“I brooded over the matter for a couple of days, putting all the rest of my practice out of thought, but I didn’t get any forwarder with it. I hate to give anything up as a bad job, and in this case I felt that there was on my shoulders a huge load of responsibility. Guide, I had thoroughly persuaded myself, had not murdered Andrew Walker; as sure as the case went into court, on its present grounding, the man would be hanged out of hand; and I persuaded myself that then I, and I alone, should be responsible for an innocent man’s death.
“At the end of those two days only one course seemed open to me. It was foreign to the brief I held, but the only method left to bring in my client’s innocence.
“I must find out who did really murder the man. I must try to implicate some third actor in the tragedy.
“To begin with, there was the railway carriage; but a little thought showed me that nothing was to be done there. The compartment would have been inspected by the police, and then swept and cleaned and garnished, and coupled on to its train once more, and used by unconscious passengers for weeks since the uproar occurred in it.
“All that I had got to go upon were the notes and relics held at Scotland Yard.
“The police authorities were very good. Of course, they were keen enough to bring off the prosecution with professional éclat; but they were not exactly anxious to hand over a poor wretch to the hangman if he was not thoroughly deserving of a dance on nothing. They placed at my disposal every scrap of their evidence, and said that they thought the reading of it all was plain beyond dispute. I thought so, too, at first. They sent an inspector to my chambers as their envoy.
“On one point, though, after a lot of thought, I did not quite agree with them. I held a grisly relic in my hand, gazing at it fixedly. It was a portion of Walker’s skull—a disc of dry bone with a splintered aperture in the middle.
“‘And so you think the pickaxe made that hole,’ I said to the inspector.
“‘I don’t think there can be any doubt about it, Mr. Grayson. Nothing else could have done it, and the point of the pick was smeared with blood.’
“‘But would there be room to swing such a weapon in a third-class Metropolitan railway carriage?’
“‘We thought of that, and at first it seemed a poser. The roof is low, and both Guide and Walker are tall men; but if Guide had gripped the shaft by the end, so, with his right hand pretty near against the head, so, he’d have had heaps of room to drive it with a sideways swing. I tried the thing for myself; it acted perfectly. Here’s the pickaxe: you can see for yourself.’
“I did see, and I wasn’t satisfied; but I didn’t tell the inspector what I thought. It was clearer to me than ever that Guide had not committed the murder. What I asked the inspector was this: ‘Had either of the men got any luggage in the carriage?’
“The inspector answered, with a laugh, ‘Not quite, Mr. Grayson, or you would see it here.’
“Then I took on paper a rough outline of that fragment of bone, and an accurate sketch of exact size of the gash in it, and the inspector went away. One thing his visit had shown me. Andrew Walker was not slain by a blow from behind by the pickaxe.
“I met Barnes whilst I was nibbling lunch, and told him this. He heard me doubtfully. ‘You may be right,’ said he, ‘but I’m bothered if I see what you have to go upon.’
“‘You know what a pickaxe is like?’ I said.
“‘Certainly.’
“‘A cross-section of one of the blades would be what?’
“‘Square—or perhaps oblong.’
“‘Quite so. Rectangular. What I want to get at is this: it wouldn’t even be diamond shape, with the angles obtuse and acute alternately.’
“‘Certainly not. The angles would be clean right-angles.’
“‘Very good. Now look at this sketch of the hole in the skull, and tell me what you see.’
“Barnes put on his glasses, and gazed attentively for a minute or so, and then looked up. ‘The pick point has crashed through without leaving any marks of its edges whatever.’
“‘That is to say, there are none of your right-angles showing.’
“‘None. But that does not go to prove anything.’
“‘No. It’s only about a tenth of my proof. It gives the vague initial idea. It made me look more carefully, and I saw this’—I pointed with my pencil to a corner of the sketch.
“Barnes whistled. ‘A clean arc of a circle,’ said he, ‘cut in the bone as though a knife had done it. You saw that pickaxe. Was it much worn? Were the angles much rounded near the point?’
“‘They were not. On the contrary, the pick, though an old one, had just been through the blacksmith’s shop to be re-sharpened, and had not been used since. There was not a trace of wear upon it: of that I am certain.’
“Barnes whistled again in much perplexity. At length said he, ‘It’s an absolutely certain thing that Walker was not killed in the way they imagine. But I don’t think this will get Guide off scot-free. There’s too much other circumstantial evidence against him. Of course you’ll do your best, but—’
“‘It would be more than a toss-up if I could avoid a conviction. Quite so. We must find out more. The question is, how was this wound made? Was there a third man in it?’
“‘Guide may have jobbed him from behind with some other instrument, and afterwards thrown it out of window.’
“‘Yes,’ said I, ‘but that is going on the assumption that Guide did the trick, which I don’t for a moment think is the case. Besides, if he did throw anything out of window, it would most assuredly have been found. They keep the permanent way very thoroughly inspected upon the Metropolitan. No, Barnes. There is some other agent in this case, animate or inanimate, which so far we have overlooked completely; and an innocent man’s life depends upon our ravelling it out.’
“Barnes lifted his shoulders helplessly, and took another sandwich. ‘I don’t see what we can do.’
“‘Nor I, very clearly. But we must start from the commencement, and go over the ground inch by inch.’
“So wrapped up was I in the case by this time, that I could not fix my mind to anything else. Then and there I went out and set about my inquiries.
“With some trouble I found the compartment in which the tragedy had taken place, but learnt nothing new from it. The station and the railway people at Addison Road, Kensington, were similarly drawn blank. The ticket inspector at Shaftesbury Road, who distinctly remembered Guide’s passage, at first seemed inclined to tell me nothing new, till I dragged it out of him by a regular emetic of questioning.
“Then he did remember that Guide had been carrying in his hand a carpenter’s straw bass as he passed through the wicket. He did not recollect whether he had mentioned this to the police: didn’t see that it mattered.
“I thought differently, and with a new vague hope in my heart, posted back to the prison. I had heard no word of this hand-baggage from Guide. It remained to be seen what he had done with it.
“They remembered me from my previous visit, and let me in to the prisoner without much demur. Guide owned up to the basket at once. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I had some few odd tools to carry from home, and as I couldn’t find anything else handy to put them in I used the old carpenter’s bass. I had an iron eye to splice on to the end of a windlass rope, a job that I like to do myself, to make sure it’s done safe. I never thought about telling you of that bass before, sir. I didn’t see as how it mattered.’
“‘Where is the bass now?’
“‘In the Left Luggage Office at Shaftesbury Road Station. Name of Hopkins. I’ve lost the ticket.’
“‘Where did you put your basket on entering the carriage at Addison Road?’
“‘On the seat, sir, in the corner by the window.’
“And with that I left him.
“‘Now,’ thought I, ‘I believe I can find o
ut whether you murdered Walker or not,’ and drove back to Hammersmith.
“I inquired at the cloak-room. Yes, the carpenter’s bass was there, beneath a dusty heap of other unclaimed luggage. There was demurrage to pay on it, which I offered promptly to hand over, but as I could produce no counterfoil bearing the name of Hopkins, the clerk, with a smile, said that he could not let me have it. However, when he heard what I wanted, he made no objection to my having an overhaul.
“The two lugs of the bass were threaded together with a hammer. I took this away, and opened the sides. Within was a ball of marline, another of spun-yarn, a grease-pot, and several large iron eyes. Also a large marline-spike. It was this last that fixed my attention. It was brand new, with a bone handle and a bright brass ferrule. Most of the iron also was bright, but three inches of the point were stained with a faint dark brown. From a casual inspection I should have put this down to the marline-spike having been last used to make a splice on tarred rope: but now my suspicions made me think of something else.
“I raised the stained point to my nose. There was no smell of tar whatever. On the bright part there was the indefinable odour of iron; at the tip, that thin coat of dark brown varnish had blotted this scent completely away.
“I think my fingers trembled when I turned to the bass again.
“Yes, there, opposite to where the point of the marline-spike had been lying—it was tilted up over the ball of spun-yarn—was a closed-up gash in the side of the bass. The spike had passed through there, and then been withdrawn. Round the gash was a dim discoloration which I knew to be dried human blood.
“In my mind’s eye I saw the whole ghastly accident clearly enough now. The two men had been standing up, struggling. Guide had gone down under a blow, knocked senseless, and Walker had stumbled over him. Pitching forward, face downwards, on to the seat before he could recover, his head had dashed violently against the carpenter’s bass. The sharp marline-spike inside, with its heel resting against the solid wall of the carriage, had entered the top of his skull like a bayonet. No human hand had been raised against him, and yet he had been killed.
“I kept my own particular ramblings in this case remarkably quiet, and in court led up to my facts through ordinary cross-examination.
“At the proper psychological moment I called attention to the shape of the puncture in Walker’s skull, and then dramatically sprang the bass and the marline-spike upon them unawares. After that, as the papers put it, ‘there was applause in court, which was instantly suppressed’.”
“Oh, the conceit of the man,” said O’Malley, laughing.
Grayson laughed too. “Well,” he said, “I was younger then, and I suppose I was a trifle conceited. The Crown didn’t throw up. But the jury chucked us a ‘Not guilty’ without leaving the box, and then leading counsel for the other side came across and congratulated me on having saved Guide from the gallows. ‘Now I’d have bet anything on hanging that man,’ said he.”
The Man Who Disappeared
L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace
L. T. Meade’s collaboration with Robert Eustace enjoyed even more success than her work with Clifford Halifax. For many years, there was speculation about Eustace’s identity, but it has now been established that in real life he was a doctor called Eustace Robert Barton (1871–1943). Meade and Eustace created several notable characters, including the sleuth Florence Cusack (so young, so beautiful, and so wealthy that “it was almost impossible to believe that she was a power in the police courts, and highly respected by every detective in Scotland Yard”), whose cases are narrated by a male physician, Dr Lonsdale. The duo’s female villains, such as Madame Sara, were also distinctive and ahead of their time.
This story which first appeared in the Strand Magazine in December 1901, demonstrates the authors’ enthusiasm for the impossible crime puzzle; their A Master of Mysteries (1898) has been described by Douglas Greene and Jack Adrian in Death Locked In (1987) as “the first collection of stories entirely dedicated to impossible crimes”; Greene and Adrian consider “The Man Who Disappeared” to be one of Meade and Eustace’s finest forays into the “miracle problem.”
* * *
CHARLES Pleydell, a very clever lawyer by profession, was with me to the end of the allotted month before he told me his story. It was a few days before he left me to join his young wife that I extracted from him the following most remarkable tale:—
I am a lawyer by profession, and have a snug set of offices in Chancery Lane. My name is Charles Pleydell. I have many clients, and can already pronounce myself a rich man.
On a certain morning towards the end of September in the year 1897 I received the following letter—
Sir,—
I have been asked to call on you by a mutual friend, General Cornwallis, who accompanied my step-daughter and myself on board the Osprey to England. Availing myself of the General’s introduction, I hope to call to see you or to send a representative about eleven o’clock today.
The General says that he thinks you can give me advice on a matter of some importance.
I am a Spanish lady. My home is in Brazil, and I know nothing of England or of English ways. I wish, however, to take a house near London and to settle down. This house must be situated in the neighbourhood of a large moor or common. It must have grounds surrounding it, and must have extensive cellars or basements, as my wish is to furnish a laboratory in order to carry on scientific research. I am willing to pay any sum in reason for a desirable habitation, but one thing is essential: the house must be as near London as is possible under the above conditions.
Yours obediently,
Stella Scaiffe
This letter was dated from the Carlton Hotel.
Now, it so happened that a client of mine had asked me a few months before to try and let his house—an old-fashioned and somewhat gruesome mansion, situated in a lonely part of Hampstead Heath. It occurred to me that this house would exactly suit the lady whose letter I had just read.
At eleven o’clock one of my clerks brought me in a card. On it were written the words, “Miss Muriel Scaiffe.” I desired the man to show the lady in, and a moment later a slight fair-haired English girl entered the room.
“Mrs. Scaiffe is not quite well and has sent me in her stead. You have received a letter from my step-mother, have you not, Mr. Pleydell?”
“I have,” I replied. “Will you sit down, Miss Scaiffe?”
She did so. I looked at her attentively. She was young and pretty. She also looked good, and although there was a certain anxiety about her face which she could not quite repress, her smile was very sweet.
“Your step-mother,” I said, “requires a house with somewhat peculiar conditions?”
“Oh, yes,” the girl answered. “She is very anxious on the subject. We want to be settled within a week.”
“That is a very short time in which to take and furnish a house,” I could not help remarking.
“Yes,” she said, again. “But, all the same, in our case it is essential. My stepmother says that anything can be done if there is enough money.”
“That is true in a sense,” I replied, smilingly. “If I can help you I shall be pleased. You want a house on a common?”
“On a common or moor.”
“It so happens, Miss Scaiffe, that there is a place called The Rosary at Hampstead which may suit you. Here are the particulars. Read them over for yourself and tell me if there is any use in my giving you an order to view.”
She read the description eagerly, then she said—
“I am sure Mrs. Scaiffe would like to see this house. When can we go?”
“Today, if you like, and if you particularly wish it I can meet you at The Rosary at three o’clock.”
“That will do nicely,” she answered.
Soon afterwards she left me.
The rest of the morning passed as u
sual, and at the appointed hour I presented myself at the gates of the Rosary. A carriage was already drawn up there, and as I approached a tall lady with very dark eyes stepped out of it.
A glance showed me that the young lady had not accompanied her.
“You are Mr. Pleydell?” she said, holding out her hand to me, and speaking in excellent English.
“Yes,” I answered.
“You saw my step-daughter this morning?”
“Yes,” I said again.
“I have called to see the house,” she continued. “Muriel tells me that it is likely to suit my requirements. Will you show it to me?”
I opened the gates, and we entered a wide carriage-drive. The Rosary had been unlet for some months, and weeds partly covered the avenue. The grounds had a desolate and gloomy appearance, leaves were falling thickly from the trees, and altogether the entire place looked undesirable and neglected.
The Spanish lady, however, seemed delighted with everything. She looked around her with sparkling glances. Flashing her dark eyes into my face, she praised the trees and avenue, the house, and all that the house contained.
She remarked that the rooms were spacious, the lobbies wide; above all things, the cellars numerous.
“I am particular about the cellars, Mr. Pleydell,” she said.
“Indeed!” I answered. “At all events, there are plenty of them.”
“Oh, yes! And this one is so large. It will quite suit our purpose. We will turn it into a laboratory.
“My brother and I—Oh, I have not told you about my brother. He is a Spaniard—Señor Merello—he joins us here next week. He and I are scientists, and I hope scientists of no mean order. We have come to England for the purpose of experimenting. In this land of the free we can do what we please. We feel, Mr. Pleydell—you look so sympathising that I cannot help confiding in you—we feel that we are on the verge of a very great—a very astounding discovery, at which the world, yes, the whole world will wonder. This house is the one of all others for our purpose. When can we take possession, Mr. Pleydell?”
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