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

by R. Austin Freeman

  This appeared to afford the bereaved officer little consolation, but as the car was now ready, he bustled away, and I, having directed the man to put the coat away in a safe place, went back to my patient.

  Mrs. Chater was by now fairly recovered, and had developed a highly vindictive interest in her late assailant. She even went so far as to regret that he had not taken at least some of her diamonds, so that robbery might have been added to the charge of attempted murder, and expressed the earnest hope that the officers would not be foolishly gentle in their treatment of him when they caught him.

  “By the way, Dr. Jervis,” said Miss Halliwell, “I think I ought to mention a rather curious thing that happened in connection with this dance. We received an acceptance from a Mr. Harrington-Baillie, who wrote from the Hotel Cecil. Now I am certain that no such name was proposed by any of the spinsters.”

  “But didn’t you ask them?” I inquired.

  “Well, the fact is,” she replied, “that one of them, Miss Waters, had to go abroad suddenly, and we had not got her address; and as it was possible that she might have invited him, I did not like to move in the matter. I am very sorry I didn’t now. We may have let in a regular criminal? Though why he should have wanted to murder Mrs. Chater I cannot imagine.”

  It was certainly a mysterious affair, and the mystery was in no wise dispelled by the return of the search party an hour later. It seemed that the bicycle had been tracked for a couple of miles towards London, but then, at the cross-roads, the tracks had become hopelessly mixed with the impressions of other machines and the officers, after cruising about vaguely for a while, had given up the hunt and returned.

  “You see, Mrs. Chater,” Major Podbury explained apologetically, “the fellow must have had a good hour’s start, and that would have brought him pretty close to London.”

  “Do you mean to tell me,” exclaimed Mrs. Chater, regarding the major with hardly-concealed contempt, “that that villain has got off scot-free?”

  “Looks rather like it,” replied Podbury, “but if I were you I should get the man’s description from the attendants who saw him and go up to Scotland Yard tomorrow. They may know the Johnny there, and they may even recognize the coat if you take it with you.”

  “That doesn’t seem very likely,” said Mrs. Chater, and it certainly did not; but since no better plan could be suggested the lady decided to adopt it; and I supposed that I had heard the last of the matter.

  In this, however, I was mistaken. On the following day, just before noon, as I was drowsily considering the points in a brief dealing with a question of survivorship, while Thorndyke drafted his weekly lecture, a smart rat-tat at the door of our chambers announced a visitor. I rose wearily—I had had only four hours’ sleep—and opened the door, whereupon there sailed into the room no less a person than Mrs. Chater, followed by Superintendent Miller, with a grin on his face and a brown-paper parcel under his arm.

  The lady was not in the best of tempers, though wonderfully lively and alert considering the severe shock that she had suffered so recently, and her disapproval of Miller was frankly obvious.

  “Dr. Jervis has probably told you about the attempt to murder me last night,” she said, when I had introduced her to my colleague. “Well, now, will you believe it? I have been to the police, I have given them a description of the murderous villain, and I have even shown them the very coat that he wore, and they tell me that nothing can be done. That, in short, this scoundrel must be allowed to go his way free and unmolested.”

  “You will observe, doctor,” said Miller, “that this lady has given us a description that would apply to fifty per cent, of the middle-class men of the United Kingdom, and has shown us a coat without a single identifying mark of any kind on it, and expects us to lay our hands on the owner without a solitary clue to guide us. Now we are not sorcerers at the Yard; we’re only policemen. So I have taken the liberty of referring Mrs. Chater to you.” He grinned maliciously and laid the parcel on the table.

  “And what do you want me to do?” Thorndyke asked quietly.

  “Why sir,” said Miller, “there is a coat. In the pockets were a pair of gloves, a muffler, a box of matches, a tram-ticket and a Yale key. Mrs. Chater would like to know whose coat it is.” He untied the parcel with his eye cocked at our rather disconcerted client, and Thorndyke watched him with a faint smile.

  “This is very kind of you, Miller,” said he, “but I think a clairvoyant would be more to your purpose.”

  The superintendent instantly dropped his facetious manner.

  “Seriously, sir,” he said, “I should be glad if you would take a look at the coat. We have absolutely nothing to go on, and yet we don’t want to give up the case. I have gone through it most thoroughly and can’t find any clue to guide us. Now I know that nothing escapes you, and perhaps you might notice something that I have overlooked; something that would give us a hint where to start on, our inquiry. Couldn’t you turn the microscope on it, for instance?” he added, with a deprecating smile.

  Thorndyke reflected, with an inquisitive eye on the coat. I saw that the problem was not without its attractions to him; and when the lady seconded Miller’s request with persuasive eagerness, the inevitable consequence followed.

  “Very well,” he said. “Leave the coat with me for an hour or so and I will look it over. I am afraid there is not the remotest chance of our learning anything from it, but even so, the examination will have done no harm. Come back at two o’clock; I shall be ready to report my failure by then.”

  He bowed our visitors out and, returning to the table, looked down with a quizzical smile on the coat and the large official envelope containing articles from the pockets.

  “And what does my learned brother suggest?” he asked, looking up at me.

  “I should look at the tram-ticket first,” I replied, “and then—well, Miller’s suggestion wasn’t such a bad one; to explore the surface with the microscope.”

  “I think we will take the latter measure first,” said he. “The tram-ticket might create a misleading bias. A man may take a tram anywhere, whereas the indoor dust on a man’s coat appertains mostly to a definite locality.”

  “Yes,” I replied; “but the information that it yields is excessively vague.”

  “That is true,” he agreed, taking up the coat and envelope to carry them to the laboratory, “and yet, you know, Jervis, as I have often pointed out, the evidential value of dust is apt to be under-estimated. The naked-eye appearances—which are the normal appearances—are misleading. Gather the dust, say, from a table-top, and what have you? A fine powder of a characterless grey, just like any other dust from any other table-top. But, under the microscope, this grey powder is resolved into recognizable fragments of definite substances, which fragments may often be traced with certainty to the masses from which they have been detached. But you know all this as well as I do.”

  “I quite appreciate the value of dust as evidence in certain circumstances,” I replied, “but surely the information that could be gathered from dust on the coat of an unknown man must be too general to be of any use in tracing the owner.”

  “I am afraid you are right,” said Thorndyke, laying the coat on the laboratory bench; “but we shall soon see, if Polton will let us have his patent dust-extractor.”

  The little apparatus to which my colleague referred was the invention of our ingenious laboratory assistant, and resembled in principle the “vacuum cleaners” used for restoring carpets. It had, however, one special feature: the receiver was made to admit a microscope-slide, and on this the dust-laden air was delivered from a jet.

  The “extractor” having been clamped to the bench by its proud inventor, and a wetted slide introduced into the receiver, Thorndyke applied the nozzle of the instrument to the collar of the coat while Polton worked the pump. The slide was then removed and, another having been substituted, the nozzle was applied to the right sleeve near the shoulder, and the exhauster again worked by Polton.
By repeating this process, half-a-dozen slides were obtained charged with dust from different parts of the garment, and then, setting up our respective microscopes, we proceeded to examine the samples.

  A very brief inspection showed me that this dust contained matter not usually met with—at any rate, in appreciable quantities. There were, of course, the usual fragments of wool, cotton and other fibres derived from clothing and furniture, particles of straw, husk, hair, various mineral particles and, in fact, the ordinary constituents of dust from clothing. But, in addition to these, and in much greater quantity, were a number of other bodies, mostly of vegetable origin and presenting well-defined characters in considerable variety, and especially abundant were various starch granules.

  I glanced at Thorndyke and observed he was already busy with a pencil and a slip of paper, apparently making a list of the objects visible in the field of the microscope. I hastened to follow his example, and for a time we worked on in silence. At length my colleague leaned back in his chair and read over his list.

  “This is a highly interesting collection, Jervis,” he remarked. “What do you find on your slides out of the ordinary?”

  “I have quite a little museum here,” I replied, referring to my list. “There is, of course, chalk from the road at Raynesford. In addition to this I find various starches, principally wheat and rice, especially rice, fragments of the cortices of several seeds, several different stone-cells, some yellow masses that look like turmeric, black pepper resin-cells, one ‘port wine’ pimento cell, and one or two particles of graphite.”

  “Graphite!” exclaimed Thorndyke. “I have found no graphite, but I have found traces of cocoa—spiral vessels and starch grains—and of hops—one fragment of leaf and several lupulin glands. May I see the graphite?”

  I passed him the slide and he examined it with keen interest. “Yes,” he said, “this is undoubtedly graphite, and no less than six particles of it. We had better go over the coat systematically. You see the importance of this?”

  “I see that this is evidently factory dust and that it may fix a locality, but I don’t see that it will carry us any farther.”

  “Don’t forget that we have a touchstone,” said he; and, as I raised my eyebrows inquiringly, he added, “The Yale latchkey. If we can narrow the locality down sufficiently, Miller can make a tour of the front doors.”

  “But can we?” I asked incredulously. “I doubt it.”

  “We can try,” answered Thorndyke. “Evidently some of the substances are distributed over the entire coat, inside and out, while others, such as the graphite, are present only on certain parts. We must locate those parts exactly and then consider what this special distribution means.” He rapidly sketched out on a sheet of paper a rough diagram of the coat, marking each part with a distinctive letter, and then, taking a number of labelled slides, he wrote a single letter on each. The samples of dust taken on the slides could thus be easily referred to the exact spots whence they had been obtained.

  Once more we set to work with the microscope, making, now and again, an addition to our lists of discoveries, and, at the end of nearly an hour’s strenuous search, every slide had been examined and the lists compared.

  “The net result of the examination,” said Thorndyke, “is this. The entire coat, inside and out, is evenly powdered with the following substances: Rice-starch in abundance, wheat-starch in less abundance, and smaller quantities of the starches of ginger, pimento and cinnamon; bast fibre of cinnamon, various seed cortices, stone-cells of pimento, cinnamon, cassia and black pepper, with other fragments of similar origin, such as resin-cells and ginger pigment—not turmeric. In addition there are, on the right shoulder and sleeve, traces of cocoa and hops, and on the back below the shoulders a few fragments of graphite. Those are the data; and now, what are the inferences? Remember this is not mere surface dust, but the accumulation of months, beaten into the cloth by repeated brushing—dust that nothing but a vacuum apparatus could extract.”

  “Evidently,” I said, “the particles that are all over the coat represent dust that is floating in the air of the place where the coat habitually hangs. The graphite has obviously been picked up from a seat and the cocoa and hops from some factories that the man passes frequently, though I don’t see why they are on the right side only.”

  “That is a question of time,” said Thorndyke, “and incidentally throws some light on our friend’s habits. Going from home, he passes the factories on his right; returning home, he passes them on his left, but they have then stopped work. However, the first group of substances is the more important as they indicate the locality of his dwelling—for he is clearly not a workman or factory employee. Now rice-starch, wheat-starch and a group of substances collectively designated ‘spices’ suggest a rice-mill, a flour-mill and a spice factory. Polton, may I trouble you for the Post Office Directory?”

  He turned over the leaves of the “Trades” section and resumed: “I see there are four rice-mills in London, of which the largest is Carbutt’s at Dockhead. Let us look at the spice-factories.” He again turned over the leaves and read down the list of names. “There are six spice-grinders in London,” said he. “One of them, Thomas Williams & Co., is at Dockhead. None of the others is near any rice-mill. The next question is as to the flour-mill. Let us see. Here are the names of several flour millers, but none of them is near either a rice-mill or a spice-grinder, with one exception: Seth Taylor’s, St. Saviour’s Flour Mills, Dockhead.”

  “This is really becoming interesting,” said I.

  “It has become interesting,” Thorndyke retorted. “You observe that at Dockhead we find the peculiar combination of factories necessary to produce the composite dust in which this coat has hung; and the directory shows us that this particular combination exists nowhere else in London. Then the graphite, the cocoa and the hops tend to confirm the other suggestions. They all appertain to industries of the locality. The trams which pass Dockhead, also, to my knowledge, pass at no great distance from the black-lead works of Pearce Duff & Co. in Rouel Road, and will probably collect a few particles of black-lead on the seats in certain states of the wind. I see, too, that there is a cocoa factory—Payne’s—in Goat Street, Horsleydown, which lies to the right of the tram line going west, and I have noticed several hop warehouses on the right side of Southwark Street, going west. But these are mere suggestions; the really important data are the rice and flour mills and the spice-grinders, which seem to point unmistakably to Dockhead.”

  “Are there any private houses at Dockhead?” I asked.

  “We must look up the ‘Street’ list,” he replied. “The Yale latch-key rather suggests a flat, and a flat with a single occupant, and the probable habits of our absent friend offer a similar suggestion.” He ran his eye down the list and presently turned to me with his finger on the page.

  “If the facts that we have elicited—the singular series of agreements with the required conditions—are only a string of coincidences, here is another. On the south side of Dockhead, actually next door to the spice-grinders and opposite to Carbutt’s rice-mills, is a block of workmen’s flats, Hanover Buildings. They fulfil the conditions exactly. A coat hung in a room in those flats, with the windows open (as they would probably be at this time of year), would be exposed to the air containing a composite dust of precisely the character of that which we have found. Of course, the same conditions obtain in other dwellings in this part of Dockhead, but the probability is in favour of the buildings. And that is all that we can say. It is no certainty. There may be some radical fallacy in our reasoning. But, on the face of it, the chances are a thousand to one that the door that that key will open is in some part of Dockhead, and most probably in Hanover Buildings. We must leave the verification to Miller.”

  “Wouldn’t it be as well to look at the tram-ticket?” I asked.

  “Dear me!” he exclaimed. “I had forgotten the ticket. Yes, by all means.” He opened the envelope and, turning its contents out on the b
ench, picked up the dingy slip of paper. After a glance at it he handed it to me. It was punched for the journey from Tooley Street to Dockhead.

  “Another coincidence,” he remarked; “and by yet another, I think I hear Miller knocking at our door.”

  It was the superintendent, and, as we let him into the room, the hum of a motor-car entering from Tudor Street announced the arrival of Mrs. Chater. We waited for her at the open door, and, as she entered, she held out her hands impulsively.

  “Say, now, Dr. Thorndyke,” she exclaimed, “have you gotten something to tell us?”

  “I have a suggestion to make,” replied Thorndyke. “I think that if the superintendent will take this key to Hanover Buildings, Dockhead, Bermondsey, he may possibly find a door that it will fit.”

  “The deuce!” exclaimed Miller. “I beg your pardon, madam; but I thought I had gone through that coat pretty completely. What was it that I had overlooked, sir? Was there a letter hidden in it, after all?”

  “You overlooked the dust on it, Miller; that is all,” said Thorndyke.

  “Dust!” exclaimed the detective, staring round-eyed at my colleague. Then he chuckled softly. “Well,” said he, “as I said before, I’m not a sorcerer; I’m only a policeman.” He picked up the key and asked: “Are you coming to see the end of it, sir?”

  “Of course he is coming,” said Mrs. Chater, “and Dr. Jervis too, to identify the man. Now that we have gotten the villain we must leave him no loophole for escape.”

  Thorndyke smiled dryly. “We will come if you wish it, Mrs. Chater,” he said, “but you mustn’t look upon our quest as a certainty. We may have made an entire miscalculation, and I am, in fact, rather curious to see if the result works out correctly. But even if we run the man to earth, I don’t see that you have much evidence against him. The most that you can prove is that he was at the house and that he left hurriedly.”

  Mrs. Chater regarded my colleague for a moment in scornful silence, and then, gathering up her skirts, stalked out of the room. If there is one thing that the average woman detests more than another, it is an entirely reasonable man.