“Yes,” replied Thorndyke, “only the sphinx was really an oracle, just waiting for the question to be asked.”
Winifred’s eyes filled. Impulsively she grasped my colleague’s hand, murmuring shakily: “What can I say to you, Dr Thorndyke? How can I ever thank you for all that you have done for my brother and me?”
“You need say nothing,” he replied “but that which is written on the back of the cat’s eye.”
Our business being now concluded, Sir Lawrence carefully returned the precious documents to the jar and replaced the cover. From without, a dull tapping that had been audible for some time past, had told us that Polton was at work on the second pillar. But that was no concern of ours.
“What are we going to do now?” asked Sir Lawrence. “It seems as if we should mark the occasion in some way.”
“I agree with you, Drayton,” said Thorndyke, “and I have, in fact, arranged a little festival at my chambers; just a simple tavern dinner, since Polton was otherwise engaged. Will that satisfy the requirements?”
“It will satisfy mine,” replied Drayton, “and I think I can answer for Brodribb.”
“Then,” said Thorndyke, “if Miss Blake will consent to combine the function of hostess with that of principal guest, we will capture Polton and betake ourselves to the Temple.”
We strolled out into the church, where Polton and the rector were gloatingly examining the newly-recovered sacred vessels, and having thanked the friendly clergyman and bidden him a warm farewell, we went forth in search of conveyances. Polton heading the procession with the heavy jar under his arm, and Winifred tenderly carrying the posset-pot swathed in her silken shawl.
In Whitechapel High Street we had the unexpected good fortune to encounter an unoccupied taxi-cab, which was by universal consent assigned to Winifred, Polton, and me. In this we bestowed ourselves and were forthwith spirited away, leaving our companions to follow as best they could. But they were not far behind, for we had barely arrived in the chambers and disposed of our treasure-trove, when a second cab drew up in King’s Bench Walk and our three friends made their appearance at the rendezvous.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Q.E.D.
To an enthusiastic and truly efficient gourmet it might be difficult to assess the respective merits of the different stages of a really good dinner; to compare the satisfactions yielded, for instance, by the first tentative approaches—the little affairs of outposts—with the voracious joy of the grand onslaught on tangible and manducable solids; or again with the placid diminuendo, the half-hearted rear-guard actions, concerned with the unsubstantial trifles on which defeated appetite delivers its expiring kick. For my own part, I can offer no opinion—at any rate, without refreshing my memory as to the successive sensations; but I recall that as our dinner drew to a close, signs of expectancy began to manifest themselves (in Mr. Brodribb’s case they seemed to be associated with the advent of the port decanter), and when Polton had evacuated the casualties to an aid-post established in the adjacent office, Sir Lawrence gave expression to the prevailing state of mind.
“I suppose, Thorndyke, you know what is expected of you?”
Thorndyke turned an impassive face towards his guest. “On these triumphal occasions,” said he, “I usually smoke a Trichinopoly cigar. On this occasion, I presume, I am expected to refrain.”
“Not at all,” replied Drayton. “I think we can endure the Trichy with reasonable fortitude; what we can’t endure is the agony of curiosity. We demand enlightenment.”
“You want to know how the ‘little Sphinx’ answered its own riddle. Is that your demand?”
“I understood you to say,” said I, “that the problem of the crime and that of the missing deeds were one and the same.”
“I said that they were closely connected. But if you want an exposition of the unravelment, it will be more convenient to take them separately and in the order in which they were presented. In which case we begin with the crime.”
He paused, and I saw him glance with an indulgent smile towards the office door which was incompletely closed, and from which issued faint sounds of furtive movement which informed us that Polton had elected to take his dinner within earshot of the exposition.
“We had better begin,” he proceeded, “with the facts presented to us on the night of the tragedy. First as to the criminals. There were traces of two men, and only two. One of these was a tall man, as shown by the size of his feet. He appeared to suffer from some weakness of the left leg. The sound of his footsteps, as heard by Anstey, suggested a slightly lame man, but as he ran away rapidly he could not have been very lame. Yet there was some distinct disability, since he had to draw up a garden seat to enable him to get over a fence which we climbed easily; and the faint impression of the left foot under the fence showed that, when he jumped down, the weight was taken principally by the right. Examination of the cast of his left hand showed a depressed scar on the tip of the forefinger. We also gathered that he carried a Baby Browning pistol and appeared to be a skilful pistol shot.
“Of the other man we learned less. He was noticeably small and slight; he was left-handed; he had dark hair, and at the time of the robbery he was wearing gloves, apparently of kid or thin leather. But later, when examining the tuft of his hair that was found grasped by the deceased, we made an important discovery. Among those dark hairs was a single blonde hair—not white, but golden—which could not have come from his own head. Of its presence there seemed to be only two possible explanations: either it had been rubbed off, or had fallen from the head of some other person, or it had become detached from the inside of a wig. But the first explanation was ruled out—”
“How?” demanded Brodribb.
“By its appearance under the microscope. When you find an alien hair, on your coat-sleeve, for instance—”
“I don’t,” said Brodribb, “at my time of life.”
“—If you examine it under the microscope, or even with a strong lens, you will invariably find it to be a dead hair—a hair which has completed its growth and dropped out of its sheath. You can identify it by the presence of the complete bulb and the absence of the inner root-sheath (which would be adherent to it if it had been pulled out while growing). Well, this blonde hair had no bulb. It had both ends broken, which suggested unusual brittleness, as if it had been treated with some bleach, such as chlorine or hydrogen peroxide. But the hair of wigs shows absence of bulbs and is commonly so treated and is usually somewhat brittle. Thus the probability was that this man had recently worn a wig of artificially bleached hair.
“These were our initial data concerning these two men. There were also some fingerprints, but we will consider those separately. The initial data included the character of the things stolen. These were of insignificant intrinsic value and were very easily identifiable. They were thus quite unacceptable to the ordinary professional thief, yet the evidence (of the suspicious visitor) suggested that they knew what they were stealing. One of the things stolen—the cat’s eye pendant—was known to have an extrinsic value and to have been eagerly sought by other persons, and there was thus the bare suggestion that this pendant might have been the object of the robbery.
“We now come to the fingerprints. These presented some very remarkable anomalies. In the first place, they were not the fingerprints of either of the robbers. That was certain. The small man wore gloves, so they could not have been his; and the tall man had a depressed scar on the tip of his left forefinger, whereas there was no trace of any such scar on the corresponding fingerprint. But if they were not the fingerprints of either of the robbers, whose fingerprints were they? There was no trace of any third person, and it was practically certain that no third person was present.
“But there was another striking anomaly. Although there were numerous impressions, only six digits were represented—the forefinger and thumb of the left hand and the thumb and the first three fingers of the right. Every impression of the right hand showed the same four di
gits, every impression of the left showed the same two.
“Now what could be the explanation of this curious repetition? Anstey’s very reasonable suggestion was that the man had soiled these particular digits with some foreign substance and that, consequently, the soiled digits alone had made prints. This suggestion received a certain amount of support from the fact that a foreign substance actually was present—it proved, on examination, to be Japanese wax. But though the presence of the wax accounted for the distinctness of the fingerprints that were there, it did not explain why the other fingers had made no mark at all. I examined the glass which bore the fingerprints with the utmost minuteness, but in no case was there the faintest trace of the other fingers. Yet those fingers, if they had existed, must have touched the glass, and if they had touched it they would have made marks. The only explanation seemed to be that there were no other fingers; that the prints were not real fingerprints at all, but counterfeits made by means of facsimile stamps of rubber, roller-composition, or—more probably—chrome gelatine.
“It seemed a far-fetched hypothesis. But it fitted all the facts, and there seemed to be no other explanation. Thus the use of a set of stamps would explain the existence of a set of fingerprints which were not those of either of the parties present; it would explain the repetition of the same group of digits (on the assumption that only six stamps were available which might easily be the case if these stamps were copies of a particular group of fingerprints); and lastly, it would explain the presence of the Japanese wax.”
“How would it?” I asked.
“Well, some foreign substance would be necessary. In a real fingerprint—on glass, for instance—the mark is produced by the natural grease of the fingers. But a rubber or gelatine stamp has no natural grease. It is quite dry, and would make no mark at all unless it were charged with some sticky or greasy material. Now Japanese wax is an ideal material for the purpose. It is markedly sticky and would consequently develop up splendidly with dusting powder; it has no tendency to spread or run, so that it gives very clear impressions; and it might easily be mistaken for natural skin-grease.
“The counterfeit fingerprints hypothesis was, therefore, the only one that explained the facts, and I adopted it provisionally, assuming that the stamps were probably thin plates of rubber or gelatine cemented on the finger tips of the gloves worn by the short man.
“A few days later I received a visit from Detective-Superintendent Miller who informed me that the fingerprints had been identified at the registry as those of a well-known ‘habitual’ named Hedges, more commonly known as Moakey. Of course this did not alter the position since there was no evidence that Moakey had ever been on the premises. However, I decided to wait until he was arrested and hear what he had to say. But he never was arrested. A day or two later, the Superintendent called on me again, and this time he settled the matter finally. My impression was, and is, that he came intending to make a clean breast of the matter, but that at the last moment he shied at the responsibility of giving away official secrets. What he actually said was that there had been a mistake; that the fingerprints were not Moakey’s after all.
“Of course this was absurd. A mistake might occur with a single fingerprint, but with a set of six it was incredible. What had happened appeared to me quite obvious. The fingerprints had been submitted to the experts, who had at once identified them as Moakey’s. Then the executive had set out to arrest Moakey—and had discovered that he was in prison. If that was really what had happened, it furnished conclusive proof that the fingerprints were forgeries.
“At once I set to work to ascertain if it were so. I searched the lists of convictions at assizes, quarter-sessions, and so forth, and eventually ran Moakey to earth. He had been convicted six months previously and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour. So, at the date of the murder, he had been in prison about six months.
“We were now on solid ground. We knew that the fingerprints were forgeries. But we knew more than this. The forgery of a fingerprint, unlike that of a signature, is a purely mechanical operation, carried out either by photography or by some other reproductive process. The forged print is necessarily a mechanical copy of an existing real print. Whence it follows that the existence of a forgery is evidence of the existence of an original. And more than that, it is evidence that the forger had access to that original. Now these forgeries were copies of Moakey’s fingerprints. It followed that we had to look for somebody who had had access to Moakey’s fingerprints.
“Fortunately we had not far to look. At the first interview the Superintendent had referred to a previous exploit of Moakey’s; a burglary at a country house, when that artist was apprehended and convicted on the evidence of his fingerprints, which were found on a silver salver. A photograph of these fingerprints was immediately taken by the owner of the house and given to the police, who took them straight to Scotland Yard. I looked up the report of that case and had the good fortune to find that the fingerprints were described. There were six of them, the thumb and first three fingers of the right hand, and the forefinger and thumb of the left hand.
“This was extremely interesting. But still more so was the fact that the house which was broken into was Beauchamp Blake, and the further fact that the owner who photographed the fingerprints was Mr. Arthur Blake.
“I need not point out the importance of the discovery. It told us that Arthur Blake had had, and presumably still had, in his possession, a set of negatives with which it was possible to make the stamps of these very fingerprints. It did not, however, follow that he had made the stamps, for that would demand an amount of technical knowledge and skill far beyond that of an ordinary photographer; knowledge ordinarily possessed only by professional photo-engravers. He might have such knowledge or he might have employed some one else. At any rate, he had the negatives and had made them himself.
“But Blake was not only associated with the fingerprints. He was also associated with the stolen property. Of all the persons known to us, he was the most likely to wish to acquire the cat’s eye pendant. So, you see, the investigation, which started with a certain connection with Beauchamp Blake, led us straight to Beauchamp Blake again. And there we will leave it for the moment and approach the problem from one or two different directions.
“First we will consider the mysterious woman who came into view on the day of the inquest and who presumably sent the poisoned chocolates. Who was she? And what was her connection with the case? Now, the first thing that struck me in the description of her was her hair. It was of that brassy, golden tint that one associates with bleaches such as hydrogen peroxide. I recalled the stray hair from the small man’s head which had suggested that he had worn a wig of precisely this character. The obvious suggestion was that this woman and that small man were one and the same person. They appeared to be similar in stature, there were good reasons why they should be the same, and no reasons why they should not. But, assuming them to be the same (it was afterwards proved that they were) the question arose, is this woman a disguised man or was that man a disguised woman? The latter view was clearly the more probable, for whereas a woman, if she cuts her hair short, will pass easily for a clean-shaved man, a clean-shaved man does not pass so easily for a woman, especially if he is dark, as this person was. It seemed probable, therefore, that this was really a woman—a dark woman wearing a fair wig. But who she was, and what—if any—was her relation to Blake, remained for the present a mystery.
“We now come to the man Halliburton. Obviously he was an object of deep suspicion. His only known address was an hotel. He visited Andrew Drayton without any reasonable purpose. He tried unsuccessfully to purchase the cat’s eye pendant, and within four days of his failure the jewel was stolen. Then he disappeared, leaving no trace.
“Anstey and I called at his hotel to make enquiries about him. There we obtained a photograph of his signature, which we have not used, but which will be produced at the inquest, and we acquired some information whi
ch has been invaluable. He had lost, and left behind, a mascot which he valued so highly that he offered ten pounds reward for its recovery. We got the loan of it, and Polton made this indistinguishable facsimile.” Here Thorndyke passed round Polton’s masterpiece for inspection. “Now,” he continued, “in connection with this mascot, two very important facts emerged. One was that, as Anstey expressed it, this man was a superstitious ass, a man who believed in the occult properties of mascots and charms. The importance of that becomes evident when we remember that the cat’s eye was, in effect, a mascot—an object credited with occult powers affecting the fortunes of its owner. It enables us to understand his anxiety to possess the cat’s eye.
“The other important fact emerges from the nature of the thing itself. It is a neck vertebra of an Echidna, or porcupine ant-eater, decorated with aboriginal ornament. The Echidna is an animal peculiar to Tasmania and Australia, and the ornament is distinctive of the locality. This mascot, therefore, established some connection between Halliburton and Australasia. But Blake had lived most of his adult life in Australia. There was, however, a difficulty. Punched on the mascot—apparently with typefounder’s steel punches—were the letters o and h. The name signed in the hotel register was Oscar Halliburton, and these letters seemed to be his initials. But if that was so, Oscar Halliburton would appear to be a real person and consequently could not be Arthur Blake.
“Thus, at this stage of the inquiry, on the hypothesis that the robbery had been committed by Blake, we had two persons whom we could not account for—the unknown woman (possibly a man) and Mr. Oscar Halliburton.
“But just as we appeared to have reached an impasse, Mr. Brodribb threw a flood of light on the problem. For different reasons, Sir Lawrence and I were anxious to obtain some particulars of Arthur Blake and his affairs, and these particulars Mr. Brodribb was fortunately in a position to supply. The information that he furnished amounted to this:
“Arthur Blake appeared to be a decent, industrious man with nothing against him but the rather queer company that he had kept. He had been associated in Australia with a man named Hugh Owen, who was a person of shady antecedents, and who, on his side, was associated with a woman named Laura Levinsky who appeared to be definitely a bad character, and who, like Owen, was under police observation. These two persons seem to have separated immediately after Blake’s departure for England, and both disappeared. Levinsky was lost sight of for good, but Owen’s body—or rather unrecognisable remains—came to light some years later and was identified by a ring which was known to have belonged to Owen.
The Second R. Austin Freeman Megapack Page 45