the question of their identification of Bendelow. I want you to be present at the interview, but I have left him to fix the date. Possibly he has made the arrangement by now. You had better ask him.”

At this moment an eligible omnibus making its appearance, we both climbed on board and were duly conveyed to King’s Cross, where we alighted and lunched at a modest restaurant, thereafter separating to go our respective ways north and south.

CHAPTER XVII

A CHAPTER OF SURPRISE

In answer to my knock, the studio door was opened by Polton; and as I met his eyes for a moment I was conscious of something unusual in his appearance. I had scanty opportunity to examine him, for he seemed to be in a hurry, bustling away after a few hasty words of apology and returning whence he had come. Following close on his heels, I saw what was the occasion of his hurry. He was engaged with a brush and a pot of melted wax in painting a layer of the latter on the insides of the moulds of a pair of arms, while Marion, seated on a high stool, was working at a wax bust, which was placed on a revolving modelling-stand, obliterating the seams and other irregularities with a steel tool which she heated from time to time at a small spirit-lamp.

When I had made my salutations, I offered my help to Polton, which he declined—without looking up from his work—saying that he wanted to carry the job through by himself. I sympathized with this natural desire, but it left me without occupation, for the work which Marion was doing was essentially a one-person job, and in any case was far beyond the capabilities of either of the apprentices. For a minute or two I stood idly looking on at Polton’s proceedings, but noticing that my presence seemed to worry him, I presently moved away—again with a vague impression that there was something unusual in his appearance—and drawing up another high stool beside Marion’s, settled myself to take a lesson in the delicate and difficult technique of surface finishing.

We were all very silent. My two companions were engrossed by their respective occupations and I must needs refrain from distracting them by untimely conversation; so I sat, well content to watch the magical tool stealing caressingly over the wax surface, causing the disfiguring seams to vanish miraculously into an unbroken contour. But my own attention was somewhat divided; for even as I watched the growing perfection of the bust there would float into my mind now and again an idle speculation as to the change in Polton’s appearance. What could it be? It was something that seemed to have altered, to some extent, his facial expression. It couldn’t be that he had shaved off his moustache or whiskers, for he had none to shave. Could he have parted his hair in a new way? It seemed hardly sufficient to account for the change; and looking round at him cautiously, I could detect nothing unfamiliar about his hair.

At this point he picked up his wax-pot and carried it away to the farther end of the studio, to exchange it for another which was heating in a water-bath. I took the opportunity to lean towards Marion and ask in a whisper:

“Have you noticed anything unusual about Polton?”

She nodded emphatically and cast a furtive glance over her shoulder in his direction.

“What is it?” I asked in the same low tone.

She took another precautionary glance and then, leaning towards me with an expression of exaggerated mystery, whispered:

“He has cut his eyelashes off.”

I gazed at her in amazement, and was about to put a further question, but she held up a warning fore-finger and turned again to her work. However, my curiosity was now at boiling-point. As soon as Polton returned to his bench, I slipped off my stool and sauntered over to it on the pretence of seeing how his wax cast was progressing.

Marion’s report was perfectly correct. His eyelids were as bare of lashes as those of a marble bust. And this was not all. Now that I came to look at him critically, his eyebrows had a distinctly moth—eaten appearance. He had been doing something to them, too.

It was an amazing affair. For one moment I was on the point of demanding an explanation, but good sense and good manners conquered the inquisitive impulse in time. Returning to my stool I cast an inquiring glance at Marion, from whom, however, I got no enlightenment but such as I could gather from a most alluring dimple that hovered about the corner of her mouth and that speedily diverted my thoughts into other channels.

My two companions continued for some time to work silently, leaving me to my meditations—which concerned themselves alternately with Polton’s eyelashes and the dimple aforesaid. Suddenly Marion turned to me and asked:

“Has Mr. Polton told you that we are all to have a holiday tomorrow?”

“No,” I answered; “but Dr. Thorndyke mentioned that Mr. Polton might have something to tell us. Why are we all to have a holiday?”

“Why, you see, sir,” said Polton, standing up and forgetting all about his eyelashes, “the Doctor instructed me to make an appointment with those two ladies. Miss Dewsnep and Miss Bonnington, to come to our chambers on a matter of identification. I have made the appointment for ten o’clock tomorrow morning; and as the Doctor wants you to be present at the interview and wants me to be in attendance, and we can’t leave Miss D’Arblay here alone, we have arranged to shut up the studio for tomorrow.”

“Yes,” said Marion; “and Arabella and I are going to spend the morning looking at the shops in Regent Street, and then we are coming to lunch with you and Dr. Thorndyke. It will be quite a red-letter day.”

“I don’t quite see what these ladies are coming to the chambers for,” said I.

“You will see, all in good time, sir,” replied Polton; and as if to head me off from any further questions, he added: “I forgot to ask how your little party went off this morning.”

“It went off with a bang,” I answered. “We got the coffin up all right, but Mr. Fox wasn’t at home. The coffin was empty.”

“I rather think that was what the Doctor expected,” said Polton.

Marion looked at me with eager curiosity. “This sounds rather thrilling,” she said. “May one ask who it was that you expected to find in that coffin?”

“My impression is,” I replied, “that the missing tenant was a person who bore a strong resemblance to that photograph that I showed you.”

“Oh, dear!” she exclaimed. “What a pity! I wish that coffin hadn’t been empty. But, of course, it could hardly have been occupied, under the circumstances. I suppose I mustn’t ask for fuller details?”

“I don’t imagine that there is any secrecy about the affair, so far as you are concerned,” I answered; “but I would rather that you had the details from Dr. Thorndyke, or at least with his express authority. He is conducting the investigations, and what I know has been imparted to me in confidence.”

This view was warmly endorsed by Polton (who had by now either forgotten his eyelashes or abandoned concealment as hopeless). The subject was accordingly dropped and the two workers resumed their occupations. When Polton had painted a complete skin of wax over the interior of both pairs of moulds, I helped him to put the latter together and fasten them with cords. Then into each completed mould we poured enough melted wax to fill it, and after a few seconds poured it out again, leaving a solid layer to thicken the skin and unite the two halves of the wax cast. This finished Polton’s job, and shortly afterwards he took his departure. Nor did we remain very much longer, for the final stages of the surface finishing were too subtle to be carried out by artificial light and had to be postponed until daylight was available.

As we walked homewards we discussed the situation so far as was possible without infringing Thorndyke’s confidences.

“I am very confused and puzzled about it all,” she said. “It seems that Dr. Thorndyke is trying to get on the track of the man who murdered my father. But whenever I hear any details of his investigations, they always seem to be concerned with somebody else or with something that has no apparent connexion with the crime.”

“That is exactly my condition,” said I. “He seems to be busily working at problems that are totally irrelevant. As far as I can make out, the murderer has never once come into sight, excepting when he appeared at the studio that terrible night. The people in whom Thorndyke has interested himself are mere outsiders—suspicious characters, no doubt, but not suspected of the murder. This man, Crile, for instance, whose empty coffin was dug up, was certainly a shady character. But he was not the murderer, though he seems to have been associated with the murderer at one time. Then there is that Morris, whose mask was found at the studio. He is another queer customer. But he is certainly not the murderer, though he was also probably an associate. Thorndyke has taken an immense interest in him. But I can’t see why. He doesn’t seem to me to be in the picture, or at any rate, not in the foreground of it. Of the actual murderer we seem to know nothing at all—at least that is my position.”

“Do you think Dr. Thorndyke has really got anything to go on?” she asked.

“My dear Marion!” I exclaimed, “I am confident that he has the whole case cut and dried and perfectly clear in his mind. What I was saying referred only to myself. My ideas are all in confusion, but his are not. He can see quite clearly who is in the picture and in what part of it. The blindness is mine. But let us wait and see what tomorrow brings forth. I have a sort of feeling—in fact he hinted—that this interview is the final move. He may have something to tell you when you arrive.”

“I do hope he may,” she said earnestly, and with this we dismissed the subject. A few minutes later we parted at the gate of Ivy Cottage and I took my way (by the main thoroughfares) home to my lodgings.

On the following morning I made a point of presenting myself at Thorndyke’s chambers well in advance of the appointed time in order that I might have a few words with him before the two ladies arrived. With the same purpose, no doubt, Superintendent Miller took a similar course, the result being that we converged simultaneously on the entry and ascended the stairs together. The ‘oak’ was already open and the inner door was opened by Thorndyke, who smilingly remarked that he seemed thereby to have killed two early birds with one stone.

“So you have, Doctor,” assented the superintendent; “two early birds who have come betimes to catch the elusive worm—and I suspect they won’t catch him.”

“Don’t be pessimistic. Miller,” said Thorndyke with a quiet chuckle. “He isn’t such a slippery worm as that. I suppose you want to know something of the programme?”

“Naturally, I do; and so, I suppose, does Dr. Gray.”

“Well,” said Thorndyke, “I am not going to tell you much—”

“I knew it,’ groaned Miller.

“Because it will be better for everyone to have an open mind—”

“Well,” interposed Miller, “mine is open enough, wide open; and nothing inside.”

“And then,” pursued Thorndyke, “there is the possibility that we shall not get the result we hope for; and in that case, the less you expect the less you will be disappointed.”

“But,” persisted Miller, “in general terms, what are we here for? I understand that those two ladies, the witnesses to Bendelow’s will, are coming presently. What are they coming for? Do you expect to get any information out of them?”

“I have some hopes,” he replied, “of learning something from them. In particular I want to test them in respect of their identification of Bendelow.”

“Ha! Then you have got a photograph of him?”

Thorndyke shook his head. “No,” he replied. “I have not been able to get a photograph of him.”

“Then you have an exact description of him?”

“No,” was the reply. “I have no description of him at all.”

The superintendent banged his hat on the table. “Then what the deuce have you got, sir?” he demanded distractedly. “You must have something, you know, if you are going to test these witnesses on the question of identification. You haven’t got a photograph, you haven’t got a description, and you can’t have the man himself because he is at present reposing in a little terra-cotta pot in the form of bone-ash. Now, what have you got?”

Thorndyke regarded the exasperated superintendent with an inscrutable smile and then glanced at Polton, who had just stolen into the room and was now listening with an expression of such excessive crinkliness that I wrote him down an accomplice on the spot.

“You had better ask Polton,” said Thorndyke. “He is the stage manager on this occasion.”

The superintendent turned sharply to confront my fellow-apprentice, whose eyes thereupon disappeared into a labyrinth of crow’s feet.

“It’s no use asking me, sir,” said he. “I’m only an accessory before the fact, so to speak. But you’ll know all about it when the ladies arrive—and I rather think I hear ’em coming now.”

In corroboration, light footsteps and feminine voices became audible, apparently ascending the stairs. We hastily seated ourselves while Polton took his station by the door and Thorndyke said to me in a low voice: “Remember, Gray, no comments of any kind. These witnesses must act without any sort of suggestion from anybody.”

I gave a quick assent, and at that moment Polton threw open the door with a flourish and announced majestically:

“Miss Dewsnep, Miss Bonnington.”

We all rose, and Thorndyke advanced to receive his visitors while Polton placed chairs for them.

“It is exceedingly good of you to take all this trouble to help us,” said Thorndyke. “I hope it was not in any way inconvenient for you to come here this morning.”

“Oh, not at all,” replied Miss Dewsnep; “only we are not quite clear as to what it is that you want us to do.”

“We will go into that question presently,” said Thorndyke. “Meanwhile, may I introduce to you these two gentlemen, who are interested in our little business: Mr. Miller and Dr. Gray.”

The two ladies bowed, and Miss Dewsnep remarked:

“We are already acquainted with Dr. Gray. We had the melancholy pleasure of meeting him at Mrs. Morris’s house on the sad occasion when he came to examine the mortal remains of poor Mr. Bendelow, who is now with the angels.”

“And no doubt,” added Miss Bonnington, “in extremely congenial society.”

At this statement of Miss Dewsnep’s the superintendent turned and looked at me sharply with an expression of enlightenment; but he made no remark, and the latter lady returned to her original inquiry. “You were going to tell us what it is that you want us to do.”

“Yes,” replied Thorndyke. “It is quite a simple matter. We want you to look at the face of a certain person who will be shown to you and to tell us if you recognize and can give a name to that person.”

“Not an insane person, I hope!” exclaimed Miss Dewsnep.

“No,” Thorndyke assured her, “not an insane person.”

“Nor a criminal person in custody, I trust,” added Miss Bonnington.

“Certainly not,” replied Thorndyke. “In short, let me assure you that the inspection of this person need not cause you the slightest embarrassment. It will be a perfectly simple affair, as you will see. But perhaps we had better proceed at once. If you two gentlemen will follow Polton, I will conduct the ladies upstairs myself.”

On this we rose, and Miller and I followed Polton out on to the landing, where he turned and began to ascend the stairs at a slow and solemn pace, as if he were conducting a funeral. The superintendent walked at my side and muttered as he went, being evidently in a state of bewilderment fully equal to my own.

“Now, what the blazes,” he growled, “can the doctor be up to now? I never saw such a man for springing surprises on one. But who the deuce can he have up there?”

At the top of the second flight we came on to a landing and, proceeding along it, reached a door which Polton unlocked and opened.

“You understand, gentlemen,” he said, halting in the doorway, “that no remarks or comments are to be made until the witnesses have gone. Those were my instructions.”

With this he entered the room, closely followed by Miller, who, as he crossed the threshold, set at naught Polton’s instructions by exclaiming in a startled voice:

“Snakes!” I followed quickly, all agog with curiosity; but whatever I had expected to see—if I had expected anything—I was totally unprepared for what I did see.

The room was a smallish room, completely bare and empty of furniture save for four chairs—on two of which Polton firmly seated us; and in the middle of the floor, raised on a pair of trestles, was a coffin covered with a black linen cloth. At this gruesome object Miller and I gazed in speechless astonishment, but, apart from Polton’s injunction, there was no opportunity for an exchange of sentiments; for we had hardly taken our seats when we heard the sound of ascending footsteps mingled with Thorndyke’s bland and persuasive accents. A few moments later the party reached the door, and as the two ladies came in sight of the coffin, both started back with a cry of alarm.

“Oh, dear!” exclaimed Miss Dewsnep, “it’s a dead person! Who is it, sir? Is it anyone we know?”

“That is what we want you to tell us,” Thorndyke replied.

“How mysterious!” exclaimed Miss Bonnington, in a hushed voice. “How dreadful! Some poor creature who has been found dead, I suppose? I hope it won’t be very—er—you know what I mean, sir—when the coffin is opened.”

“There will be no need to open the coffin,” Thorndyke reassured her. “There is an inspection window in the coffin-lid through which you can see the face. All you have to do is to look through the window and tell us if the face that you see is the face of anyone who is known to you. Are you ready, Polton?”

Polton replied that he was, having taken up his position at the head of the coffin with an air of profound gravity, approaching to gloom. The two ladies shuddered audibly, but their nervousness being now overcome by a devouring curiosity, they advanced, one on either side of the coffin, and taking up a position close to Polton, gazed eagerly at the covered coffin. There was a solemn pause as Polton carefully gathered up the two corners of the linen pall. Then, with a quick movement, he threw it back. The two witnesses simultaneously stooped and peered in at the window. Simultaneously their mouths opened and they sprang back with a shriek.

“Why, it’s Mr. Bendelow!”

“You are quite sure it is Mr. Bendelow?” Thorndyke asked.

“Perfectly,” replied Miss Dewsnep. “And yet,” she continued with a mystified look, “it can’t be; for I saw him pass through the bronze doors into the cremation furnace. I saw him with my own eyes,” she added, somewhat unnecessarily. “And what’s more, I saw his ashes in the casket.”

She gazed with wide-open eyes at Thorndyke and then at her friend, and the two women tiptoed forward and once more stared in at the window with starting eyes and dropped chins.

“It is Mr. Bendelow,” said Miss Bonnington, in an awe-stricken voice.

“But it can’t be,” Miss Dewsnep protested in tremulous tones. “You saw him put through those doors yourself, Susan, and you saw his ashes afterwards.”

“I can’t help that, Sarah,” the other lady retorted. “This is Mr. Bendelow. You can’t deny that it is.”

“Our eyes must be deceived,” said Miss Dewsnep, the said eyes being still riveted on the face behind the window. “It can’t be—and yet it is—but yet it is impossible—”

She paused suddenly and raised a distinctly alarmed face to her friend.

“Susan,” she said, in a low, rather shaky voice, “there is something here with which we, as Christian women, are better not concerned. Something against nature. The dead has been recalled from a burning fiery furnace by some means which we may not inquire into. It were better, Susan, that we should now depart from this place.”

This was evidently Susan’s opinion, too, for she assented with uncommon alacrity and with a distinctly uncomfortable air; and the pair moved with one accord towards the door. But Thorndyke gently detained them.

“Do we understand,” he asked, “that, apart from the apparently impossible circumstances, the body in that coffin is, in your opinion, the body of the late Simon Bendelow?”

“You do,” Miss Dewsnep replied in a resentfully nervous tone and regarding Thorndyke with very evident alarm. “If it were possible that it could be, I would swear that those unnatural remains were those of my poor friend Mr. Bendelow. As it is not possible, it cannot be.”

“Thank you,” said Thorndyke, with the most extreme suavity of manner. “You have done us a great service by coming here today, and a great service to humanity—how great a service you will learn later. I am afraid it has been a disagreeable experience to both of you, for which I am sincerely sorry; but you must let me assure you that there is nothing unlawful or supernatural in what you have seen. Later, I hope you will be able to realize that. And now I trust you will allow Mr. Polton to accompany you to the dining-room and offer you a little refreshment.”

As neither of the ladies raised any objection to this programme, we all took our leave of them and they departed down the stairs, escorted by Polton. When they had gone, Miller stepped across to the coffin and cast a curious glance in at the window.

“So that is Mr. Bendelow,” said he. “I don’t think much of him, and I don’t see how he is going to help us. But you have given those two old girls a rare shake-up, and I don’t wonder. Of course, this can’t be a dead body that you have got in this coffin, but it is a most life-like representation of one, and it took in those poor old Judies properly. What have you got to tell us about this affair, Doctor? I can see that your scheme, whatever it was, has come off. They always do. But what about it? What has this experiment proved?”

“It has turned a mere name into an actual person,” was the reply.

“Yes, I know,” rejoined Miller, “Very interesting, too. Now we know exactly what he looked like. But what about it? And what is the next move?”

“The next move on my part is to lay a sworn information against him as the murderer of Julius D’Arblay; which I will do now, if you will administer the oath and witness my signature.” As he spoke, Thorndyke produced a paper from his pocket and laid it on the coffin.

The superintendent looked at the paper with a surprised grin.

“A little late, isn’t it,” he said, “to be swearing an information? Of course you can if you like, but when you’ve done it, what then?”

“Then,” replied Thorndyke, “it will be for you to arrest him and bring him to trial.”

At this reply the superintendent’s eyes opened until his face might have been a symbolic mask of astonishment. Grasping his hair with both hands, he rose slowly from his chair, staring at Thorndyke as if at some alarming apparition.

“You’ll be the death of me. Doctor!” he exclaimed. “You really will. I am not fit for these shocks at my time of life. What is it you ask me to do? I am to arrest this man! What man? Here is a waxwork gentleman in a coffin—at least, I suppose that is what he is—that might have come straight from Madame Tussaud’s. Am I to arrest him? And there is a casket full of ashes somewhere. Am I to arrest those? Or am I off my head or dreaming?”

Thorndyke smiled at him indulgently. “Now, Miller,” said he, “don’t pretend to be foolish, because you are not. The man whom you are to arrest is a live man, and what is more, he is easily accessible whenever you choose to lay your hands on him.”

“Do you know where to find him?”

“Yes,” Thorndyke replied. “I, myself, will conduct you to his house, which is in Abbey Road, Hornsey, nearly opposite Miss D’Arblay’s studio.”

I gave a gasp of amazement on hearing this, which directed the superintendent’s attention to me.

“Very well. Doctor,” he said, “I will take your information, but you needn’t swear to it; just sign your name. I must be off now, but I will look in tonight about nine, if that will do, to get the necessary particulars and settle the arrangements with you. Probably tomorrow afternoon will be a good time to make the arrest. What do you think?”

“I should think it would be an excellent time,” Thorndyke replied, “but we can settle definitely tonight.”

With this, the superintendent, having taken the signed paper from Thorndyke, shook both our hands and bustled away with the traces of his late surprise still visible on his countenance.

The recognition of the tenant of the coffin as Simon Bendelow had come on me with almost as great a shock as it had on the two witnesses, but for a different reason. My late experiences enabled me to guess at once that the mysterious tenant was a waxwork figure, presumably of Polton’s creation. But what I found utterly inexplicable was that such a waxwork should have been produced in the likeness of a man whom neither Polton nor Thorndyke had ever seen. The astonishing conversation between the latter and Miller had, for the moment, driven this mystery out of my mind; but as soon as the superintendent had gone, I stepped over to the coffin and looked in at the window. And then I was more amazed than ever. For the face that I saw was not the face that I had expected to see. There, it is true, was the old familiar skull-cap, which Bendelow had worn, pulled down over the temples above the jaw-bandage. But it was the wrong face. (Incidentally I now understood what had become of Polton’s eyelashes. That conscientious realist had evidently taken no risks.)

“But,” I protested, “this is not Bendelow. This is Morris.”

Thorndyke nodded. “You have just heard two competent witnesses declare with complete conviction and certainty that this is Simon Bendelow; and, as you yourself pointed out, there can be no doubt as to their knowledge of Bendelow, since they recognized the photograph of him that was shown to them by the American detective.”

“That is perfectly true,” I admitted. “But it is a most incomprehensible affair. This is not the man who was cremated.”

“Evidently not, since he is still alive.”

“But these two women saw Bendelow cremated—at least they saw him pass through into the crematorium, which is near enough. And they had seen him in the coffin a few minutes before I saw him in the coffin, and they saw him again a few minutes after Cropper and Morris and I had put him back in the coffin. And the man whom we put into the coffin was certainly not this man.”

“Obviously not, since he helped you to put the corpse in.”

“And again,” I urged, “if the body that we put into the coffin was not the body that was cremated, what has become of it? It wasn’t buried, for the other coffin was empty. Those women must have made some mistake.”

He shook his head. “The solution of the mystery is staring you in the face,” said he. “It is perfectly obvious, and I am not going to give you any further hints now. When we have made the arrest, you shall have a full exposition of the case. But tell me, now; did those two women ever meet Morris?”

I considered for a few moments and then replied: “I have no evidence that they ever met him. They certainly never did in my presence. But even if they had, they would hardly have recognized him as the person they have identified today. He had grown a beard and moustache, you will remember, and his appearance was very much altered from what it was when I first saw him.”

Thorndyke nodded. “It would be,” he agreed. Then, turning to another subject, he said: “I am afraid it will be necessary for you to be present at the arrest. I would much rather that you were not, for he is a dangerous brute and will probably fight like a wild cat; but you are the only one of us who really knows him by sight in his present state.”

“I should like to be in at the death,” I said eagerly.

“That is well enough,” said he, “so long as it is his death. You must bring your pistol and don’t be afraid to use it.”

“And how shall I know when I am wanted?” I asked.

“You had better go to the studio tomorrow morning,” he replied. “I will send a note by Polton giving you particulars of the time when we shall call for you. And now we may as well help Polton to prepare for our other visitors, and I think. Gray, that we will say as little as possible about this morning’s proceedings or those of tomorrow. Explanations will come better after the event.”

With this, we went down to the dining-room, where we found Polton sedately laying the table, having just got rid of the two ladies. We made a show of assisting him and I ventured to inquire:

“Who is doing the cooking today, Polton? Or is it to be a cold lunch?”

He looked at me almost reproachfully as he replied: “It is to be a hot lunch, and I am doing the cooking, of course.”

“But,” I protested, “you have been up to your eyes in other affairs all the morning.”

He regarded me with a patronizing crinkle. “You can do a good deal,” said he, “with one or two casseroles, a hay-box and a four-storey cooker on a gas stove. Things don’t cook any better for your standing and staring at them.”

Events went to prove the soundness of Polton’s culinary principles; and the brilliant success of their application in practice gave a direction to the conversation which led it comfortably away from other and less discussable topics.

CHAPTER XVIII

The Last Act

Shortly before leaving Thorndyke’s chambers with Marion and Miss Boler, I managed to secure his permission to confide to them, in general terms, what was to happen on the morrow; and very relieved I was thereat, for I had little doubt that questions would be asked which it would seem ungracious to evade. Events proved that I was not mistaken; indeed, we were hardly clear of the precincts of the Temple when Marion opened the inquisition.

“You said yesterday,” she began, “that Dr. Thorndyke might have something to tell us today, and I hoped that he might. I even tried to pluck up courage to ask him, but then I was afraid that it might seem intrusive. He isn’t the sort of man that you can take liberties with. So I suppose that whatever it was that happened this morning is a dead secret?”

“Not entirely,” I replied. “I mustn’t go into details at present, but I am allowed to give you the most important item of information. There is going to be an arrest tomorrow.”

“Do you mean that Dr. Thorndyke has discovered the man?” Marion demanded incredulously.

“He says that he has, and I take it that he knows. What is more, he offered to conduct the police to the house. He has actually given them the address.”

“I would give all that I possess,” exclaimed Miss Boler, “to be there and see the villain taken.”

“Well,” I said, “you won’t be far away, for the man lives in Abbey Road, nearly opposite the studio.”

Marion stopped and looked at me aghast. “What a horrible thing to think of!” she gasped. “Oh, I am glad I didn’t know! I could never have gone to the studio if I had. But now we can understand how he managed to find his way to the place that foggy night, and to escape so easily.”

“Oh, but it is not that man,” I interposed, with a sudden ease of hopeless bewilderment. For I had forgotten this absolute discrepancy when I was talking to Thorndyke about the identification.

“Not that man!” she repeated, gazing at me in wild astonishment. “But that man was my father’s murderer. I feel certain of it.”

“So do I,” was my rather lame rejoinder.

“Besides,” she persisted, “if he was not the murderer, who was he, and why should he want to kill me?”

“Exactly,” I agreed. “It seems conclusive. But apparently it isn’t. At any rate, the man they are going to arrest is the man whose mask Thorndyke found at the studio.”

“Then they are going to arrest the wrong man,” said she, looking at me with a deeply troubled face. I was uncomfortable, too, for I saw what was in her mind. The memory of the ruffian who had made that murderous attack on her still lingered in her mind as a thing of horror. The thought that he was still at large and might at any moment reappear made it impossible for her ever to work alone in the studio, or even to walk abroad without protection. She had looked, as I had, to the discovery of the murderer to rid her of this abiding menace. But now it seemed that even after the arrest of the murderer this terrible menace would remain.

“I can’t understand it,” she said dejectedly. “When you showed me that photograph of the man who tried to kill me, I naturally hoped that Dr. Thorndyke had discovered who he was. But now it appears that he is at large and still untraced, yet I am convinced that he is the man who ought to have been followed.”

“Never mind, my dear,” I said cheerfully. “Let us see the affair out. You don’t understand it and neither do I. But Thorndyke does. I have absolute faith in him, and so, I can see, have the police.”

She assented without much conviction, and then Miss Boler began to press for further particulars. I mentioned the probable time of the arrest and the part that I was required to play in identifying the accused.

“You don’t mean that you are asked to be present when the actual arrest is made, do you?” Marion asked anxiously.

“Yes,” I answered. “You see, I am the only person who really knows the man by sight.”

“But,” she urged, “you are not a policeman. Suppose this man should be violent, like that other man; and he probably will be.”

“Oh,” I answered airily, “that will be provided for. Besides, I am not asked to arrest him; only to point him out to the police.”

“I wish,” she said, “you would stay in the studio until they have secured him. Then you could go and identify him. It would be much safer.”

“No doubt,” I agreed. “But it might lead to their arresting the wrong man and letting the right one slip. No, Marion, we must make sure of him if we can. Surely you are at least as anxious as any of us that he should be caught and made to pay the penalty?”

“Yes,” she answered, “if he is really the right man—which I can hardly believe. But still, punishing him will not bring poor Daddy back, whereas if anything were to happen to you, Stephen—Oh! I don’t dare to think of it!”

“You needn’t think of it, Marion,” I rejoined, cheerfully. “I shall be all right. And you wouldn’t have your—apprentice hang back when the bobbies are taking the affair as a mere every-day job.”

She made no reply beyond another anxious glance; and I was glad enough to let the subject drop, bearing in mind Thorndyke’s words with regard to the pistol. As a diversion, I suggested a visit to the National Gallery, which we were now approaching, and the suggestion being adopted, without acclamation, we drifted in and rather listlessly perambulated the galleries, gazing vacantly at the exhibits and exchanging tepid comments. It was a spiritless proceeding, of which I remember very little but some rather severe observations by Miss Boler concerning a certain ‘hussy’ (by one Bronzino) in the great room. But we soon gave up this hollow pretence and went forth to board a yellow bus which was bound for the Archway Tavern; and so home to an early supper.

On the following morning I made my appearance betimes at Ivy Cottage, but it was later than usual when Marion and I started to walk in leisurely fashion to the studio.

“I don’t know why we are going at all,” said she. “I don’t feel like doing any work.”

“Let us forget the arrest for the moment,” said I. “There is plenty to do. Those arms of Polton’s have got to be taken out of the moulds and worked. It will be much better to keep ourselves occupied.”

“I suppose it will,’ she agreed; and then, as we turned a corner and came in sight of the studio, she exclaimed:

“Why, what on earth is this? There are some painters at work on the studio! I wonder who sent them. I haven’t given any orders. There must be some extraordinary mistake.”

There was not, however. As we came up, one of the two linen-coated operators advanced, brush in hand, to meet us and briefly explained that he and his mate had been instructed by Superintendent Miller to wash down the paint-work and keep an eye on the premises opposite. They were, in fact, ‘plain-clothes’ men on special duty.

“We have been here since seven o’clock,” our friend informed us, as we made a pretence of examining the window-sashes, “and we took over from a man who had been watching the house all night. My nabs is there all right. He came home early yesterday evening and he hasn’t come out since.”

“Then you know the man by sight?” Marion asked eagerly.

“Well, miss,” was the reply, “we have a description of him, and the man who went into the house seemed to agree with it; and, as far as we know, there isn’t any other man living there. But I understand that we are relying on Dr. Gray to establish the identity. Could I have a look at the inside woodwork?”

Marion unlocked the door and we entered, followed by the detective, whose interest seemed to be concerned exclusively with the woodwork of windows; and from windows in general finally became concentrated on a small window in the lobby which commanded a view of the houses opposite. Having examined the sashes of this, with his eye cocked on one of the houses aforesaid, he proceeded to operate on it with his brush, which, being wet and dirty and used with a singular lack of care, soon covered the glass so completely with a mass of opaque smears that it was impossible to see through it at all. Then he cautiously raised the sash about an inch, and whipping out a prism binocular from under his apron, stood back a couple of feet and took a leisurely survey through the narrow opening of one of the opposite houses.

“Hallo!” said he. “There is a woman visible at the first-floor window. Just have a look at her, sir. She can’t see us through this narrow crack.”

He handed me the glass, indicating the house, and I put the instrument to my eyes. It was a powerful glass, and seemed to bring the window and the figure of the woman within a dozen feet of me. But at the moment she had turned her head away, apparently to speak to someone inside the room, and all that I could see was that she seemed to be an elderly woman who wore what looked like an old-fashioned widow’s cap. Suddenly she turned and looked out over the half-curtain, giving me a perfectly clear view of her face; and then I felt myself lapsing into the old sense of confusion and bewilderment.

I had, of course, expected to recognize Mrs. Morris. But this was evidently not she, although not such a very different-looking woman, an elderly, white-haired widow in a crape cap and spectacles—reading-spectacles they must be, since she was looking over and not through them. She seemed to be a stranger—and yet not quite a stranger; for as I looked at her some chord of memory stirred. But the cup of my confusion was not yet full. As I stared at her, trying vainly to sound a clearer note on that chord of memory, a man slowly emerged from the darkness of the room behind and stood beside her; and him I recognized instantly as the bottle-nosed person whom I had watched from my ambush at the top of Dartmouth Park Hill.

“Well, sir,” said the detective, as the man and woman turned away from the window and vanished, “what do you make of ’em? Do you recognize ’em?”

“I recognize the man,” I replied, “and I believe I have seen the woman before, but they aren’t the people I expected to see.”

“Oh, dear!” said he. “That’s a bad lookout. Because I don’t think there is anybody else there.”

“Then,” I said, “we have made a false shot; and yet—well, I don’t know. I had better think this over and see if I can make anything of it.”

I turned into the studio, where I found Marion—who had been listening attentively to this dialogue—in markedly better spirits.

“It seems a regular muddle,” she remarked cheerfully. “They have come to arrest the wrong man and now it appears that he isn’t there.”

“Don’t talk to me for a few minutes, Marion, dear,” said I. “There is something behind this and I want to think what it can be. I have seen that woman somewhere, I feel certain. Now, where was it?”

I cudgelled my brains for some time without succeeding in recovering the recollections connected with her. I re-visualized the face that I had seen through the glass, with its deepset, hollow eyes and strong, sharply sloping eyebrows, and tried to connect it with some person whom I had seen, but in vain. And then in a flash it came to me. She was the widow whom I had noticed at the inquest. The identification, indeed, was not very complete, for the veil that she had worn on that occasion had considerably obscured her features. But I had no doubt that I was right, for her present appearance agreed in all that I could see with that of the woman at the inquest.

The next question was, who could she be? Her association with the bottle-nosed man connected her in some way with what Thorndyke would have called ‘the case’; for that man, whoever he was, had certainly been shadowing me. Then her presence at the inquest had now a sinister suggestiveness. She would seem to have been there to watch developments on behalf of others. Could she be a relative of Mrs. Morris? A certain faint resemblance seemed to support this idea. As to the man, I gave him up. Evidently there were several persons concerned in this crime, but I knew too little about the circumstances to be able to make even a profitable guess. Having reached this unsatisfactory conclusion, I turned, a little irritably, to Marion, exclaiming:

“I can make nothing of it. Let us get on with some work to pass the time.”

Accordingly we began, in a half-hearted way, upon Polton’s two moulds. But the presence of the two detectives was disturbing, especially when, having finished the exterior, they brought their pails and ladders inside and took up their station at the lobby window. We struggled on for a time; but when, about noon. Miss Boler made her appearance with a basket of provisions and a couple of bottles of wine, we abandoned the attempt and occupied ourselves in tidying up and laying a table.

“Don’t you think, Marion,” I said, as we sat down to lunch (having provided for the needs of the two ‘painters,’ who lunched in the lobby), “that it would be best for you and Arabella to go home before any fuss begins?”

“Whatever Miss Marion thinks,” Arabella interposed firmly, “I am not going home. I came down expressly to see this villain captured, and here I stay until he is safely in custody.”

“And I,” said Marion, “am going to stay with Arabella. You know why, Stephen. I couldn’t bear to go away and leave you here after what you have told me. We shall be quite safe in here.”

“Well,” I temporised, seeing plainly that they had made up their minds, “you must keep the door bolted until the business is over.”

“As to that,” said Miss Boler, “we shall be guided by circumstances,” and from this ambiguous position neither she nor Marion would budge.

Shortly after lunch I received a farther shock of surprise. In answer to a loud single knock, I hurried out to open the door. A tradesman’s van had drawn up at the kerb and two men stood on the threshold, one of them holding a good—sized parcel. I stared at the latter in astonishment, for I recognized him instantly as the second shadower of the Dartmouth Park Hill adventure; but before I could make any comment, both men entered—with the curt explanation ‘police business’—and the last—comer shut the door, when I heard the van drive off.

“I am Detective-Sergeant Porter,” the stranger explained. “You know what I am here for, of course.”

“Yes,” I replied; and turning to the other man, I said:

“I think I have seen you before. Are you a police-officer, too?”

My acquaintance grinned. “Retired Detective-Sergeant,” he explained, “name of Barber. At present employed by Dr. Thorndyke. I think I have seen you before, sir,” and he grinned again, somewhat more broadly.

“I should like to know bow you were employed when I saw you last,” said I. But here Sergeant Porter interposed:

“Better leave explanations till later, sir. You’ve got a back gate, I think.”

“Yes,” said one of the ‘painters.’ “At the bottom of the garden. It opens on an alley that leads into the next road—Chilton Road.”

“Can we get into the garden through the studio?” the sergeant asked, and on my answering in the affirmative, he requested permission to inspect the rear premises. I conducted both men to the back door and let them out into the garden, where they passed out at the back gate to reconnoitre the alley. In a minute or two they returned; and they had hardly re-entered the studio when another knock at the door announced more visitors. They turned out to be Thorndyke and Superintendent Miller; of whom the latter inquired of the senior painter:

“Is everything in going order, Jenks?”

“Yes, sir,” was the reply. “The man is there all right. Dr. Gray saw him; but I should mention, sir, that he doesn’t think it’s the right man.”

“The devil he doesn’t!” exclaimed Miller, looking at me uneasily and then glancing Thorndyke.

“That man isn’t Morris,” said I. “He is that red-nosed man whom I told you about. You remember.”

“I remember,” Thorndyke replied calmly. “Well, I suppose we shall have to content ourselves with the red-nosed man;” upon which ex-Sergeant Barber’s countenance became wreathed in smiles and the superintendent looked relieved.

“Are all the arrangements complete, Sergeant?” Miller inquired, turning to Sergeant Porter.

“Yes, sir,” the latter replied. “Inspector Follett has got some local men, who know the neighbourhood well, posted in the rear watching the back garden, and there are some uniformed men waiting round both the corners to stop him, in case he slips past us. Everything is ready, sir.”

“Then,” said the superintendent, “we may as well open the ball at once. I hope it will go off quietly. It ought to. We have got enough men on the job.”

He nodded to Sergeant Porter, who at once picked up his parcel and went out into the garden, accompanied by Barber. Miller, Thorndyke and I now adjourned to the lobby window, where, with the two painter-detectives, we established a lookout. Presently we saw the sergeant and Barber advancing separately on the opposite side of the road, the latter leading and carrying the parcel. Arrived at the house, he entered the front garden and knocked a loud single knock. Immediately, the mysterious woman appeared at the ground-floor window—it was a bay-window—and took a long, inquisitive look at ex-Sergeant Barber. There ensued a longish pause, during which Sergeant Porter walked slowly past the house. Then the door opened a very short distance—being evidently chained—and the woman appeared in the narrow opening. Barber offered the parcel, which was much too large to go through the opening without unchaining the door, and appeared to be giving explanations. But the woman evidently denied all knowledge of it, and having refused to receive it, tried to shut the door, into the opening of which Barber had inserted his foot; but he withdrew it somewhat hastily as a coal-hammer descended, and before he could recover himself the door shut with a bang and was immediately bolted.

The ball was opened, as Miller had expressed it, and the developments followed with a bewildering rapidity that far out-paced any possible description.

The sergeant returning and joining Barber, the two men were about to force the ground-floor window, when pistol-shots and police whistles from the rear announced a new field of operations. At once Miller opened the studio door and sallied forth, with the two detectives and Thorndyke; and when I had called out to Marion to bolt the door, I followed, shutting it after me. Meanwhile, from the rear of the opposite houses came a confused noise of police-whistles, barking dogs and women’s voices, with an occasional report. Following three rapid pistol-shots there came a brief interval, then, suddenly, the door of a house farther down the street burst open and the fugitive rushed out, wild-eyed and terrified, his white face contrasting most singularly with his vividly-red nose. Instantly, the two detectives and Miller started in pursuit, followed by the sergeant and Barber; but the man ran like a hare and was speedily drawing ahead when suddenly a party of constables appeared from a side-turning and blocked the road. The fugitive zigzagged and made as if he would try to dodge between them, flinging away his empty pistol and drawing out another. The detectives and Miller were close on him, when in an instant he turned and, with extraordinary agility, avoided them. Then, as the two sergeants bore down on him, he fired at them at close range, stopping them both, though neither actually fell. Again he out-ran his pursuers, racing down the road towards us, yelling like a maniac and firing his pistol wildly at Thorndyke and me. And suddenly my left leg doubled up and I fell heavily to the ground nearly opposite the studio door.

The fall confused me for a moment and as I lay, half-dazed, I was horrified to see Marion dart out of the studio. In an instant she was kneeling by my side with her arm around my neck. “Stephen! Oh, Stephen, darling!” she sobbed and gazed into my face with eyes full of terror and affection, oblivious of everything but my peril. I besought her to go back, and struggled to get out my pistol, for the man, still gaining on his pursuers, was now rapidly approaching. He had flung away his second pistol and had drawn a large knife, and as bore down on us, mad with rage and terror, he gibbered and grinned like a wild cat.

When he was but a couple of dozen paces away, I saw Thorndyke raise his pistol and take a careful aim. But before he had time to fire, a most singular diversion occurred. From the open door of the studio Miss Boler emerged, swinging a massive stool with amazing ease. The man, whose eyes were fixed on me and Marion, did not observe her until she was within a few paces of him; when, gathering all her strength, she hurled the heavy stool with almost incredible force. It struck him below the knees, knocking his feet from under him, and he fell with a sort of dive or half-somersault, falling with the hand that grasped the knife under him.

He made no attempt to rise, but lay with slightly twitching limbs but otherwise motionless. Miss Boler stalked up to him and stood looking down on him with grim interest until Thorndyke, still holding his pistol, stooped and, grasping one arm, gently turned him over. Then we could see the handle of the knife sticking out from his chest near the right shoulder.

“Ha!” said Thorndyke. “Bad luck to the last. It must have gone through the arch of the aorta. But perhaps it is just as well.”

He rose and, stepping across to where I sat, supported by Marion and still nursing my pistol, bent over me with an anxious face.

“What is it, Gray?” he asked. “Not a fracture, I hope?”

“I don’t think so,” I replied. “Damaged muscle and perhaps nerve. It is all numb at present, but it doesn’t seem to be bleeding much. I think I could hobble if you would help me up.”

He shook his head and beckoned to a couple of constables, with whose aid he carried me into the studio and deposited me on the sofa. Immediately afterwards the two wounded officers were brought in, and I was relieved to hear that neither of them was dangerously hurt, though the sergeant had a fractured arm and Barber a flesh-wound of the chest and a cracked rib. The ladies having been politely ejected into the garden, Thorndyke examined the various injuries and applied temporary dressings, producing the materials from a very business-like-looking bag which he had providently brought with him. While he was thus engaged, three constables entered carrying the corpse, which, with a few words of apology, they deposited on the floor by the side of the sofa.

I looked down on the ill-omened figure with lively curiosity; and especially was I impressed and puzzled by the very singular appearance of the face. Its general colour was of that waxen pallor characteristic of the faces of the dead, particularly of those who have died from haemorrhage. But the nose and the acne patches remained unchanged. Indeed, their colour seemed intensified, for their vivid red ‘stared’ from the surrounding white like the painted patches on a down’s face. The mystery was solved when, the surgical business being concluded, Barber came and seated himself on the edge of the sofa.

“Masterly make-up, that,” said he, nodding at the corpse. “Looks queer enough now; but when he was alive you couldn’t spot it, even in daylight.”

“Make-up!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t know you could make-up off the stage.”

“You can’t wear a celluloid nose off the stage, or a tie-on beard,” he replied. “But when it is done as well as this—a touch or two of nose-paste or toupee-paste, tinted carefully with grease-paint and finished up with powder—it’s bard to spot. These experts in make-up are a holy terror to the police.”

“Did you know that he was made up? I asked, looking at Thorndyke.

“I inferred that he was,” the latter replied, “and so did Sergeant Barber. But now we had better see what his natural appearance is.”

He stooped over the corpse and with a small ivory paper-knife scraped from the end of the nose and the parts adjacent a layer of coloured plastic material about the consistency of modelling—wax. Then with vaseline and cotton-wool he cleaned away the red pigment until the pallid skin showed unsullied.

“Why, it is Morris after all!” I exclaimed. “It is perfectly incredible; and you seemed to remove such a very small quantity of paste, too! I wouldn’t have believed that it would make such a change.”

“Not after that very instructive demonstration that Miss D’Arblay gave us with the day and the plaster mask?” he asked with a smile.

I smiled sheepishly in return. “I told you I was a fool, sir,” and then, as a new idea burst upon me, I asked: “And that other man—the hook-nosed man?”

“Morris—that is to say, Bendelow,” he replied, “with a different, more exaggerated make-up.”

I was pondering with profound relief on this answer when one of the painter-detectives entered in search of the superintendent.

“We got into the house from the back, sir,” he reported. “The woman is dead. We found her lying on the bed in the first-floor front; and we found a tumbler half-full of water and this by the bedside.”

He exhibited a small, wide-mouthed bottle labelled ‘Potassium Cyanide,’ which the superintendent took from him.

“I will come and look over the house presently,” the latter said. “Don’t let anybody in; and let me know when the cabs are here.”

“There are two here now, sir,” the detective announced, “and they have sent down three wheeled stretchers.”

“One cab will carry our two casualties and I expect the Doctor will want the other. The bodies can be put on two of the stretchers, but you had better send the woman here for Dr. Gray to see.”

The detective saluted and retired, and in a few minutes a stretcher dismounted from its carriage was borne in by two constables and placed on the floor beside Morris’s corpse. But even now, prepared as I was, and knowing who the new arrival must be, I looked doubtfully at the pitiful effigy that lay before me so limp and passive, that but an hour since had been a strong, courageous, resourceful woman. Not until the white wig, the cap and the spectacles had been removed, the heavy eyebrows detached with spirit and the dark pigment cleaned away from the eyelids, could I say with certainty that this was the corpse of Mrs. Morris.

“Well, Doctor,” said the superintendent, when the wounded and the dead had been borne away and we were alone in the studio, “you have done your part to a finish, as usual, but ours is a bit of a failure. I should have liked to bring that fellow to trial.”

“I sympathize with you. Miller,” replied Thorndyke. “The gallows ought to have had him. But yet I am not sure that what has happened is not all for the best. The evidence in both cases—the D’Arblay and the Van Zellen murders—is entirely circumstantial and extremely intricate. That is not good evidence for a jury. A conviction would not have been a certainty either here or in America; and an acquittal would have been a disaster that I don’t dare to think of. No, Miller, I think that, on the whole, I am satisfied, and I think that you ought to be, too.”

“I suppose I ought,” Miller conceded, “but it would have been a triumph to put him in the dock, after he had been written off as dead and cremated. However, we must take things as we find them, and now I had better go and look over that house.”

With a friendly nod to me, he took himself off, and Thorndyke went off to notify the ladies that the intruders had departed.

As he returned with them I heard Marion cross-examining him with regard to my injuries and listened anxiously for his report.

“So far as I can see. Miss D’Arblay,” he answered, “the damage is confined to one or two muscles. If so, there will be no permanent disablement and he should soon be quite well again. But he will want proper surgical treatment without delay. I propose to take him straight to our hospital, if he agrees.”

“Miss Boler and I were hoping,” said Marion, “that we might have the privilege of nursing him at our house.”

“That is very good of you,” said Thorndyke, “and perhaps you might look after him during his convalescence. But for the present he needs skilled surgical treatment. If it should not be necessary for him to stay in the hospital after the wound has been attended to, it would be best for him to occupy one of the spare bedrooms at my chambers, where he can be seen daily—the surgeon and I can keep an eye on him. Come,” he added coaxingly, “let us make a compromise. You or Miss Boler shall come to the Temple every day for as long as you please and do what nursing is necessary. There is a spare room of which you can take possession; and as to your work here, Polton will give you any help that he can. How will that do?”

Marion accepted the offer gratefully (with my concurrence), but begged to be allowed to accompany me to the hospital.

“That was what I was going to suggest,” said Thorndyke. “The cab will hold the four of us, and the sooner we start the better.”

Our preparations were very soon made. Then the door was opened, I was assisted out through a lane of hungry-eyed spectators, held at bay by two constables, and deposited in the cab; and when the studio had been locked up, we drove off, leaving the neighbourhood to settle down to its normal condition.

CHAPTER XIX

Thorndyke Disentangles the Threads

The days of my captivity at Number 5A Kings Bench Walk passed with a tranquillity that made me realize the weight of the incubus that had been lifted. Now, in the mornings, when Polton ministered to me—until Arabella arrived and was ungrudgingly installed in office—I could let my untroubled thoughts stray to Marion, working alone in the studio with restored security, free for ever from the hideous menace which hung over her. And later, when she herself, released by her faithful apprentice, came to take her spell of nursing, what a joy it was to see her looking so fresh and rosy, so youthful and buoyant!

Of Thorndyke—the giver of these gifts—I saw little in the first few days, for he had heavy arrears of work to make up. However, he paid me visits from time to time, especially in the mornings and at night, when I was alone, and very delightful those visits were. For he had now dropped the investigator and there had come into his manner something new, something fatherly or elder-brotherly; and he managed to convey to me that my presence in his chambers was a source of pleasure to him—a refinement of hospitality that filled up the cup of my gratitude to him.

It was on the fifth day, when I was allowed to sit up in bed—for my injury was no more than a perforating wound of the outer side of the calf, which had missed every important structure—that I sat watching Marion making somewhat premature preparations for tea, and observed with interest that a third cup had been placed on the tray.

“Yes,” Marion replied to my inquiry, “‘the Doctor’ is coming to tea with us today. Mr. Polton gave me the message when he arrived.” She gave a few further touches to the tea-set and continued: “How sweet Dr. Thorndyke has been to us, Stephen! He treats me as if I were his daughter, and however busy he is, he always walks with me to the Temple gate and puts me into a cab. I am infinitely grateful to him—almost as grateful as I am to you.”

“I don’t see what you have got to be grateful to me for,” I remarked.

“Don’t you?” said she. “Is it nothing to me, do you suppose, that in the moment of my terrible grief and desolation, I found a noble chivalrous friend whom I trusted instantly, that I have been guarded through all the dangers that threatened me, and that at last I have been rescued from them and set free to go my ways in peace and security? Surely, Stephen, dear, all this is abundant matter for gratitude. And I owe it all to you.”

“To me!” I exclaimed in astonishment, recalling secretly what a consummate donkey I had been. “But there, I suppose it is the way of a woman to imagine that her particular gander is a swan.”

She smiled a superior smile. “Women,” said she, “are very intelligent creatures. They are able to distinguish between swans and ganders, whereas the swans themselves are apt to be muddle-headed and self-depreciatory.”

“I agree to the muddle-headed factor,” I rejoined, “and I won’t be unduly ostentatious as to the ganderism. But to return to Thorndyke, it is extraordinarily good of him to allow himself to be burdened with me.”

“With us,” she corrected.

“It is the same thing, sweetheart. Do you know if he is going to give us a long visit?”

“I hope so,” she replied. “Mr. Polton said that he had got through his arrears of work and had this afternoon free.”

“Then,” said I, “perhaps he will give us the elucidation that he promised me some time ago. I am devoured by curiosity as to how he unravelled the web of mystification that the villain, Bendelow, spun round himself.”

“So am I,” said she; “and I believe I can hear his footsteps on the stair.”

A few moments later Thorndyke entered the room and, having greeted us with quiet geniality, seated himself in the easy-chair by the table and regarded us with a benevolent smile.

“We were just saying, sir,” said I, “how very kind it is of you to allow your chambers to be invaded by a stray cripple and his—his belongings.”

“I believe you were going to say ‘baggage’;” Marion murmured.

“Well,” said Thorndyke, smiling at the interpolation, “I may tell you both in confidence that you were talking nonsense. It is I who am the beneficiary.”

“It is a part of your goodness to say so, sir,” I said.

“But,” he rejoined, “it is the simple truth. You enable me to combine the undoubted economic advantages of bachelordom with the satisfaction of having a family under my roof, and you even allow me to participate in a way, as a sort of supercargo, in a certain voyage of discovery which is to be undertaken by two young adventurers in the near future—in the very near future, as I hope.”

“As I hope, too,” said I, glancing at Marion, who had become a little more rosy than usual and who now adroitly diverted the current of the conversation.

“We were also wondering,” said she, “if we might hope for some enlightenment on things which have puzzled us so much lately.”

“That,” he replied, “was in my mind when I arranged to keep this afternoon and evening free. I wanted to give Stephen—who is my professional offspring, so to speak—a full exposition of this very intricate and remarkable case. If you, my dear, will keep my cup charged as occasion arises, I will begin forthwith. I will address myself to Stephen, who has all the facts first-hand; and if, in my exposition, I should seem somewhat callously to ignore the human aspects of this tragic story—aspects which have meant so much in irreparable loss and bereavement to you, poor child—remember that it is an exposition of evidence, and necessarily passionless and impersonal.”

“I quite realize that,” said Marion, “and you may trust me to understand.”

He bowed gravely, and, after a brief pause, began: “I propose to treat the subject historically, so to speak; to take you over the ground that I traversed myself, recounting my observations and inferences in the order in which they occurred. The inquiry falls naturally into certain successive stages, corresponding to the emergence of new facts, of which the first was concerned with the data elicited at the inquest. Let us begin with them.

“First, as to the crime itself. It was a murder of a very distinctive type. There was evidence, not only of premeditation in the bare legal sense, but of careful preparation and planning. It was a considered act and not a crime of impulse or passion. What could be the motive for such a crime? There appeared to be only two alternative possibilities: either it was a crime of revenge or a crime of expediency. The hypothesis of revenge could not be explored, because there were no data excepting the evidence of the victim’s daughter, which was to the effect that deceased had no enemies, actual or potential; and this evidence was supported by the very deliberate character of the crime.

“We were therefore thrown back on the hypothesis of expediency, which was, in fact, the more probable one, and which became still more probable as the circumstances were further examined. But having assumed, as a working hypothesis, that this crime had been committed in pursuit of a definite purpose which was not revenge, the next question was. What could that purpose have been? And that question could be answered only by a careful consideration of all that was known of the parties to the crime—the criminal and the victim and their possible relations to one another.

“As to the former, the circumstances indicated that he was a person of some education, that he had an unusual acquaintance with poisons and such social position and personal qualities as would enable him to get possession of them; that he was subtle, ingenious and resourceful, but not far-sighted, since he took risks that could have been avoided. His mentality appeared to be that of the gambler, whose attention tends to be riveted on the winning chances and who makes insufficient provision for possible failure. He staked everything on the chance of the needle-puncture being overlooked and the presence of the poison being undiscovered.

“But the outstanding and most significant quality was his profound criminality. Premeditated murder is the most atrocious of crimes; and murder for expediency is the most atrocious form of murder. This man, then, was of a profoundly criminal type and was, most probably, a practising criminal.

“Turning now to the victim, the evidence showed that he was a man of high moral qualities; honest, industrious, thrifty, kindly and amiable and of good reputation—the exact reverse of the other. Any illicit association between these two men was therefore excluded; and yet there must have been an association of some kind. Of what kind could it have been?

“Now, in the case of this man, as in that of the other, there was one outstanding fact. He was a sculptor. And not only a sculptor but an artist in the highest class of waxwork. And not only this. He was probably the only artist of this kind practising in this country. For waxwork is almost exclusively a French art. So far as I know, all the wax figures and high-class lay figures that are made are produced in France. This man, therefore, appeared to be the unique English practitioner of this very curious art.

“The fact impressed me profoundly. To realize its significance we must realize the unique character of the art. Waxwork is a fine art, but it differs from all other fine arts in that its main purpose is one that is expressly rejected by all those other arts. An ordinary work of sculpture, no matter how realistic, is frankly an object of metal, stone or pottery. Its realism is restricted to truth of form. No deception is aimed at, but, on the contrary, is expressly avoided. But the aim of waxwork is complete deception; and its perfection is measured by the completeness of the deception achieved. How complete that may be can be judged by incidents that have occurred at Madame Tussaud’s. When that exhibition was at the old Baker Street Bazaar, the snuff-taker—whose arms, head and eyes were moved by clock-work—used to be seated on an open bench; and it is recorded that, quite frequently, visitors would sit down by him on the bench and try to open conversation with him. So, too, the waxwork policeman near the door was occasionally accosted with questions by arriving visitors.

“Bearing this fact in mind, it is obvious that this art is peculiarly adapted to employment in certain kinds of fraud, such as personation, false alibi and the like; and it is probable that the only reason why it is not so employed is the great difficulty of obtaining first-class waxworks.

“Naturally, then, when I observed this connexion of a criminal with a waxwork artist, I asked myself whether the motive of the murder was not to be sought in that artist’s unique powers. Could it be that an attempt had been made to employ the deceased on some work designed for a fraudulent purpose? If such an attempt had been made, whether it had or had not been successful, the deceased would be in possession of knowledge which would be highly dangerous to the criminal; but especially if a work had actually been executed and used as an instrument of fraud.

“But there were other possibilities in the case of a sculptor who was also a medallist. He might have been employed to produce—quite innocently—copies of valuable works which were intended for fraudulent use: and the second stage of the investigation was concerned with these possibilities. That stage was ushered in by Follett’s discovery of the guinea, the additional facts that we obtained at the Museum, and later, when we learned that the guinea that had been found was an electrotype copy, and that deceased was an expert electrotyper, all seemed to point to the production of forgeries as the crime in which Julius D’Arblay had been implicated. That was the view to which we seemed to be committed; but it did not seem to me satisfactory, for several reasons. First, the motive was insufficient—there was really nothing to conceal. When the forgeries were offered for sale, it would be obvious that someone had made them and that someone could be traced by the purchaser through the vendor. The killing of the actual maker would give no security to the man who sold the forgeries and who would have to appear in the transaction. And then, although deceased was unique as a waxworker, he was not as a copyist or electrotyper. For those purposes, much more suitable accomplices might have been found. The execution of copies by deceased appeared to be a fact; but my own feeling was that they had been a mere by-product—that they had been used as a means of introduction to deceased for some other purpose connected with waxwork.

“At the end of this stage we had made some progress. We had identified this unknown man with another unknown man, who was undoubtedly a professional criminal. We had found, in the forged guinea, a possible motive for the murder. But, as I have said, that explanation did not satisfy me, and I still kept a lookout for new evidence connected with the waxworks.

“The next stage opened on that night when you arrived at Cornish’s, looking like a resuscitated ‘found drowned.’ Your account of your fall into the canal and the immediately antecedent events made a deep impression on me, though I did not, at the time, connect them with the crime that we were investigating. But the whole affair was so abnormal that it seemed to call for very careful consideration; and the more I considered it, the more abnormal did it appear.

“The theory of an accident could not be entertained, nor could the dropping of that derrick have been a practical joke. Your objection that no one was in sight had no weight, since there was a gate in the wall by which a person could have made his escape. Someone had attempted to murder you; and that attempt had been made immediately after you had signed a cremation certificate. That was a very impressive fact. As you know, it is my habit to look very narrowly at cremation cases, for the reason that cremation offers great facilities for certain kinds of crime. Poisoners—and particularly arsenic and antimony poisoners—have repeatedly been convicted on evidence furnished by an exhumed body. If such poisoners can get the corpse of the victim cremated, they are virtually safe; for whatever suspicions may thereafter arise, no conviction is possible, since the means of proving the administration have been destroyed.

“Accordingly, I considered very carefully your account of the proceedings, and as I did so, strong suggestions of fraud arose in all directions. There was, for instance, the inspection window in the coffin. What was its object? Inspection windows are usually provided only in cases where the condition of the body is such that it has to be enclosed in a hermetically sealed coffin. But no such condition existed in this case. There was no reason why the friends should not have viewed the body in the usual manner in an open coffin. Again, there was the curious alternation of you and the two witnesses. First they went up and viewed deceased—through the window. Then, after a considerable interval, you and Cropper went up and viewed deceased—through the window. Then you took out the body, examined it and put it back. Again, after a considerable interval, the witnesses went up a second time and viewed the deceased—through the window.

“It was all rather queer and suspicious, especially when considered in conjunction with the attempt on your life. Reflecting on the latter, the question of the gate in the wall by the canal arose in my mind, and I examined the map to see if I could locate it. It was not marked, but the wharf was; and from this and your description it appeared certain that the gate must be in the wall of the garden of Morris’s house. Here was another suspicious fact. For Morris—who could have let you out by this side-gate—sent you by a long, roundabout route to the tow-path. He knew which way you must be going—westward—and could have slipped out of the gate and waited for you in the hut by the wharf. It was possible, and there seemed to be no other explanation of what had happened to you. Incidentally, I made another discovery. The map showed that Morris’s house had two frontages—one on Field Street and one on Market Street—and that you appeared to have been admitted by the back entrance. Which was another slightly abnormal circumstance.

“I was very much puzzled by the affair. There was a distinct suggestion that some fraud—some deception—had been practised, that what the spinsters saw through the coffin window was not the same thing as that which you saw. And yet, what could the deception have been? There was no question about the body. It was a real body. The disease was undoubtedly genuine and was, at least, the effective cause of death. And the cremation was necessarily genuine; for though you can bury an empty coffin, you can’t cremate one. The absence of calcined bone would expose the fraud instantly.

“I considered the possibility of a second body; that of a murdered person, for instance. But that would not do. For if a substitution had been effected, there would still have been a redundant body to dispose of and account for. Nothing would have been gained by the substitution.

“But there was another possibility to which no such objection applied. Assuming a fraud to have been perpetrated, here was a case adapted in the most perfect manner to the use of a waxwork. Of course, a full-length figure would have been impossible because it would have left no calcined bones. But the inspection window would have made it unnecessary. A wax head would have done; or better still, a wax mask, which could have been simply placed over the face of the real corpse. The more I thought about it the more was I impressed by the singular suitability of the arrangements to the use of a wax mask. The inspection window seemed to be designed for the very purpose—to restrict the view to a mere face and to prevent the mask from being touched and the fraud thus discovered—and the alternate inspections by you and the spinsters were quite in keeping with a deception of that kind.

“There was another very queer feature in the case. These people, living at Hoxton, elected to employ a doctor who lived miles away at Bloomsbury. Why did they not call in a neighbouring practitioner? Also, they arranged the days and even the hours at which the visits were to be made. Why? There was an evident suggestion of something that the doctor was not to know—something or somebody that he was not desired to see, that some preparations had to be made for his visits.

“Again, the note was addressed to Dr. Stephen Gray, not to Dr. Cornish. They knew your name and address, although you had only just come there, and they did not know Dr. Cornish, who was an old resident. How was this? The only explanation seemed to be that they had read the report of the inquest, or even been present at it. You there stated publicly that your temporary address was at 61 Mecklenburgh Square; that you were, in fact, a bird of passage; and you gave your full name and your age. Now, if any fraud was being carried out, a bird of passage, who might be difficult to find later, and a young one at that, was just the most suitable kind of doctor.

“To sum up the evidence at this stage: The circumstances, taken as a whole, suggested in the strongest possible manner that there was something fraudulent about this Cremation. That fraud must be some kind of substitution or personation with the purpose of obtaining a certificate that some person had been cremated, who in fact had not been cremated. In that case it was nearly certain that the dead man was not Simon Bendelow, for the certificates would be required to agree with false appearances, not true. There was a suggestion—but only a speculative one—that the deception might have been effected by means of a wax mask.

“There were, however two objections. As to the wax mask, there was the great difficulty of obtaining one. A perfect portrait mask could have been obtained only either from an artist in Paris or from Julius D’Arblay. The objection to the substitution theory was that there was a real body—the body of a real person. If the cremation was in a name which was not the name of that person, then the disappearance of that person would remain unaccounted for.

“So you see that the whole theory of the fraud was purely conjectural. There was not a single particle of direct evidence. You also see that at two points there was a faint hint of a connexion between this case and the murder of Mr. D’Arblay. These people seemed to have read of, or attended at, the inquest, and if a wax mask existed, it was quite probably made by him.

“The next stage opens with the discovery of the mask at the studio. But there are certain antecedent matters that must first be glanced at. When the attempt was made to murder Marion, I asked myself the questions:

“1. Why did this man want to kill Marion?

“2. What did he come to the studio on the preceding night to search for?

“3. Did he find it, whatever it was?

“4. Why had he delayed so long to make the search?

“Let us begin with the second question. What had he come to look for? The obvious suggestion was that he had come to get possession of some incriminating object. But what was that object? Could it be the mould of some forged coin or medal? I did not believe that it was. For since the forgery or forgeries were extant, the moulds had no particular significance; and what little significance they had, applied to Mr. D’Arblay, who was, technically, the forger. My feeling was that the object was in some way connected with waxwork, and in all probability with a wax portrait mask, as the most likely thing to be used for a fraudulent purpose. And I need hardly say that the cremation case lurked in the back of my mind.

“This view was supported by consideration of the third question. Did he find what he came to seek? If he came for moulds of coins or medals, he must have found them, for none remained. But the fact that he came the next night and attempted to murder Marion—believing her to be alone—suggested that his search had failed. And consideration of the fourth question led—less decisively—to the same conclusion as to the nature of the object sought.

“Why had he waited all this time to make the search? Why had he not entered the studio immediately after the murder, when the place was mostly unoccupied? The most probable explanation appeared to me to be that he had only recently become aware that there was any incriminating object in existence. Proceeding on the hypothesis that he had commissioned Mr. D’Arblay to make a wax portrait mask, I further assumed that he knew little of the process, and—perhaps misunderstanding Mr. D’Arblay—confused the technique of wax with that of plaster. In making a plaster mask from life—as you probably know by this time—you have to destroy the mould to get the mask out. So when the mask has been delivered to the client, there is nothing left.

“But to make a wax mask, you must first make one of plaster to serve as a matrix from which to make the gelatine mould for the wax. Then, when the wax mask has been delivered to the client, the plaster matrix remains in the possession of the artist.

“The suggestion, then, was that this man had supposed that the mould had been destroyed in making the mask, and that only some time after the murder had he, in some way, discovered his mistake. When he did discover it, he would see what an appalling blunder he had made; for the plaster matrix was the likeness of his own face.

“You see that all this was highly speculative. It was all hypothetical and it might all have been totally fallacious. We still had not a single solid fact; but all the hypothetical matter was consistent, and each inference seemed to support the others.”

“And what,” I asked, “did you suppose was his motive for trying to make away with Marion?”

“In the first place,” he replied, “I inferred that he looked on her as a dangerous person who might have some knowledge of his transactions with her father. This was probably the explanation of his attempt when he cut the brake-wire of her bicycle But the second, more desperate attack, was made, I assume, when he had realized the existence of the plaster mask, and supposed that she knew of it, too. If he had killed her, he would probably have made another search with the studio fully lighted up.

“To return to our inquiry. You see that I had a mass of hypothesis but not a single real fact. But I still had a firm belief that a wax mask had been made and that—if it had not been destroyed—there must be a plaster mask somewhere in the studio. That was what I came to look for that morning; and as it happens that I am some six inches taller than Bendelow was, I was able to see what had been invisible to him. When I discovered that mask, and when Marion had disclaimed all knowledge of it, my hopes began to rise. But when you identified the face as that of Morris, I felt that our problem was solved. In an instant my card-house of speculative hypothesis was changed into a solid edifice. What had been but bare possibilities had now become so highly probable that they were almost certainties.

“Let us consider what the finding of this mask proved—subject, of course, to verification. It proved that a wax mask of Morris had been made—for here was the matrix, varnished, as you will remember, in readiness for the gelatine mould; and that mask was obviously obtained for the purpose of a fraudulent cremation. And that mask was made by Julius D’Arblay.

“What was the purpose of the fraud? It was perfectly obvious. Morris was clearly the real Simon Bendelow, and the purpose of the fraud was to create undeniable evidence that he was dead. But why did he want to prove that he was dead? Well, we knew that he was the murderer of Van Zellen, for whom the American police were searching, and he might be in more danger than we knew. At any rate, a death-certificate would make him absolutely secure—on one condition: that the body was cremated. Mere burial would not be enough; for an exhumation would discover the fraud. But perfect security could be secured only by destruction of all evidence of the fraud. Julius D’Arblay held such evidence. Therefore Julius D’Arblay must be got rid of. Here, then, was an amply sufficient motive for the murder. The only point which remained obscure was the identity of your patient and the means by which his disappearance had been accounted for.

“My hypothesis, then, had been changed into highly probable theory. The next stage was the necessary verification. I began with a rather curious experiment. The man who tried to murder Marion could have been no other than her father’s murderer. Then he must have been Morris. But it seemed that he was totally unlike Morris, and the mask evidently suggested to her no resemblance. But yet it was probable that the man was Morris, for the striking features—the hook nose and the heavy brows—would be easily ‘made up,’ especially at night. The question was whether the face was Morris’s with these additions. I determined to put that question to the test. And here Polton’s new accomplishment came to our aid.

“First, with a pinch of clay, we built up on Morris’s mask a nose of the shape described and slightly thickened the brows. Then Polton made a gelatine mould and from this produced a wax mask. He fitted it with glass eyes and attached it to a rough plaster head, with ears which were casts of my own painted. We then fixed on a moustache, beard and wig, and put on a shirt, collar and jacket. It was an extraordinarily crude affair, suggestive of the fifth of November. But it answered the purpose, which was to produce a photograph; for we made the photograph so bad—so confused and ill-focused—that the crudities disappeared, while the essential likeness remained. As you know, that photograph was instantly recognized, without any sort of suggestion. So the first test gave a positive result. Marion’s assailant was pretty certainly Morris.”

“I should like to have seen Mr. Polton’s prentice effort,” said Marion, who had been listening, enthralled by this description.

“You shall see it now,” Thorndyke replied with a smile. “It is in the next room, concealed in a cupboard.”

He went out, and presently returned, carrying what looked like an excessively crude hair-dresser’s dummy, but a most extraordinarily horrible and repulsive one. As he turned the face towards us, Marion gave a little cry of horror and then tried to laugh—without very striking success.

“It is a dreadful-looking thing!” she exclaimed, “and so hideously like that fiend.” She gazed at it with the most extreme repugnance for a while and then said, apologetically: “I hope you won’t think me very silly, but—”

“Of course I don’t,” Thorndyke interrupted. “It is going back to its cupboard at once,” and with this he bore it away, returning in a few moments with a smaller object, wrapped in a cloth, which he laid on the table. “Another ‘exhibit,’ as they say in the courts,” he explained, “which we shall want presently. Meanwhile we resume the thread of our argument.”

“The photograph of this waxwork, then, furnished corroboration of the theory that Morris was the man whom we were seeking. My next move was to inquire at Scotland Yard if there were any fresh developments of the Van Zellen case. The answer was that there were; and Superintendent Miller arranged to come and tell me all about them. You were present at the interview and will remember what passed. His information was highly important, not only by confirming my inference that Bendelow was the murderer, but especially by disposing of the difficulty connected with the disappearance of your patient. For now there came into view a second man—Crile—who had died at Hoxton of an abdominal cancer and had been duly buried; and when you were able to give me this man’s address, a glance at the map and at the Post Office Directory showed that the two men had died in the same house. This fact, with the farther facts that they had died of virtually the same disease and within a day or two of the same date, left no reasonable doubt that we were really dealing with one man who had died and for whom two death certificates, in different names, and two corresponding burial orders had been obtained. There was only one body, and that was cremated in the name of Bendelow. It followed that the coffin which was buried at Mr. Crile’s funeral must have been an empty coffin. I was so confident that this must be so that I induced Miller to apply for an exhumation, with the results that you know.

“There now remained only a single point requiring verification: the question as to what face it was that those two ladies saw when they looked into the coffin of Simon Bendelow. Here again Polton’s new accomplishment came to our aid. From the plaster mask your apprentice made a most realistic wax mask, which I offer for your critical inspection.”

He unfolded the cloth and produced a mask of thin, yellowish wax and of a most cadaverous aspect, which he handed to Marion.

“Yes,” she said approvingly, “it is an excellent piece of work; and what beautiful eyelashes. They look exactly like real ones.”

“They are real ones,” Thorndyke explained with a chuckle.

She looked up at him inquiringly, and then, breaking into a ripple of laughter, exclaimed: “Of course! They are his own! Oh! how like Mr. Polton! But he was quite right, you know. He couldn’t have got the effect any other way.”

“So he declared,” said Thorndyke. “Well, we hired a coffin and had an inspection window put in the lid, and we got a black skull-cap. We put a dummy head in the coffin with a wig on it; we laid the mask where the face should have been and we adjusted the jaw-bandage and the skull-cap so as to cover up the edges of the mask, and we got the two ladies here and showed them the coffin. When they had identified the tenant as Mr. Bendelow, the verification was complete, the hypothesis was now converted into ascertained fact, and all that remained to be done was to lay hands on the murderer.”

“How did you find out where Morris was living?” I asked.

“Barber did that,” he replied. “When I learned that you were being stalked, I employed Barber to shadow you. He, of course, observed Morris on your track and followed him home.”

“That was what I supposed,” said I; and for a while we were all silent. Presently Marion said: “It is all very involved and confusing. Would you mind telling us exactly what happened?”

“In a direct narrative, you mean?” said he. “Yes; I will try to reconstruct the events in the order of their occurrence. It began with the murder of Van Zellen by Bendelow. There was no evidence against him at the time, but he had to fly from America for other reasons and he left behind him incriminating traces which he knew must presently be discovered and which would fix the murder on him. His friend Crile, who fled with him, developed gastric cancer and only had a month or two to live. Then Bendelow decided that when Crile should die, he would make believe to die at that same time. To this end, he commissioned your father to make a wax mask—a portrait mask of himself with his eyes closed. His wife must then have persuaded the two spinsters to visit him—he, of course, taking to his bed when they called and being represented as a mortally sick man. Then they moved from Hornsey to Hoxton, taking Crile with him. There he engaged two doctors—Usher and Gray, both of whom lived at a distance—to attend Crile and to visit him on alternate days. Crile seems to have been deaf, or at least, hard of hearing, and was kept continuously under the influence of morphia. Usher, who was employed by Mrs. Bendelow—whom he knew as Mrs. Pepper—came to the front of the house in Field Street to visit Mr. Crile, while Stephen, who was employed by the Bendelows—whom he knew by the name of Morris—entered at the rear of the house in Market Street to visit the same man under the name of Bendelow. About the time of the move, Bendelow committed the murder in order to destroy all evidence of the making of the wax mask.

“Eventually Crile died—or was finished off with an extra dose of morphia—on a Thursday. Usher gave the certificate and the funeral took place on the Saturday. But previously—probably on the Friday night—the coffin-lid was unscrewed by Bendelow, the body taken out and replaced by a sack of sawdust with some lead pipe in it.

“On the Monday the body was again produced; this time as that of Simon Bendelow, who was represented as having died on the Sunday afternoon. It was put in a cremation coffin with a celluloid window in the lid. The wax mask was placed over the face; the jaw-bandage and the skull-cap adjusted to hide the place where the wax face joined the real face; and the two spinsters were brought up to see Mr. Bendelow in his coffin. They looked in through the window and, of course, saw the wax mask of Bendelow. Then they retired. The coffin-lid was taken off, the wax mask removed, the coffin-lid screwed on again, and then the two doctors were brought up. They removed the body from the coffin, examined it and put it back; and Bendelow—or Morris—put on the coffin-lid.

“As soon as the doctors were gone, the coffin-lid was taken off again, the wax mask was put back and adjusted and the coffin-lid replaced and screwed down finally. Then the two ladies were brought up again to take a last look at poor Mr. Bendelow; not actually the last look, for, at the funeral, they peeped in at the window and saw the wax face just before the coffin was passed through into the crematorium.”

“It was a diabolically clever scheme,” said I.

“It was,” he agreed. “It was perfectly convincing and consistent. If you and those two ladies had been put in the witness-box, your testimony and theirs would have been in complete agreement. They had seen Simon Bendelow (whom they knew quite well) in his coffin. A few minutes later, you had seen Simon Bendelow in his coffin, had taken the body out, examined it thoroughly and put it back, and had seen the coffin-lid screwed down; and again a few minutes later they had looked in through the coffin-window and had again seen Simon Bendelow. The evidence would appear to be beyond the possibility of a doubt. Simon Bendelow was proved conclusively to be dead and cremated and was doubly certified to have died from natural causes. Nothing could be more complete.

“And yet,” he continued, after a pause, “while we are impressed by the astonishing subtlety and ingenuity displayed, we are almost more impressed by the fundamental stupidity exhibited along with it—a stupidity that seems to be characteristic of this type of criminal. For all the security that was gained by one part of the scheme was destroyed by the idiotic efforts to guard against dangers that had no existence. The murder was not only a foul crime; it was a tactical blunder of the most elementary kind. But for that murder, Bendelow would now be alive and in unchallenged security. The cremation scheme was completely successful. It deceived everybody. Even the two detectives, though they felt vague suspicions, saw no loophole. They had to accept the appearances at their face value.

“But it was the old story. The wrong-doer could not keep quiet. He must be for ever making himself safer and yet more safe. At each move he laid down fresh tracks. And so, in the end, he delivered himself into our hands.”

He paused and for a while seemed to be absorbed in reflection on what he had been telling us. Presently he looked up, and, addressing Marion, said in quiet, grave tones:

“We have ended our quest and we have secured retribution. Justice was beyond our reach; for complete justice implies restitution; and to attain that, the dead must have been recalled from beyond the grave. But, at least sometimes, out of evil cometh good. Surely it will seem to you when, in the happy years which I trust and confidently believe lie before you, your thoughts turn back to the days of your mourning and grief, that the beloved father, who, when living, made your happiness his chief concern, even in dying bequeathed to you a blessing.”

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFO

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

THE MEGAPACK SERIES

INTRODUCTION: MEET DR. THORNDYKE, by R. Austin Freeman

THE BLUE SCARAB (1923)

THE NEW JERSEY SPHINX (1923)

THE TOUCHSTONE (1923)

A FISHER OF MEN (1923)

THE STOLEN INGOTS (1923)

THE FUNERAL PYRE (1923)

THE CAT’S EYE (1923) [Part 1]

THE CAT’S EYE (1923) [Part 2]

THE MYSTERY OF ANGELINA FROOD (1924) [Part 1]

THE MYSTERY OF ANGELINA FROOD (1924) [Part 2]

THE SHADOW OF THE WOLF (1925) [Part 1]

THE SHADOW OF THE WOLF (1925) [Part 2]

THE PUZZLE LOCK (1925)

THE GREEN CHECK JACKET (1925)

THE SEAL OF NEBUCHADNEZZAR (1925)

PHYLLIS ANNESLEY’S PERIL (1925)

A SOWER OF PESTILENCE (1925)

REX V. BURNABY (1925)

A MYSTERY OF THE SAND-HILLS (1925)

THE APPARITION OF BURLING COURT (1925)

THE MYSTERIOUS VISITOR (1925)

THE D’ARBLAY MYSTERY (1926) [Part 1]

THE D’ARBLAY MYSTERY (1926) [Part 2]