Dr. Thorndyke Omnibus Vol 6

by R. Austin Freeman

  As he spoke, he switched off the lamp and hooked the basket on to the tackle by means of a pair of clip-hooks, provided with a safety catch. Then he produced a candle from his pocket and proceeded to light it.

  “I don’t like the idea of your going down, Doctor,” said the Superintendent. “It’s really our job.”

  “Not at all,” replied Thorndyke, drawing the basket to the edge of the hole and stepping into it. “I proposed the exploration and undertook to carry it out. Besides, I want to see what the bottom of this dene hole is like.”

  “Don’t you think, sir,” Polton interposed, earnestly, “that it would be better for me to go down? I am so much lighter and should put less strain on the tackle.”

  “My dear Polton,” said Thorndyke, regarding his devoted henchman with an appreciative smile, “this tackle would bear a couple of tons, easily. There isn’t any strain. But I will ask you to pay out the rope as steadily as you can, and keep an eye on this candle. If it goes out, you had better haul up at once without waiting for a signal, as you will know that I have dropped into foul air. Now, I am ready if you are.”

  He steadied himself by lightly grasping two of the tackle-ropes and I took a turn round the trunk of a birch tree with the “fall” by passing the big coil round. Then Miller and the sergeant hauled on the rope while I gathered in the slack; the tackle grew taut, the basket began to rise from the ground and swung directly over the black hole.

  “Now, pay out steadily and not too fast,” said Thorndyke; and as we began to ease out the rope, he slowly sank, like a stage demon, and disappeared into the bowels of the earth, while Polton, grasping the tripod and leaning over the hole, watched his descent with starting eyes and an expression of horror.

  Owing to the great power of the tackle, the weight on the fall was quite trifling. I could, alone, have paid it out easily with the aid of the turn round the tree. So we were able, in turn, to leave it to satisfy our curiosity and relieve our anxiety by a glance down the shaft; which now looked even more alarming than when we had looked into the mere, impenetrable blackness of the hole. For now, as we peered down the well-like shaft, at our friend—already grown small in the distance—faintly illuminated by the glimmer of the candle, we were able to realize the horrible depth to which this strange memorial of a forgotten race sank into the earth.

  But the unfailing glimmer of the candle-light—though it had now dwindled to a mere distant spark—reassured us; for, apart from the possibility of “choke damp,” there was really no appreciable danger. Notwithstanding which, Polton was fain, from time to time, to relieve his overwrought feelings by hailing the now invisible explorer with the inquiry, “All right, sir?” to which a strange, sepulchral, but surprisingly loud voice replied: “All right, Polton.”

  After an almost interminable paying-out, the diminishing remainder of rope warned us that Thorndyke must have nearly reached the bottom, and then a sudden relaxation of the tension informed us that he had already done so. Immediately afterwards, that uncanny, megaphonic voice announced the fact and directed us to switch on the light and throw down the spare sling. I at once complied with the first order and was about to carry out the other when it occurred to me that a stout rope sling might fall with unpleasant force after a drop of sixty feet. Accordingly, I coiled it loosely round the tackle-ropes, and, securing the ends with a hitch, let go; when I saw it slide smoothly down the ropes to the bottom.

  “I wonder what he wants with that sling,” Miller speculated, grasping the tripod and leaning over to peer down. But, as the only result was to obscure the light of the lamp and throw the shaft into shadow, he withdrew and waited for events to enlighten him. Then the voice came reverberating up the shaft, commanding us to hoist.

  If the paying-out had been a long business, the hauling up was longer. There seemed to be no end to that rope; and as I hauled and hauled, I found myself wishing that Thorndyke had been a little less cautious and contented himself with a less powerful but quicker tackle. From time to time, Miller was impelled by the intensity of his curiosity to thrust his head over the hole to see what was coming up; but, as his head cut off the light of the lamp and rendered the ascending object invisible, he retired each time, defeated and muttering. At length, as the accumulating coils of rope told us that our freight must be nearing the surface, he succeeded in catching a glimpse of the object. But so far was that glimpse from allaying his curiosity that it reduced him to a frenzy of excitement.

  “It looks like a body!“ he exclaimed. “A man’s body. But it can’t be!”

  It was, however. As we hauled in the last few feet of the rope and made fast to the tree, there arose out of the hole the body of a tall, well-dressed man which had been suspended from the hook of the tackle by the sling, passed round the chest under the arms. Miller helped me to haul it away from the hole, when we unfastened the sling and let the body fall on the ground.

  “Well,” said the Superintendent, surveying it gloomily, “this is a disappointment. We have come all this way and taken all this trouble just to salve the body of a poor devil who has stumbled into this infernal pit by accident and who is no concern of ours at all. Of course, it is not the Doctor’s fault. He discovered that there was something down there and he drew the very natural conclusion, though it happened to be the wrong one. Let the damn tackle down again as fast as you can and get the Doctor up. I expect he is as sick as I am.”

  The lowering of the tackle was a slow and tedious business, for, as there was now no weight to pull it down, it had to be “overhauled.” Fortunately, Polton had oiled the sheaves so that they turned smoothly and easily; but it was a long time before the voice from below notified us that the lower block had reached the bottom. Its reverberations had hardly died away when the order came up to hoist, and we straightway began to haul, while Polton coiled down the rope as it was gathered in. Presently I noticed a puzzled expression on the Superintendant’s face, and, as I looked at him inquiringly, he exclaimed:

  “This can’t be the Doctor. He’s a bigger man than that poor beggar, but there doesn’t seem to be any weight on the rope at all.”

  I had noticed this, myself, and now suggested that we might take advantage of the light weight by hauling up more quickly; which we did with such a will that Miller’s opinion was presently confirmed by the appearance of the basket at the mouth of the pit. As it came into view, the Superintendent gazed at it in astonishment.

  “Why, it’s the clothes, after all!” he exclaimed, seizing the basket and turning its contents out on to the ground, “and the right ones, too, by the look of them. A complete outfit; suit, shirt, underclothing, socks, boots—everything but the hat. He must have had a hat, and so must the other fellow. Perhaps the Doctor will bring them up with him.”

  Having emptied the basket, we sent it down again; and now being able to judge the distance, we let it run down by its own weight, only checking it as it neared the bottom. After a very brief interval, the hollow voice from below directed us to haul up, and once again we began to gather in the rope and coil it down.

  “This is queer,” said Miller, as he took his turn at the rope. “It is no heavier than it was last time. I wonder what he is sending up now.”

  In his impatience to solve this new mystery, he hauled with such energy that beads of sweat began to appear on his forehead. But it is difficult to hurry a four-fold tackle and it was a long time before the basket came into view. When, at last, it became visible a few feet down, its appearance evidently disappointed him, for he exclaimed, in a tone of disgust:

  “Hats. Two hats. I should have thought he might have brought them up with him and saved a journey.”

  “There is something in it besides the hats,” said I, as the basket rose out of the mouth of the pit and I drew it aside on to the ground, while the others gathered round. I seized the two hats and lifted them out; and then I stood as if petrified, with the hats in my hands, too astounded to utter a sound.

  “My God!” Miller exclaimed, h
uskily. “A man’s head! Now what the blazes can be the meaning of this?”

  He stood, staring in amazement—as, indeed, we all did—at the horrible relic that lay at the bottom of the basket. Suddenly he seized the latter and turned it upside down, when the head rolled out on the ground. Then he flung the basket into the hole and gruffly ordered us to “let go.”

  There was no interval this time, for, almost as the rope slackened, informing us that the basket had settled on the bottom, the hollow voice from below commanded us to haul up. And as soon as we had taken in the slack, we knew by the weight that Thorndyke was at the other end of the tackle. Accordingly, I once more took a turn round the tree to prevent the chance of a slip or jerk and the others hauled steadily and evenly. Even now, the weight seemed comparatively trifling, but what we gained from the tackle in lifting power we lost in speed. In mechanics as in other things you can’t have it both ways. However, at long last, Polton, grasping the tripod and craning over the hole, was able to announce that “the Doctor” was nearly up; and after another couple of minutes he appeared rising slowly above ground, when Polton carefully drew the basket on to the solid earth and helped him to step out.

  “Well, Doctor,” said Miller, “you’ve given us a bit of a surprise, as you generally do. But,” he added, pointing to the head, which lay with its shrunken, discoloured face turned up to the sky, “what are we to make of that? We’ve got a head too many.”

  “Too many for what?” asked Thorndyke.

  “For what we were inquiring into,” Miller replied testily. “See what you have done for us. We find a head in a box at Fenchurch Street Station. Then we keep a look-out for the body belonging to it, and at last it turns up. Then you bring us here and produce another head; which puts us back where we started. We’ve still got a spare head that we can’t account for.”

  Thorndyke smiled grimly. “I am not under a contract,” said he, “to supply facts that will fit your theory of a crime. We must take the facts as they come; and I think there can be no doubt that this head belongs to the body that was found on the shelf a few yards from here.”

  “Then what about the other head?” demanded Miller. “Where is the body belonging to that?”

  Thorndyke shook his head. “That is another story,” said he. “But the immediate problem is how these remains are to be disposed of. We can’t carry them and the gear down to the ambulance without assistance”

  Here the sergeant interposed with a suggestion.

  “There is a big electric station a little farther down the road. If I were to run the patrol man down there, he could get on the phone to his head-quarters, and perhaps, meanwhile, they could lend us one or two men from the works. We’ve got a folding stretcher in the car.”

  “Good,” said Miller. “That will do to a T, Sergeant. You cut along as fast as you can, and perhaps Mr. Polton might go with you to take charge of the patrol man’s bicycle.”

  As Polton and the sergeant retired along the now plainly visible track, Miller turned to Thorndyke with a puzzled and questioning air.

  “I can’t quite make this out, Doctor,” said he. “You brought us here, as I understood, in the expectation of probably finding that poor devil’s clothes. Had you any expectation of finding anything else?”

  “I thought it probable,” replied Thorndyke, “that if we found the clothes, we should probably find the head with them. But I certainly did not expect to find that body. That came as quite a surprise.”

  “Naturally,” said Miller. “A queer coincidence that he should have happened to tumble in, just about the same time. Still, he isn’t in the picture.”

  “There,” said Thorndyke, “I think you are mistaken I should say that he is very much in the picture. My very strong impression is that he is none other than the murderer.”

  “The murderer!” exclaimed Miller. “What makes you think that? Or are you just guessing?”

  “I am considering the obvious probabilities,” Thorndyke replied. As he spoke, he stooped over the dead man and drew up first the jacket and then the waistcoat. As the latter garment rose, there came into view, projecting up from within the waist-band of the trousers, the haft of an undeniable Green River knife. Thorndyke drew the weapon out of its leather sheath, glanced at it and silently held it out for our inspection. No expert eye was needed to read its message. The streaks of blackened rust on the blade were distinctive enough, but much more so was the shiny black deposit at the junction of the steel and the wooden handle.

  “Yes,” said Miller, as Thorndyke replaced the knife in its sheath, “that tells the tale pretty well. And exactly the kind of knife that the doctor described at the inquest.” He cogitated profoundly for a few moments and then asked: “How do you suppose this fellow came to fall into the pit?”

  “I should say,” Thorndyke replied, “that the affair happened somewhat in this way: The murderer either enticed his victim into this wood, or he murdered him elsewhere and brought his body here. We shall probably never know which, and it really doesn’t matter. Obviously, the murderer knew this place pretty well, as we can judge by his acquaintance with the dene hole. Having committed the murder, or deposited the body, near the edge of the wood close to the road, he stripped the corpse and carried the clothes through the wood to the hole and dropped them down. And when we bear in mind that this must, almost certainly, have been done at night, we must conclude that, not only must the murderer have been familiar with the locality, but he had probably planned the crime in advance and reconnoitred the ground.

  “Having dropped the clothes down the pit, he returned to the corpse. And now he had the most difficult part of his task to do. He had to detach the head; and he had to detach it in a particular way—and in the dark, too.”

  “Why did he have to?” Miller asked.

  “Let us leave that question for the moment. It was part of the plan, as the case presents itself to me. Well, having detached the head, he dragged the nude and headless corpse the short distance to the edge of the cutting and pushed it over, knowing that it would roll down only as far as the shelf. Then he carried the head to the dene hole.

  “Now, we may assume that he was a man of pretty strong nerves, but, by the time he had murdered this man, stripped the corpse and cut off the head—in a public place, mind you, in which discovery was possible at any moment—he must have been considerably shaken. He was walking in the dark with the dead man’s head in his hands, over ground which, as Jervis can testify, is a mass of traps and entanglements. In his terror and agitation he probably hurried to get rid of his dreadful burden, and, just as he approached the hole, he must have caught his foot in a bramble and fallen, sprawling, right into the pit. That is how I picture the course of events.”

  “Yes,” said I, “it sounds pretty convincing as to what probably did happen, though I am in the same difficulty as Miller. I don’t quite see why he did it. Why, for instance, he didn’t throw the body, itself, down the pit.”

  “We must go into that question on another occasion,” said Thorndyke; “but you will notice that—but for this investigation of ours—he did actually secure a false identification of the body.”

  “Yes,” agreed Miller, “he had us there. We had fairly fixed the body on to that Fenchurch Street head.”

  Once more the Superintendent fell into a train of cogitation, with a speculative eye on the body that lay on the ground at his feet. Suddenly, he roused, and, turning to Thorndyke, asked:

  “Have you any idea, Doctor, who these two people are?”

  “I have formed an opinion,” was the reply, “and I think it is probably a correct opinion. I should say that this,” indicating the dead man, “is the person known as Bassett, or Dobson, the man who deposited the case of stolen platinum at the cloak room; and this man,” pointing to the head, “is the one who stole the case and left the embalmed head in exchange.”

  Thorndyke’s answer, delivered in calm, matter-of-fact tones, fairly took my breath away. I was too astonished to
make any comment. And the Superintendent was equally taken by surprise, for he, too, stood for a while gazing at my colleague without speaking. At length he said—voicing my sentiments as well as his own:

  “This is a knock-out, Doctor! I wasn’t aware that you knew anything about this case, or were taking any interest in it. Yet you seem to have it all cut and dried. Knowing you, I assume that this isn’t just a guess. You’ve got something to go on?”

  “In respect of the identification? Certainly. Without going into any other matters, there is the appearance of these remains. In both cases it corresponds exactly with the description given at the inquest. The man who stole the case—”

  “And left the box with the human head in it,” interpolated Miller. “You are ignoring that trivial detail.”

  “Yes,” Thorndyke admitted. “We are dealing with the robbery, in which they were both concerned. Well, that man was described by the attendant as dark, clean-shaved, and having conspicuous gold fillings in both central incisors. If you look at that head, you can see the gold fillings plainly enough, as well as the other, less distinctive characteristics.

  “In the case of this other man the correspondence is much more striking. Here is the long, thin face with the long, thin, pointed nose, curved on the bridge, and the dark, nearly black hair. The fair complexion and pale blue eye colour are not now clearly distinguishable. But there is one very impressive correspondence. You remember that the witness, Mr. Pippet, was strongly of opinion that the hair and beard were dyed. Now, if you take my lens and examine the roots of the hair and beard, you will see plainly that it is light brown hair dyed black.”

  Miller and I took the lens in turn and made the examination; with the result that the condition was established beyond any possible doubt.

  “Yes,” Miller agreed handing back the lens, “that is dyed hair, right enough, and it seems to settle the identification.”

  “But we needn’t leave it at that,” pursued Thorndyke. “The very clothing agrees perfectly. There is the blue serge suit, the brown shoes, the wrist watch, and the additional pocket watch with its guard of plaited twine.”