Then the judge came in; and with his coming the atmosphere of the court became charged with that sense of anxious strain peculiar to trials for murder. It was rather like the atmosphere of a sick-room in a case of fatal illness, but worse.
Willoughton came into the dock looking under the weather and very much subdued. But he was certainly looking dignified, and he said that he was not guilty in a steady enough voice.
Greatorex, the leading counsel for the Crown, opened the case for the prosecution. There was no suggestion in his speech that the police had discovered any new fact. He begged the jury not to lay too much stress on the fact that the weapon had not been found. He had to, of course.
Then Helston gave evidence of finding that Kelstern had been stabbed, and he and the other three men who had been with him in the hot room gave evidence of the quarrel they had overheard between Willoughton and the dead man, and that Willoughton came out of the hottest room scowling and obviously furious. One of them, a fussy old gentleman of the name of Underwood, declared that it was the bitterest quarrel he had ever heard. None of the four of them could throw any light on the matter of whether Willoughton was carrying the missing weapon in the folds of the towel in which he was draped; all of them were sure that he had nothing in his hands.
The medical evidence came next. In cross-examining the doctors who had made the autopsy, Hazeldean, Willoughton’s counsel, established the fact quite definitely that the missing weapon was of a fair size; that its rounded blade must have been over half an inch in diameter and between three and four inches long. They were of the opinion that to drive a blade of that thickness into the heart a handle of at least four inches in length would be necessary to give a firm enough grip. They agreed that it might very well have been a piece of a steel, or iron, rod sharpened like a pencil. At any rate, it was certainly a sizable weapon, not one to be hidden quickly or to disappear wholly in a Turkish bath. Hazeldean could not shake their evidence about the tea-leaf; they were confident that it had been driven into the wound and cut in half by the blade of the missing weapon, and that went to show that the wound had been inflicted while Kelstern was drinking his tea.
Detective-Inspector Brackett, who was in charge of the case, was cross-examined at great length about his search for the missing weapon. He made it quite clear that it was nowhere in that Turkish bath, neither in the hot rooms, nor the shampooing room, nor the dressing-rooms, nor the vestibule, nor the office. He had had the plunge bath emptied; he had searched the roofs, though it was practically certain that the skylight above the hot room, not the hottest, had been shut at the time of the crime. In re-examination he scouted the idea of Willoughton’s having had an accomplice who had carried away the weapon for him. He had gone into that matter most carefully.
The shampooer stated that Willoughton came to him scowling so savagely that he wondered what had put him into such a bad temper. In cross-examining him, Arbuthnot, Hazeldean’s junior, made it clearer than ever that, unless Willoughton had already hidden the weapon in the bare hottest room, it was hidden in the towel. Then he drew from the shampooer the definite statement that Willoughton had set down the towel beside the couch on which he was shampooed; that he had hurried back to the hot rooms in front of the shampooer; that the shampooer had come back from the hot rooms, leaving Willoughton still in them discussing the crime, to find the towel lying just as Willoughton had set it down, with no weapon in it and no trace of blood on it.
Since the inspector had disposed of the possibility that an accomplice had slipped in, taken the weapon from the towel, and slipped out of the bath with it, this evidence really made it clear that the weapon had never left the hottest room.
Then the prosecution called evidence of the bad terms on which Kelstern and Willoughton had been. Three well-known and influential men told the jury about Kelstern’s efforts to prejudice Willoughton in their eyes and the damaging statements he had made about him. One of them had felt it to be his duty to tell Willoughton about this; and Willoughton had been very angry. Arbuthnot, in cross-examining, elicited the fact that any damaging statement that Kelstern made about any one was considerably discounted by the fact that every one knew him to be in the highest degree cantankerous.
I noticed that during the end of the cross-examination of the shampooer and during this evidence Ruth had been fidgeting and turning to look impatiently at the entrance to the court, as if she were expecting someone. Then, just as she was summoned to the witness-box, there came in a tall, stooping, grey-headed, grey-bearded man of about sixty, carrying a brown-paper parcel. His face was familiar to me, but I could not place him. He caught her eye and nodded to her. She breathed a sharp sigh of relief, and bent over and handed a letter she had in her hand to Willoughton’s solicitor and pointed out the grey-bearded man to him. Then she went quietly to the witness-box.
Hamley read the letter and at once bent over and handed it to Hazeldean and spoke to him. I caught a note of excitement in his hushed voice. Hazeldean read the letter and appeared to grow excited too. Hamley slipped out of his seat and went to the grey-bearded man, who was still standing just inside the door of the porch, and began to talk to him earnestly.
Greatorex began to examine Ruth; and naturally I turned my attention to her. His examination was directed also to show on what bad terms Kelstern and Willoughton had been. Ruth was called on to tell the jury some of Kelstern’s actual threats. Then he questioned Ruth about her own relations with Willoughton and the breaking off of the engagement and its infuriating effect on her father. She admitted that he had been very bitter about it, and had told her that he was resolved to do his best to do Willoughton in. I thought that she went out of her way to emphasize this resolve of Kelstern’s. It seemed to me likely to prejudice the jury still more against Willoughton, making them sympathize with a father’s righteous indignation, and making yet more obvious that he was a dangerous enemy. Yet she would not admit that her father was right in believing that Willoughton had jilted her.
Hazeldean rose to cross-examine Ruth with a wholly confident air. He drew from her the fact that her father had been on excellent terms with Willoughton until the breaking off of the engagement.
Then Hazeldean asked: ‘Is it a fact that since the breaking off of your engagement the prisoner has more than once begged you to forgive him and renew it?’
‘Four times,’ said Ruth.
‘And you refused?’
‘Yes,’ said Ruth. She looked at Willoughton queerly and added: ‘He wanted a lesson.’
The judge asked: ‘Did you intend, then, to forgive him ultimately?’
Ruth hesitated; then she rather evaded a direct answer; she scowled frankly at Willoughton, and said: ‘Oh, well, there was no hurry. He would always marry me if I changed my mind and wanted to.’
‘And did your father know this?’ asked the judge.
‘No. I didn’t tell him. I was angry with Mr Willoughton,’ Ruth replied.
There was a pause. Then Hazeldean started on a fresh line.
In sympathetic accents he asked: ‘Is it a fact that your father was suffering from cancer in a painful form?’
‘It was beginning to grow very painful,’ said Ruth sadly.
‘Did he make a will and put all his affairs in order a few days before he died?’
‘Three days,’ said Ruth.
‘Did he ever express an intention of committing suicide?’
‘He said that he would stick it out for a little while and then end it all,’ said Ruth. She paused and added: ‘And that is what he did do.’
One might almost say that the court started. I think that every one in it moved a little, so that there was a kind of rustling murmur.
‘Will you tell the court your reasons for that statement?’ said Hazeldean.
Ruth seemed to pull herself together—she was looking very tired—then she began in a quiet, even voice: ‘I never believed f
or a moment that Mr Willoughton murdered my father. If my father had murdered Mr Willoughton it would have been a different matter. Of course, like everybody else, I puzzled over the weapon; what it was and where it had got to. I did not believe that it was a pointed piece of a half-inch steel rod. If anybody had come to the Turkish bath meaning to murder my father and hide the weapon, they wouldn’t have used one so big and so difficult to hide, when a hat-pin would have done just as well and could be hidden much more easily. But what puzzled me most was the tea-leaf in the wound. All the other tea-leaves that came out of the flask were lying on the floor. Inspector Brackett told me they were. And I couldn’t believe that one tea-leaf had fallen on to my father at the very place above his heart at which the point of the weapon had penetrated the skin and got driven in by it. It was too much of a coincidence for me to swallow. But I got no nearer understanding it than any one else.’
She paused to ask if she might have a glass of water, for she had been up all night and was very tired. It was brought to her.
Then she went on in the same quiet voice: ‘Of course, I remembered that dad had talked of putting an end to it; but no one with a wound like that could get up and hide the weapon. So it was impossible that he had committed suicide. Then, the night before last, I dreamt that I went into the laboratory and saw a piece of steel rod, pointed, lying on the table at which my father used to work.’
‘Dreams!’ murmured Greatorex, a trifle pettishly, as if he was not pleased with the way things were going.
‘I didn’t think much of the dream, of course,’ Ruth went on. ‘I had been puzzling about it all so hard for so long that it was only natural to dream about it. But after breakfast I had a sudden feeling that the secret was in the laboratory if I could only find it. I did not attach any importance to the feeling; but it went on growing stronger; and after lunch I went to the laboratory and began to hunt.
‘I looked through all the drawers and could find nothing. Then I went round the room looking at everything and into everything, instruments and retorts and tubes and so on. Then I went into the middle of the floor and looked slowly round the room pretty hard. Against the wall, near the door, lying ready to be taken away, was a gas cylinder. I rolled it over to see what gas had been in it and found no label on it.’
She paused to look round the court as if claiming its best attention; then she went on: ‘Now that was very queer, because every gas cylinder must have a label on it—so many gases are dangerous. I turned on the tap of the cylinder and nothing came out of it. It was quite empty. Then I went to the book in which all the things which come in are entered, and found that ten days before dad died he had had a cylinder of CO2 and seven pounds of ice. Also he had had seven pounds of ice every day till the day of his death. It was the ice and the CO2 together that gave me the idea. CO2, carbon dioxide, has a very low freezing-point—eighty degrees centigrade—and as it comes out of the cylinder and mixes with the air it turns into very fine snow; and that snow, if you compress it, makes the hardest and toughest ice possible. It flashed on me that dad could have collected this snow and forced it into a mould and made a weapon that would not only inflict that wound but would evaporate very quickly! Indeed, in that heat you’d have to see the wound inflicted to know what had done it.’
She paused again to look round the court at about as rapt a lot of faces as any narrator could desire. Then she went on: ‘I knew that that was what he had done. I knew it for certain. Carbon dioxide ice would make a hard, tough dagger, and it would evaporate quickly in the hottest room of a Turkish bath and leave no smell because it is scentless. So there wouldn’t be any weapon. And it explained the tea-leaf, too. Dad had made a carbon dioxide dagger perhaps a week before he used it, perhaps only a day. And he had put it into the thermos flask as soon as he had made it. The thermos flask keeps out the heat as well as the cold, you know. But to make sure that it couldn’t melt at all, he kept the flask in ice till he was ready to use the dagger. It’s the only way you can explain that tea-leaf. It came out of the flask sticking to the point of the dagger and was driven into the wound!’
She paused again, and one might almost say that the court heaved a deep sigh of relief.
‘But why didn’t you go straight to the police with this theory?’ asked the judge.
‘But that wouldn’t have been any good,’ she protested quickly. ‘It was no use my knowing it myself; I had to make other people believe it; I had to find evidence. I began to hunt for it. I felt in my bones that there was some. What I wanted was the mould in which dad compressed the carbon dioxide snow and made the dagger. I found it!’
She uttered the words in a tone of triumph and smiled at Willoughton; then she went on: ‘At least, I found bits of it. In the box into which we used to throw odds and ends, scraps of material, damaged instruments, and broken test-tubes, I found some pieces of vulcanite; and I saw at once that they were bits of a vulcanite container. I took some wax and rolled it into a rod about the right size, and then I pieced the container together on the outside of it—at least most of it—there are some small pieces missing. It took me nearly all night. But I found the most important bit—the pointed end!’
She dipped her hand into her handbag and drew out a black object about nine inches long and three-quarters of an inch thick, and held it up for every one to see.
Someone, without thinking, began to clap; and there came a storm of applause that drowned the voice of the clerk calling for order.
When the applause died down, Hazeldean, who never misses the right moment, said: ‘I have no more questions to ask the witness, my lord,’ and sat down.
That action seemed to clinch it in my eyes, and I have no doubt it clinched it in the eyes of the jury.
The judge leant forward and said to Ruth in a rather shocked voice: ‘Do you expect the jury to believe that a well-known man like your father died in the act of deliberately setting a trap to hang the prisoner?’
Ruth looked at him, shrugged her shoulders, and said, with a calm acceptance of the facts of human nature one would expect to find only in a much older woman: ‘Oh, well, daddy was like that. And he certainly believed he had very good reasons for killing Mr Willoughton.’
There was that in her tone and manner which made it absolutely certain that Kelstern was not only like that, but that he had acted according to his nature.
Greatorex did not re-examine Ruth; he conferred with Hazeldean. Then Hazeldean rose to open the case for the defence. He said that he would not waste the time of the court, and that, in view of the fact that Miss Kelstern had solved the problem of her father’s death, he would only call one witness, Professor Mozley.
The grey-headed, grey-bearded, stooping man, who had come to the court so late, went into the witness-box. Of course his face had been familiar to me; I had seen his portrait in the newspapers a dozen times. He still carried the brown-paper parcel.
In answer to Hazeldean’s questions he stated that it was possible, not even difficult, to make a weapon of carbon dioxide hard enough and tough enough and sharp enough to inflict such a wound as that which had caused Kelstern’s death. The method of making it was to fold a piece of chamois leather into a bag, hold that bag with the left hand, protected by a glove, over the nozzle of a cylinder containing liquid carbon dioxide, and open the valve with the right hand. Carbon dioxide evaporates so quickly that its freezing-point, eighty degrees centigrade, is soon reached; and it solidifies in the chamois-leather bag as a deposit of carbon dioxide snow. Then turn off the gas, spoon that snow into a vulcanite container of the required thickness, and ram it down with a vulcanite plunger into a rod of the required hardness. He added that it was advisable to pack the container in ice while filling it and ramming down the snow. Then put the rod into a thermos flask; and keep it till it is needed.
‘And you have made such a rod?’ said Hazeldean.
‘Yes,’ said the professor, cutting the string of the
brown-paper parcel. ‘When Miss Kelstern hauled me out of bed at half-past seven this morning to tell me her discoveries, I perceived at once that she had found the solution of the problem of her father’s death, which had puzzled me considerably. I had breakfast quickly and got to work to make such a weapon myself for the satisfaction of the court. Here it is.’
He drew a thermos flask from the brown paper, unscrewed the top of it, and inverted it. There dropped into his gloved hand a white rod, with a faint sparkle to it, about eight inches long. He held it out for the jury to see, and said:
‘This carbon dioxide ice is the hardest and toughest ice we know of; and I have no doubt that Mr Kelstern killed himself with a similar rod. The difference between the rod he used and this is that his rod was pointed. I had no pointed vulcanite container; but the container that Miss Kelstern pieced together is pointed. Doubtless Mr Kelstern had it specially made, probably by Messrs. Hawkins and Spender.’
He dropped the rod back into the thermos flask and screwed on the top.
Hazeldean sat down, Greatorex rose.
‘With regard to the point of the rod, Professor Mozley, would it remain sharp long enough to pierce the skin in that heat?’ he asked.
‘In my opinion it would,’ said the professor. ‘I have been considering that point, and bearing in mind the facts that Mr Kelstern would from his avocation be very deft with his hands, and being a scientific man would know exactly what to do, he would have the rod out of the flask and the point in position in very little more than a second—perhaps less. He would, I think, hold it in his left hand and drive it home by striking the butt of it hard with his right. The whole thing would not take him two seconds. Besides, if the point of the weapon had melted the tea-leaf would have fallen off it.’
Capital Crimes: London Mysteries Page 20