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

by R. Austin Freeman

  “I see,” said the latter. “Well, they have found the rest of the trunk, including, I understand, the ribs that were missing from the other part. Isn’t that so, Davis?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied the constable. “Inspector Badger says all the ribs is here, and all the bones of the neck as well.”

  “The inspector seems to be an anatomist,” I remarked.

  The sergeant grinned. “He’s a very knowing gentleman, is Mr. Badger. He came down here this morning quite early and spent a long time looking over the bones and checking them by some notes in his pocket-book. I fancy he’s got something on, but he was precious close about it.”

  Here the sergeant shut up rather suddenly—perhaps contrasting his own conduct with that of his superior.

  “Let us have these new bones out on the table,” said the police-surgeon. “Take that sheet off, and don’t shoot them out as if they were coals. Hand them out carefully.”

  The labourer fished out the wet and muddy bones one by one from the sack, and as he laid them on the table the surgeon arranged them in their proper relative positions.

  “This has been a neatly executed job,” he remarked; “none of your clumsy hacking with a chopper or a saw. The bones have been cleanly separated at the joints. The fellow who did this must have had some anatomical knowledge, unless he was a butcher, which, by the way, is not impossible. He has used his knife uncommonly skilfully, and you notice that each arm was taken off with the scapula attached, just as a butcher takes off a shoulder of mutton. Are there any more bones in that bag?”

  “No, sir,” replied the labourer, wiping his hands with an air of finality on the posterior aspect of his trousers; “that’s the lot.”

  The surgeon looked thoughtfully at the bones as he gave a final touch to their arrangement, and remarked:

  “The inspector is right. All the bones of the neck are there. Very odd. Don’t you think so?”

  “You mean—”

  “I mean that this very eccentric murderer seems to have given himself such an extraordinary amount of trouble for no reason that one can see. There are these neck vertebrae, for instance. He must have carefully separated the skull from the atlas instead of just cutting through the neck. Then there is the way he divided the trunk; the twelfth ribs have just come in with this lot, but the twelfth dorsal vertebra to which they belong was attached to the lower half. Imagine the trouble he must have taken to do that, and without cutting or hacking the bones about, either. It is extraordinary. This is rather interesting, by the way. Handle it carefully.”

  He picked up the breastbone daintily—for it was covered with wet mud—and handed it to me with the remark: “That is the most definite piece of evidence we have.”

  “You mean,” I said, “that the union of the two parts into a single mass fixes this as the skeleton of an elderly man?”

  “Yes, that is the obvious suggestion, which is confirmed by the deposit of bone in the rib-cartilages. You can tell the inspector, Davis, that I have checked this lot of bones and that they are all here.”

  “Would you mind writing it down, sir?” said the constable. “Inspector Badger said I was to have everything in writing.”

  The surgeon took out his pocket-book, and, while he was selecting a suitable piece of paper, he asked: “Did you form any opinion as to the height of the deceased?”

  “Yes, I thought he would be about five feet eight” (here I caught the sergeant’s eyes fixed on me with a knowing leer).

  “I made it five eight and a half,” said the police-surgeon; “but we shall know better when we have seen the lower leg bones. Where was this lot found, Davis?”

  “In the pond just off the road in Lord’s Bushes, sir, and the inspector has gone off now to—”

  “Never mind where he’s gone,” interrupted the sergeant. “You just answer questions and attend to your business.”

  The sergeant’s reproof conveyed a hint to me on which I was not slow to act. Friendly as my professional colleague was, it was clear that the police were disposed to treat me as an interloper who was to be kept out of the “know” as far as possible. Accordingly I thanked my colleague and the sergeant for their courtesy, and bidding them adieu until we should meet at the inquest, took my departure and walked away quickly until I found an inconspicuous position from which I could keep the door of the mortuary in view. A few moments later I saw Constable Davis emerge and stride away up the road.

  I watched his rapidly diminishing figure until he had gone as far as I considered desirable, and then I set forth in his wake. The road led straight away from the village, and in less than half a mile entered the outskirts of the forest. Here I quickened my pace to close up somewhat, and it was well that I did so, for suddenly he diverged from the road into a green lane, where for a while I lost sight of him. Still hurrying forward, I again caught sight of him just as he turned off into a narrow path that entered a beech wood with a thickish undergrowth of holly, along which I followed him for several minutes, gradually decreasing the distance between us, until suddenly there fell on my ear a rhythmical, metallic sound like the clank of a pump. Soon after I caught the sound of men’s voices, and then the constable struck off the path into the wood.

  I now advanced more cautiously, endeavouring to locate the search party by the sound of the pump, and when I had done this I made a little detour so that I might approach from the opposite direction to that from which the constable had appeared.

  Still guided by the noise of the pump, I at length came out into a small opening among the trees and halted to survey the scene. The centre of the opening was occupied by a small pond, not more than a dozen yards across, by the side of which stood a builder’s handcart. The little two-wheeled vehicle had evidently been used to convey the appliances which were deposited on the ground near it, and which consisted of a large tub—now filled with water—a shovel, a rake, a sieve, and a portable pump, the latter being fitted with a long delivery hose. There were three men besides the constable, one of whom was working the handle of the pump, while another was glancing at a paper that the constable had just delivered to him. He looked up sharply as I appeared, and viewed me with unconcealed disfavour.

  “Hallo, sir!” said he. “You can’t come here.”

  Now, seeing that I actually was here, this was clearly a mistake, and I ventured to point out the fallacy.

  “Well, I can’t allow you to stay here. Our business is of a private nature.”

  “I know exactly what your business is, Inspector Badger.”

  “Oh, do you?” said he, surveying me with a foxy smile. “And I expect I know what yours is, too. But we can’t have any of you newspaper gentry spying on us just at present, so you just be off.”

  I thought it best to undeceive him at once, and accordingly, having explained who I was, I showed him the coroner’s permit, which he read with manifest annoyance.

  “This is all very well, sir,” said he as he handed me back the paper, “but it doesn’t authorise you to come spying on the proceedings of the police. Any remains that we discover will be deposited in the mortuary, where you can inspect them to your heart’s content; but you can’t stay here and watch us.”

  I had no defined object in keeping a watch on the inspector’s proceedings; but the sergeant’s indiscreet hint had aroused my curiosity, which was further excited by Mr. Badger’s evident desire to get rid of me. Moreover, while we had been talking, the pump had stopped (the muddy floor of the pond being now pretty fully exposed), and the inspector’s assistant was handling the shovel impatiently.

  “Now, I put it to you, Inspector,” said I, persuasively, “is it politic of you to allow it to be said that you refused an authorised representative of the family facilities for verifying any statements that you may make hereafter?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I mean that if you should happen to find some bone which could be identified as part of the body of Mr. Bellingham, that fact would be of more impor
tance to his family than to anyone else. You know that there is a very valuable estate and a rather difficult will.”

  “I didn’t know it, and I don’t see the bearing of it now” (neither did I, for that matter); “but if you make such a point of being present at the search, I can’t very well refuse. Only you mustn’t get in our way, that’s all.”

  On hearing this conclusion, his assistant, who looked like a plain-clothes officer, took up his shovel and stepped into the mud that formed the bottom of the pond, stooping as he went and peering among the masses of weed that had been left stranded by the withdrawal of the water. The inspector watched him anxiously, cautioning him from time to time to “look out where he was treading”; the labourer left the pump and craned forward from the margin of the mud, and the constable and I looked on from our respective points of vantage. For some time the search was fruitless. Once the searcher stooped and picked up what turned out to be a fragment of decayed wood; then the remains of a long-deceased jay were discovered, examined, and rejected. Suddenly the man bent down by the side of a small pool that had been left in one of the deeper hollows, stared intently into the mud, and stood up.

  “There’s something here that looks like a bone, sir,” he sang out.

  “Don’t grub about, then,” said the inspector. “Drive your shovel right into the mud where you saw it and bring it to the sieve.”

  The man followed out these instructions, and as he came shorewards with a great pile of the slimy mud on his shovel we all converged on the sieve, which the inspector took up and held over the tub, directing the constable and labourer to “lend a hand,” meaning thereby that they were to crowd round the tub and exclude me as completely as possible. This, in fact, they did very effectively with his assistance, for, when the shovelful of mud had been deposited on the sieve, the four men leaned over it and so nearly hid it from view that it was only by craning over, first on one side and then on the other, that I was able to catch an occasional glimpse of it and to observe it gradually melting away as the sieve, immersed in the water, was shaken to and fro.

  Presently the inspector raised the sieve from the water and stooped over it more closely to examine its contents. Apparently the examination yielded no very conclusive results, for it was accompanied by a series of rather dubious grunts.

  At length the officer stood up, and turning to me with a genial but foxy smile, held out the sieve for my inspection.

  “Like to see what we have found, Doctor?” said he.

  I thanked him and stooped over the sieve. It contained the sort of litter of twigs, skeleton leaves, weed, pond-snails, dead shells, and fresh-water mussels that one would expect to strain out from the mud of an ancient pond; but in addition to these there were three small bones which at the first glance gave me quite a start until I saw what they were.

  The inspector looked at me inquiringly. “H’m?” said he.

  “Yes,” I replied. “Very interesting.”

  “Those will be human bones, I fancy; h’m?”

  “I should say so, undoubtedly,” I answered.

  “Now,” said the inspector, “could you say, off-hand, which finger those bones belong to?”

  I smothered a grin (for I had been expecting this question), and answered:

  “I can say off-hand that they don’t belong to any finger. They are the bones of the left great toe.”

  The inspector’s jaw dropped. “The deuce they are!” he muttered. “H’m. I thought they looked a bit stout.”

  “I expect,” said I, “that if you go through the mud close to where this came from you’ll find the rest of the foot.”

  The plain-clothes man proceeded at once to act on my suggestion, taking the sieve with him to save time. And sure enough, after filling it twice with the mud from the bottom of the pool, the entire skeleton of the foot was brought to light.

  “Now you’re happy, I suppose,” said the inspector when I had checked the bones and found them all present.

  “I should be more happy,” I replied, “if I knew what you were searching for in this pond. You weren’t looking for the foot, were you?”

  “I was looking for anything that I might find,” he answered. “I shall go on searching until we have the whole body. I shall go through all the streams and ponds around here, except Connaught Water. That I shall leave to the last, as it will be a case of dredging from a boat and isn’t so likely as the smaller ponds. Perhaps the head will be there; it’s deeper than any of the others.”

  It now occurred to me that as I had learned all that I was likely to learn, which was little enough, I might as well leave the inspector to pursue his researches unembarrassed by my presence. Accordingly I thanked him for his assistance and departed by the way I had come.

  But as I retraced my steps along the shady path I speculated profoundly on the officer’s proceedings. My examination of the mutilated hand had yielded the conclusion that the finger had been removed either after death or shortly before, but more probably after. Someone else had evidently arrived at the same conclusion, and had communicated his opinion to Inspector Badger; for it was clear that that gentleman was in full cry after the missing finger. But why was he searching for it here when the hand had been found at Sidcup? And what did he expect to learn from it when he found it? There is nothing particularly characteristic about a finger, or, at least, the bones of one; and the object of the present researches was to determine the identity of the person of whom these bones were the remains. There was something mysterious about the affair, something suggesting that Inspector Badger was in possession of private information of some kind. But what information could he have? And whence could he have obtained it? These were questions to which I could find no answer, and I was still fruitlessly revolving them when I arrived at the modest inn where the inquest was to be held, and where I proposed to fortify myself with a correspondingly modest lunch as a preparation for my attendance at that inquiry.

  CHAPTER XIII

  THE CROWNER’S QUEST

  The proceedings of that fine old institution, the coroner’s court, are apt to have their dignity impaired by the somewhat unjudicial surroundings amidst which they are conducted. The present inquiry was to be held in a long room attached to the inn, ordinarily devoted, as its various appurtenances testified, to gatherings of a more convivial character.

  Hither I betook myself after a protracted lunch and a meditative pipe, and, being the first to arrive—the jury having already been sworn and conducted to the mortuary to view the remains—whiled away the time by considering the habits of the customary occupants of the room by the light of the objects contained in it. A wooden target with one or two darts sticking in it hung on the end wall and invited the Robin Hoods of the village to try their skill; a system of incised marks on the oaken table made sinister suggestions of shove-halfpenny; and a large open box, filled with white wigs, gaudily coloured robes and wooden spears, swords and regalia, crudely coated with gilded paper, obviously appertained to the puerile ceremonials of the Order of Druids.

  I had exhausted the interest of these relics and had transferred my attentions to the picture gallery when the other spectators and the witnesses began to arrive. Hastily I seated myself in the only comfortable chair besides the one placed at the head of the table, presumably for the coroner; and I had hardly done so when the latter entered accompanied by the jury. Immediately after them came the sergeant, Inspector Badger, one or two plain-clothes men, and finally the divisional surgeon.

  The coroner took his seat at the head of the table and opened his book, and the jury seated themselves on a couple of benches on one side of the long table. I looked with some interest at the twelve “good men and true.” They were a representative group of British tradesmen, quiet, attentive, and rather solemn; but my attention was particularly attracted by a small man with a very large head and a shock of upstanding hair whom I had diagnosed, after a glance at his intelligent but truculent countenance and the shiny knees of his trousers, as th
e village cobbler. He sat between the broad-shouldered foreman, who looked like a blacksmith, and a dogged, red-faced man whose general aspect of prosperous greasiness suggested the calling of a butcher.

  “The inquiry, gentlemen,” the coroner commenced, “upon which we are now entering concerns itself with two questions. The first is that of identity: Who was this person whose body we have just viewed? The second is, How, when, and by what means did he come by his death? We will take the identity first and begin with the circumstances under which the body was discovered.”

  Here the cobbler stood up and raised an excessively dirty hand.

  “I rise, Mr. Chairman,” said he, “to a point of order.” The other jurymen looked at him curiously and some of them, I regret to say, grinned. “You have referred, sir,” he continued, “to the body which we have just viewed. I wish to point out that we have not viewed a body: we have viewed a collection of bones.”

  “We will refer to them as the remains, if you prefer it,” said the coroner.

  “I do prefer it,” was the reply, and the objector sat down.

  “Very well,” rejoined the coroner, and he proceeded to call the witnesses, of whom the first was the labourer who had discovered the bones in the watercress-bed.

  “Do you happen to know how long it was since the beds had been cleaned out previously?” the coroner asked, when the witness had told the story of the discovery.

  “They was cleaned out by Mr. Tapper’s orders just before he gave them up. That will be a little better than two years ago. In May it were. I helped to clean ’em. I worked on this very same place and there wasn’t no bones there then.”

  The coroner glanced at the jury. “Any questions, gentlemen?” he asked.

  The cobbler directed an intimidating scowl at the witness and demanded:

  “Were you searching for bones when you came on these remains?”