“I should like to have seen Mr. Polton’s prentice effort,” said Marion, who had been listening, enthralled by this description.
“You shall see it now,” Thorndyke replied with a smile. “It is in the next room, concealed in a cupboard.”
He went out, and presently returned, carrying what looked like an excessively crude hair-dresser’s dummy, but a most extraordinarily horrible and repulsive one. As he turned the face towards us, Marion gave a little cry of horror and then tried to laugh—without very striking success.
“It is a dreadful-looking thing!” she exclaimed, “and so hideously like that fiend.” She gazed at it with the most extreme repugnance for a while and then said, apologetically: “I hope you won’t think me very silly, but—”
“Of course I don’t,” Thorndyke interrupted. “It is going back to its cupboard at once,” and with this he bore it away, returning in a few moments with a smaller object, wrapped in a cloth, which he laid on the table. “Another ‘exhibit,’ as they say in the courts,” he explained, “which we shall want presently. Meanwhile we resume the thread of our argument.”
“The photograph of this waxwork, then, furnished corroboration of the theory that Morris was the man whom we were seeking. My next move was to inquire at Scotland Yard if there were any fresh developments of the Van Zellen case. The answer was that there were; and Superintendent Miller arranged to come and tell me all about them. You were present at the interview and will remember what passed. His information was highly important, not only by confirming my inference that Bendelow was the murderer, but especially by disposing of the difficulty connected with the disappearance of your patient. For now there came into view a second man—Crile—who had died at Hoxton of an abdominal cancer and had been duly buried; and when you were able to give me this man’s address, a glance at the map and at the Post Office Directory showed that the two men had died in the same house. This fact, with the farther facts that they had died of virtually the same disease and within a day or two of the same date, left no reasonable doubt that we were really dealing with one man who had died and for whom two death certificates, in different names, and two corresponding burial orders had been obtained. There was only one body, and that was cremated in the name of Bendelow. It followed that the coffin which was buried at Mr. Crile’s funeral must have been an empty coffin. I was so confident that this must be so that I induced Miller to apply for an exhumation, with the results that you know.
“There now remained only a single point requiring verification: the question as to what face it was that those two ladies saw when they looked into the coffin of Simon Bendelow. Here again Polton’s new accomplishment came to our aid. From the plaster mask your apprentice made a most realistic wax mask, which I offer for your critical inspection.”
He unfolded the cloth and produced a mask of thin, yellowish wax and of a most cadaverous aspect, which he handed to Marion.
“Yes,” she said approvingly, “it is an excellent piece of work; and what beautiful eyelashes. They look exactly like real ones.”
“They are real ones,” Thorndyke explained with a chuckle.
She looked up at him inquiringly, and then, breaking into a ripple of laughter, exclaimed: “Of course! They are his own! Oh! how like Mr. Polton! But he was quite right, you know. He couldn’t have got the effect any other way.”
“So he declared,” said Thorndyke. “Well, we hired a coffin and had an inspection window put in the lid, and we got a black skull-cap. We put a dummy head in the coffin with a wig on it; we laid the mask where the face should have been and we adjusted the jaw-bandage and the skull-cap so as to cover up the edges of the mask, and we got the two ladies here and showed them the coffin. When they had identified the tenant as Mr. Bendelow, the verification was complete, the hypothesis was now converted into ascertained fact, and all that remained to be done was to lay hands on the murderer.”
“How did you find out where Morris was living?” I asked.
“Barber did that,” he replied. “When I learned that you were being stalked, I employed Barber to shadow you. He, of course, observed Morris on your track and followed him home.”
“That was what I supposed,” said I; and for a while we were all silent. Presently Marion said: “It is all very involved and confusing. Would you mind telling us exactly what happened?”
“In a direct narrative, you mean?” said he. “Yes; I will try to reconstruct the events in the order of their occurrence. It began with the murder of Van Zellen by Bendelow. There was no evidence against him at the time, but he had to fly from America for other reasons and he left behind him incriminating traces which he knew must presently be discovered and which would fix the murder on him. His friend Crile, who fled with him, developed gastric cancer and only had a month or two to live. Then Bendelow decided that when Crile should die, he would make believe to die at that same time. To this end, he commissioned your father to make a wax mask—a portrait mask of himself with his eyes closed. His wife must then have persuaded the two spinsters to visit him—he, of course, taking to his bed when they called and being represented as a mortally sick man. Then they moved from Hornsey to Hoxton, taking Crile with him. There he engaged two doctors—Usher and Gray, both of whom lived at a distance—to attend Crile and to visit him on alternate days. Crile seems to have been deaf, or at least, hard of hearing, and was kept continuously under the influence of morphia. Usher, who was employed by Mrs. Bendelow—whom he knew as Mrs. Pepper—came to the front of the house in Field Street to visit Mr. Crile, while Stephen, who was employed by the Bendelows—whom he knew by the name of Morris—entered at the rear of the house in Market Street to visit the same man under the name of Bendelow. About the time of the move, Bendelow committed the murder in order to destroy all evidence of the making of the wax mask.
“Eventually Crile died—or was finished off with an extra dose of morphia—on a Thursday. Usher gave the certificate and the funeral took place on the Saturday. But previously—probably on the Friday night—the coffin-lid was unscrewed by Bendelow, the body taken out and replaced by a sack of sawdust with some lead pipe in it.
“On the Monday the body was again produced; this time as that of Simon Bendelow, who was represented as having died on the Sunday afternoon. It was put in a cremation coffin with a celluloid window in the lid. The wax mask was placed over the face; the jaw-bandage and the skull-cap adjusted to hide the place where the wax face joined the real face; and the two spinsters were brought up to see Mr. Bendelow in his coffin. They looked in through the window and, of course, saw the wax mask of Bendelow. Then they retired. The coffin-lid was taken off, the wax mask removed, the coffin-lid screwed on again, and then the two doctors were brought up. They removed the body from the coffin, examined it and put it back; and Bendelow—or Morris—put on the coffin-lid.
“As soon as the doctors were gone, the coffin-lid was taken off again, the wax mask was put back and adjusted and the coffin-lid replaced and screwed down finally. Then the two ladies were brought up again to take a last look at poor Mr. Bendelow; not actually the last look, for, at the funeral, they peeped in at the window and saw the wax face just before the coffin was passed through into the crematorium.”
“It was a diabolically clever scheme,” said I.
“It was,” he agreed. “It was perfectly convincing and consistent. If you and those two ladies had been put in the witness-box, your testimony and theirs would have been in complete agreement. They had seen Simon Bendelow (whom they knew quite well) in his coffin. A few minutes later, you had seen Simon Bendelow in his coffin, had taken the body out, examined it thoroughly and put it back, and had seen the coffin-lid screwed down; and again a few minutes later they had looked in through the coffin-window and had again seen Simon Bendelow. The evidence would appear to be beyond the possibility of a doubt. Simon Bendelow was proved conclusively to be dead and cremated and was doubly certified to have died from natural causes. Nothing could be more complete.
/> “And yet,” he continued, after a pause, “while we are impressed by the astonishing subtlety and ingenuity displayed, we are almost more impressed by the fundamental stupidity exhibited along with it—a stupidity that seems to be characteristic of this type of criminal. For all the security that was gained by one part of the scheme was destroyed by the idiotic efforts to guard against dangers that had no existence. The murder was not only a foul crime; it was a tactical blunder of the most elementary kind. But for that murder, Bendelow would now be alive and in unchallenged security. The cremation scheme was completely successful. It deceived everybody. Even the two detectives, though they felt vague suspicions, saw no loophole. They had to accept the appearances at their face value.
“But it was the old story. The wrong-doer could not keep quiet. He must be for ever making himself safer and yet more safe. At each move he laid down fresh tracks. And so, in the end, he delivered himself into our hands.”
He paused and for a while seemed to be absorbed in reflection on what he had been telling us. Presently he looked up, and, addressing Marion, said in quiet, grave tones:
“We have ended our quest and we have secured retribution. Justice was beyond our reach; for complete justice implies restitution; and to attain that, the dead must have been recalled from beyond the grave. But, at least sometimes, out of evil cometh good. Surely it will seem to you when, in the happy years which I trust and confidently believe lie before you, your thoughts turn back to the days of your mourning and grief, that the beloved father, who, when living, made your happiness his chief concern, even in dying bequeathed to you a blessing.”
Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFO
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
THE MEGAPACK SERIES
INTRODUCTION: MEET DR. THORNDYKE, by R. Austin Freeman
THE BLUE SCARAB (1923)
THE NEW JERSEY SPHINX (1923)
THE TOUCHSTONE (1923)
A FISHER OF MEN (1923)
THE STOLEN INGOTS (1923)
THE FUNERAL PYRE (1923)
THE CAT’S EYE (1923) [Part 1]
THE CAT’S EYE (1923) [Part 2]
THE MYSTERY OF ANGELINA FROOD (1924) [Part 1]
THE MYSTERY OF ANGELINA FROOD (1924) [Part 2]
THE SHADOW OF THE WOLF (1925) [Part 1]
THE SHADOW OF THE WOLF (1925) [Part 2]
THE PUZZLE LOCK (1925)
THE GREEN CHECK JACKET (1925)
THE SEAL OF NEBUCHADNEZZAR (1925)
PHYLLIS ANNESLEY’S PERIL (1925)
A SOWER OF PESTILENCE (1925)
REX V. BURNABY (1925)
A MYSTERY OF THE SAND-HILLS (1925)
THE APPARITION OF BURLING COURT (1925)
THE MYSTERIOUS VISITOR (1925)
THE D’ARBLAY MYSTERY (1926) [Part 1]
THE D’ARBLAY MYSTERY (1926) [Part 2]
The Second R. Austin Freeman Megapack Page 145