The Second R. Austin Freeman Megapack

by R. Austin Freeman

  “He didn’t use rags. He used Whatman’s water-colour paper, which is a pure linen paper. Apparently he tore it up into tiny fragments and boiled it in soda lye until it was ready to go into the beater. Monk found a supply of the paper in a cupboard and some half-cooked stuff in the boiler.” As he spoke, Miller unscrewed and raised the lid of the boiler, which was then seen to be half filled with a clear liquid, at the bottom of which was a mass of sodden fragments of shredded paper. From the boiler he turned to a small cupboard and opened the door. “That seems to be his stock of material,” he said, indicating a large roll of thick white paper. He took out a sheet and handed it to Thorndyke, who held it up to the light and read the name “Whatman,” which formed the water-mark.

  “Yes,” said Thorndyke, as he returned the sheet. “His method of work seems clear enough, but that is not of much interest, as you have the moulds. What we want is the man himself. You have no description of him, I suppose?”

  “Not if your description of him is correct,” replied Miller. “The suspected person, according to the Belgian police, is a smallish, slight, dark man. They may be on the wrong track, or there may be a confederate. There must have been a confederate, perhaps more than one. But Bromeswell only made the paper. Someone else must have done the engraving and printing. As to planting the notes, that may have been done by some other parties, or by either or both of these two artists. I should think they probably kept the game to themselves, judging by what we have seen here. This seems to be a one man show, and it looks as if even the engraver didn’t know where the paper was made, or the moulds wouldn’t have been left in this way. Shall we go and look for those hairs that you spoke of?”

  They returned to the outer room, where they both subjected the little pillow of the camp bed to a searching scrutiny. But though they examined both sides and even took off the dusty pillow-case, not a single hair was to be found. Then they turned their attention to the rugs, which had been folded neatly and placed on the canvas—there was no mattress—unfolding them carefully and going over them inch by inch. Here, too, they seemed to have drawn a blank, for they had almost completed their examination, when the Superintendent uttered an exclamation, and delicately picked a small object from near the edge of the rug.

  “This seems to be a hair, Doctor,” said he, holding it up between his finger and thumb. “Looks like a moustache hair, but it’s a mighty short one.”

  Thorndyke produced his pocket lens and a sheet of notepaper, and holding the latter while Miller cautiously dropped the hair on it, he inspected the find through his lens.

  “Yes,” he said, “it is a moustache hair, about half an inch long, decidedly thick, cleanly cut, and of a lightish red-brown colour. Somehow it seems to fit the other characters. A closely-cropped, bristly, sandy moustache appears to go appropriately with the stature and weight of the man and that massive pipe. There is a tendency for racial characters to go together, and the blond races run to height and weight. Well, we have a fairly complete picture of the man, unless we have made some erroneous inferences, and we seem to have finished our inspection. Have you been through the stuff in the letter-box?”

  “Monk went through it, but we may as well have a look at it to make sure that he hasn’t missed anything. I’ll hand the things out if you will put them on the table and check them.”

  As Miller took out the letters in handfuls, Thorndyke received them from him and laid them out on the table. Then he and Miller examined the collection systematically.

  “You see, Doctor,” said the latter, “they are all circulars; not a private letter among them excepting the two notes from the treasurer about the rent. And they are quite a miscellaneous lot. None of these people knew anything about Bromeswell, apparently; they just copied the address out of the directory. Here’s one from a money-lender. Bromeswell could have given him a tip or two. The earliest post-mark is the eleventh of June, so we may take it that he wasn’t here after the tenth or the morning of the eleventh.”

  “There is a slight suggestion that he left at night,” said Thorndyke, as he made a note of the date. “The place where you found the pipe would be in deep shadow by gaslight, but not by daylight. Certainly the blind was up, but he would probably have drawn it up after he had turned the gas out, as its being down during the day might attract attention.”

  “Yes,” said Miller, “you are probably right about the time; and that reminds me that Monk found a small piece of paper under the bench—I’ve got it in my pocket—which seems to bear out your suggestion.” He took from his pocket a bulky letter-case, from an inner recess of which he extracted a little scrap of Whatman paper. “Here it is,” he said, handing it to Thorndyke. “He seems to have just jotted down the times of two trains, and, as you say, they were probably night trains.”

  Thorndyke looked with deep attention at the fragment, on which was written, hastily but legibly in very black ink, “8.15 and 11.15,” and remarked:

  “Quite a valuable find in its way. The writing is very characteristic, and so is the ink. Probably it would be more so when seen through the microscope. Magnification brings out shades of colour that are invisible to the naked eye.

  “Well, Doctor,” said Miller, “if you can spare the time to have a look at it through the microscope, I wish you would, and let us know if you discover anything worth noting. And perhaps you wouldn’t mind taking a glance at the hair, too, to settle the colour more exactly.”

  He transferred the latter, which he had carefully folded in paper and put in his pocket-book, to Thorndyke, who deposited it, with the scrap of paper, in his letter-case, after pencilling on the wrapper a note of the nature and source of the object.

  “And that,” said the Superintendent, “seems to be the lot. We haven’t done so badly, after all. If you are right—and I expect you are—we have got quite a serviceable description of the man Bromeswell. But it is a most mysterious affair. I can’t imagine what the deuce can have happened. It is pretty clear that he came here about the tenth of June, and probably made a batch of paper, which we shall hear of later. But what can have happened to the man? Something out of the common, evidently. He would never have stayed away voluntarily with the certainty that the premises would be entered, his precious moulds found, and the whole thing blown upon. If he had intended to clear out he would certainly have taken the moulds with him, or at least destroyed them if he thought that the game was up. What do you think, Doctor?”

  “It seems to me,” replied Thorndyke, “that there are three possibilities. He may be dead, and if so he probably died suddenly, before he was able to make any arrangements; he may be in prison on some other charge; or he may have got a scare that we know nothing of and had to keep out of sight. You said that the Belgian police were taking some action.”

  “Yes, they have got an officer over here, by agreement with us, who is making inquiries about the man who planted the notes in Belgium. But he isn’t after Bromeswell. He is looking for quite a different man, as I told you. But he doesn’t pretend that he could recognize him.”

  “It doesn’t follow that Bromeswell knows that. If the confederate has discovered that inquiries are being made, he may have given his friend a hint and the pair of them may have absconded. But that is a mere speculation. As you say, something extraordinary must have happened, and it must have been something sudden and unforeseen. And that is all that we can say at present.”

  By the time that this conclusion was reached, they had emerged from Clifford’s Inn Passage into Fleet Street; and here they parted, the Superintendent setting a course westward and Thorndyke crossing the road to the gateway of Inner Temple Lane.

  CHAPTER VIII

  In which Thorndyke tries over the Moves

  It was in a deeply meditative frame of mind that Thorndyke pursued his way towards his chambers after parting with the Superintendent. For the inspection which he had just made had developed points of interest other than those which he had discussed with the detective officer. To his a
cute mind, habituated to rapid inference, the case of the mysterious Mr. Bromeswell had inevitably presented a parallelism with that of Daniel Purcell. Bromeswell had disappeared without leaving a trace. If he had absconded, he had done so without premeditation or preparation, apparently under the compulsion of some unforeseen but imperative necessity. But that was precisely Purcell’s case; and the instant the mere comparison was made, other points of agreement began to appear and multiply in the most startling manner.

  The physical resemblance between Purcell and the hypothetical Bromeswell was striking but not conclusive. Both were big, heavy men; but such men are not uncommon, and the resemblance in the matter of the moustache had to be verified—or disproved. But the other points of agreement were very impressive—impressive alike by their completeness and by their number. Both men were connected with the making of paper and of the same kind—handmade paper. The banknote moulds had been stolen or lost at Maidstone about six years ago. But at that very time Purcell was at. Maidstone, and was then engaged in the paper industry. Bromeswell appeared to have a sailor’s knowledge and skill in respect of cordage. But Purcell was a yachtsman and had such knowledge and skill. Then the dates of the two disappearances coincided very strikingly. Bromeswell disappeared from London about the tenth of June; Purcell disappeared from Penzance on the twenty-third of June. Even in trivial circumstances there was curious agreement. For instance, it was a noticeable coincidence that Bromeswell’s pipe should have been bought at a shop within a minute’s walk of Purcell’s office.

  But there was another coincidence that Thorndyke had noted even while he was examining the premises at Clifford’s Inn. Those premises were concerned exclusively with the making of the paper blanks on which the notes would later be printed. Of the engraving and printing activities there was no trace. Bromeswell was a papermaker pure and simple; but somewhere in the background there must have been a confederate, who was an engraver and a printer, to whom Bromeswell supplied the paper blanks and who engraved the plates and printed the notes. But Purcell had one intimate friend; and that friend was a skilful engraver, who was able to print from engraved plates. Moreover, the rather vague description given by the Belgian police of the man who uttered the forged notes, while it obviously could not apply to Purcell, agreed very completely with Purcell’s intimate friend.

  And there was yet another agreement, perhaps more striking than any. If it were assumed that Bromeswell and Purcell were one and the same person, the whole of the mystery connected with Mr. Penfield’s letter was resolved. Every thing became consistent and intelligible—up to a certain point. If the mysterious “enclosures,” were a batch of paper blanks with the Bank of England water-mark on them, it was easy to understand Mr. Penfield’s reticence; for he had made himself an accessory to a felony, to say nothing of the offence that he was committing by having these things in his possession. It would also account completely for Purcell’s sudden flight and his silence as to his whereabouts; for he would, naturally, assume that no lawyer would be such an imbecile as to accept the position of an accessory to a crime that he had no connection with. He would take it for granted that Penfield would forthwith hand the letter and the enclosures to the police.

  But there were one or two difficulties. In the first place, the theory implied an incredible lack of caution on the part of Penfield, who was a lawyer of experience, and would fully appreciate the risk he was running. Then it assumed an equally amazing lack of care and caution in the case of Purcell—a carelessness quite at variance with the scrupulous caution and well-maintained secrecy of the establishment at Clifford’s Inn. But the most serious discrepancy was the presence of the paper blanks in a letter. The letter into which they ought to have been put would be addressed to the confederate, and that confederate was assumed to be Varney. But why should they have been sent in a letter to Varney? On the very day on which the letter was posted, Varney and Purcell had been alone together for some hours on the yacht. The blanks could have been handed to Varney then, and naturally would have been. The discrepancy seemed to render the hypothesis untenable, or at any rate to rule out Varney as the possible confederate.

  But it was impossible to dismiss the hypothesis as untenable. The agreement with the observed facts were too numerous; and as soon as the inquiry was transferred to a new field, a fresh set of agreements came into view. Very methodically Thorndyke considered the theory of the identity of Purcell with Bromeswell in connection with his interviews with Mr. Penfield and Mr. Levy.

  Taking the latter first, what had it disclosed? It had shown that Purcell was a common money lender; not an incriminating fact, for the business of a money-lender is not in itself unlawful. But it is a vocation to which little credit attaches, and its practice is frequently associated with very unethical conduct. It is rather on the outside edge of lawful industry.

  But what of Levy? Apparently he was not a mere employee. He appeared to be able to get on quite well without Purcell, and seemed to have the status of a partner. Was it possible that he was a partner in the other concern, too? It was not impossible. A money-lender has excellent opportunities for getting rid of good flash notes. His customers usually want notes in preference to cheques, and he could even get batches of notes from the Bank and number his forgeries to correspond, thus protecting himself in case of discovery. But even if Levy were a confederate he would not exclude Varney, for there was no reason to suppose that he was an engraver, whereas Varney was both an engraver and an old and constant associate of Purcell’s. In short, Levy was not very obviously in the picture at all, and, for the time being, Thorndyke dismissed him and passed on to the other case. Taking now the interview with Penfield, there were the facts elicited by the examination of the envelope. That envelope had contained a rather bulky mass, apparently of folded paper, about five inches long or a little more, and somewhat less than three inches wide. Thorndyke rose, and, taking from the bookshelves a manuscript book labelled “Dimensions,” found in the index the entry Banknotes” and turned to the page indicated. Here the dimensions of a five-pound note were given as eight inches and three-eighths long by five inches and five thirty-seconds wide. Folded lengthwise into three, it would thus be five inches and five thirty-seconds, or say five and an eighth long by two and three-quarters wide, if folded quite accurately, or a fraction more if folded less exactly. The enclosure in Penfield’s envelope was therefore exactly the size of a small batch of notes folded into three. It did not follow that the enclosures actually were banknotes. They might have been papers of some other kind but of similar size. But the observed facts were in complete agreement with the supposition that they were banknotes, and taken in conjunction with Penfield’s extraordinary secrecy and the wording of his letter to Margaret Purcell, they strongly supported that supposition.

  Then there was the suggestion that the envelope had been steamed open and reclosed. It was only a suggestion, not a certainty. The appearances might be misleading. But to Thorndyke’s expert eye the suggestion had been very strong. The gum had smeared upwards on the inside, which seemed impossible if the envelope had been closed once for all; and the paper showed traces of cockling, as if it had been damped. Mr. Penfield had rejected the suggestion, partly for the excellent reasons that he had given, but also, perhaps, because Purcell’s flight implied that he had discovered the mistake, and that therefore the mistake was presumably his own.

  But there was one important point that Penfield seemed to have overlooked. The letter that he expected to receive would (presumably) have contained no enclosures. The letter that he did receive contained a bulky enclosure which bulged the envelope. The two letters must therefore have been very different in appearance. Now, ordinarily, when two letters are put each into the envelope of the other, when once the envelopes are closed the mistake is covered up. There is nothing in their exterior to suggest that any mistake has occurred. But in the present case the error was blatantly advertised by the appearance of the closed letters. Penfield’s envelope, which s
hould have been flat, bulged with its contents. The other envelope—if there was one, as there almost certainly must have been—which should have bulged, was conspicuously flat. Of course, Penfield may have been wrong in assuming that no enclosures were to be sent to him. Both letters may have held enclosures. But taking the evidence as it was presented, it was to the effect that there were enclosures in only one of the letters. And if that were the case, the mistake appeared incredible. It became impossible to understand how Purcell could have handled the two letters and finally put them into the post without seeing that the enclosures were in the wrong envelope.

  What was the significance of the point? Well, it raised the question whether Purcell could possibly have posted this letter himself; and this question involved the further question whether the envelope had been opened and reclosed. For if it had, the transposition of the contents must have taken place after the letters left Purcell’s hands. Against this was the fact of Purcell’s flight, which made it practically certain that he had become aware of the transposition. But it was not conclusive, and having noted the objection, Thorndyke proceeded to follow out the alternative theory. Accepting, for the moment, the hypothesis that the letter had been opened and the transposition made intentionally, certain other questions arose. First, who had the opportunity? Second, what could have been the purpose of the act? And, third, who could have had such a purpose? Thorndyke considered these questions in the same methodical fashion, taking them one by one and in the order stated.

  Who had the opportunity? That depended, among other things, on the time at which the letter was posted. Penfield had stated that the letter had been posted at 8.30 P.M. If that were true, it put Varney out of the problem, for he had left Penzance some hours before that time. But it was not true. The time shown by the post-mark was not the time at which the letter was posted, but that at which it was sorted at the post office. It might have been posted at a pillar-box some hours previously. It was therefore not impossible that it might have been posted by Varney. And if it was physically possible, it at once became the most probable assumption, since there was no reasonable alternative. It was inconceivable that Purcell should have handed the letters to a stranger to post; and if he had, it was inconceivable that that stranger should have opened the letters and transposed their contents. There was, indeed, the possibility that Purcell had met a confederate at Penzance and had handed him the letters—one of which would be addressed to himself—to post, and that this confederate might have made the transposition. But this was pure speculation, without a particle of evidence to support it; whereas Varney, as an intimate friend, even if not a confederate, might conceivably have had the letters handed to him to post, though this was profoundly improbable, seeing that Purcell was going ashore and Varney was in charge of the yacht. In effect, there was no positive evidence that anybody had had the opportunity to make the transposition; but if it had not been done by Purcell, himself, then Varney appeared to be the only possible agent.