The shepherd had shaken his head with the quiet firmness of a man who tells an unpleasant truth.
“Nothing come alive out of that pot,” he said. “Poor little beggar, but you can reckon he’ll be dead by now. It’s not a dry pot, you see, Mister. There’s a scour of water at the bottom.” Twenty years ago, continued the shepherd, a party of experts had gone down to explore. They had found a sheep, which had fallen in a month before. At least, they thought it was a sheep. The icy current and the jagged rocks had done their dissecting work very thoroughly and the evidence was by then inconclusive.
“Another month,” said the shepherd, “and there wouldn’t have been nothing left at all.”
“They ought to put a proper fence around it,” Arthur had said, angrily.
“So they ought,” the shepherd had agreed, but he had said it without much conviction because, rusty and rickety as it was, the fence was now strong enough to stop a sheep, and that was all he really cared about.
The day after Kenneth packed up his fly rods and left for the north, Arthur went on a walking tour. He went a certain distance by train, and after that he used youth hostels on some nights, and on others nothing at all, for he was an experienced camper, and could make shift for days by himself with a sleeping bag and a small primus stove. Four days later he passed the night in a tangle of thickets just above Howorth’s Farm. He had walked twenty miles the day before without putting his foot on a man-made road. He had provisions for seven days with him, War and Peace in the three-volume edition, and a strong pair of field glasses. Luckily the weather remained fine.
On the fourth day he saw Kenneth, a walking-stick in his hand instead of a fishing rod, coming up the hill by the path which ran past his encampment.
Hastily brushing himself down he slid out of the undergrowth, and made a detour, striking the path higher up.
Thus the cousins met, face to face, on a turn in the track, out of sight of the farm.
When greetings had been exchanged, Arthur said, “I’m based on a hostel over at Langdale. I thought I’d take a walk in this direction and watch you catch some fish.”
“Not today,” said Kenneth. “The dry weather has sucked the life out of the stream. The old boy down at the farm swears it’s going to rain tonight, and that I’ll get some sport tomorrow. Today I’m giving it a rest. Have you any ideas on what it would be fun to do? I don’t know the countryside myself.”
Arthur pretended to consider.
“It’s the best part of three miles,” he said, “but let’s go and look at that pot-hole I found five years ago.”
His cousin was agreeable.
It took them an hour, and Kenneth’s life depended solely upon whether they happened to meet anyone. A single shepherd, seeing them from a distance, would have made it necessary for Arthur to choose another time.
They met no one, and no one saw them.
Presently they were gazing down into the hole.
“You can almost hear the water running,” said Arthur. “Look out, man – don’t lean too far—!”
A month later Arthur sat again in the room of Mr. Rumbold, the solicitor.
“Tragic,” said the lawyer. “I don’t suppose we shall ever know the truth. He must have gone out for a walk and fallen down one of those holes. There are a lot of them in that district, I understand.”
“Dozens,” said Arthur, “and it would take a month to explore a single one of them thoroughly.”
“You were on holiday, yourself, when it happened?”
“I was on a walking tour. I may have been less than forty miles from the accident when it happened,” said Arthur. He never lied unnecessarily.
“A tragic coincidence,” said the lawyer.
Towards the end of the interview Arthur broached what was in his mind.
“I suppose,” he said, “in the circumstances – I know the formalities will take a little time – but might I be able to have a little money?”
“Well, I’m not sure,” said the lawyer.
“But—” Arthur took a firm hold of himself. “You said yourself,” he went on, “that it all went to the survivor.”
“Can you prove that you are the survivor?”
There was a long pause.
“I suppose not. Not prove it. Everyone assumes – I mean, he left all his things at the farm. No one’s heard a word from him since.”
“The law,” said Mr. Rumbold, “is very slow to assume that a man is dead. If, in all the circumstances, it appears probable that a man has died, you will, after a suitable time has elapsed, be permitted to deal with his estate—”
“A suitable time?” said Arthur hollowly.
“Seven years is the usual period.”
“Seven years – but it’s crazy! Mr. Rumbold, surely, in a case like this, where it’s obvious that an accident—”
“If Kenneth is dead,” said Mr. Rumbold, “and, as I say, the law will presume no such thing from his mere absence, but if he is dead, then I am not at all sure that it was an accident.”
When Arthur had recovered his voice he said, “What do you mean?”
“I tell you this in confidence,” said Mr. Rumbold, “as it was told me. But your cousin has been suffering, since the war, from a deteriorating condition of the spine. One specialist had gone so far as to say that he was unlikely to live out the year. I’m afraid he may have made his mind up, perhaps on the spur of the moment, to end himself. So you see—”
Arthur saw. He saw only too clearly.
Modus Operandi
Chief Inspector Hazlerigg, who has recently been promoted to superintendent, came from Norfolk to London at the age of seventeen and started his career pounding a beat in Whitechapel. He has risen by regulation steps at reasonably long intervals. His chief asset is that he looks so honest that no one ever attempts to bribe him. He possesses a rigid sense of right and wrong, which he inherited from his mother, who was a Quaker, and a shrewd ability to see round corners, which came from his father, who was a poacher.
He is very rarely angry about crime. This was one of the rare occasions. But then, in this case he had every reason to be.
Hazlerigg reserved his most intolerant criticisms for what he called ‘pinch of dust’ detectives.
I think the expression originated in his mind when I told him of a story I had read in a magazine about a detective whose only clue to the identity of a felon was a sample of dust from the turn-ups of his trousers – the felon’s trousers, I mean. Microscopic analysis revealed that this dust was composed in equal parts of a green chalk, of grains of sand of a type found only at Bognor Regis, and of particles of powdered granite belonging to a geological stratum which, surprisingly enough, approaches the earth’s surface at Bickley. It was then child’s play to deduce, look for, and arrest a billiard marker of Bickley who took his summer holidays at Bognor.
“Why?” said Hazlerigg. “Why not an enthusiastic snooker-player from Bognor with relatives at Bickley?”
“Or,” suggested Inspector Pickup, “a man who lived at Orpington but worked in a shop at Bickley and had in his back garden a sandpit that his predecessor had stocked with sand from Bognor.”
“Or a man who had bought a pair of trousers secondhand from a chap who had exchanged his trousers for—”
“All right, all right,” I said. “We yield the point. You mean, I take it, that it’s no good using these scientific analyses to catch your man.”
“Oh, there’s nothing wrong with science,” said Hazlerigg, broadmindedly. “Once the prisoner’s in custody, let science have its head. So long as it’s the sort of science a jury will swallow,” he added. “It’s taken them fifty years to believe in fingerprints.”
“Then if you don’t catch them by science—?”
Hazlerigg observed the bait, but appeared to accept the hook.
“That’s what you’ve been leading up to all along, isn’t it?” he said. “All right, I’ll tell you. There’s no terrific secret about it. Take burglars. Apa
rt from the ones which are actually caught on the job – and the British householder perpetually amazes me by his willingness to tackle anything up to twice his own weight in armed house-breakers – out of every hundred who eventually get caught, I should say that fifty, at least, run into trouble trying to dispose of the proceeds.
“And it’s a sad reflection on human nature,” went on Hazlerigg, “but the next biggest group are those who are given away by informers.”
“And the rest?”
“Miscellaneous. Hard work and concentration on the M.O. files.”
“I’ve never really understood that,” I said. “I mean, I know the principle of modus operandi. You are called to a burglary in Hampstead and you find that the pantry window has been forced with a bricklayer’s trowel and that the burglar has helped himself to a cup of tea before leaving by the back door. You then trot back to Scotland Yard, turn up the index, and discover that the only man on your books who habitually uses a bricklayer’s trowel and gains access by pantry windows and helps himself to a cup of tea is Smokey Joe. So you send someone off to pull Joe in, and if Joe can’t explain his movements last Friday evening, then ten to one he’s for it. That’s about it, isn’t it?”
“More or less.”
“But what I don’t understand is, why doesn’t Joe take the trouble to change his habits? He’s only got to open, say, the library window with a pick head, or even wait till he gets home before he has his cup of tea, and he’s safe as houses.”
“You might think so,” said Hazlerigg. “It doesn’t work out that way. First, because a lot of the items in the M.O. index are things that he can’t change or, at least, would be very unlikely to change. The type of stuff he steals – well, that’ll depend on what facilities he has for getting rid of it, doesn’t it? If his receiver gives him top prices for fur coats, then fur coats he must have. The demand creates the supply. Again, take the question of whether he works alone or not. Now, that’s a matter of temperament. He’s born with it—”
“In fundamentals, I agree; but what about the little things?”
“Look here,” said Hazlerigg. “If I told you that it was vitally important that you shouldn’t hitch up the knees of your trousers before sitting down in a chair – as I’ve noticed once or twice is a habit of yours – if I told you that your life depended on your not doing it, could you guarantee that you wouldn’t do it again – say, next week?”
“Well—no. Perhaps not. But I don’t think that’s a fair analogy.”
Hazlerigg grinned and looked at Inspector Pickup, who mouthed a word that sounded like ‘Copley’, and they both laughed.
That was all I got out of them, at the time. The story was still on the secret file. I heard the rest of it some time later.
During the aftermath of the late war, at a time when all the crime charts were rocketing, Scotland Yard started to become conscious of the activities of a new burglar. All criminals whose work is both distinctive and successful – successful, I mean, from the criminal’s point of view – are apt to acquire simple nicknames and this burglar was known to the police of the Metropolis and Home Counties as the Flat Man (because he specialised in flats) or more commonly as the Neat Man, because he never left many traces of his visit, unless you can call the absence of the owner’s silver, jewellery, and clothing a trace. He was also called the Neat Man for another reason which will presently appear.
“He works single-handed,” said Hazlerigg, when he was presenting an analysis to the Assistant Commissioner (the Neat Man had become as important as that). “And either he is the most marvellous lock-picker alive or else he has the art of selecting the right key for the right door. He never forces a catch. He never goes through a window. So far as we know, he enters like a gentleman, by the front door, which he opens, as I said, with a key or in some other painless manner.”
“Catch locks?” said the Assistant Commissioner.
“Oh, no, sir. Everything. Mortice locks and all. Then there’s another thing. He seems to know his way about so uncannily. We can usually pick up his footprints. He has an exceptionally small neat foot and often wears dancing pumps. Many of these expensive flats have wall-to-wall carpets, and when we arrive on the scene before it’s been too trodden over, we can follow his progress there and back. It’s always the same story. He comes in the front door; he goes straight to the room he wants; he takes what he can find – I mean, he never breaks open cupboards or desks, he just lifts whatever comes handy; then he goes straight back again to the hall – and then there was something used to puzzle us. You’d see his footsteps going straight up the hall. Suddenly, for no reason, they’d stop, there’d be a mark where he’d turned, and a pair of prints pointing sideways, towards the wall, if you follow me. Usually with the toe prints clearer than the heels.”
“It sounds quite mad to me,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “What did you make of it?”
“We made nothing of it at first,” said Hazlerigg. “But when we did spot it, well, it was perfectly obvious. He was a tie-twiddler.”
“A what?”
“A tie-twiddler or a hair-smoother, or a lapel-brusher – I mean, he was the sort of man who couldn’t pass a looking-glass without stopping for a moment to peer at himself.
Probably did it quite unconsciously. Being on the small side – as his footprints indicate – he usually had to stand on tiptoe. Hence the marks.”
“So all we’ve got to do,” said the Assistant Commissioner, “is to search London for a small man who admires himself in looking-glasses.” He didn’t say it unkindly. He appreciated the difficulties.
Inspector Hazlerigg had found himself in charge of the Neat Man investigation in the fortuitous way that things sometimes happened at Scotland Yard. The Neat Man seemed to specialise in stealing good clothes. The best market for stolen suits is Whitechapel. Hazlerigg had a lot of contacts still in Whitechapel. Therefore, the Neat Man was handed to him. Hazlerigg was neither pleased nor grateful. He had a good deal on his plate already. Nevertheless he made the routine investigations in the same thorough way that he did all his work. All the relevant reports were brought to him and he studied them and analysed them and cross-indexed the results and hoped for a break. Then, one night, the job ceased to be routine.
Hazlerigg was living, at that time, in a furnished flat towards the Highgate end of Hornsey Lane. He came home to it at a quarter to midnight after a long day. He felt very tired. When he got in he went to the sideboard for a tankard of beer and found, to his surprise, that the cupboard was empty. There had been some table silver in it as well as the tankards; also a pair of rather nice small Georgian candle-sticks. They were gone, too. With a sudden sinking feeling he made for his bedroom and opened the wardrobe. “Both suits and my dinner jacket,” he said, “curse him!” He reached for the telephone.
“It’s Mr. Neat all right,” said the divisional detective inspector. “It’s got all the trade marks. Here’s where he stopped to take a look at himself” – he pointed to a barometer that had been hanging on the wall predicting Wet to Stormy ever since Hazlerigg had come into the flat. “No marks of forcing on the door, either. Did you turn the lock when you went out, sir?”
Hazlerigg had the grace to blush. “No,” he said. “I forgot.”
From that moment he really started putting his back into the job.
First thing next morning he summoned Sergeant Brakewell to his room. What Sergeant Brakewell didn’t know about locks could hardly be classified as knowledge.
“How do burglars set about picking locks?” Hazlerigg asked. “In particular, the locks on the doors of flats.”
“Well, sir,” said Sergeant Brakewell, “it’s a big subject, roughly speaking—”
At the end of three-quarters of an hour he paused for breath and Hazlerigg said: “As I understand it, catch locks are easy. You push the tongue back with a stiff bit of talc, or gum the works up with liquid paraffin, and use a plain key. Mortice locks are more difficult, but most real experts h
ave such a fine collection of basic keys – what people call skeleton keys – that they can usually find one to fit. And if it won’t quite fit they cover it with lampblack, push it in, look at the scratches, file it down a trifle, and Bob’s your uncle.”
“That’s about it,” said Sergeant Brakewell.
“Right. Now, here are the records of more than forty housebreakings. We’re pretty certain they are the same man. I’ll let you have them to study and I’ll arrange for you to see the actual lock itself if you think it’ll be helpful – and if you want a recent and untouched specimen,” he added grimly, “I have the very thing for you at home.”
“So I’ve heard,” said Sergeant Brakewell with a discreet grin.
A week later he made his report.
“I think, sir,” he concluded, “that there’s no reasonable doubt. In every case the door was opened with a copy of the actual key. As I explained, where the lock’s new, a copy key will make very much the same marks as the regular one. But where it’s an old lock, one that has developed play, a copy, however careful, will leave marks.”
He enumerated them, and Hazlerigg listened a little absent-mindedly.
When Sergeant Brakewell had gone, he opened the classified directory and searched under the house agents until he found the firm he wanted. Then he turned to the records of the cases and went through them again, copying down details.
To Inspector Pickup, two days later, he confided the results of his enquiries.
“I think we’re on to something,” he said, “though I’m blessed if I can quite see how it works. If Brakewell’s right about the keys – and I’d back his judgement in that line against anyone in England – then it means that this burglar must at some time or other have had his hand on the original keys. But then you’re up against a difficulty. House keys are things people are apt to be a bit careful with. I mean, they don’t leave them lying about or entrust them to perfect strangers. I didn’t anyway. I don’t think my door key was ever out of my possession.”
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