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

by R. Austin Freeman

  There was joy among the journalists on the following day. Each of the morning papers devoted an entire column to an unusually detailed account of the inquest on the late Percival Bland—who, it appeared, met his death by misadventure—and a verbatim report of the coroner’s eloquent remarks on the danger of solitary, fireside tippling, and the stupefying effects of port wine. An adjacent column contained an equally detailed account of the appearance of the deceased at Bow Street Police Court to answer complicated charges of arson, fraud and forgery; while a third collated the two accounts with gleeful commentaries.

  Mr. Percival Bland, alias Robert Lindsay, now resides on the breezy uplands of Dartmoor, where, in his abundant leisure, he, no doubt, regrets his misdirected ingenuity. But he has not laboured in vain. To the Lord Chancellor he has furnished an admirable illustration of the danger of appointing lay coroners; and to me an unforgettable warning against the effects of suggestion.

  THE CASE OF THE WHITE FOOTPRINTS (1920)

  “Well,” said my friend Foxton, pursuing a familiar and apparently inexhaustible topic, “I’d sooner have your job than my own.”

  “I’ve no doubt you would,” was my unsympathetic reply. “I never met a man who wouldn’t. We all tend to consider other men’s jobs in terms of their advantages and our own in terms of their drawbacks. It is human nature.”

  “Oh, it’s all very well for you to be so beastly philosophical,” retorted Foxton. “You wouldn’t be if you were in my place. Here, in Margate, it’s measles, chicken-pox and scarlatina all the summer, and bronchitis, colds and rheumatism an the winter. A deadly monotony. Whereas you and Thorndyke sit there in your chambers and let your clients feed you up with the raw material of romance. Why, your life is a sort of everlasting Adelphi drama.”

  “You exaggerate, Foxton,” said I. “We, like you, have our routine work, only it is never heard of outside the Law Courts; and you, like every other doctor, must run up against mystery and romance from time to time.”

  Foxton shook his head as he held out his hand for my cup. “I don’t,” said be. “My practice yields nothing but an endless round of dull routine.”

  And then, as if in commentary on this last statement, the housemaid burst into the room and, with hardly dissembled agitation, exclaimed:

  “If you please, sir, the page from Beddingfield’s Boarding-house says that a lady has been found dead in her bed and would you go round there immediately.”

  “Very well, Jane,” said Foxton, and as the maid retired, he deliberately helped himself to another fried egg and, looking across the table at me, exclaimed: “Isn’t that always the way? Come immediately—now—this very instant, although the patient may have been considering for a day or two whether he’ll send for you or not. But directly he decides you must spring out of bed, or jump up from your breakfast, and run.”

  “That’s quite true,” I agreed; “but this really does seem to be an urgent case.”

  “What’s the urgency?” demanded Foxton. “The woman is already dead. Anyone would think she was in imminent danger of coming to life again and that my instant arrival the only thing that could prevent such a catastrophe.”

  “You’ve only a third-hand statement that she is dead,” said I. “It is just possible that she isn’t; and even if she is, as you will have to give evidence at the inquest, you do want the police to get there first and turn out the room before you’ve made your inspection.”

  “Gad!” exclaimed Foxton. “I hadn’t thought of that. Yes. You’re right. I’ll hop round at once.”

  He swallowed the remainder of the egg at a single gulp rose from the table. Then he paused and stood for a few moments looking down at me irresolutely.

  “I wonder, Jervis,” he said, “if you would mind coming round with me. You know all the medico-legal ropes, and I don’t. What do you say?”

  I agreed instantly, having, in fact, been restrained only by delicacy from making the suggestion myself; and when I had fetched from my room my pocket camera and telescopic tripod, we set forth together without further delay.

  Beddingfield’s Boarding-house was but a few minutes walk from Foxton’s residence being situated near the middle of Ethelred Road, Cliftonville, a quiet, suburban street which abounded in similar establishments, many of which, I noticed, were undergoing a spring-cleaning and renovation to prepare them for the approaching season.

  “That’s the house,” said Foxton, “where that woman is standing at the front door. Look at the boarders, collected at the dining-room window. There’s a rare commotion in that house, I’ll warrant.”

  Here, arriving at the house, he ran up the steps and accosted in sympathetic tones the elderly woman who stood by the open street door.

  “What a dreadful thing this is, Mrs. Beddingfield! Terrible! Most distressing for you!”

  “Ah, you’re right, Dr. Foxton,” she replied. “It’s an awful affair. Shocking. So bad for business, too. I do hope, and trust there won’t be any scandal.”

  “I’m sure I hope not,” said Foxton. “There shan’t be I can help it. And as my friend Dr. Jervis, who is staying with me for a few days, is a lawyer as well as a doctor, we shall have the best advice. When was the affair discovered?”

  “Just before I sent for you, Dr. Foxton. The maid, noticed that Mrs. Toussaint—that is the poor creature’s name—had not taken in her hot water, so she knocked at the door. As she couldn’t get any answer, she tried the door and found it bolted on the inside, and then she came and told me. I went up and knocked loudly, and then, as I couldn’t get any reply, I told our boy, James, to force the door open with a case-opener, which he did quite easily as the bolt was only a small one. Then I went in, all of a tremble, for I had a presentiment that there was something wrong; and there she was lying stone dead, with a most ’orrible stare on her face and an empty bottle in her hand.”

  “A bottle, eh!” said Foxton.

  “Yes. She’d made away with herself, poor thing; and all on account of some silly love affair—and it was hardly even that.”

  “Ah,” said Foxton. “The usual thing. You must tell us about that later. Now we’d better go up and see the patient—at least the—er—perhaps you’ll show us the room, Mrs. Beddingfield.”

  The landlady turned and preceded us up the stairs to the first-floor back, where she paused, and softly opening a door, peered nervously into the room. As we stepped past her and entered, she seemed inclined to follow, but, at a significant glance from me, Foxton persuasively ejected her and closed the door. Then we stood silent for a while and looked about us.

  In the aspect of the room there was something strangely incongruous with the tragedy that had been enacted within its walls; a mingling of the commonplace and the terrible that almost amounted to anticlimax. Through the wide-open window the bright spring sunshine streamed in on the garish wallpaper and cheap furniture; from the street below, the periodic shouts of a man selling “sole and mack-ro!” broke into the brisk staccato of a barrel-organ and both sounds mingled with a raucous voice close at hand, cheerfully trolling a popular song, and accounted for by a linen-clad elbow that bobbed in front of the window and evidently appertained to a house-painter on an adjacent ladder.

  It was all very commonplace and familiar and discordantly out of character with the stark figure that lay on the bed like a waxen effigy symbolic of tragedy. Here was none of that gracious somnolence in which death often presents itself with a suggestion of eternal repose. This woman was dead; horribly, aggressively dead. The thin, sallow face was rigid as stone, the dark eyes stared into infinite space with a horrid fixity that was quite disturbing to look on. And yet the posture of the corpse was not uneasy, being, in fact, rather curiously symmetrical, with both arms outside the bedclothes and both hands closed, the right grasping, as Mrs. Beddingfield had said, an empty bottle.

  “Well,” said Foxton, as he stood looking down on the dead woman, “it seems a pretty clear case. She appears to have laid herself out and kept hold of the b
ottle so that there should be no mistake. How long do you suppose this woman has been dead, Jervis?”

  I felt the rigid limbs and tested the temperature of the body surface.

  “Not less than six hours,” I replied. “Probably more. I should say that she died about two o’clock this morning.”

  “And that is about all we can say,” said Foxton, “until the post-mortem has been made. Everything looks quite straightforward. No signs of a struggle or marks of violence. That blood on the mouth is probably due to her biting her lip when she drank from the bottle. Yes; here’s a little cut on the inside of the lip, corresponding to the upper incisors. By the way, I wonder if there is anything left in the bottle.”

  As he spoke, he drew the small, unlabelled, green glass phial from the closed hand—out of which it slipped quite easily—and held it up to the light.

  “Yes,” he exclaimed, “there’s more than a drachm left; quite enough for an analysis. But I don’t recognize the smell. Do you?”

  I sniffed at the bottle and was aware of a faint unfamiliar vegetable odour.

  “No,” I answered. “It appears to be a watery solution of some kind, but I can’t give it a name. Where is the cork?”

  “I haven’t seen it,” he replied. “Probably it is on the floor somewhere.”

  We both stooped to look for the missing cork and presently found it in the shadow, under the little bedside table. But, in the course of that brief search, I found something else, which had indeed been lying in full view all the time—a wax match. Now a wax match is a perfectly innocent and very commonplace object, but yet the presence of this one gave me pause. In the first place, women do not, as a rule, use wax matches, though there was not much in that. What was more to the point was that the candlestick by the bedside contained a box of safety matches, and that, as the burnt remains of one lay in the tray, it appeared to have been used to light the candle. Then why the wax match?

  While I was turning over this problem Foxton had corked the bottle, wrapped it carefully in a piece of paper which he took from the dressing-table and bestowed it in his pocket.

  “Well, Jervis,” said he, “I think we’ve seen everything. The analysis and the post-mortem will complete the case. Shall we go down and hear what Mrs. Beddingfield has to say?”

  But that wax match, slight as was its significance, taken alone, had presented itself to me as the last of a succession of phenomena each of which was susceptible of a sinister interpretation; and the cumulative effect of these slight suggestions began to impress me somewhat strongly.

  “One moment, Foxton,” said I. “Don’t let us take anything for granted. We are here to collect evidence, and we must go warily. There is such a thing as homicidal poisoning, you know.”

  “Yes, of course,” he replied, “but there is nothing to suggest it in this case; at least, I see nothing. Do you?”

  “Nothing very positive,” said I; “but there are some facts that seem to call for consideration. Let us go over what we have seen. In the first place, there is a distinct discrepancy in the appearance of the body. The general easy, symmetrical posture, like that of a figure on a tomb, suggests the effect of a slow, painless poison. But look at the face. There is nothing reposeful about that. It is very strongly suggestive of pain or terror or both.”

  “Yes,” said Foxton, “that is so. But you can’t draw any satisfactory conclusions from the facial expression of dead bodies. Why, men who have been hanged, or even, stabbed, often look as peaceful as babes.”

  “Still,” I red “it is a fact to be noted. Then there is that cut on the lip. It may have been produced in the way you suggest; but it may equally well he the result of pressure on the mouth.”

  Foxton made no comment on this beyond a slight shrug of the shoulders, and I continued:

  “Then there is the state of the band. It was closed, but, it did not really grasp the object it contained. You drew the bottle out without any resistance. It simply lay in the closed hand. But that is not a normal state of affairs. As you know, when a person dies grasping any object, either the hand relaxes and lets it drop, or the muscular action passes into cadaveric spasm and grasps the object firmly. And lastly, there is this wax match. Where did it come from? The dead woman apparently lit her candle with a safety match from the box. It is a small matter, but it wants explaining.”

  Foxton raised his eyebrows protestingly. “You’re like all specialists, Jervis,” said he. “You see your speciality in everything. And while you are straining these flimsy suggestions to turn a simple suicide into murder, you ignore the really conclusive fact that the door was bolted and had to be broken open before anyone could get in.”

  “You are not forgetting, I suppose,” said I, “that the window was wide open and that there were house-painters about and possibly a ladder left standing against the house.”

  “As to the ladder,” said Foxton, “that is a pure assumption; but we can easily settle the question by asking that fellow out there if it was or was not left standing last night.”

  Simultaneously we moved towards the window; but halfway we both stopped short. For the question of the ladder had in a moment became negligible. Staring up at us from the dull red linoleum which covered the floor were the impressions of a pair of bare feet, imprinted in white paint with the distinctness of a woodcut. There was no need to ask if they had been made by the dead woman: they were unmistakably the feet of a man, and large feet at that. Nor could there be any doubt as to whence those feet had come. Beginning with startling distinctness under the window, the tracks shed rapidly in intensity until they reached the carpeted portion of the room, where they vanished abruptly; and only by the closest scrutiny was it possible to detect the faint traces of the retiring tracks.

  Foxton and I stood for some moments gazing in, silence at the sinister white shapes; then we looked at one another.

  “You’ve saved me from a most horrible blunder, Jervis,” said Foxton. “Ladder or no ladder, that fellow came in at the window; and he came in last night, for I saw them painting these window-sills yesterday afternoon. Which side did he come from, I wonder?”

  We moved to the window and looked out on the sill. A set of distinct, though smeared impressions on the new paint gave unneeded confirmation and showed that the intruder had approached from the left side, close to which was a cast-iron stack-pipe, now covered with fresh green paint.

  “So,” said Foxton, “the presence or absence of the ladder is of no significance. The man got into the window somehow, and that’s all that matters.”

  “On the contrary,” said I, “the point may be of considerable importance in identification. It isn’t everyone who could climb up a stack-pipe, whereas most people could make shift to climb a ladder, even if it were guarded by a plank. But the fact that the man took off his boots and socks suggests that he came up by the pipe. If he had merely aimed at silencing his footfalls, he would probably have removed his boots only.”

  From the window we turned to examine more closely the footprints on the floor, and while I took a series of measurements with my spring tape Foxton entered them in my notebook.

  “Doesn’t it strike you as rather odd, Jervis,” said he, “that neither of the little toes has made any mark?”

  “It does indeed,” I replied. “The appearances suggest that the little toes were absent, but I have never met with such a condition. Have you?”

  “Never. Of course one is acquainted with the supernumerary toe deformity, but I have never heard of congenitally deficient little toes.”

  Once more we scrutinized the footprints, and even examined those on the window-sill, obscurely marked on the fresh paint; but, exquisitely distinct as were those on the linoleum, showing every wrinkle and minute skin-marking, not the faintest hint of a little toe was to be seen on either foot.

  “It’s very extraordinary,” said Foxton. “He has certainly lost his little toes, if he ever had any. They couldn’t have failed to make some mark. But it’s a queer aff
air. Quite a windfall for the police, by the way; I mean for purposes of identification.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “and having regard to the importance of the footprints, I think it would be wise to get a photograph of them.”

  “Oh, the police will see to that,” said Foxton. “Besides, we haven’t got a camera, unless you thought of using that little toy snapshotter of yours.”

  As Foxton was no photographer I did not trouble to explain that my camera, though small, had been specially made for scientific purposes.

  “Any photograph is better than none,” I said, and with this I opened the tripod and set it over one of the most distinct of the footprints, screwed the camera to the goose-neck, carefully framed the footprint in the finder and adjusted the focus, finally making the exposure by means of an antinous release. This process I repeated four times, twice on a right footprint and twice on a left.

  “Well,” Foxton remarked, “with all those photographs the police ought to be able to pick up the scent.”

  “Yes, they’ve got something to go on; but they’ll have to catch their hare before they can cook him. He won’t be walking about barefooted, you know.”

  “No. It’s a poor clue in that respect. And now we may as well be off as we’ve seen all there is to see. I think we won’t have much to say to Mrs. Beddingfield. This is a police case, and the less I’m mixed up in it the better it will be for my practice.”

  I was faintly amused at Foxton’s caution when considered by the light of his utterances at the breakfast-table. Apparently his appetite for mystery and romance was easily satisfied. But that was no affair of mine. I waited on the doorstep while he said a few—probably evasive—words to the landlady and then, as we started off together in the direction of the police station, I began to turn over in my mind the salient features of the case. For some time we walked on in silence, and must have been pursuing a parallel train of thought for, when he at length spoke, he almost put my reflections into words.