The First R. Austin Freeman Megapack: 27 Mystery Tales of Dr. Thorndyke & Others

by R. Austin Freeman

  “I have recommended him to plead guilty and throw himself on the clemency of the court as a first offender. You must see for yourself that there is no defence possible.”

  The young man flushed crimson, but made no remark.

  “But let us be clear how we stand,” said Thorndyke. “Are we defending an innocent man or are we endeavouring to obtain a light sentence for a man who admits that he is guilty?”

  Mr. Lawley shrugged his shoulders.

  “That question can be best answered by our client himself,” said he.

  Thorndyke directed an inquiring glance at Reuben Hornby, remarking—

  “You are not called upon to incriminate yourself in any way, Mr. Hornby, but I must know what position you intend to adopt.”

  Here I again proposed to withdraw, but Reuben interrupted me.

  “There is no need for you to go away, Dr. Jervis,” he said. “My position is that I did not commit this robbery and that I know nothing whatever about it or about the thumb-print that was found in the safe. I do not, of course, expect you to believe me in the face of the overwhelming evidence against me, but I do, nevertheless, declare in the most solemn manner before God, that I am absolutely innocent of this crime and have no knowledge of it whatever.”

  “Then I take it that you did not plead ‘guilty’?” said Thorndyke.

  “Certainly not; and I never will,” replied Reuben hotly.

  “You would not be the first innocent man, by very many, who has entered that plea,” remarked Mr. Lawley. “It is often the best policy, when the defence is hopelessly weak.”

  “It is a policy that will not be adopted by me,” rejoined Reuben. “I may be, and probably shall be, convicted and sentenced, but I shall continue to maintain my innocence, whatever happens. Do you think,” he added, turning to Thorndyke, “that you can undertake my defence on that assumption?”

  “It is the only assumption on which I should agree to undertake the case,” replied Thorndyke.

  “And—if I may ask the question—” pursued Reuben anxiously, “do you find it possible to conceive that I may really be innocent?”

  “Certainly I do,” Thorndyke replied, on which I observed Mr. Lawley’s eyebrows rise perceptibly. “I am a man of facts, not an advocate, and if I found it impossible to entertain the hypothesis of your innocence, I should not be willing to expend time and energy in searching for evidence to prove it. Nevertheless,” he continued, seeing the light of hope break out on the face of the unfortunate young man, “I must impress upon you that the case presents enormous difficulties and that we must be prepared to find them insuperable in spite of all our efforts.”

  “I expect nothing but a conviction,” replied Reuben in a calm and resolute voice, “and can face it like a man if only you do not take my guilt for granted, but give me a chance, no matter how small, of making a defence.”

  “Everything shall be done that I am capable of doing,” said Thorndyke; “that I can promise you. The long odds against us are themselves a spur to endeavour, as far as I am concerned. And now, let me ask you, have you any cuts or scratches on your fingers?”

  Reuben Hornby held out both his hands for my colleague’s inspection, and I noticed that they were powerful and shapely, like the hands of a skilled craftsman, though faultlessly kept. Thorndyke set on the table a large condenser such as is used for microscopic work, and taking his client’s hand, brought the bright spot of light to bear on each finger in succession, examining their tips and the parts around the nails with the aid of a pocket lens.

  “A fine, capable hand, this,” said he, regarding the member approvingly, as he finished his examination, “but I don’t perceive any trace of a scar on either the right or left. Will you go over them, Jervis? The robbery took place a fortnight ago, so there has been time for a small cut or scratch to heal and disappear entirely. Still, the matter is worth noting.”

  He handed me the lens and I scrutinised every part of each hand without being able to detect the faintest trace of any recent wound.

  “There is one other matter that must be attended to before you go,” said Thorndyke, pressing the electric bell-push by his chair. “I will take one or two prints of the left thumb for my own information.”

  In response to the summons, Polton made his appearance from some lair unknown to me, but presumably the laboratory, and, having received his instructions, retired, and presently returned carrying a box, which he laid on the table. From this receptacle Thorndyke drew forth a bright copper plate mounted on a slab of hard wood, a small printer’s roller, a tube of fingerprint ink, and a number of cards with very white and rather glazed surfaces.

  “Now, Mr. Hornby,” said he, “your hands, I see, are beyond criticism as to cleanliness, but we will, nevertheless, give the thumb a final polish.”

  Accordingly he proceeded to brush the bulb of the thumb with a well-soaked badger-hair nail-brush, and, having rinsed it in water, dried it with a silk handkerchief, and gave it a final rub on a piece of chamois leather. The thumb having been thus prepared, he squeezed out a drop of the thick ink on to the copper plate and spread it out with the roller, testing the condition of the film from time to time by touching the plate with the tip of his finger and taking an impression on one of the cards.

  When the ink had been rolled out to the requisite thinness, he took Reuben’s hand and pressed the thumb lightly but firmly on to the inked plate; then, transferring the thumb to one of the cards, which he directed me to hold steady on the table, he repeated the pressure, when there was left on the card a beautifully sharp and clear impression of the bulb of the thumb, the tiny papillary ridges being shown with microscopic distinctness, and even the mouths of the sweat glands, which appeared as rows of little white dots on the black lines of the ridges. This manoeuvre was repeated a dozen times on two of the cards, each of which thus received six impressions. Thorndyke then took one or two rolled prints, i.e. prints produced by rolling the thumb first on the inked slab and then on the card, by which means a much larger portion of the surface of the thumb was displayed in a single print.

  “And now,” said Thorndyke, “that we may be furnished with all the necessary means of comparison, we will take an impression in blood.”

  The thumb was accordingly cleansed and dried afresh, when Thorndyke, having pricked his own thumb with a needle, squeezed out a good-sized drop of blood on to a card.

  “There,” said he, with a smile, as he spread the drop out with the needle into a little shallow pool, “it is not every lawyer who is willing to shed his blood in the interests of his client.”

  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 fingerprint as a kind of magical touchstone, a final proof, beyond which inquiry need not go. Now, this is an entire mistake. A fingerprint is merely a fact—a very important and significant one, I admit—but still 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 fingerprint 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.