by Otto Penzler
“It was perfectly clear that the man had been killed suddenly, without warning, while he sat unconscious of any danger, engaged simply with the selection of a fly.
“The door to the room was locked, and it was bolted on the inside. All the windows in the room were closed, and had not been opened. Not one of them had been opened. We were able to tell this on account of the metal fixtures. They had been turned to hold the windows firmly closed, and they had rusted in that position. The windows could not have been opened unless they were turned, and if they had been turned, the rust would have been disturbed.
“We sent an expert down to make sure.
“He went over it very carefully with a glass. It was certain the windows had not been opened. Besides, when we did open them, we were able to do it only with difficulty, because they had remained so long closed.
“The markedly strange thing about the situation, so far as Bradmoor was concerned, was that the door had been so carefully fastened on the inside. Of course, whatever it was that ejected Bradmoor out of life may thus have fastened the door. But if so, how did it get out of the room? The bolt does not connect with the lock. It is at least two feet above the lock. It is a heavy oak door. The hinges were sound—the door had not been tampered with; the lock was right, and solid. The door had simply been strongly secured on the inside, and that was all there was about it. The key was in the lock on the inside.
“There was no way to get into this room, or to get out of it.
“The walls were all solid. It is true that the walls were wainscoted, paneled in heavy oak; but there was no chance of a secret exit; we took the panels all out, and went over every inch of the floor and ceiling. We could not have been mistaken—there was not any way to get into that room, or out of it, that we could conceive of; and yet here in the center of the room, on this hot afternoon, sat Bradmoor in a chair, shot through the chest—with a fishing rod in one hand, and a bright-colored fly in the other.
“Of course, we took the rod to pieces.
“But it was an absurd thing to do. It was the usual big fishing rod, about twelve feet long, and rather heavy. There were not any secret rigamajigs about the rod, nor about anything else connected with the dead man, that we could find. He had simply been preparing for an evening’s sport, when something killed him!
“You will not have failed to notice that I keep saying ‘something,’ and I suppose we shall have to keep on saying ‘some thing’—the curse of Sir Godfrey, over there, or Dunn’s God of the Mountain out of the Dunsany story.… I don’t know what it was!
“We had no clue to any assassin. Bradmoor had been pretty hard up, at the end—no one realized how hard up, until the complete collapse after his death. The servants had gone into the village. Of course, we looked them up—the cook, to visit her daughter who was ill, and the old butler to do the marketing. There was no one about the place, except the butler’s mother, in a little cottage in the garden—an old woman, practically unable to move from her chair.
“She was the only witness we had to anything; and her evidence included two features only: she had heard a sound, which she thought was the back-fire of a motor car—that, of course, was the sound of the shot that killed Bradmoor; and she had heard something leap into the water.
“Of course, she had a theory.
“All old women of her type have theories to explain mysterious happenings: the Devil did it! She heard him leap into the sea! Of course, she gradually supplied details, as such persons invariably do—details that could not possibly have had any basis in fact! The Devil climbed the wall, shot Bradmoor and leaped off into the sea. Well, no one but the Devil could have climbed it; it is a sheer, smooth wall, and descends fifty feet from the window to the water.
“Of course, we went over the wall. We scaffolded up from the bottom, and examined, carefully, every inch of it. There was not a mark on the wall! It is bare of vines, to begin with—and there is a thin green fungus over the whole of it. I do not mean a lichen. I mean the thin fungus that presently covers a damp stone. If there had been any attempt to scale this wall, we would have found the marks—and we did not find the marks; there was not a mark on it in any direction.
“We did not stop at the sill of the window. We went up to the roof. Nothing could have descended from above. There was a lot of dust on the roof—it had been long dry, and one could have made a mark on the tiles of the roof and on the gutters. We were minutely careful.
“There was not a mark or a scratch, either above or below that narrow slit of a window. No human creature could have climbed the wall and killed Bradmoor. The old woman’s theory was as good as any—it must have been the Devil.
“But she was profoundly disappointed that we did not find seared hoofprints on the wall. They must be there. We had not looked close enough! She wished to be carried out in her chair, so that she could examine it herself. She stuck to her theory. Of course, she could be persuaded out of her details—her amplifications of the thing. But she held stoutly to one fact—she had heard the Devil leap off into the sea!
“I put some of the best men from the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard on it at once; and they gave it up. Of course, we tried to get at it by the usual method of elimination. One had to consider every theory and see how it fitted the facts. How could anyone have murdered Bradmoor when it was impossible to get out of the room after having done it, or to get into the room if Bradmoor had himself locked the door?
“And how could the man have taken his own life?
“There was no weapon to be found; his right hand was clutched around a fishing rod; and his left hand was full of flies—with a bright-colored one between the thumb and finger. These things must have been in his hand before his death, and at the time of his death, for they were still clutched in his convulsed fingers.
“The wound was hideous. The man must have died instantly. He could not have moved after the thing happened. Every nerve must have been paralyzed. It was clearly beyond reason to formulate any theory which would have depended upon any movement of the man after the wound was made. The surgeons simply laughed at the idea.
“He could not have moved after the bullet struck him; and there he sat with his fishing tackle gripped in his hands. There could not have been anything else in his hands; and as I have said, there was no weapon.
“I don’t think we omitted anything in our efforts to get at a solution of the mystery.
“Everybody in the country about was put in inquisition. There had been no one in the neighborhood of the house on that afternoon. We knew the names of each person, and his mission, who traveled the road that afternoon. We knew every motor car that went over it, and every workman that walked along it. We knew where every man, woman, and child in the community was that afternoon. There was simply no clew to an assassin.… And there was no explanation.”
Sir Godfrey Simon’s eyes batted again.
“Except mine,” he said.
Marquis laughed. “Or Dunn’s—the Stone God stumping down out of the mountain; or the old woman’s theory. The country accepted that. It was even more popular than the theory Sir Godfrey advances.
“We have had a variety of mysteries at Scotland Yard during my time as Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department, and from Mayne’s time down; but the Mystery of the Letts, the Rising Sun postcard, or the affair of the Chinese Embassy were nothing to this.
“In every other mystery with which we have been concerned, there was always some possible explanation. One could make a hypothesis that did not outrage the human understanding; but one could not form a hypothesis in this case that did not outrage it.
“Now, that is an appalling thing when you stop to think about it! The human mind is very clever, very ingenious. When you present a mysterious case, it will furnish you with some solution; but it can’t furnish a solution for this case.
“Arrange the facts before you, and try it!
“A man is found dead in a locked room; there is n
o weapon; the fingers of both of his hands are gripped about objects that could have had nothing to do with his death. There is no way into, or out of, the room. There is a great, ragged hole in his chest. The sound of the shot is heard; and there you are.
“If you can formulate an explanation, you will be cleverer than the whole of England. There is nothing that the British public loves like a mystery; and when the details of one are given to them, every individual in the kingdom sits down to formulate an explanation. You can’t stop him—it’s an obsession. It’s like a puzzle. He goes on doggedly until he gets a solution. That’s the reason why, when Scotland Yard wishes to remove a mystery from public notice, it gives out a solution. The whole interest of the country lies in solving the mystery; once solved, it is forgotten.
“But even our best experts could not give out an explanation in this case; we wished to do so because we wished to keep the thing quietly in our hands until we could work it out. But we could not put out a solution; there wasn’t any!”
He paused in the narrative, and selected a cigarette from an open box on the table but did not at once light it.
“When it became certain,” he went on, “that no assassin could be connected with this incomprehensible tragedy, we turned back upon the details of the only witness who was able to furnish us any fact whatsoever. But with every day’s delay, and with each complication of the matter, the old woman’s story had become more involved. It was so decked out with fanciful imaginings that it became difficult to realize that the whole extravaganza was pure fancy, outside of two evidences.
“These two evidences stood alone as the only concrete features in the case; one, that she had heard a sound, which could have been the explosion of a weapon; that she took it for the back-fire of a motor car at some distance away indicated that it was a loud explosive sound.
“This fact seemed to be unquestioned.
“Bradmoor had been killed by a shot, and the sound of the shot had been heard. Of this we were certain; but that something had leaped off into the water was an evidence more in doubt. We were convinced that the woman had heard the sound of the shot that killed the old Duke, but we were by no means convinced that she had heard a splash in the water. That element of her story seemed always too closely associated with her theory—that the whole tragedy was at the hand and instigation of the Devil. Around that idea she presently built up her fantastic explanation.
“With every interrogation of her, she became more elaborate, more profuse in her details, and more extravagant in her assurance. She had heard the Devil leap into the sea. It was not a heavy splash—such as the body of a man would make; it could not have been the body of a man. It was a thin, slight, sharp splash, precisely what the slender body of a Devil’s imp would make as it leaped lightly from the edge of the window into the water—its pointed feet descending, its arm up.”
Henry Marquis laughed!
“She had every detail of it now. It must have given her an immense interest in life. Imagine that startling melodrama cutting into the monotony of uneventful days in a padded chair by a window. And from being a neglected and forgotten derelict, she was presently the heroine of a vivid romance, a person of importance to the countryside. The cottage was crowded, and she had the glory of a story-teller of Baghdad.
“The result was, of course, that she presently became useless so far as any further inquiry was concerned. That was clear. She was of value to us for two facts only—and one of them in doubt. That she had heard the shot was certain. We felt we could depend on that; but the splash was likely fancy. And the more we considered that element of the case, the more we were convinced that this was one of the colored details requisite to her theory.
“There was no ledge to the window. There was no way in which an assassin could have climbed there in order to leap off into the sea after the crime had been committed. There was no place beyond that window from which the shot could have been fired. There was only the open sea lying beyond it.
“Of course, there were improbabilities suggested—one of them was that the shot had been fired from the high mast of a sailing ship; but there had been no sailing ship on that afternoon. The officials of the Coast Service were able to assure us of that; they kept a record of everything. No sailing ship had been on the open sea on that afternoon inside of this point.
“Of course, we considered everything.
“Some crank sent us an anonymous letter, saying that the shot had been fired from an airplane, or a seaplane; and we looked into that. But there had been no such craft in the neighborhood on that afternoon. So those possibilities were excluded. They were so unlikely that it seemed almost absurd to inquire into them. But when you stop to think about it, they were the only theories that in any way indicated a rational solution of the matter; and that they were not the solution, there was, as it happened, conclusive evidence. There had been no sailing ship, and no aircraft, near the place on that afternoon.”
Marquis paused again. He lighted his cigarette at one of the candles on the table, drew the smoke through it an instant, and then came back to his narrative.
“I have been giving you this case in extended detail,” he said, “because I am trying to make you realize the difficulties that it presented, and how carefully those difficulties were considered. I wish you to understand, as we presently came to understand, how incapable the thing was of any solution. We returned again and again to it, as I have returned here in my narrative again and again to it, because we were constantly assailed with the belief that we had overlooked something. There must be some evidences that had escaped us—a way into that room, or a way out of it, by which an assassin could have encompassed Bradmoor’s death. But we got no further. There was no way into that room, nor any way out of it, and there was no way from above it in which an assassin could have killed Bradmoor; and yet there he was, shot to death in his chair!”
Henry Marquis laughed. It was an ironical chuckle of a laugh.
“The butler’s mother was the only person with a theory, and by Heaven, there were evidences to support it. She assembled them and fitted them together. She convinced the countryside. The very impossible things we found connected with the irrational explanations of the matter, were the strongest evidences of her theory.
“One had to consider them, no matter how practical one was.
“The very fact that we were able to show that old Bradmoor could not have been killed by any human agency of which we had any knowledge, proved, as she pointed out, that he could have been killed by a supernatural agency only. Certainly only a Devil’s imp could leave no marks on a wall, and could leap off, disappearing into the sea. Besides, Bradmoor had been afraid of the Devil!”
Henry Marquis hesitated a moment. He broke the cigarette in his fingers into fragments, crumbling them on the table.
“Now, there,” he said, “one came upon a series of evidences that had to be admitted. Bradmoor had been noticed to act queerly for some time. It was only after his death that the various trivial instances were precisely recalled, and fitted together. But they had been beyond doubt observed, and, now when they were connected up, they took on an unquestioned significance.
“The man had been afraid of something!
“He would lock himself into his room at night; he never sat long in one position; he would not stand before a window, nor sit with his back to an open door. It was recalled that he had been clever with an explanation of these idiosyncrasies—extremely clever. It was a draft he avoided before an open door. Or his eyes were sensitive to the strong light of a window; or he was nervous—too many pipes—he must find a milder tobacco, and so forth.
“The explanations covered the peculiarities while the man was living, and there was nothing to create a suspicion of some unusual motive; but after his death they became signboards that all pointed in one direction—the morale of the man had been gradually breaking down under an increasing monomania of fear!
“These evidences were all bright-color
ed threads for the Devil theory. Bradmoor had been afraid of the Devil! And he had not been afraid without a reason! The butler’s mother had a fine, lurid theory that pleased the countryside.”
Henry Marquis suddenly smote the table with his hand.
“But it could not be considered by us. There is only one thing of which I am absolutely certain, and that is that the supernatural does not exist. This is a physical world. Every problem in it has an explanation. The Devil is a myth.
“There was one thing only to do now,” he pursued, “and that was to go back over the man’s life to see if it contained any adventure that might be in any way connected with the tragedy. We began to investigate his life.”
The face of Sir Godfrey Simon beyond him at the table lifted unmoving, like a mask:
“There is where you made a mistake,” he said; “it was not enough to go back over Bradmoor’s life; you had to go farther than that.”
“Farther than Bradmoor’s life?” Marquis interrogated. “How could we go farther than that? What was farther than his life?”
A faint smile appeared on Sir Godfrey Simon’s face, but he made no reply.
Henry Marquis was annoyed.
“You mean the curse that killed Bradmoor!”
“Precisely that,” replied Sir Godfrey, his face unmoving.
“If you had come to me, I could have predicted what would happen to Bradmoor. He could not escape it.”
Marquis interrupted.
“Then you knew it was going to kill Bradmoor?”