Mycroft Holmes 03 - The Notched Hairpin

by H. F. Heard

  The inspector certainly liked a phrase and I was tickled by his attempt at eloquence. But I was even more pleased when, adding, “Now, for further specific proof,” he moved across to a desk and from one of its drawers took out a finely bound book. It was a delight to the eye. He held it up for us to study. I saw at once it was the beautiful Nonpareil edition of classical texts bound in pigskin and printed on esparto grass paper in that press’s fine font—a treasure indeed, and a lovely addition to the decor of any room even if you never opened it. Across its broad handsome back, in finely stamped gold letters that were miniatures of the Trajan Column inscription capitals, one could read with ease the title: Suetonius: The Lives of the Caesars. Martial: Epigrams. Pliny: Letters.

  Mr. M. took the noble volume from the inspector. “A charming selection! First, that almost unbelievable story of how absolute power came successively to twelve mostly commonplace men, with results utterly fantastic and generally fatal not only to those around them but to themselves. Then, the incomparably terse satire-comment on such a society by Epigram’s father. And finally, the quiet reflections of a perfect gentleman who lived just after that too-exciting time—the ideal position for a moralist. I have always admired this way of showing Latin’s Golden Age turning, as autumn does in late October, from the gold to the silver. Here’s an example: this placing of the famous Martial Epigram 1.14 on one page and on the opposite the Pliny Epistle 111.16. What could be happier—each throwing light on the other! And after the horrors of the actual tyranny, as Suetonius has given it earlier, the poet and the essayist select for comment an act of heroism that shines all the more brightly against the sullen background of arbitrary violence.”

  I think the inspector was a little impatient at Mr. M. for having caught and bettered his taste in rhetoric. Certainly I wasn’t sorry when we were brought back from comments on classical cutthroats to our actual problem.

  “You will see,” our informant went on, “why I have shown you this book. You are looking at the actual page which the victim was reading when the fatal impulse took him. It indicates what I feel sure any jury, without a doctor to help them, would conclude served as the ‘trigger action.’”

  “But,” Mr. M. challenged, “how do you know this was the actual page he was reading and not merely the way the book fell when he toppled over it?”

  “Look closely into the cleft of these pages. There’s cigarette ash, see, that silted down into the binding. That proves this was the point Sankey had reached when suddenly the impulse took him.”

  “But why …?” Mr. M. began; and then fell silent, reading.

  His question was apparently sensed by our very informed informant.

  “Reading live clues to trace dead men’s motives keeps one from having time to read dead languages,” he said. “But as soon as I saw that the ash had marked the last page the dead man had read, I had it translated. The vicar here, who had to come up to see about the funeral and whom I interrogated about Millum, is a fine Latinist and kindly made this rendering for me,” and he took a slip of paper from his pocket. “These lines do provide us with the sudden provocation, the final proof that here we have suicide.”

  But before he could read his scrap or I could shift round and glance at the original that had provided such an unexpected provocation to felo-de-se, Mr. M.’s voice, in the best lectern manner, boomed out: “‘Taking the dagger she drove it into her own side, withdrew it, handed it to her hesitating husband, remarking quietly as she sank, “It does not hurt, Petus!’” A fairly free translation, but it will serve.”

  And after paying himself this first compliment, he turned handsomely on his colleague, “Yes, that’s a fine piece of deduction and a core piece in your argument. Sankey, brooding on suicide, reads how noble it is to die, and, further, in this classic case, how easy death by self-stabbing really is! ‘So every bondsman in his own hand bears the power to cancel his captivity.’ And to borrow another line from the same poet so much greater than Martial, the bondsman may do it ‘with a bare bodkin.’”

  If our guide had been a little impatient at Mr. M.’s competing with him in phrase-making, that was now all forgotten at this open appreciation and apparent conviction. He almost flushed with pleasure, and showed his friendliness with an added desire to pile proof on proof; though by now I was quite satisfied and content in every sense of the word that here we did not have a murder but simply a person who didn’t seem to have been very nice, who had removed himself from the scene.

  But Mr. M. seemed to want more and co-operated at once when the inspector went on,” Well, Sir, that rightly does bring us to the bare bodkin itself, as I promised. Will you now let me go over it with you?”

  And, sure enough, Mr. M. brought out the little box from his pocket. They opened it, and this time I strained to get over their shoulders a glimpse of the relic. There it lay, a dismal piece of metal.

  “The fingerprints?” questioned Mr. M.

  “Agree with Sankey’s,” the other replied, “and not a trace of anyone else’s! So how could he have been stabbed by anyone else? They couldn’t have grasped his hand and made him stab himself!”

  “You know what this object is?” Mr. Mycroft was clearly determined to go on showing knowledge even if the case was closed, like an automatic lighthouse goes on giving out flashes of light though all the ships have gone into port.

  “Oh, some sort of objet d’art—a fake piece, I suppose,” the other answered casually.

  “No, it’s a real piece, on the whole. It’s one of those extravagant giant hairpins, made in the form of weapons usually. This one is a miniature of a long-bladed halberd. These large skewers were used by Renaissance ladies to adorn and fasten their high-built hair. It’s weighted at the blade end to keep it from toppling out of the hair coils. This one, as most of them were, is of silver. That accounts for its color. Tarnished or patinated silver, you know, is nearly black.”

  I did feel a little taken aback that I had dismissed as a worthless piece of pastiche not only a weapon that had just committed murder—if only self-murder—but also an archaeological object of some interest in its own right. But Mr. M., having made this his contribution to coiffeur curiosities, had gone back to mope over the Suetonius—always a danger of his mind, as much as Jane the maid’s, that attraction of irrelevant interests. How strangely, I thought, extremes meet—one mind too full, the other too empty; both, therefore, caught and held by anything!

  The inspector roused him with, “We should, I think, see Jane once more and ask her about this knifelike pin. Then I think we needn’t keep her on call any longer nor I further detain either of you. The case will be closed.”

  He called Jane, who was not far off, and at once asked her about the pin-paper knife. It was a theme she fancied.

  “That knife, I never did like it! You see that little pot over there, still a bit on the bright and cheery side? Well, believe me or not, that nearly lost me my situation! One day I gave it a bit of Polisho: it was as dirty as that horrid knife. And up the copper came as bright as the sun’s self. And then Mr. Sankey came in as black as thunder and said I’d ruined all the patty something and I’d be dismissed if ever I did such a thing again!”

  “Patina?” suggested Mr. M.

  “Patty or putty, dirt is dirt; but of course masters can be dirty, if maids must (and like to be) clean. But I left that horrid little knife alone and, indeed, he always liked it laid beside him as he read. Often he’d play with it, spinning it about or cutting the pages of books the publishers had forgot to. And now it’s turned on him.”

  The flow was stopped by the inspector again thanking our star witness, and once more she began to withdraw, obviously almost as pleased with her second act and exit as with her first. It was, however, her friend Mr. M. who gave her an encore.

  “I wonder whether you could tell us when it was that Mr. Sankey obtained this book?” And he held out the Suetonius for her to see. “I don’t see his bookplate in it, and I have noticed that it i
s in his own books as a rule.”

  I was surprised at this but shouldn’t have been, Mr. M. was like a juggler and conjuror rolled into one, and for every occasion on which you observed him picking up clues you may be sure there were half a dozen when you never observed him observing—indeed, the analogy was even closer; for often I found, at the cost of being crestfallen later, that when he appeared obviously to be attending to something, in point of fact this was a blind—he was really keeping his eye on another thing that was quite unaware it was being watched.

  But Jane rewarded his perspicacity with a hearty, “Well, now, Sir, you really are as sharp as the proverbial pin! True enough! It isn’t—or perhaps I ought to say” (and she lengthened her round face slightly as a salute to the unmourned dead) “it wasn’t his book. And I can tell you about it, too!”

  “Ah, you can!” said Mr. M., somehow making with his voice a tone that ridiculously reminded me of those few encouraging chords with which a brilliant and helpful accompanist, turning round to the shy singer, will rouse his protégé to go into action.

  “Yes,” said Jane, throwing herself into her mood of recollection. “Now I have it. I sees it as though I were going through it all again. As I’ve said, I let Mr. Millum in. And he holds the doors open for me. And there I see it again. It was just like him, but today it is just a bit more thoughtful-like. For I notice—you see, being that sort myself, naturally I notice kind things that aren’t merely careless kind, but cost—I notice that as he’d a big book in his right hand he’d have to open the door for me with his left, awkward-like; and I notice that he’s cut his left thumb and finger while so kindly doing that pruning the day before. I remarked on it and asked if I might bandage it properly. For it was done that clumsy he must have done it himself, and men—nor, for that matter, Mrs. Sprigg—are no use for such things, are they?” We submitted in silence to the charge. “But he, so anxious never to give trouble, said of course not! It was nothing. He was being overcareful to bandage it at all and please would I not nohow draw Mr. Sankey’s attention to it. As if I would! I’m a very poor storyteller if I’ve given the impression that he was that sort!”

  “Then, when I was arranging the ‘elevens,’ Mr. Millum was, I believe, putting the book down on that other table. I’m as sure as can be he said something about having brought round ‘that book, Suet ’n Onions.’ I remember the name, for Mr. Sankey was very fond of food, but food wasn’t fond of Mr. Sankey, and small blame to it, I say. He soured enough things round him, heaven knows. Not that I’d say a word against the dead; but if I did, well, I’d wager sweet food and such an acid stomach could never match or mingle. And when he couldn’t eat, as when he could, then he’d read about cooking. Oh, cook had her times, as I had. A sorrow shared is a true tie, and cook and I have shared ours, and make no mistake! He’d read up new recipes in fancy cook books by people who maybe could write, but, Lord, the troubles their fancies made for cook’s fingers. She’d say to me, ‘Doubt if one of them ever put down his pen to handle a rolling pin. And as for washing up, why, they’d faint at the sight of a dishcloth!’ Mrs. Beaton did for cook and for me. But this fancy stuff! Look at those books up there: Second Helping—heaven help us, what a name! And there, that white finical one, The Gay Glutton, and it so you couldn’t put it on a kitchen table for an hour! As cook used to say, ‘A cook book with a poor back is as bad as one empty in its insides.’ But I must say this latest Mr. Millum lent was, you see, well-bound, sensible as all things about Mr, Millum are. And the name, too. When you come to think of it, plain and frank-like—Suet and Onions, both good, plain victuals.”

  Even Mr. M. began to flag under this drive of anecdotage and took to handling the classic author degraded to the kitchen. He began lensing its pages for lack of other interest. Jane, too, at last perceived she had had her great hour and that repetition would not add force to her presentation.

  “Thank you, thank you,” tolled Mr. M. like a passing bell.

  And with, “So you see, murder it was and murder by some dangerous tramp,” as her last line, Jane was content to make her final exit.

  When she was gone, the two men were rapidly businesslike. The inspector ran through the points and Mr. M. checked them over.

  “No one enters the garden on the day of the murder save Millum, and he is seen off the premises by Jane. Hence we are once more back at suicide, suicide of a melancholic prompted by reading the classic passage which says that stabbing yourself through the heart is both quite easy and practically painless, and even permits of a graceful exit and last words of an improving sort, if you wish.”

  We had retreated to the hall, and I was glad to go, for I was tired and disappointed. A suicide is no substitute—save to a sleuth—for a charming summer resort. But Mr. M. was not finished.

  “You will, of course, now tell me about this Mr. Millum?”

  I was relieved by the answer: “Oh, that, as you’ve seen, is as clear as the rest of the case. He was an old friend of the deceased who lives in that twin house over the road here. He had taken great care of Sankey—who was not the kind of man with whom other people would trouble—and clearly Sankey depended on him quite a lot. He is a man—I’ve made the routine inquiries—liked as much by others as you see he is by the maid here. And another routine point: he is a man of very considerable means and has always lived quietly and generously with his neighbors down here. The vicar, though he said he was not what he could claim as one of his constant churchgoers, said that in all matters of charity he could always depend on his kindliness. No, even if any feature of the case should seem to point to him—and none do—the utter lack of motive would keep him clear. Indeed, he was so upset—for he is a sensitive type—that he has gone off for a few days’ holiday. I may add,” added the inspector, with rather a father-confessor look, “after quite rightly asking me whether it would be correct for him to do so. Yes, a likeable, open man, as you will have judged from our loquacious Jane!”

  Mr. M. paused, and I thought the day might be called a day and closed. But suddenly, of all things, I was called on to prolong it!

  “You see,” began Mr. M. almost diffidently, “you see, I brought my friend Mr. Silchester down here almost under false pretenses. I have often found his angle on things useful, so that, though he takes no interest in my work, I value and sometimes employ his gifts—so complementary to mine—by stealth! But today we were killing two birds with one stone, or viewing a kill and also chasing another kind of quarry. We thought we might take a house in the country, and certainly the one we have seen is very choice and maybe, with the slight cloud over it, might be cheap. I myself would not be disturbed by the fact that the late owner had launched himself from the garden into the unknown. But, anyhow I am glad to have seen this house and, as twins of this sort are as interesting as they are rare, do you think, before we go back to town, we might view that one opposite?”

  The inspector evidently respected Mr. Mycroft and was pleased to have won him from the certainty of murder to the higher certainty of suicide—a real gain in the gruesome gain of wits these two obviously loved to play. So he replied, “Yes, I think we could. I’ve been in and out there these last two weeks and know the housekeeper quite well now. As our Jane said, she too is a kind woman; though it is queer, isn’t it, how often kindly women don’t very much like each other?”

  While this was going on, he’d stepped up the flight of stone stairs that led to the hall door of this house, as a similar flight led to that we had just left behind us. The door opened so quickly that I felt we might have been watched, and we were welcomed here much as on the other shore. The inspector explained that Mr. Mycroft had been looking at the other house and had been so interested at the two being twins that he hoped she could be so kind, as he was sure Mr. Millum would wish, to show us over the place and its garden. She was a large, cheery, rather flouncy body in a copious but, in spite of that fact, tight chintz, and she bustled and chuckled ahead of us like a giant hen.

  As we
were led off, the inspector said, “I’ll leave you in Mrs. Sprigg’s good hands. I’ll be down at the inn when you come back to town.”

  “Don’t trouble to send the carriage for us,” called out Mr. Mycroft. “We’ll walk back; it will be charming.”

  We were taken over the whole house, and I fancied that Mrs. Sprigg felt a certain competitive necessity to show that her twin was as well-reared and cared for as was the rival over the way. Perhaps there was not quite the polish of the one we had first visited, but there were more beautiful things. And evidently here it was the master who cared while the maid seconded, while there it was the maid who provoked and the master who grudgingly permitted. When we had been taken to every room, I believe, save our leading lady’s bedroom, Mr. M. paused and so did Mrs. Sprigg, no doubt now certain that all that remained was the small transfer of cash-loaded thanks with which such surveys always terminate. But Mr. M. had a further request.

  “One of the charms of these houses is the beauty of the landscape which they serve to adorn. With their tine, parapeted roofs, what a noble prospect must be obtained from them. Do you think we might just run up ‘and view the landscape o’er,’ as the hymn says?”

  It was tactfully put. Mrs. Sprigg was evidently what is called in that part of the world “of chapel folk,” to whom an apt quotation from Isaac Watts, hymnist, is as sweet and telling as one from Horace to a classicist. “Why, of course,” she beamed. “But I fear the way up …” and here we saw professional pride getting ready its defenses, “is not quite dusted out, as you might say. I haven’t been out on that roof for ever so long and I’ve never seen Mr. Millum go up there neither. Come to think of it, the last time anyone was up there was last Michaelmas, when the tilers had to go up fixing down the tiles after the last big equinoctial blow we had.”