“And why not?” inquired his companion.
“Because that was not the first conversation we overheard.”
Walter Weir clutched his knees with his long bony hands, and seemed to stiffen still more as if in a trance, but he went on talking steadily.
“I have told you the moral and the burden of all these things; that it is one thing to hear what men say and another to hear what they mean. And it was at the very first talk that we heard all the words and missed all the meaning. We did not overhear that first talk slinking about in moonlit gardens and whispering galleries. We overheard that first talk sitting openly at our regular desks in broad daylight, in a bright and businesslike office. But we no more made sense of that talk than if it had been half a whisper, heard in a black forest or a cave.”
He sprang to his feet as if a stiff spring were released and began striding up and down, with what was for him an unnatural animation.
“That was the talk we really misunderstood,” he cried. “That was the conversation that we heard word for word, and yet missed entirely! Fools that we were! Deaf and dumb and imbecile, sitting there like dummies and being stuffed with a stage play! We were actually allowed to be eavesdroppers, tolerated, ticketed, given special permits to be eavesdroppers; and still we could not eavesdrop! I never even guessed till ten minutes ago the meaning of that conversation in the office. That terrible conversation! That terrible meaning! Hate and hateful fear and shameless wickedness and mortal peril—death and hell wrestled naked before our eyes in that office, and we never saw them. A man accused another man of murder across a table, and we never heard it.”
“Oh,” gasped Brandon at last, “you mean that the Master accused the brother of murder?”
“No!” retorted Weir, in a voice like a volley, “I mean that the brother accused the Master of murder.”
“The Master!”
“Yes,” answered Weir, and his high voice fell suddenly, “and the accusation was true. The man who murdered old Morse was our employer, Dr. Adrian Hyde.”
“What can it all mean?” asked Brandon, and thrust his hand through his thick brown hair.
“That was our mistake at the beginning,” went on the other calmly, “that we did not think what it could all mean. Why was the brother so careful to say the reproduction of the footprint was a proof and not the original? Why did Dr. Hyde say the outline of the fugitive would be difficult to prove? Why did he tell us, with that sardonic grin, that the brother having robbed a bank was the key of the riddle? Because the whole of that consultation of the client and the specialist was a fiction for our benefit. The whole course of events was determined by that first thing that happened; that the young and innocent detectives were allowed to remain in the room. Didn’t you think yourself the interview was a little too like that at the beginning of every damned detective story? Go over it speech by speech, and you will see that every speech was a thrust or parry under a cloak. That blackmailing blackguard Alfred hunted out Doctor Hyde simply to accuse and squeeze him. Seeing us there, he said, ‘This is confidential,’ meaning, ‘You don’t want to be accused before them.’ Dr. Hyde answered, ‘They’re my favourite pupils,’ meaning, ‘I’m less likely to be blackmailed before them; they shall stay.’ Alfred answered, ‘Well, I can state my business, if not quite so personally,’ meaning, ‘I can accuse you so that you understand, if they don’t.’ And he did. He presented his proofs like pistols across the table; things that sounded rather thin, but, in Hyde’s case, happened to be pretty thick. His boots, for instance, happened to be very thick. His huge footprint would be unique enough to be a clue. So would the cigar-end; for very few people can afford to smoke his cigars. Of course, that’s what got him tangled up with the moneylender—extravagance. You see how much money you get through if you smoke those cigars all day and never drink anything but the best vintage champagne. And though a black silhouette against the moon sounds as vague as moonshine, Hyde’s huge figure and hunched shoulders would be rather marked. Well, you know how the blackmailed man hit back: ‘I perceive by your left eyebrow that you are a deserter; I deduce from the pimple on your nose that you were once in gaol,’ meaning, ‘I know you, and you’re as much a crook as I am; expose me and I’ll expose you.’ Then he said he had deduced in the Sherlock Holmes manner that Alfred had robbed a bank, and that was where he went too far. He presumed on the incredible credulity, which is the mark of the modern mind when anyone has uttered the magic word ‘science.’ He presumed on the priestcraft of our time; but he presumed the least little bit too much, so far as I was concerned. It was then I first began to doubt. A man might possibly deduce by scientific detection that another man had been in a certain navy or prison, but by no possibility could he deduce from a man’s appearance that what he had once robbed was a bank. It was simply impossible. Dr. Hyde knew it was his biggest bluff; that was why he told you in mockery, that it was the key to the riddle. It was; and I managed to get hold of the key.”
He chuckled in a hollow fashion as he laid down his pipe. “That jibe at his own bluff was like him; he really is a remarkable man or a remarkable devil. He has a sort of horrible sense of humour. Do you know, I’ve got a notion that sounds rather a nightmare, about what happened on that great slope of steps that night. I believe Hyde jeered at the journalistic catchword, ‘Whose Was the Hand?’ partly because he, himself, had managed it without hands. I believe he managed to commit a murder entirely with his feet. I believe he tripped up the poor old usurer and stamped on him on the stone steps with those monstrous boots. An idyllic moonlight scene, isn’t it? But there’s something that seems to make it worse. I think he had the habit anyhow, partly to avoid leaving his fingerprints, which may be known to the police. Anyhow, I believe he did the whole murder with his hands in his trouser-pockets.”
Brandon shuddered suddenly; then collected himself and said, rather weakly:
“Then you don’t think the science of observation—”
“Science of observation be damned!” cried Weir. “Do you still think private detectives get to know about criminals by smelling their hair-oil, or counting their buttons? They do it, a whole gang of them do it just as Hyde did. They get to know about criminals by being half criminals themselves, by being of the same rotten world, by belonging to it and by betraying it, by setting a thief to catch a thief, and proving there is no honour among thieves. I don’t say there are no honest private detectives, but if there are, you don’t get into their service as easily as you and I got into the office of the distinguished Dr. Adrian Hyde. You ask what all this means, and I tell you one thing it means. It means that you and I are going to sweep crossings or scrub out drains. I feel as if I should like a clean job.”
The Secret of
Dunstan’s Tower
Ernest Bramah
Ernest Brammah Smith (1868–1942) wrote under the pseudonym Ernest Bramah. At the start of the twentieth century, he created Kai Lung, a Chinese story-teller, who became highly popular with readers. It is his blind detective Max Carrados, however, whose appeal has proved more enduring. The first of three successful collections of stories about Carrados appeared in 1914. Like A. J. Raffles, Carrados made his final appearance in an unsatisfactory novel; Bramah, like Conan Doyle and Hornung, was a writer whose skills were better suited to the short form.
Carrados is assisted in this story by his butler, Parkinson, but his customary “Watson” is Louis Carlyle, formerly a lawyer and now a private enquiry agent. In his preface to The Eyes of Max Carrados, in which this story first appeared in book form, Bramah explained the concept of the character: “so far from [blindness] crippling his interests in life or his energies, it has merely impelled him to develop those senses which in most us lie half dormant…while he may be at a disadvantage when you are at an advantage, he is at an advantage when you are at a disadvantage.”
***
It was a peculiarity of Mr Carrados that he could drop t
he most absorbing occupation of his daily life at a moment’s notice if need be, apply himself exclusively to the solution of some criminological problem, possibly a matter of several days, and at the end of the time return and take up the thread of his private business exactly where he had left it.
On the morning of the 3rd of September he was dictating to his secretary a monograph to which he had given the attractive title, “The Portrait of Alexander the Great, as Jupiter Ammon, on an unedited octadrachm of Macedonia,” when a telegram was brought in. Greatorex, the secretary, dealt with such communications as a matter of course, and, taking the envelope from Parkinson’s salver, he cut it open in the pause between a couple of sentences.
“This is a private matter of yours, sir,” he remarked, after glancing at the message. “Handed in at Netherhempsfield, 10.48 a.m. Repeated. One step higher. Quite baffled. Tulloch.”
“Oh yes; that’s all right,” said Carrados. “No reply, Parkinson. Have you got down ‘the Roman supremacy’?”
“‘…the type of workmanship that still enshrined the memory of Spartan influence down to the era of Roman supremacy,’” read the secretary.
“That will do. How are the trains for Netherhempsfield?”
Greatorex put down the notebook and took up an “ABC.”
“Waterloo departure 11—” He cocked an eye towards the desk clock. “Oh, that’s no good. 12.17, 2.11, 5.9, 7.25.”
“The 5.9 should do,” interposed Carrados. “Arrival?”
“6.48.”
“Now what has the gazetteer to say about the place?”
The yellow railway guide gave place to a weightier volume, and the secretary read out the following details:
“Netherhempsfield, parish and village, pop. 732, South Downshire. 2728 acres land and 27 water; soil rich loam, occupied as arable, pasture, orchard and woodland; subsoil various. The church of St Dunstan (restored 1740) is Saxon and Early English. It possesses an oak roof with curious grotesque bosses, and contains brasses and other memorials (earliest 13th century) of the Aynosforde family. In the ‘Swinefield,’ 1 1/2 miles south-west of the village, are 15 large stones, known locally as the Judge and Jury, which constitute the remains of a Druidical circle and temple. Dunstan’s Tower, a moated residence built in the baronial style, and probably dating from the 14th century, is the seat of the Aynosfordes.”
“I can give three days easily,” mused Carrados. “Yes, I’ll go down by the 5.9.”
“Do I accompany you, sir?” inquired Greatorex.
“Not this time, I think. Have three days off yourself. Just pick up the correspondence and take things easy. Send on anything to me, care of Dr Tulloch. If I don’t write, expect me back on Friday.”
“Very well, Mr Carrados. What books shall I put out for Parkinson to pack?”
“Say…Gessner’s Thesaurus and—yes, you may as well add Hilarion’s Celtic Mythology.”
Six hours later Carrados was on his way to Netherhempsfield. In his pocket was the following letter, which may be taken as offering the only explanation why he should suddenly decide to visit a place of which he had never even heard until that morning:—
“Dear Mr Carrados (‘old Wynn,’ it used to be),—Do you remember a fellow at St Michael’s who used to own insects and the name of Tulloch—‘Earwigs,’ they called him? Well, you will find it at the end of this epistle, if you have the patience to get there. I ran across Jarvis about six months ago on Euston platform—you’ll recall him by his red hair and great feet—and we had a rapid and comprehensive pow-wow. He told me who you were, having heard of you from Lessing, who seems to be editing a high-class review. He always was a trifle eccentric, Lessing.
“As for yours t., well, at the moment I’m local demon in a G-f-s little place that you’d hardly find on anything less than a 4-inch ordnance. But I won’t altogether say it mightn’t be worse, for there’s trout in the stream, and after half-a-decade of Cinder Moor, in the Black Country, a great and holy peace broods on the smiling land.
“But you will guess that I wouldn’t be taking up the time of a busy man of importance unless I had something to say, and you’d be right. It may interest you, or it may not, but here it is.
“Living about two miles out of the village, at a sort of mediaeval stronghold known as Dunstan’s Tower, there is an ancient county family called Aynosforde. And, for the matter of that, they are about all there is here, for the whole place seems to belong to them, and their authority runs from the power to charge you two-pence if you sell a pig between Friday night and Monday morning to the right to demand an exchange of scabbards with the reigning sovereign whenever he comes within seven bowshot flights of the highest battlement of Dunstan’s Tower. (I don’t gather that any reigning sovereign ever has come, but that isn’t the Aynosfordes’ fault.) But, levity apart, these Aynosfordes, without being particularly rich, or having any title, are accorded an extraordinary position. I am told that scarcely a living duchess could hold out against the moral influence old dame Aynosforde could bring to bear on social matters, and yet she scarcely ever goes beyond Netherhempsfield now.
“My connection with these high-and-mighties ought to be purely professional, and so, in a manner, it is, but on the top of it I find myself drawn into a full-blooded, old haunted house mystery that takes me clean out of my depth.
“Darrish, the man whose place I’m taking for three months, had a sort of arrangement that once a week he should go up to the Tower and amuse old Mrs Aynosforde for a couple of hours under the pretence of feeling her pulse. I found that I was let in for continuing this. Fortunately the old dame was quite amiable at close quarters. I have no social qualifications whatever, and we got on very well together on those terms. I have heard that she considers me ‘thoroughly responsible.’
“For five or six weeks everything went on swimmingly. I had just enough to do to keep me from doing nothing; people have a delightful habit of not being taken ill in the night, and there is a comfortable cob to trot round on.
“Tuesday is my Dunstan’s Tower day. Last Tuesday I went as usual. I recall now that the servants about the place seemed rather wild and the old lady did not keep me quite as long as usual, but these things were not sufficiently noticeable to make any impression on me at the time. On Friday a groom rode over with a note from Swarbrick, the butler. Would I go up that afternoon and see Mrs Aynosforde? He had taken the liberty of asking me on his own responsibility as he thought that she ought to be seen. Deuced queer it struck me, but of course I went.
“Swarbrick was evidently on the look-out. He is a regular family retainer, taciturn and morose rather than bland. I saw at once that the old fellow had something on his mind, and I told him that I should like a word with him. We went into the morning-room.
“‘Now, Swarbrick,’ I said, ‘you sent for me. What is the matter with your mistress since Tuesday?’
“He looked at me dourly, as though he was still in two minds about opening his mouth. Then he said slowly:
“‘It isn’t since Tuesday, sir. It was on that morning.’
“‘What was?’ I asked.
“‘The beginning of it, Dr Tulloch. Mrs Aynosforde slipped at the foot of the stairs on coming down to breakfast.’
“‘She did?’ I said. ‘Well, it couldn’t have been very serious at the time. She never mentioned it to me.’
“‘No, sir,’ the old monument assented, with an appalling surface of sublime pride, ‘she would not.’
“‘Why wouldn’t she if she was hurt?’ I demanded. ‘People do mention these things to their medical men, in strict confidence.’
“‘The circumstances are unusual, sir,’ he replied, without a ruffle of his imperturbable respect. ‘Mrs Aynosforde was not hurt, sir. She did not actually fall, but she slipped—on a pool of blood.’
“‘That’s unpleasant,’ I admitted, looking at him sharply, for an owl could hav
e seen that there was something behind all this. ‘How did it come there? Whose was it?’
“‘Sir Philip Bellmont’s, sir.’
“I did not know the name. ‘Is he a visitor here?’ I asked.
“‘Not at present, sir. He stayed with us in 1662. He died here, sir, under rather unpleasant circumstances.’
“There you have it, Wynn. That is the keystone of the whole business. But if I keep to my conversation with the still reluctant Swarbrick I shall run out of foolscap and into midnight. Briefly, then, the ‘unpleasant circumstances’ were as follows:—Just about two and a half centuries ago, when Charles II. was back, and things in England were rather gay, a certain Sir Philip Bellmont was a guest at Dunstan’s Tower. There were dice, and there was a lady—probably a dozen, but the particular one was the Aynosforde’s young wife. One night there was a flare-up. Bellmont was run through with a rapier, and an ugly doubt turned on whether the point came out under the shoulder-blade, or went in there. Dripping on to every stair, the unfortunate man was carried up to his room. He died within a few hours, convinced, from the circumstances, of treachery all round, and with his last breath he left an anathema on every male and female Aynosforde as the day of their death approached. There are fourteen steps in the flight that Bellmont was carried up, and when the pool appears in the hall some Aynosforde has just two weeks to live. Each succeeding morning the stain may be found one stair higher. When it reaches the top there is a death in the family.
“This was the gist of the story. As far as you and I are concerned, it is, of course, merely a matter as to what form our scepticism takes, but my attitude is complicated by the fact that my nominal patient has become a real one. She is seventy-two and built to be a nonagenarian, but she has gone to bed with the intention of dying on Tuesday week. And I firmly believe she will.
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