The Rasp

by Philip MacDonald

As he entered the hall from the passage, a woman rushed at him. She was tall, and suspiciously beautiful. She drooped and made eyes. She was shy and daring and coy.

  ‘Oh!’ she gasped. ‘Is it Colonel Gethryn? Is it? Oh, you must be? Oh, colonel, how thrilling to meet you! How too thrilling!’

  Mrs Roland Mainwaring pleased Anthony not at all. It is to be deplored that he was at no pains to conceal his distaste.

  ‘Mrs Mainwaring?’ he said. ‘Madam, the thrill is yours.’

  She stood blocking his path. Perforce he stood still. ‘Oh, colonel, do tell me you don’t think that sweet boy—oh! the beastly police—it’s all too, too horrible and awful!’

  Anthony laughed. The thought of Deacon as a ‘sweet boy’ amused him. The lady regarded his mirth with suspicion.

  Anthony became ponderously official. ‘Your questions, madam, are embarrassing. But my opinions are—my opinions; and I keep them’—he tapped his forehead solemnly—‘here.’

  Awe-stricken eyes were rolled at him. ‘Oh, colonel,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, colonel! How won-derful!’ Then, coyly: ‘How lucky for little me that I’m a poor, weak woman!’

  ‘I have always,’ said Anthony gravely, ‘believed in equal rights for women. They occupy an equal footing with men in my—opinions.’ He bowed and brushed past her, crossing the hall.

  CHAPTER XI

  THE BOW AND ARROW

  WITHOUT a glance behind him at the beautiful lady, Anthony made for the study, entered it, and closed the door behind him.

  The great room bore an aspect widely different from that of his first visit. Down the centre ran the long trestle table of the coroner’s court. Two smaller ones were ranged along the walls. The far end of the room was blocked with rows of chairs.

  Anthony realised, with something of surprise, what a vast room it was. Then he banished from his mind everything save his immediate purpose, and turned to the little rosewood table which stood between the door and the grandfather clock.

  He bent to see more clearly the scar on the table-top, the scar which he had noticed on his second visit to the room and which had, in some vague way he could not define, been persistently worrying him during the day. It was an even more perfect impression of the wood-rasp than he had remembered it to be, an orderly series of indentations which made a mark two inches wide and nearly a foot in length.

  That something kept jogging in his mind; something about the mark that was indefinably wrong because the mark itself was so undoubtedly right.

  Beside him the door opened. He straightened his back and turned to see Sir Arthur.

  ‘Hallo, Gethryn. Can I come in? Thought you might be in here. Turn me out if you’d rather be alone.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Anthony. ‘Come in. I’m here because I wanted to look at something and because it was the best way of escape. What sweetness! I feel quite sticky, I do!’

  Sir Arthur smiled. ‘Dodo Mainwaring, eh? I caught a glimpse of her. What d’you think?’

  Anthony raised one eyebrow.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Sir Arthur. ‘If that woman doesn’t go soon I won’t wait for Laura, I’ll pack her off myself.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Anthony said vaguely, looking down at the table. ‘I say, have you seen the Bow and Arrow?’

  ‘Eh? What?’

  ‘The wood-rasp.’

  Sir Arthur shivered. ‘Oh, yes. Yes, I have. It was an exhibit at the inquest.’

  ‘What was the size of it?’

  ‘Well, I believe it’s about the biggest made. Usual short, thick handle with a blade of about a foot long and perhaps two inches wide.’

  Anthony pointed to the table. ‘Did it make this mark?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course. Why, all that came out at the inquest. Weren’t—’

  ‘I’ve got it!’ cried Anthony, and slapped his thigh.

  ‘What’s that? What’s that? Have you thought—found something?’

  ‘I have and I have. Now, another thing: was the handle of the thing old and battered and worn at the edges and filthy and split?’

  Sir Arthur smiled. ‘No; I’m afraid you’re wrong there, Gethryn. It was almost brand-new.’

  ‘Exactly!’ said Anthony. ‘Exactly. All polished and convenient. Oh, ours is a nice case, ours is!’

  ‘My dear boy, I’m afraid you go too fast for me.’ Sir Arthur was puzzled.

  ‘That’s nothing,’ Anthony said. ‘I go a damn sight too fast for myself sometimes.’

  ‘But what are you driving at? What’s all this about the wood-rasp?’

  ‘I won’t give you a direct answer—it’s against the rules of the Detectives’ Union? but I invite you to bring your intellect to bear on the position of this scar here. You’ll see that it’s roughly twelve inches by two and lies ten inches from all four edges of the table—right in the middle, in fact. Then think of the nice new handle on the wood-rasp.’ Anthony appeared well-pleased. ‘“O frabjous day, Calloo callay!” Rappings from Doyle!’

  Sir Arthur shook his head. ‘I suppose you’re not mad?’ he said, smiling.

  ‘“No, not mad, said the monkey”.’

  There fell a long silence, broken at last by the elder man.

  ‘God!’ he cried in a whisper. ‘Let’s get out of this room. Gethryn, it’s horrible! Horrible! Where poor old John was killed—and here we are cracking jokes and laughing!’ He took Anthony by the arm and pulled him to the door.

  They went into the garden through the verandah. By the windows of the study Anthony stopped and stood staring at the creeper-covered wall; staring as he had stared on the afternoon before. Sir Arthur stood at his elbow.

  ‘Splendid sight, that creeper,’ said Anthony. ‘Ampelopsis Veitchii, isn’t it?’

  ‘So you’re a botanist? It may be what you say. I’m afraid it’s just creeper to me.’

  Anthony, turning, saw Boyd walking towards them, and waved a hand.

  ‘Damn!’ Sir Arthur growled. ‘The Scotland Yard man. He arrested the boy. Officious fool!’

  ‘Oh, Boyd’s a good chap. I like Boyd. He’s done his best. On the evidence he couldn’t do anything but take Deacon.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Sir Arthur impatiently. ‘But all the same, he—’ He broke off, turning to go.

  Boyd came up to them. ‘Good evening, gentlemen.’

  ‘Evening, Boyd,’ said Anthony.

  Suddenly, ‘By Gad!’ Sir Arthur cried, and turned a bewildered face upon them. ‘I didn’t think of that before!’

  ‘Think of what, sir?’ asked Boyd.

  ‘Why, something that may change everything! Look here, that’s the window of my sitting-room up there—the one over the window of the study which you say the murderer must have got in by!’

  Anthony was silent. Boyd said stolidly: ‘Well, sir?’

  ‘But don’t you see, man? Don’t you see, Gethryn? I was sitting up in my room, by that window, all the time. I should have been bound to hear something. Bound to!’

  ‘But you didn’t, sir,’ said Boyd.

  ‘Ach!’ Sir Arthur turned on his heel and flung away from them and into the house.

  ‘He’s very upset because he thinks you’ve taken the wrong man, Boyd,’ said Anthony.

  ‘I know, sir. Do you?’

  Anthony laughed. ‘I do, I do. By the way, can I see him?’

  ‘You can, sir. He asked for you. That’s really what I came up for. That and the walk.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll take you down in the car. How long before Deacon’s moved to the county jail?’

  ‘He’ll be going tomorrow sometime, sir. Afternoon or evening.’

  They walked in silence to the car. Anthony drove out of the gates and down the hill very slowly. Boyd sighed relief: he knew the colonel’s driving of old.

  ‘I’m afraid, sir,’ he said at last, ‘that this case has been a disappointment to you, so to speak.’

  Anthony looked round at him. ‘Why so fast, Boyd? Why so fast?’ After a moment he added: ‘Pumps not working too well today, are the
y?’

  The detective gave a rumbling chuckle. ‘I suppose it was a bit obvious, sir,’ he said. ‘But you’re puzzling me, that you are.’

  ‘What am I that I should flummox one of the Big Four? Oh, Fame! Oh, Glory! I stand within your gates.’

  Boyd reddened. ‘Oh, don’t josh, sir. What I mean is, here are we with as clear a case as ever there was, and yet there are you, a gentleman who’s no amatewer, still searching around and—and trying to make another criminal, so to speak.’

  ‘It’s not a bit of good trying to get me to explain what I’m doing, Boyd, because I don’t know myself. I’m groping—and it’s devilish dark. There is a little light, but I don’t know where it’s coming from—yet. But I will.’ He fell silent; then added in a different tone: ‘Look here: we’ll take it that I’m mad and that the law is sane. But will you help me in my madness? Just one or two little things?’

  ‘As far as I can, sir,’ Boyd said solemnly, ‘of course I will.’

  ‘You’re a good fellow, Boyd,’ said Anthony warmly, ‘and you can start now.’ He stopped the car and turned in his seat. ‘Where’s the Bow—I mean the wood-rasp?’

  ‘At present it’s at the station. Where we’re going. Tomorrow it’ll be taken up to the Yard.’

  ‘Can I see it this evening?’

  ‘You can, sir, seeing that you’re an old friend, if I may say so.’

  ‘Excellent man!’

  ‘Look, here, sir.’ Boyd took a wallet from his pocket; from the wallet some photographs. ‘You might care to see these. Enlargements of the fingerprints.’

  Anthony took the six pieces of thin pasteboard and bent eagerly to examine them. They had been taken, these photographs, from three points of view. They showed that the handle of the rasp had been marked by a thumb and two fingers—all pointing downwards towards the blade.

  ‘And these were the only marks?’ Anthony said.

  ‘Enough, aren’t they, sir?’

  ‘Yes,’ murmured Anthony. ‘Oh, yes. What lovely little marks! How kind of Archibald!’

  ‘What’s that, sir?’

  ‘I was remarking, Boyd, on the kindly forethought which Mr Deacon showed for Scotland Yard. He couldn’t bear to think of you wasting your time detecting all the wrong people, so he left his card for you.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at at all, sir.’ Boyd shook his head sadly.

  Anthony handed back the photographs and started the car. In less than a minute they had finished the descent and turned the corner into the village of Marling. Boyd caught his breath and clung to his seat. The High Street streamed by them. At its far end Anthony pulled up, outside the little police station. Marling was proud of its police station, an offensive affair of pinkish brick. To Anthony, coming upon it in the midst of the little leaning houses, the low-browed shops and thatched cottages, it was like finding a comic post-card of the mother-in-law school in an exhibition of pleasing miniatures.

  He shivered, and dragged Boyd inside. Here he was received by the local inspector. At a word from Boyd the inspector produced keys, opened locks and at last laid on the table the wood-rasp.

  It was, as Sir Arthur had said, the biggest of its kind—a foot-long bar of serrated iron, looking like a file whose roughnesses have been ten times magnified. To the points of these roughnesses clung little scraps of stained and withered flesh, while in the corresponding hollows were dark encrustations of dried blood. The handle was new, of some light-coloured wood, and was perhaps four inches long and three and a half in circumference.

  ‘Now that’s not at all pretty,’ said Anthony, with a grimace. ‘Can I pick it up? Or would that spoil the marks?’

  Boyd said: ‘Oh, that’s all right, sir. The coroner’s jury have passed it about. And we’ve got the official record and the photos.’

  Anthony took it from the table; peered at it; shook it; weighed it in his hand.

  Boyd pointed to the blade. ‘Not much doubt that’s what did the trick, is there, C—Mr Gethryn?’

  ‘Never a doubt,’ said Anthony, and shook the thing with vigour.

  There was a sudden clatter. The blade had flown off, struck the table, and fallen to the floor.

  ‘Bit loose,’ said Anthony, looking at the handle in his fingers.

  He stooped and picked up the blade, holding it gingerly.

  ‘Those blows that broke in the deceased’s skull,’ said Boyd, ‘must’ve been hard enough to loosen anything, so to speak.’

  ‘Possibly.’ Anthony’s tone was not one of conviction. ‘Aha! Now what are you doing here, little friends?’ He picked, from a notch in the thin iron tongue upon which the handle had been fitted, two threads of white linen. ‘And you, too, what are you?’ He stooped and picked up from the floor a small wedge of darkish wood. ‘There should be another of you somewhere,’ he murmured, and peered into, the handle. He shook it, and there dropped out of the hollow where the tongue of the blade had been another slip of wood, identical with the first.

  He turned to the two men watching him. ‘Boyd, I give these, the threads and the woods, into your official keeping. You and the inspector saw where they came from.’ He took an envelope from his pocket, slipped his discoveries into it and laid it upon the table beside the dismembered rasp.

  The inspector looked at the man from Scotland Yard, and scratched his head.

  ‘That’s all, I think,’ Anthony said. ‘Can I see the prisoner now?’

  CHAPTER XII

  EXHIBITS

  THE door of the cell clanged to behind Boyd. From a chair, Deacon unfolded his bulk to greet Anthony. They shook hands.

  ‘Wasn’t long before I yelled for you,’ the criminal grinned. ‘Take the chair. I’ll squat on the gent’s bedding.’

  Anthony sat, running his eye over the cell. There, was the chair he sat on, the truckle bed, a tinware washstand, a shelf, a dressing-case of Deacon’s, and, in one corner, a large brown-paper parcel.

  ‘Pretty snug, brother, isn’t it?’ Deacon smiled. ‘I languish in comfort. ’D’ve been pretty glad of this at times during the recent fracas in France. I say, wouldn’t you like to write the story of my life? Some Criminals I Have Known: Number One—The Abbotshall Murderer. You know the sort of thing.’

  Anthony laughed. ‘Well, you take it easily enough. I’m afraid I should alternate fury and depression.’

  For a moment Deacon’s blue eyes met his; and in them Anthony saw a kind of despairing horror. But only for the half of a second. And then the old laughing look was in them again. More than ever, Anthony felt admiration and a desperate desire to get this large man out of his small cell; to make him free again—as free as the hot, gleaming streak of the setting sun which pierced the little barred window and painted a broad line of gold upon the drab floor. But to get him out one must work.

  ‘What about those fingerprints?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘You have me,’ said Deacon, ‘on the hip. That’s the most amazing bit of jiggery pokery about all this hocus pocus. What about ’em to you?’

  ‘They certainly savour,’ Anthony said, ‘of hanky panky. In fact, since I know they’re yours and that you didn’t kill Hoode, I know they must be. Now, have you seen that wood-rasp?’

  ‘Yes. At the inquest.’

  ‘Never before?’

  ‘Not as I knows on, guv’nor. In fact, I’d almost swear to “never”. But then I’m the most amazing ass about tools. A fret-saw or a pile-driver, they’re all one to me.’

  ‘Did you notice the handle?’ Anthony asked.

  ‘With interest; because they said it had my paw-marks on it.’

  ‘Ever seen that before? By itself, I mean.’

  Deacon shook his head, ‘Never.’ He fell silent, then said: ‘I suppose those prints couldn’t be anyone else’s, could they?’

  ‘I’m afraid they couldn’t,’ said Anthony. ‘You see, it’s as near proved as a thing like that can be that no two men have the same markings on the fingers. They compared those on the wood with tho
se on the bit of paper Boyd got you to hold, and their experts don’t make mistakes. By the way, I suppose you realised at the inquest how you’d been caught?’

  Deacon smiled. ‘Not at the inquest, brother, but at the time. I’ve read too many spot-the-murderer serials in my time not to know what a sleuth’s up to when he hands me a bit of paper and asks me whether I ever saw it before. But I didn’t mind at the time, you see, not knowing about that blasted file thing. I say, Gethryn, are we mad? Or is this all a bloody nightmare? I tell you, I didn’t kill the boss, and yet the thing he’s killed with is all over the marks of my fingers! And as far as I know I never even saw the gadget before! It doesn’t work out, does it?’

  ‘It’s got to,’ Anthony said. ‘I’ll damned well make it. Now, what d’you know about the incomparable Vanda?’

  Deacon whistled. ‘How did you get hold of that?’ he asked wonderingly.

  ‘You know my methods, my dear Deacon. But what d’you know about Vanda? Beyond the fact that she’s the most wonderful dancer of all time.’

  ‘I don’t really know anything; but I’ve a shrewd little suspish that she was the boss’s mistress.’

  ‘She was. But as you didn’t actually know anything, I gather you can’t help me further there.’

  ‘’Fraid not. For one thing my suspicion was founded on something that happened by accident, and for another I’ve not the foggiest idea of what you’re driving at.’

  ‘They will all say that!’ Anthony sighed. ‘And it’s just what I want someone to tell me. Never mind, we’ll get on with the exhibits. Have you ever seen this?’ He took from a swollen hip pocket a small paper package, unfolded it, and handed the contents to Deacon.

  They were a coil of filthy, black-smeared silk cord. Curiously, the prisoner shook it out, letting one end fall to the floor. He saw now that it was knotted at regular intervals along its length, which was a full sixteen feet.

  ‘Never saw it in my natural.’ He looked up at Anthony. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Obviously a length of silk cord,’ Anthony said, ‘with, as you would probably say, knobs on.’

  ‘I mean, where did you find it? What bearing’s it got?’