CHAPTER XXII
THORNDYKE REVIEWS THE CASE
WHEN Professor Woodfield, having deliberately packed his bag and—to my great relief and Jervis's—declined Thorndyke's invitation to stay and take tea with us, presently took his departure, we descended to the sitting-room, whither Polton followed us almost immediately with a tea-tray, having, apparently, boiled the kettle in the adjacent workshop while the final act of the analysis was in progress. He placed the tray on a small table by Thorndyke's chair, and, evidently, anticipating the inevitable discussion on the results of the analysis, made up the fire on a liberal scale and retired with unconcealed reluctance.
As soon as we were alone, Jervis opened the subject by voicing his and my joint desire for "more light."
"This has been a great surprise to me, Thorndyke," said he.
"A complete surprise?" Thorndyke asked.
"No, I can't say that. The solution of the problem was one that I had proposed to myself, but I had rejected it as impossible; and it looks impossible still, though I now know it to be the true solution."
"I quite appreciate your difficulty," said Thorndyke, "and I see that if you did not happen to light on the answer to it, the difficulty was insuperable. That was the really brilliant feature in Maddock's plan. But for a single fact which was almost certain to be overlooked, the real explanation of the circumstances would appear utterly incredible. Even if suspicion had been aroused later and the true explanation suggested, there seemed to be one fact with which it was absolutely irreconcilable."
"Yes," agreed Jervis; "that is what I have felt."
"The truth is," said Thorndyke, "that this crime was planned with the most diabolical cleverness and subtlety. We realize that when we consider by what an infinitely narrow margin it failed. Indeed, we can hardly say that it did fail. As far as we can see, it succeeded completely, and if the criminal could only have accepted its success, there seems to be no reason why any discovery should ever have taken place. Looking back on the case, we see that our experience has been the same as O'Donnell's; we had no clue whatever expecting the one that was furnished by the criminal himself in his unnecessary efforts to obtain even greater security. Suppose Maddock, having carried out his plan successfully, had been content to leave it at that, who would have known, or even suspected, that a crime had been committed? Not a soul, I believe. But instead of that he must needs do what the criminal almost invariably does; he must tinker at the crime when all is going well and surround himself by a number of needless safeguards by which, in the end, attention is attracted to his doings. He knows, or believes he knows, that Jardine has in his possession certain knowledge of a highly dangerous character; he does not ask himself whether Jardine is aware that he possesses such knowledge, but, appraising that knowledge at what he, himself, knows to be its value, he decides to get rid of Jardine as the one element of danger. And that was where he failed. If he had left Jardine alone, the whole affair would have passed off as perfectly normal and its details would soon have been lost sight of and forgotten. Even as it was, he missed complete success only by a hair's breadth. But for the most trivial coincidence, Jardine's body might be lying undiscovered in that cellar at this very moment."
"That's a comfortable thought for you, Jardine," my younger colleague remarked.
"Very," I agreed, with a slight shudder at the recollecting of that horrible death-trap. "But what was the coincidence? I never understood how you came to be in that most unlikely place at that very opportune moment."
"It was the merest chance," replied Thorndyke. "I happened to have called in at the hospital that evening, and, having an hour to spare, it occurred to me to look in at Batson's and see if you were getting on quite happily in your new command. As I had induced you to take charge, I felt some sort of responsibility in the matter."
"It was exceedingly kind of you, sir," said I.
"Not in the least," said Thorndyke. "It was just the ordinary solicitude of the teacher for a promising pupil. Well, when I arrived at the house, I found that excellent girl, Maggie, standing on the doorstep, looking anxiously up and down the street. It seemed that, on reflection, she was still convinced that the works were untenanted, and the oddity of the whole set of circumstances had made her somewhat uneasy. I waited a few minutes and disposed of one or two patients, and then, as you did not return, after what seemed an unaccountably long absence, I very easily induced her to show me where the place was; and when we arrived there, the deserted aspect of the building and the notice board over the gate seemed rather to justify her anxiety.
"I rang the bell loudly, as I daresay you know, but I did not wait very long. When I failed to get any response, I too, became suspicious, and proceeded without delay to pick the lock of the wicket—and it is most fortunate that the wicket was unprovided with a bolt, which would have delayed me very considerably. You know the rest. When I shouted your name you must have tried to answer, for I caught a kind of muffled groan and the sound of tapping, which guided me and Maggie to your prison. But it was a near thing; for, when I opened the cellar door, you fell out quite unconscious and accompanied by a gush of carbon dioxide that was absolutely stifling."
"Yes," said I, "it was touch and go. A few minutes more and it would have been all up with me. I realized that as soon as I recovered consciousness. But I couldn't for the life of me understand why anybody should want to murder me, and I am not so very clear on the subject now. I really knew nothing about Maddock."
"You knew more than anyone else knew, and he thought you knew more than you did. But perhaps it would be instructive to review the case in detail."
"It would be very instructive to me," said Jervis, "for I don't, even now, see how you managed to bridge over those gaps that stopped me in my attempts to make a hypothesis that covered all the circumstances."
"Very well," said Thorndyke, "then we will begin at the beginning; and the beginning, for me, was the finding of Jardine, as I have described it. Here was a pretty plain case of attempted murder, evidently premeditated and apparently committed by some person who had access to these works; evidently, also, conceived and planned with considerable knowledge, skill and foresight, though with how much foresight I did not realize until I had heard Jardine's story. When I had Jardine's account of the affair, I saw that the crime had been planned with quite remarkable ingenuity and judgment; in fact, the circumstances had been so carefully considered, and contingencies so well provided for that, but for a single tactical error the plan would have succeeded. That error was in making the pretended emergency a surgical injury. If the letter to Jardine had stated that a man was in a fit, instead of suffering from a wound, our friend would have had no need to call at the surgery for appliances but would have gone straight to the works. And there, in all probability, his body would still be lying, for no one would have known whither he had gone; and even if his body had been accidentally discovered, all traces of the means by which he had been killed would probably have been removed. There would have been nothing to show that he had not strayed into the deserted factory and turned on the gas himself; indeed, it is pretty certain that matters would have been so arranged as to convey that impression to the persons who made the discovery."
"There was the letter," said I. "That would have given things away to some extent."
"But you would have had it in your pocket, from which he would, of course, have removed it. We may be sure that he had not overlooked the letter. It was the need for surgical appliances that he had overlooked; but, in spite of this error, the plan was ingenious subtle, and clearly not the work of an ignorant man.
"And here I would point out to you that this latter fact was one of great importance in searching for the solution of the mystery. We knew something of our man. He was subtle, resourceful, and absolutely ruthless. Noting this, I was prepared, in pursuing the case, to find his other actions characterized by subtlety, resourcefulness and ruthlessness. His further actions were not going to be those of a dullard or an ignoramus.
"But this was not all the information that I had concerning the personality of this unknown villain. Jervis and I looked over the cellars that same night within an hour and a half of the rescue and before anything had been moved. We were then in a position to infer that the unknown was probably a somewhat tall man and above the average of strength, as shown by the weight, position and arrangement of the iron bottles. Moreover, since there was no faintest trace of a finger-print on any of them, it followed that some precaution against them—such as gloves—had been adopted; which again suggested either a professional criminal or a person well acquainted with criminal methods.
"So much for the man. As to the rest of the information that I obtained by looking into the cellar, it seemed, at the time meager enough; and yet, when considered by the light of Jardine's statement, it turned out to be of vital importance. You remember what it was, Jardine? That cellar contained certain objects. They seemed very unilluminating and commonplace, but, according to my invariable custom, I considered them attentively and made a written list of them. Do you remember what they were?"
"Yes, quite well. There were ten empty cylinders, a spanner, a packing-case"
"What were the dimensions of the case?" Thorndyke interrupted.
"Seven feet long by two and a half wide and deep. Then there were a couple of waterproof sheets and a quantity of straw. That is the lot, I think, and I'll be hanged if I can see what any of them—excepting the three cylinders that were used for my benefit—have to do with the case. Can you, Jervis?"
"I'm afraid I can't," he replied. "They are all such very ordinary objects."
"Ordinary or not," said Thorndyke, "there they were; and I made a note of them on the principle—which I am continually impressing on my students—that you can never judge in advance what the evidential value of any fact will be, and on the further principle that in estimating evidence there is no such thing as a commonplace fact or object.
"Until I had heard Jardine's account of the affair there was not much to be gained by thinking about the possibilities that it presented. There was, however one point to be settled, and I dealt with it at once. My slight inspection of the works had shown that no business was being carried on in them; and the question was whether they were completely untenanted or whether there was some person who had regular access to them. My inquiries resulted, as you know, in the unearthing of the mysterious Mr. Gill, but what his relation to the affair might be I was not, at the moment, in a position to judge.
"Then came our talk with Jardine, from which emerged the fact that the ordinary motives of murder apparently did not exist in this case, and that the crime appeared to have its origin in circumstances that had arisen locally and recently. And, on our proceeding to search for such conditions as might conceivably generate an adequate motive, we lighted on a case of cremation.
"Now, it is my habit, whenever I have to deal with death which has been followed by cremation, to approach the case with the utmost caution and scrutinize the circumstances most narrowly. For, admirable as is this method of disposing of the dead regarded from a hygienic standpoint, it has the fatal defect of lending itself most perfectly to the more subtle forms of murder, and especially to the administration of poison. By cremation all traces of the alkaloids, the toxines and the other organic poisons are utterly destroyed, while of the metals, the three whose compounds are most commonly employed for criminal purposes—arsenic, antimony and mercury—are volatilized by heat and would be more or less completely dissipated during the incineration of the body. It is true that the most elaborate precautions in the form of examination and certification are prescribed—and usually taken, I presume—before cremation is performed; but, as every medical jurist knows, precautions taken before the event are useless, for, to be effective, they would have to cover every possible cause of death, which would be impracticable. Hence, as suspicion, in case of poisoning, commonly does not arise until some time after death, I always give the closest consideration to the antecedent circumstances in cases where cremation has been performed.
"But in this case of Jardine's it was at once obvious that the circumstances called for the minutest inquiry and that no inquiry had been made. On the face of it the case was a suspicious one; and the curious incident that Jardine described made it look more suspicious still and, moreover, suggested a possible motive for the attempt on his life. Apparently he had seen, or was believed to have seen, something that he was not desired to see; something that it was not intended that anyone should see.
"Now what might that something have been? Apparently it was connected with the hand or with the part of the arm adjacent to the hand. I considered the possibilities; and at once they fell into two categories. That something might have been a wound, an injury, a hypodermic needle-mark; something, that is to say, related to the cause of death; or it might have been a mutilation, a deformity, a finger-ring, a tattoo-mark; something, that is to say, related to the identity of the deceased. And it followed that the cremation might have been made use of to conceal either the cause of death or the identity of the body. But all this was purely speculative. The case looked suspicious; but there was not a particle of positive evidence that anything abnormal had occurred.
"At this point Jardine exploded on us his second mystery; that of the dead cleric at Hampstead. This gave us at once, an adequate motive for getting rid of him; for it had every appearance of a case of murder with successful concealment of the body, and Jardine was the only witness who could testify to its having occurred. On hearing of this I was for a moment disposed to dismiss the cremation case; to consider that the suspicious elements in it had been magnified by our imaginations in our endeavors to find an explanation of the assault on Jardine. Moreover, since we now had a sufficient motive for that assault the cremation case appeared to be outside the scope of the inquiry.
"But there was a difficulty. It was now six weeks since Jardine had encountered the body in the lane, and during that time he had been entirely unmolested. The assault had occurred on his moving into a new neighborhood, to which he had come unexpectedly unannounced. Moreover, the assault had been committed by some person who either had access to the factory or was, at least, well acquainted with it and who, therefore, seemed to be connected with the new neighborhood; and it was committed within a few days of the cremation incident. Furthermore, the assault was manifestly premeditated and prepared; but yet the circumstances—namely, Jardine's recent and unexpected appearance in the neighborhood—were such as to make it certain that the crime could have been planned only a day or two before its execution. Which again seemed to connect it with the cremation case rather than with the Hampstead case.
"There were two more points. We have seen that Jardine's would-be murderer was a subtle, ingenious, resourceful and cautious villain. But a crime adjusted, to the conditions of cremation is exactly such a crime as we should expect of such a man; whereas the Hampstead crime—assuming it to be a crime—appeared to have been a somewhat clumsy affair, though the successful concealment of the body pointed to a person of some capacity. So that the former crime was more congruous with the known personality of the would-be murderer than the latter.
"The second point was made on further investigation. The day after our consultation I looked round the neighborhood with the aid of a large-scale map; when I discovered that the yard of the factory in Norton Street backed on the garden of the Samways' house in Gayton Street. This, again, suggested a connection between the cremation case and the assault on Jardine; and the suggestion was so strong that once more the cremation incident assumed the uppermost place in my mind.
"I considered that case at length. Assuming a crime to have been committed, what was the probable nature of that crime? Now, cremation, as I have said, tends to destroy two kinds of evidence, namely; that relating to the cause of death and that relating to the identity of the body; whence it follows that the two crimes which it may be used to conceal are murder and substitution.
"To which of these crimes did the evidence point in the present instance? Well we had the undoubted fact that cremation had been performed pursuant to the expressed wishes of Septimus Maddock, the man who was alleged to have been cremated. But if it was a case of murder, the crime must have been hurriedly planned a few days before the man's death—that is, after the execution of the will; for we could assume that Maddock would not have connived at his own murder; whereas, if it was a case of substitution, Maddock himself was probably the actual agent. Considering the circumstances—the inexplicable, symptomless illness and the unexpected death—the latter crime was obviously more probable than the former. The illness, in that case, would be a sham illness deliberately planned to prepare the way for the introduction of the substituted body.
"Moreover, the attendant circumstances were more in favor of substitution than of murder. Of the three doctors who saw the body, only one had seen the living man; and that one, Batson, was more than half blind and wholly inattentive and neglectful. For the purpose of substitution, no more perfectly suitable practitioner could have been selected. The identity of the body was taken for granted—naturally enough, I admit—and no verification was even thought of. Then, as to Jardine's experience. The hand or wrist is not at all a likely region on which to find either a fatal injury or the trace of a hypodermic injection; whereas it is a most important region for purposes of identification. The hand is highly characteristic in itself even when normal; and there is no part of the body that is so subject to mutilation or in which mutilations and deformities are so striking, so conspicuous, and so characteristic. Lost fingers, stiff fingers, webbed fingers, supernumerary fingers, contracted palm, deformed nails, brachydactyly and numerous other abnormal conditions are not only easily recognized, but—since the hand is usually unclothed and visible—their existence will be known to a large number of persons.
"The evidence, in short, was strongly in favor of substitution as against murder.
"If, however, the body which was cremated was not that of Maddock, then it was the body of some other person; that is to say that the theory of substitution left us with a dead body that was unaccounted for. And since a dead body implies the death of some person, the theory of substitution left us with a death unaccounted for and obviously concealed; that is to say, it raised a strong presumption of the murder of some unknown person. And here it seemed that our data came to an end; that we had no material whatever for forming any hypothesis as to the identity of the person whose dead body we were assuming to have been substituted for that of Septimus Maddock.
"But while I was thus turning over the possibilities of this cremation case, the other—the Hampstead case—continued to lurk in the background of my mind. It was much less hypothetical. There was positive evidence of some weight that a crime had been committed. And the circumstances offered a fully adequate motive for getting rid of Jardine. Thus it was natural that I should raise the question. Was it possible that the two cases could be in any way connected?
"At the first glance, the suggestion looked absolutely wild. But still I considered it at length; and then it looked somewhat less wild. The two cases had this in common, that if a crime had been committed, Jardine was the sole witness. Moreover, the supposition that the two cases were connected and incriminated the same parties, greatly intensified the motive for making away with Jardine. But there was another and much stronger point in favor of this view. If we adopted the theory of substitution, it was impossible, on looking at the two cases, to avoid being struck by the very curious converseness of their conditions. In the Hampstead case we were dealing with a body which had suddenly vanished, no one could say whither; in the Maddock case we were dealing with a body which had suddenly appeared, no one could say whence.
"When I reflected on this very striking appearance of relation it was inevitable that I should ask myself the question, Is it conceivable that these two bodies could have been one and the same? That the body which was cremated could have been the body which Jardine saw in the lane?
"Again, at the first glance, the question looked absurd. The first body was seen by Jardine more than six weeks before the alleged death of Maddock; and the body which he saw at the Samways' house was that of a man newly dead, with rigor mortis just beginning. It was, indeed, barely conceivable that the Hampstead body was not actually dead and that the man might have lingered on alive for six weeks. But this suggestion failed to fit the known facts in two respects. In the first place, the body which Jardine saw in the lane was, from his description, pretty unmistakably a dead body, and, in the second, the sham illness of Maddock and the elaborate, leisurely preparations suggest a complete control of the time factor, which would be absent if those preparations were adjusted to a dying man who might expire at any moment.
"Rejecting this suggestion, then, the further question arose, Is it possible that the body that was seen in the lane could, after an interval of six weeks, have been produced in Gayton Street, perfectly fresh and in a state of incipient rigor mortis? And when the question was thus fairly stated, the answer was obviously in the affirmative. For, is it, not a matter of common knowledge that the bodies of sheep are habitually brought from New Zealand to London, traversing the whole width of the Tropics in the voyage, and are delivered, after an interval of more than six weeks, perfectly fresh and in a state of incipient rigor mortis? The physical possibility was beyond question.
"But if physically possible, was such preservation practicable? Well, how are the bodies of the sheep preserved? By exposing them continuously to intense cold. And how is that intense cold produced? Roughly speaking, by the volatilization of a liquified gas—ammonia, in the case of the sheep. But behold! The very man whom we are suspecting of being the agent in this crime is a man who has command of large quantities of a liquefied gas, and who has hired a mineral water factory for no apparent reason and put the premises to no apparent use."
At this point Jervis brought his fist down with a bang on the arm of his chair.
"Idiot!" he exclaimed. "Ass, fool, dolt, imbecile that I am! With those cylinders staring me in the face, too! Of course, it was that interval of six weeks that brought me up short. And yet I had actually heard Jardine describe the cloud of carbon dioxide snow that fell on his face! Don't you consider me an absolute donkey, Thorndyke?"
"Certainly not," replied Thorndyke. "You happened to miss a link and, of course, the chain would not hold. It occurs to us all now and again. But, do you see, Jardine, how 'the stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner?' Don't you understand how, when I reached this point, there rose before me the picture of that cellar with the commonplace objects that it contained? The case, seven feet by two and a-half—so convenient for preserving a body in a bulky packing; the two waterproof sheets—so well adapted to holding a mass of carbon dioxide snow in contact with the body; the mass of straw—one of the most perfect non-conductors—so admirably fitted for its use as a protective packing for the frozen body; and lastly, those ten empty cylinders, of which seven had been used for some purpose unknown to us? Let this case be a lesson to you, Jardine, not only in legal medicine but in clinical medicine, too, to take the facts as you find them—relevant or irrelevant, striking or commonplace—note them carefully and trust them to find their own places in the inductive scheme."
"It has been a most instructive lesson to me," said I; "especially your analysis of the reasoning by which you identified the criminal."
"Hum," said Thorndyke. "I didn't know I'd got as far as that."
"But if the body was preserved in a frozen state, there could not be much doubt as to who had preserved it."
"Possibly not," Thorndyke agreed. "But I had not proved that it had been so preserved, but only that it was possible for it to have been; and that the supposition of its having been so preserved was in agreement with the known circumstances of the case. But I must impress on you that up to this point I was dealing in pure hypothesis. My hypothesis was perfectly sound, perfectly consistent in all its parts, and perfectly congruous with all the known facts, but it did not follow therefore that it was true. It was entirely unverified; for hitherto I had not one single item of positive evidence to support it.
"Nevertheless, the striking agreement between the hypothesis and the known facts encouraged me greatly; and, as it was evident that I had now exhausted the material yielded by the cremation incident, I decided to take up the clue at the other end; to investigate the details of the Hampstead affair. To this end I called on Jardine, who very kindly went over the case with me afresh. And here it was that I first came within hail of positive evidence. On his wall was pinned an oil sketch, and on that sketch was a distinct print of a right thumb. It was beautifully clear; for the paint having been dry on the surface but soft underneath, had taken the impression as sharply as a surface of warm wax.
"Now, you will remember that I took possession of the letter which summoned Jardine to the mineral water works and I may now say that I tested it most carefully for finger-prints. But paper is a poor material on which to develop invisible prints owing to its absorbent nature and I had very indifferent success. Still, I did not fail entirely. By the combined use of lycopodium powder and photography I obtained impressions of parts of two finger-tips and a portion of the end of a right thumb. They were wretched prints but yet available for corroboration, since one could see part of the pattern on each and could make out that the ridge-pattern of the thumb was of the kind known as a 'twinned loop.'
"Bearing this fact in mind, you will understand that I was quite interested to find that the print on the sketch—also that of a right thumb—had a twinned loop pattern. I noted the fact as a coincidence, but, of course, attached no importance to it until Jardine told me that the artist who painted the sketch habitually worked in gloves; and even then I merely made a mental note that I would ascertain who and what the artist was.
"I need not go over our examination of the scene of the crime. I need only say that I was deeply interested in following the track along which the body had been carried because I was on the look-out for something; and that something was a house or other building in which the body might have been temporarily deposited.
"My hypothesis seemed to demand such a building. For, since the body was quite fresh and rigor mortis was only beginning when Jardine saw it at Gayton Street, it must have been frozen very shortly after death. Now, it obviously could not have been carried from Hampstead to Gayton Street on a man's back; the alternative is either a vehicle waiting at an appointed place—and necessarily not far away—or a house or other building to which the body could be taken. But the vehicle would, under the circumstances be almost impracticable. It would hardly be possible to make an appointment with any exactness as to time; and the presence of a waiting or loitering vehicle would, at such an hour—it was about midnight, you will remember—be almost certain to arouse suspicion and inquiry.
"On the other hand, a house to which the body could be conveyed would meet the conditions perfectly. When once the body was deposited there, the danger of pursuit would be practically at an end; and it would be quite possible to have a supply of the liquid gas ready for use on its arrival. This is assuming long premeditation and very deliberate preparation; an assumption supported by Gill's peculiar tenancy of the factory.
"I, therefore, kept a sharp look-out for a likely house or building; and, as Jardine and I came out of Ken Wood by the turnstile, behold! a house which answered the requirements to perfection. It was a solitary house; there was no other house near; and it lay right on the track along which the body had apparently been carried. Instantly, I decided to investigate the recent history of that house and its tenants; but Jardine saved me the trouble. From him I learned that, at the time of the assumed murder, it had been inhabited by the artist whom he had mentioned, but that it had now been empty for a week or two.
"Here were news indeed! This artist, who habitually wore gloves and whose right thumb-print was a twinned loop, had been living in this house at the time of the assumed murder, but had been living elsewhere at the time of the cremation! It was a striking group of facts, and I eagerly availed myself of the opportunity of looking over the house.
"At first the examination was quite barren and disappointing. The man's habits, as shown by the few discarded articles of use or other traces, were of no interest to me—and still less to Jardine; and of traces of his personality there were none. I searched all the rejected canvases and every available scrap of paper in the hope of collecting some fresh finger-prints, but without the smallest result. In fact, the examination looked like being an utter failure up to the very last, when we entered the stable-loft; but here I came upon one or two really significant traces of occupation.
"The first of these was a smooth, indented line on the floor, as if some heavy, metallic object had been dragged along it, with other, rougher lines, apparently made by a heavy wooden case. Then there was a quantity of straw, not new straw such as you might expect to find in a stable-loft, but straw that had evidently been used for packing. And, finally, there was a pair of canvas pliers which appeared to have been strained by a violent effort to rotate from right to left some hard, metallic body, three quarters of an inch wide, with sharp corners and apparently square in section; some body, in fact, that in shape, in size and apparently in material, was identical with the square of the cock on one of the liquid gas bottles; which appeared to have been connected with a screw thread and had clearly required great force to turn it with this inadequate appliance.
"The evidence collected from the loft, suggesting that a large case had been moved in and out and that a gas cylinder had been opened, you will say was of the flimsiest. And so it was. But the effects of evidence are cumulative. To estimate the value of these observations made in the loft, you must add them to the facts just obtained concerning the artist himself, the position of his house and the date on which he vacated it; and these coincidences and agreements must be added to—or, more strictly, multiplied into—the body of coincidences and agreements which I have already described.
"But the evidence collected at the house was the least important part of the day's 'catch.' On returning to Jardine's rooms I ventured to borrow the sketch and took it home with me; and when I compared the thumb-print on it with the photograph of the thumb-print on the letter—employing the excellent method of comparison that is in use at Scotland Yard—there could be no possible doubt (disregarding for the moment, the chances of forgery) that they were the prints of one and the same thumb.
"Here, then, at last I had stepped out of the region of mere hypothesis. Here was an item of positive evidence, and one, moreover, of high probative value. It proved, beyond any reasonable doubt, the existence of some connection between the house on the Heath and the factory in Norton Street; and it established a strong presumption that the artist and the man at the factory were the same person; the weak point in this being the absence of proof that the thumb-print on the painting was made by the artist.
"And here, Jardine, I would draw your attention to the interesting way in which, when a long train of hypothetical reasoning has at length elicited an actual, demonstrable truth, that truth instantly reacts on the hypothesis, lifting it as a whole on to an entirely different plane of probability. I may compare the effect to that of a crystal, dropped into a super-saturated solution of a salt, such as sodium sulphate. So long as it is at rest, the solution remains a clear liquid; but drop into it the minutest crystal of its own salt, and, in a few moments the entire liquid has solidified into a mass of crystals.
"So it was in the present case. In the instant when it became an established fact that the house at Hampstead and the factory in Norton Street had been occupied by the same person, the entire sequence of events which I had hypothetically constructed sprang from the plane of mere conceivability to that of actual probability. It was now more likely than unlikely that the unknown cleric had been murdered, that his body had been conveyed to the artist's house, that it had there been frozen, transferred to the factory, preserved there for some weeks, passed over the wall to the Samways' house, and finally cremated under the name of Septimus Maddock.
"All that now remained to be done was the verification and identification of the body. As to the first, I examined the will at Somerset House and found it, as the American detectives suspected, a mere notification to the New York authorities that Septimus Maddock was dead. I wrote to the detective agency and in due course came O'Donnell with the answers to my questions; from which we learned for certain that the artist was Septimus Maddock and that the assumed peculiarity of the hands consisted of brachydactyly. And then came the good Father Humperdinck to enable us to give a name to the body and to furnish us with that unlooked-for means of identification. Henceforward, all was plain sailing with only one possible source of failure; the possibility that the bullet might have been subsequently extracted. But this was highly improbable. We knew that the wound had healed completely, and it was pretty certain that the bullet was lying quietly encysted or embedded in the bone. Still, I will confess that I have never in my life been more relieved than I was when my eyes lighted on that dent in the ilium with the stain of lead oxide round it."
"So I can imagine," said Jervis. "It was a triumph; and you deserved it. I have never known even my revered senior to work out the theory of a crime more neatly or with less positive matter to work from. And I suppose you have a pretty clear and connected idea of the actual sequence of events."
"I think so," replied Thorndyke, "although much of it is necessarily conjectural. I take it that Maddock, while hiding in Bruges under the name of Burton, made the acquaintance of Reinhardt, and saw in the rich, friendless, eccentric bachelor a suitable subject for a crime which he had probably already considered in general terms. I should think that they were probably somewhat alike in appearance and that the idea of personation was first suggested by the circumstance that they both wore gloves habitually. Maddock will have learned of Reinhardt's intended visit to England and immediately begun his preparations. His scheme—and a most ingenious one it was, I must confess—was clearly to cause Reinhardt to disappear in one locality and produce his body after a considerable interval in another at some distance; and the house on the Heath was apparently taken with this object and to be near Reinhardt's haunts. I take it, that on the night of the murder, Reinhardt had an appointment to visit him at that house, but that, having learned at Miss Vyne's of the sudden illness of Brother Bartholomew, he suddenly altered his plans and refused to go. Then Maddock—who had probably waited for him on the road—seeing his scheme on the point of being wrecked, walked with him as he was going home and took the risk of killing him in Millfield Lane. The risk was not great, considering the time of night and the solitary character of the place, and the distance from the house was not too great for a strong man, as Maddock seems to have been, to carry the body.
"Death was almost certainly produced by a stab in the back; and Maddock was probably just about to carry the body away when destiny, in the form of Jardine, appeared. Then Maddock must have lurked, probably behind the fence which had the large hole in it, until Jardine went away, when he must instantly have picked up the body, carried it down the lane, pushed it over the fence—detaching the reliquary as he did so—carried it away to the house, stripped it and proceeded at once to freeze it, having provided a bottle of the gas in readiness.
"The next morning he will have gone to Marchmont's office, probably dressed in Reinhardt's clothes, from thence to Charing Cross, and, with Reinhardt's luggage, gone straight on to Paris, leaving the body packed in an abundance of the carbonic acid snow. At Paris he will have made his arrangements with Desiré and then disappeared, returning in disguise to England to carry out the rest of the plan. And a wonderfully clever plan it was, and most ingeniously and resolutely executed. If it had succeeded—and it was within a hair's breath of succeeding—the hunted criminal, Maddock, would have been beyond the reach of Justice for ever, and the fictitious Reinhardt might have lived out his life in luxury and absolute security."
As Thorndyke concluded, he rose from his chair, and, stepping over to a cabinet, drew from some inner recess a cigar of melanotic complexion and repulsive aspect.
Jervis looked at it and chuckled.
"Thorndyke's one dissipation," said he. "At the close of every successful case he proceeds, as a sort of thanksgiving ceremony, to funk us out of these chambers with the smoke of a Trichinopoly cheroot. But listen! Don't light it yet, Thorndyke. Here comes some harmless and inoffensive stranger."
Thorndyke paused with the cigar in his fingers.
A quick step ascended the stairs and then came a sharp, official rat-tat from the little brass knocker. Thorndyke laid the cigar on the mantelpiece and strode over to the door. I saw him take in a telegram, open it, glance at the paper and dismiss the messenger. Then, closing the door, he came back to the fireside with the "flimsy" in his hand.
"There, Jardine," said he, laying it on my knee; "there is your order of release."
I picked up the paper and read aloud its curt message.
- "Maddock arrested Folkestone now in custody Bow Street. Miller."
"That means to say," said Thorndyke, "that the halter is already around his neck. I think I may light my Trichinopoly now."
And he did so.
There is little more to tell. This has been a history of coincidences and one more coincidence brings it to a close. The very day on which my formal engagement to Sylvia was made public, chanced to be the day on which the execution of Septimus Maddock was described in the papers. On that day, too, the portrait of poor Letitia, painted by that skilful and murderous hand, was placed in the handsome ebony frame that I had caused to be made for it. As I write these closing words, it hangs before me, flanked on either side by the little jar of violets that are renewed religiously from day to day by my wife or me. The pale, inscrutable eyes look out on me, her friend whom she loved so faithfully and who so little merited her love; but as I look into them, the picture fades and shows me the same face glorified, waxen, pallid, drowsy-eyed, peaceful and sweet—the dead face of the woman who gave her heart's blood as the price of my ransom, and who was fated then to pass—out of my life indeed, but out of my heart's shrine and my most loving remembrance, never.
THE END