John Hoode Arthur Digby-Coates
Captain of Upchester (last three years at school). Senior Monitor (same three years).
Won John Halkett scholarship to Magdalen. Second on list.
Rowed 2 IN OXFORD BOAT (THIRD YEAR). Rowed 6 IN TRIALS (THIRD YEAR).
Gaisford (fourth year). Newdigate (fourth year).
Minor office (Admiralty) after three years in Parliament. Still merely M.P. after six months longer in Parliament.
President of Board of Trade. Still M.P. (He was, I believe, offered at this time a minor Parliamentary Secretaryship; but refused).
K.C.M.G., C.V.O., etc. K.B.E.
Minister of Imperial Finance (from the date of the forming of the Ministry in 1919). Almost at same time accepted Parliamentary Secretaryship to Board of Conciliation.
‘One could go on for pages, for ever telling this story of races won by a stride—Hoode the winner, Digby-Coates his follower-up—and that stride getting longer and longer as time went on.
‘But at last came the race for the Woman—the race whose loss snapped the last cord of sanity in the mind of the loser.
‘I discovered the existence of the Woman in this way: I searched Hoode’s desk in suspicion of a hidden drawer. I found one and in it a diary (of no use save to corroborate the fact of some of those races), and a bunch of newspaper-cuttings. But I knew—how is no matter—that something was missing from that drawer.
‘What that something was I did not know. I only knew that it was most probably of importance. So I searched the house—and found it. A packet of letters from the Woman. As I was by then up to the neck in the unspeakably nasty work of the Private Inquiry Agent, I read them. Who the woman is will not be set down here. It is my hope that not even in court shall I have to give her name.
‘I sought her and talked with her. Put briefly and brutally her replies were that I was correct in assuming that she had been Hoode’s mistress, and that I was also right (this was a shot in black dark) in assuming that she knew Sir Arthur Digby-Coates. She did not, it seemed, have any affection for the gentleman. She made it plain to me, under some pressure, that Sir Arthur had wished her to stand in relation to him that she subsequently did to John Hoode. But (a shrug of distaste) Sir Arthur had been sent packing—and quickly.
‘Is not that enough, when added to those other and perpetual defeats of the past five-and-thirty years, to show the reason for hatred in the mind of the egoist? Consider the history of the matter. First, boyish jealousy and a determination to win next time; then the gradual process of realisation that strive as he would he would never reach a common goal before his rival; then the slow at first but increasingly fast transition from healthy jealousy to dislike, from dislike to utter hatred. Then, at last, with the crowning loss of the Woman, the monomania—for this is what the hatred is grown—takes a firmer hold and becomes a fire so fierce that only the complete elimination of the hated man will quench it.
‘So much for reasons why Digby-Coates should have hated Hoode. Now for corroboration that such hatred actually existed.
‘I wrote just now of certain newspaper-cuttings which I found in the hidden drawer of Hoode’s desk. These were a bunch of twenty-four, taken from various issues (all bearing dates within the last two years) of The Searchlight, The St Stephen’s Gazette, and Vox Populi. Every one of the cuttings was a leading or almost equally prominent article attacking the Minister of Reconstruction in no half-hearted way.
‘Being one who prefers news without sensationalism, I had never before read a line from any one of these three papers. I came to these extracts, therefore, with a mind not only open but blank, and was immediately struck by the strange unanimity of the three newspapers in regard to John Hoode. For, as all the world must know, whether they read them or not, the trio are of politics widely varying. Their attacks upon the murdered man were made upon different grounds, it is true, but the very fact that the attacks were made, and made so viciously, struck me as unusual. It seemed to me that in the ordinary way the fact of one attacking would be enough to make at least one of the others defend. Further, the grounds upon which the attacks were made appeared to my unbiased mind as flimsy compared with the whole-hearted virulence of the writing.
‘From wondering and re-reading, I came upon a thing yet stranger: the unmistakable and mysterious similarity in the style of the composition. This similarity was to me, who have made something of a study of other men’s methods, even more pronounced when attempts had been made to disguise or vary the manner of writing. After ten minutes’ examination of those cuttings, I was prepared to swear that one man had been conducting the anti-Hoode campaign in three papers whose views on every other matter from vaccination to the Vatican are as wide apart as Stoke Poges, Seattle, and Sinbad the Sailor. I pictured a man of some scholastic attainment who was unable to write in fashion other than preciously correct and so set in his style as to be incapable of varying it, tried he never so hard.
‘I took the cuttings and my conviction to Deacon. He could not help me, so I went to his predecessor as Hoode’s private secretary (the real private secretary, like Deacon, not the departmental one.) From him I obtained confirmation of my theory. He, too, had suspected that not only was one man behind these press attacks, but that this man was also the actual author. He showed me something I had only half-noticed till then; something which went further than mere similarity of style. Throughout the articles, he pointed out, quotations occurred. They were, some of them, unusual quotations. But usual or unusual, one and all were correct! They were correct in some cases to the point of pedantry—if correctness can be so described. And they were thus correct in these three widely differing and highly sensational papers, whose literary standards have always been a byword with those who hate journalese, cliché, and the dreadful mutilation, humiliation and weakening of the English language.
‘It was when this former secretary of Hoode’s pointed this out to me that I recollected having recently been puzzled by a memory which would not be remembered. In one of the cuttings I had come across a quotation from Virgil, in which a dative case had been used rather than the all-prevalent but less correct genitive, and had been haunted at the time of reading with a sense of having seen this same rarity only recently. Suddenly it came back to me. It had been in a book of essays I had dipped into—a book of essays which, on inquiry made later, turned out to be from the pen of Sir Arthur Digby-Coates, writing under a feminine nom de guerre.
‘That, I admit, is not much to go upon. But more was to come. This forerunner of Deacon had—before he quarrelled with Hoode and left him—on his own initiative employed a private detective and set him to unearth this enemy of Hoode’s that seemed to command and write for three incendiary newspapers. You see, this secretary was sure that there was an enemy of some importance at work. At first he said nothing to Hoode, but at last told of his suspicions. He was laughed at. He returned to the charge—and they quarrelled. He left Hoode’s employment without having told him of the private detective. Being, with some excuse, not a little angry, he paid the detective, telling him to stop the work and go to hell.
‘But, luckily, the private detective had smelt a Big Thing, and consequently Big Money. He went on working. He finished his job. I got into touch with him. He has been paid, and the result of his labours has been forwarded to Scotland Yard.
‘His proofs are more than adequate. He has established, mainly through the corruptibility of a disgruntled employee, that Digby-Coates was beyond doubt the hidden owner of those three newspapers and also the composer of all those elaborate paeans of hate which appeared in them from time to time, and were directed against the man who was his friend and whose friendship he so cleverly pretended to return. (One cannot but admire the ingenuity with which Digby-Coates foisted more or less respectable and quite foolish figureheads upon the world—including the rest of the Press—as owners of the papers upon the purchase and upkeep of which he must have spent nearly half his great fortune. He was trul
y a great Enemy!)
‘But it was in writing himself the attacks with which he tried to bring Hoode to a fall that he overstepped himself and made a loophole through which curious persons could wriggle. Had he left the writing to different men and rested content with being the power behind the machine, he would have increased by a thousand his chances of remaining undiscovered. I suppose that his hate was so strong that to leave to others the forging of the weapons was beyond him.
‘Before ending the third part of this report, I would draw attention to what has thus far been established—established, I hope, to the satisfaction of even the most rigorous anti-Deaconite.
‘It has been shown that there is both reason for and corroboration of Digby-Coates’s hatred of Hoode.
‘It has been shown not only that all the evidence against Deacon can be used equally well against Digby-Coates, but also that there is in fact more of this evidence of material signs against Digby-Coates than there is against Deacon.
‘Above all, we have in the case against Digby-Coates two things (which might be called one thing) that there have never been against Deacon. The first is motive—although it is nothing more (or less) than the crazy hatred of a half-madman. The second is reliable evidence that ill-will existed before the murder.
IV
‘If I were delivering this report as a lecture, I am sure that there would be a little fat man in a corner bounding up and down with ill-suppressed irritation. At this stage he would be unable to restrain himself any longer and would ask passionately why the hell I was wasting my time and his by faking up a case against a man who had a chilled-steel alibi—the perfect, unassailable defence of a man who is seen by various people at such times and in such a place as to make it impossible for him to have committed the crime.
‘I would assure the fat little man—as I assure those who read—that I would in due course deal with and demolish that alibi, pointing out at the same time that it was the very perfection of the thing which had bred some of my first suspicions of its owner. It was too good, too complete, in a household where everyone else had only ordinary ones; it was a Sunday-go-to-meeting alibi; the alibi of a man who at least knew that a crime was going to be committed.
‘But more of that later. For the moment I will take two points which, though they might be considered proper to the first part of this document, I have seen fit to reserve until now.
‘The first concerns a rope. I have explained that I found it necessary to search the house. During that search, which was not only for the missing letters from the drawer in Hoode’s writing-table, I went into Deacon’s bedroom. This is next to, and on the west side of, the room used by Digby-Coates as a sitting room, study and, occasionally, carpenter’s shop. (He has had a bench fitted up there for him, as I mentioned earlier.)
‘In the grate in Deacon’s bedroom was a little pile of soot which at once attracted my attention, as being unusual in so scrupulously tended a house as Abbotshall. I investigated. On the ledge which runs round the interior of the chimney at the point where—on a level with the mantelpiece outside—it suddenly narrows, I found a coil of silk cord of roughly the thickness of a man’s little finger. It was double-knotted at intervals of two inches throughout its length, which was sixteen feet. (By the time this report is read the rope will be in the hands of the authorities. They would have had it sooner, only I was not giving away information until my case was complete.)
‘That pile of soot in the grate was not of long standing. The cord was new. I knew at once that I had found the rope by which my criminal had descended the wall. But how did it get where I found it?
‘I saw that the only answer which would fit the rest of my case was that the rope had been put there by Digby-Coates. Since I knew Deacon to be innocent and I had nowhere found any evidence to show that Digby-Coates had an accomplice, it could have been nobody else. And it was so easy for him, occupying as he did the room next to Deacon’s.
‘I am aware that here I am treading on dangerous ground—from the point of view, that is, of the logical anti-Deaconite—but I say nevertheless that this business of the rope strengthens my case and goes to give yet further indication of Digby-Coates’s deliberate plan to fasten his guilt upon Deacon. Silk rope of so excellent a quality is not common, and I think that Scotland Yard should have little difficulty in tracing its purchase. So convinced am I that they will find Digby-Coates at the other end of the trail that, if I could be of any use, I would willingly help them. Without the rest of my investigations, the finding of that rope would only have hastened Deacon’s journey to another and thicker one. But with them it has an effect most different.
‘Now for the second matter which was to be dealt with before the alibi.
‘It will be remembered that a great point against Deacon was that the hands of the overturned clock in the study stood at 10.45. The coroner, in reviewing the case at the end of the inquest, argued thus: At a quarter to eleven Deacon had entered the room of Sir Arthur Digby-Coates and inquired the time. That he had done so was apparent both from the evidence of Sir Arthur and of Deacon himself. All the other evidence pointed to Deacon. Was it not then only reasonable to assume that Deacon, after committing the murder and arranging the room to look as if a struggle had taken place, had pushed those hands back to 10.45, knowing that at that time he had been with so reputable a witness as is Arthur Digby-Coates? The whole thing was clear, said the coroner, answering his own question and practically directing the already willing jury to pass a verdict against Deacon.
‘The coroner added that he could not say whether, if his assumption were correct, which he was sure it was, Deacon had asked the time of Sir Arthur Digby-Coates in order to be able, by moving the clock, to establish an alibi, or whether that request for the time had been an accident and the moving of the clock hands a subsequent idea brought about by memory of the “time” incident. In any case, added this erudite official, the omission to make a corresponding alteration in the chiming served to show how the cleverest criminal will always make some foolish mistake which will afterwards lead to his capture.
‘How true! How trite! And, in this instance, how utterly wrong! Observe. Both Digby-Coates and Deacon are highly intelligent men. Suppose either of them wishing to show by moving back the hands of a clock that the clock stopped at a time earlier than it did in fact: would either make the ridiculous, childish mistake of forgetting the striking? I think not!
‘Observe again. Two men know that one asked the other the time. Why, then, is the subsequent utilising of that incident to be attributed to only one of them? Clearly it can apply equally to both!
‘Here again the evidence which has been used against Deacon can be used at least equally well against Digby-Coates.
‘This clock business, I say, is only further proof of the great ingenuity of Digby-Coates. It was the cleverest stroke of all. Deacon innocently, naturally, asks him the time. At once Digby-Coates, having already made up his mind that tonight was the night, is seized with an idea whose brilliance is surprising even to himself. Deacon, the man he has already chosen as scapegoat, is playing into his hands.
‘Suppose (I can see his mind working) that he slew Hoode just on the hour, and then made sure, after the clock in the study had struck, that its works, though undamaged, would not go on working, and then moved the hands back till they stood at 10.45. The disorder of the striking when the clock was set going again would reveal to investigators the fact that the hands had been moved and that the clock had stopped not before the hour but after it. Why, these investigators, would ask, had the hands been moved to that particular place—10.45? Soon they would find out—he, clever fellow! helping them without seeming to—that at this moment on the night of the crime Deacon had asked him the time. “Ah-ha!” would say the investigators, “Mr Deacon, to whom so much else points, has been trying to make alibis for himself!”
‘But now, he thinks, he can carry out this great, this wonderful scheme? Ah, yes! Let him put himself in D
eacon’s place; let him think what Deacon would do if he was killing Hoode. If he stopped the clock, he wouldn’t draw too much attention to it, so—so—ah, yes!—he would try to make it look as if there had been a struggle and would derange the tidy room accordingly!
‘That, I am convinced, is the way Digby-Coates reasoned. To put it briefly, he had to arrange the study to look, not as if a struggle had really taken place, but as if someone had tried their best to make it look like that. That is to say, while giving the air of a genuine attempt to mislead, he must yet make sure that investigators were not, in fact, misled; the first thing, for instance, that he had to do was to ensure that attention was drawn to the clock, but in such a way as to make it seem that endeavours had been made to draw attention from it.
‘Clever, you must admit. Clever as hell! And successful, as those who had followed the case must know. He got the effect he wanted—that of a man who had really tried to mislead. The police know that “struggle” scene for a fake. But I hope I have shown that it was a double fake. If you think I have imbued my criminal with more ingenuity than any murderer would possess, remember that I, too, am a man, and therefore a potential murderer. Remember also something of which I have given more tangible proof—the fingerprint game he played on Deacon. Remember that it was through him that the police first learnt of the money Hoode had drawn from his bank, and the fact that at 10.45 on the night of the murder Deacon had asked him the time! Remember that this business of the clock and the “struggle” is like that of the silk cord—nothing without what I have described in the earlier parts of this report, but with it a great deal.
‘And now for that alibi.
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