The Detective Megapack

by Various Writers

  He proceeded to make a dozen prints as before on two cards, writing a number with his pencil opposite each print as he made it.

  “We are now,” said he, as he finally cleansed his client’s thumb, “furnished with the material for a preliminary investigation, and if you will now give me your address, Mr. Hornby, we may consider our business concluded for the present. I must apologise to you, Mr. Lawley, for having detained you so long with these experiments.”

  The lawyer had, in fact, been viewing the proceedings with hardly concealed impatience, and he now rose with evident relief that they were at an end.

  “I have been highly interested,” he said mendaciously, “though I confess I do not quite fathom your intentions. And, by the way, I should like to have a few words with you on another matter, if Mr. Reuben would not mind waiting for me in the square just a few minutes.”

  “Not at all,” said Reuben, who was, I perceived, in no way deceived by the lawyer’s pretence. “Don’t hurry on my account; my time is my own—at present.” He held out his hand to Thorndyke, who grasped it cordially.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Hornby,” said the latter. “Do not be unreasonably sanguine, but at the same time, do not lose heart. Keep your wits about you and let me know at once if anything occurs to you that may have a bearing on the case.”

  The young man then took his leave, and, as the door closed after him, Mr. Lawley turned towards Thorndyke.

  “I thought I had better have a word with you alone,” he said, “just to hear what line you propose to take up, for I confess that your attitude has puzzled me completely.”

  “What line would you propose?” asked Thorndyke.

  “Well,” said the lawyer, with a shrug of his shoulders, “the position seems to be this: our young friend has stolen a parcel of diamonds and has been found out; at least, that is how the matter presents itself to me.”

  “That is not how it presents itself to me,” said Thorndyke drily. “He may have taken the diamonds or he may not. I have no means of judging until I have sifted the evidence and acquired a few more facts. This I hope to do in the course of the next day or two, and I suggest that we postpone the consideration of our plan of campaign until I have seen what line of defence it is possible to adopt.”

  “As you will,” replied the lawyer, taking up his hat, “but I am afraid you are encouraging the young rogue to entertain hopes that will only make his fall the harder—to say nothing of our own position. We don’t want to make ourselves ridiculous in court, you know.”

  “I don’t, certainly,” agreed Thorndyke. “However, I will look into the matter and communicate with you in the course of a day or two.”

  He stood holding the door open as the lawyer descended the stairs, and when the footsteps at length died away, he closed it sharply and turned to me with an air of annoyance.

  “The ‘young rogue,’” he remarked, “does not appear to me to have been very happy in his choice of a solicitor. By the way, Jervis, I understand you are out of employment just now?”

  “That is so,” I answered.

  “Would you care to help me—as a matter of business, of course—to work up this case? I have a lot of other work on hand and your assistance would be of great value to me.”

  I said, with great truth, that I should be delighted.

  “Then,” said Thorndyke, “come round to breakfast tomorrow and we will settle the terms, and you can commence your duties at once. And now let us light our pipes and finish our yarns as though agitated clients and thick-headed solicitors had no existence.”

  CHAPTER III

  A LADY IN THE CASE

  When I arrived at Thorndyke’s chambers on the following morning, I found my friend already hard at work. Breakfast was laid at one end of the table, while at the other stood a microscope of the pattern used for examining plate-cultures of micro-organisms, on the wide stage of which was one of the cards bearing six thumb-prints in blood. A condenser threw a bright spot of light on the card, which Thorndyke had been examining when I knocked, as I gathered from the position of the chair, which he now pushed back against the wall.

  “I see you have commenced work on our problem,” I remarked as, in response to a double ring of the electric bell, Polton entered with the materials for our repast.

  “Yes,” answered Thorndyke. “I have opened the campaign, supported, as usual, by my trusty chief-of-staff; eh! Polton?”

  The little man, whose intellectual, refined countenance and dignified bearing seemed oddly out of character with the tea-tray that he carried, smiled proudly, and, with a glance of affectionate admiration at my friend, replied—

  “Yes, sir. We haven’t been letting the grass grow under our feet. There’s a beautiful negative washing upstairs and a bromide enlargement too, which will be mounted and dried by the time you have finished your breakfast.”

  “A wonderful man that, Jervis,” my friend observed as his assistant retired. “Looks like a rural dean or a chancery judge, and was obviously intended by Nature to be a professor of physics. As an actual fact he was first a watchmaker, then a maker of optical instruments, and now he is mechanical factotum to a medical jurist. He is my right-hand, is Polton; takes an idea before you have time to utter it—but you will make his more intimate acquaintance by-and-by.”

  “Where did you pick him up?” I asked.

  “He was an in-patient at the hospital when I first met him, miserably ill and broken, a victim of poverty and undeserved misfortune. I gave him one or two little jobs, and when I found what class of man he was I took him permanently into my service. He is perfectly devoted to me, and his gratitude is as boundless as it is uncalled for.”

  “What are the photographs he was referring to?” I asked.

  “He is making an enlarged facsimile of one of the thumb-prints on bromide paper and a negative of the same size in case we want the print repeated.”

  “You evidently have some expectation of being able to help poor Hornby,” said I, “though I cannot imagine how you propose to go to work. To me his case seems as hopeless a one as it is possible to conceive. One doesn’t like to condemn him, but yet his innocence seems almost unthinkable.”

  “It does certainly look like a hopeless case,” Thorndyke agreed, “and I see no way out of it at present. But I make it a rule, in all cases, to proceed on the strictly classical lines of inductive inquiry—collect facts, make hypotheses, test them and seek for verification. And I always endeavour to keep a perfectly open mind.

  “Now, in the present case, assuming, as we must, that the robbery has actually taken place, there are four conceivable hypotheses: (1) that the robbery was committed by Reuben Hornby; (2) that it was committed by Walter Hornby; (3) that it was committed by John Hornby, or (4) that it was committed by some other person or persons.

  “The last hypothesis I propose to disregard for the present and confine myself to the examination of the other three.”

  “You don’t think it possible that Mr. Hornby could have stolen the diamonds out of his own safe?” I exclaimed.

  “I incline at present to no one theory of the matter,” replied Thorndyke. “I merely state the hypotheses. John Hornby had access to the diamonds, therefore it is possible that he stole them.”

  “But surely he was responsible to the owners.”

  “Not in the absence of gross negligence, which the owners would have difficulty in proving. You see, he was what is called a gratuitous bailee, and in such a case no responsibility for loss lies with the bailee unless there has been gross negligence.”

  “But the thumb-mark, my dear fellow!” I exclaimed. “How can you possibly get over that?”

  “I don’t know that I can,” answered Thorndyke calmly; “but I see you are taking the same view as the police, who persist in regarding a finger-print as a kind of magical touchstone, a final proof, beyond which inquiry need not go. Now, this is an entire mistake. A finger-print is merely a fact—a very important and significant one, I admit—but st
ill a fact, which, like any other fact, requires to be weighed and measured with reference to its evidential value.”

  “And what do you propose to do first?”

  “I shall first satisfy myself that the suspected thumb-print is identical in character with that of Reuben Hornby—of which, however, I have very little doubt, for the finger-print experts may fairly be trusted in their own speciality.”

  “And then?”

  “I shall collect fresh facts, in which I look to you for assistance, and, if we have finished breakfast, I may as well induct you into your new duties.”

  He rose and rang the bell, and then, fetching from the office four small, paper-covered notebooks, laid them before me on the table.

  “One of these books,” said he, “we will devote to data concerning Reuben Hornby. You will find out anything you can—anything, mind, no matter how trivial or apparently irrelevant—in any way connected with him and enter it in this book.” He wrote on the cover “Reuben Hornby” and passed the book to me. “In this second book you will, in like manner, enter anything that you can learn about Walter Hornby, and, in the third book, data concerning John Hornby. As to the fourth book, you will keep that for stray facts connected with the case but not coming under either of the other headings. And now let us look at the product of Polton’s industry.”

  He took from his assistant’s hand a photograph ten inches long by eight broad, done on glazed bromide paper and mounted flatly on stiff card. It showed a greatly magnified facsimile of one of the thumb-prints, in which all the minute details, such as the orifices of the sweat glands and trifling irregularities in the ridges, which, in the original, could be seen only with the aid of a lens, were plainly visible to the naked eye. Moreover, the entire print was covered by a network of fine black lines, by which it was divided into a multitude of small squares, each square being distinguished by a number.

  “Excellent, Polton,” said Thorndyke approvingly; “a most admirable enlargement. You see, Jervis, we have photographed the thumb-print in contact with a numbered micrometer divided into square twelfths of an inch. The magnification is eight diameters, so that the squares are here each two-thirds of an inch in diameter. I have a number of these micrometers of different scales, and I find them invaluable in examining cheques, doubtful signatures and such like. I see you have packed up the camera and the microscope, Polton; have you put in the micrometer?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied Polton, “and the six-inch objective and the low-power eye-piece. Everything is in the case; and I have put ‘special rapid’ plates into the dark-slides in case the light should be bad.”

  “Then we will go forth and beard the Scotland Yard lions in their den,” said Thorndyke, putting on his hat and gloves.

  “But surely,” said I, “you are not going to drag that great microscope to Scotland Yard, when you only want eight diameters. Haven’t you a dissecting microscope or some other portable instrument?”

  “We have a most delightful instrument of the dissecting type, of Polton’s own make—he shall show it to you. But I may have need of a more powerful instrument—and here let me give you a word of warning: whatever you may see me do, make no comments before the officials. We are seeking information, not giving it, you understand.”

  At this moment the little brass knocker on the inner door—the outer oak being open—uttered a timid and apologetic rat-tat.

  “Who the deuce can that be?” muttered Thorndyke, replacing the microscope on the table. He strode across to the door and opened it somewhat brusquely, but immediately whisked his hat off, and I then perceived a lady standing on the threshold.

  “Dr. Thorndyke?” she inquired, and as my colleague bowed, she continued, “I ought to have written to ask for an appointment but the matter is rather urgent—it concerns Mr. Reuben Hornby and I only learned from him this morning that he had consulted you.”

  “Pray come in,” said Thorndyke. “Dr. Jervis and I were just setting out for Scotland Yard on this very business. Let me present you to my colleague, who is working up the case with me.”

  Our visitor, a tall handsome girl of twenty or thereabouts, returned my bow and remarked with perfect self-possession, “My name is Gibson—Miss Juliet Gibson. My business is of a very simple character and need not detain you many minutes.”

  She seated herself in the chair that Thorndyke placed for her, and continued in a brisk and business-like manner—

  “I must tell you who I am in order to explain my visit to you. For the last six years I have lived with Mr. and Mrs. Hornby, although I am no relation to them. I first came to the house as a sort of companion to Mrs. Hornby, though, as I was only fifteen at the time, I need hardly say that my duties were not very onerous; in fact, I think Mrs. Hornby took me because I was an orphan without the proper means of getting a livelihood, and she had no children of her own.

  “Three years ago I came into a little fortune which rendered me independent; but I had been so happy with my kind friends that I asked to be allowed to remain with them, and there I have been ever since in the position of an adopted daughter. Naturally, I have seen a great deal of their nephews, who spend a good part of their time at the house, and I need not tell you that the horrible charge against Reuben has fallen upon us like a thunderbolt. Now, what I have come to say to you is this: I do not believe that Reuben stole those diamonds. It is entirely out of character with all my previous experience of him. I am convinced that he is innocent, and I am prepared to back my opinion.”

  “In what way?” asked Thorndyke.

  “By supplying the sinews of war,” replied Miss Gibson. “I understand that legal advice and assistance involves considerable expense.”

  “I am afraid you are quite correctly informed,” said Thorndyke.

  “Well, Reuben’s pecuniary resources are, I am sure, quite small, so it is necessary for his friends to support him, and I want you to promise me that nothing shall be left undone that might help to prove his innocence if I make myself responsible for any costs that he is unable to meet. I should prefer, of course, not to appear in the matter, if it could be avoided.”

  “Your friendship is of an eminently practical kind, Miss Gibson,” said my colleague, with a smile. “As a matter of fact, the costs are no affair of mine. If the occasion arose for the exercise of your generosity you would have to approach Mr. Reuben’s solicitor through the medium of your guardian, Mr. Hornby, and with the consent of the accused. But I do not suppose the occasion will arise, although I am very glad you called, as you may be able to give us valuable assistance in other ways. For example, you might answer one or two apparently impertinent questions.”

  “I should not consider any question impertinent that you considered necessary to ask,” our visitor replied.

  “Then,” said Thorndyke, “I will venture to inquire if any special relations exist between you and Mr. Reuben.”

  “You look for the inevitable motive in a woman,” said Miss Gibson, laughing and flushing a little. “No, there have been no tender passages between Reuben and me. We are merely old and intimate friends; in fact, there is what I may call a tendency in another direction—Walter Hornby.”

  “Do you mean that you are engaged to Mr. Walter?”

  “Oh, no,” she replied; “but he has asked me to marry him—he has asked me, in fact, more than once; and I really believe that he has a sincere attachment to me.”

  She made this latter statement with an odd air, as though the thing asserted were curious and rather incredible, and the tone was evidently noticed by Thorndyke as well as me for he rejoined—

  “Of course he has. Why not?”

  “Well, you see,” replied Miss Gibson, “I have some six hundred a year of my own and should not be considered a bad match for a young man like Walter, who has neither property nor expectations, and one naturally takes that into account. But still, as I have said, I believe he is quite sincere in his professions and not merely attracted by my money.”

  “I d
o not find your opinion at all incredible,” said Thorndyke, with a smile, “even if Mr. Walter were quite a mercenary young man—which, I take it, he is not.”

  Miss Gibson flushed very prettily as she replied—

  “Oh, pray do not trouble to pay me compliments; I assure you I am by no means insensible of my merits. But with regard to Walter Hornby, I should be sorry to apply the term ‘mercenary’ to him, and yet—well, I have never met a young man who showed a stronger appreciation of the value of money. He means to succeed in life and I have no doubt he will.”

  “And do I understand that you refused him?”

  “Yes. My feelings towards him are quite friendly, but not of such a nature as to allow me to contemplate marrying him.”

  “And now, to return for a moment to Mr. Reuben. You have known him for some years?”

  “I have known him intimately for six years,” replied Miss Gibson.

  “And what sort of character do you give him?”

  “Speaking from my own observation of him,” she replied, “I can say that I have never known him to tell an untruth or do a dishonourable deed. As to theft, it is merely ridiculous. His habits have always been inexpensive and frugal, he is unambitious to a fault, and in respect to the ‘main chance’ his indifference is as conspicuous as Walter’s keenness. He is a generous man, too, although careful and industrious.”

  “Thank you, Miss Gibson,” said Thorndyke. “We shall apply to you for further information as the case progresses. I am sure that you will help us if you can, and that you can help us if you will, with your clear head and your admirable frankness. If you will leave us your card, Dr. Jervis and I will keep you informed of our prospects and ask for your assistance whenever we need it.”

  After our fair visitor had departed, Thorndyke stood for a minute or more gazing dreamily into the fire. Then, with a quick glance at his watch, he resumed his hat and, catching up the microscope, handed the camera case to me and made for the door.

  “How the time goes!” he exclaimed, as we descended the stairs; “but it hasn’t been wasted, Jervis, hey?”