“He is not there,” was the quiet retort of the inspector. “I have sent for the Assistant Commissioner to Scotland Yard, and will ask him to take over the case. It is too much for me.”
The tension in all our minds had now reached such a state of strain that we began to fear our own shadows.
Oscar Digby, standing‚ as it were‚ on the threshold of a very great future, the hero of a legend worthy of old romance, had suddenly and inexplicably vanished. I could not get my reason to believe that he was not still in the house, for there was not the least doubt that he had not come out. What would happen in the next few hours?
“Is there no secret chamber or secret passage that we have overlooked?” I said, turning to the inspector.
“The walls have been tapped,” he replied. “There is not the slightest indication of a hollow. There are no underground passages. The man is not within these walls.”
He now spoke with a certain degree of irritation in his voice which the mystery of the case had evidently awakened in his mind. A few moments later the sound of approaching wheels caused us to turn our heads. A cab drew up at the gates, out of which alighted the well-known form of Sir George Freer.
Garland had already entered the house, and on Sir George appearing on the scene he and I followed him.
We had just advanced across the hall to the room where the members of the household, with the exception of poor Muriel Scaiffe, were still detained, when, to our utter amazement, a long strange peal of laughter sounded from below. This was followed by another, and again by another. The laughter came from the lips of Garland. We glanced at each other. What on earth did it mean? Together we darted down the stone steps, but before we reached the laboratory another laugh rang out. All hope in me was suddenly changed to a chilling fear, for the laugh was not natural. It had a clanging, metallic sound, without any mirth.
In the centre of the room stood Garland. His mouth was twitching and his breath jerked in and out convulsively.
“What is it? What is the matter?” I cried.
He made no reply, but, pointing to a machine with steel blocks, once more broke into a choking, gurgling laugh which made my flesh creep.
Had he gone mad? Sir George moved swiftly across to him and laid his hand on his shoulder.
“Come, what is all this, Garland?” he said, sternly, though his own face was full of fear.
I knew Garland to be a man of extraordinary self-control, and I could see that he was now holding himself in with all the force at his command.
“It is no use—I cannot tell you,” he burst out.
“What—you know what has become of him?”
“Yes.”
“You can prove it?”
“Yes.”
“Speak out, man.”
“He is not here,” said Garland.
“Then where is he?”
He flung his hand out towards the Heath, and I saw that the fit was taking him again, but once more he controlled himself. Then he said in a clear, level voice:—
“He is dead, Sir George, and you can never see his body. You cannot hold an inquest for there is nothing to hold it on. The winds have taken him and scattered him in dust on the Heath. Don’t look at me like that, Pleydell. I am sane, although it is a wonder we are not all mad over this business, Look and listen.”
He pointed to the great metal tank.
“I arrived at my present conclusion by a process of elimination,” he began. “Into that tank which contained liquid air Digby, gagged and bound, must have been placed violently, probably after he had given away the chart. Death would have been instantaneous, and he would have been frozen into complete solidity in something like forty minutes. The ordinary laboratory experiment is to freeze a rabbit, which can then be powdered into mortar like any other friable stone. The operation here has been the same. It is only a question of size. Remember we are dealing with 312 degrees below Fahrenheit, and then—well, look at this and these.”
He pointed to a large machine with steel blocks and to a bench littered with saws, chisels, pestles, and mortars.
“That machine is a stone-breaker,” he said. “On the dust adhering to these blocks I found this.”
He held up a test tube containing a blue liquid.
“The Guiacum test,” he said. “In other words, blood. This fact taken with the facts we already know, that Digby never left the house; that the only other agent of destruction of a body, fire, is out of the question; that this tank is the receptacle of that enormous machine for making liquid air in very large quantities; and, above all, the practical possibility of the operation being conducted by the men who are at present in the house, afford me absolutely conclusive proof beyond a possibility of doubt as to what has happened. The body of that unfortunate man is as if it had never been, without a fragment of pin-point size for identification or evidence. It is beyond the annals of all the crimes that I have ever heard of. What law can help us? Can you hold an inquest on nothing? Can you charge a person with murder where no victim or trace of a victim can be produced?”
A sickly feeling came over me. Garland’s words carried their own conviction, and we knew that we stood in the presence of a horror without a name. Nevertheless, to the police mind horror per se does not exist. To them there is always a mystery, a crime, and a solution. That is all. The men beside me were police once more. Sentiment might come later.
“Are there any reporters here?” asked Sir George.
“None,” answered Frost.
“Good. Mr. Oscar Digby has disappeared. There is no doubt how. There can, of course, be no arrest, as Dr. Garland has just said. Our official position is this. We suspect that Mr. Digby has been murdered, but the search for the discovery of the body has failed. That is our position.”
Before I left that awful house I made arrangements to have Muriel Scaiffe conveyed to a London hospital. I did not consult Mrs. Scaiffe on the subject. I could not get myself to say another word to the woman. In the hospital a private ward was secured for the unhappy girl, and there for many weeks she hovered between life and death.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Scaiffe and her brother were detained at The Rosary. They were closely watched by the police, and although they made many efforts to escape they found it impossible. Our hope was that when Muriel recovered strength she would be able to substantiate a case against them. But, alas! this hope was unfounded, for, as the girl recovered, there remained a blank in her memory which no efforts on our part could fill. She had absolutely and completely forgotten Oscar Digby, and the house on Hampstead Heath was to her as though it had never existed. In all other respects she was well. Under these circumstances the Spaniard and his sister were tried for the murder of Oscar Digby. They escaped conviction on technical grounds and returned to their own country, our one most earnest hope being that we might never see or hear of them again.
Meanwhile, Muriel grew better. I was interested in her from the first. When she was well enough I placed her with some friends of my own. A year ago she became my wife. I think she is happy. A past which is forgotten cannot trouble her. I have long ago come to regard her as the best and truest woman living.
The Cyprian Bees
Anthony Wynne
Anthony Wynne’s reputation as a detective novelist languished in obscurity for decades following the appearance of his final novel in 1950. Interest in his work has revived as a result of the republication in the British Library Crime Classics series of Murder of a Lady (aka The Silver Scale Mystery, 1931), set in the author’s native Scotland. That novel is a clever example of the impossible crime mystery, a sub-genre in which Wynne developed a specialism. In real life, Wynne was Robert McNair Wilson, a former house surgeon at Glasgow Western Infirmary who became a long-serving medical correspondent for The Times. Keenly interested in politics and economics, he stood twice for Parliament as a Liberal Party candidate in the 1920
s, but without success.
Wynne’s long-serving series detective was the snuff-taking Dr. Eustace Hailey, and many of Hailey’s cases, including this one, make effective use of his creator’s scientific and medical know-how. “The Cyprian Bees” is, by a distance, Wynne’s most famous short story, first appearing in Hutchinson’s Mystery-Story Magazine in 1924. It was collected in Sinners Go Secretly (1927), and the following year in Dorothy L. Sayers’ ground-breaking omnibus Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror.
* * *
INSPECTOR Biles, of Scotland Yard, placed a small wooden box on the table in front of Doctor Hailey.
“There,” he remarked in cheerful tones, “is a mystery which even you, my dear doctor, will scarcely be able to solve.”
Doctor Hailey bent his great head and examined the box with minute care. It was merely a hollowed-out block of wood to which a lid, also of wood, was attached at one point by a nail. The lid rotated on this nail. He put out his hand to open it; but Biles checked that intention immediately.
“Take care,” he exclaimed, “there are three live bees in that box.” He added: “There were four originally but one of them stung a colleague of mine who was incautious enough to pull the lid open without first finding out what it covered.”
He leaned back in his chair and drew a long whiff of the excellent cigar with which Doctor Hailey had supplied him. He remained silent while a heavy vehicle went lumbering down Harley Street. Then he said:
“Last night one of my men found the box lying in the gutter in Piccadilly Circus, just opposite the Criterion Theatre. He thought it looked peculiar and brought it down to the Yard. We have a bee-keeper of some distinction on the staff and he declares that these insects are all workers and that only a lunatic would carry them about in this fashion. Queens, it appears, are often transported in boxes.”
Doctor Hailey raised his eyeglass and set it in his eye.
“So I have heard.” He opened his snuff-box and took a large pinch. “You know, of course, my dear Biles,” he added, “what this particular box contained before the bees were put into it?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Serum; either anti-diphtheria serum or one of the other varieties. Practically every manufacturer of these products uses this type of receptacle for them.”
“H’m!” Biles leaned forward in his chair. “So that means that, in all probability, the owner of the bees is a doctor. How very interesting.”
Doctor Hailey shook his head.
“It doesn’t follow,” he remarked. “The box was perhaps left in a patient’s house after its contents had been used. The patient may have employed it for its present purpose.”
Biles nodded. He appeared to hesitate a moment, then he said:
“The reason why I troubled you was that, last night, a woman was found dead at the wheel of a motorcar—a closed coupé—in Leicester Square. She had been stung by a bee just before her death.”
He spoke in quiet tones, but his voice nevertheless revealed the fact that the disclosure he was making had assumed a great importance in his mind. He added:
“The body was examined by a doctor almost immediately. He observed the sting which was in her forehead. The dead bee was recovered, later, from the floor of the car.”
As he spoke he took another box from his pocket, and opened it. He held it out to the doctor.
“You will notice that there are rather unusual markings on the bee’s body; those yellow rings. Our expert says, that they indicate a special breed, the Cyprian, and that these insects are notoriously very ill-natured. The peculiar thing is that the bees in the wooden box are also Cyprian bees.”
Doctor Hailey picked up a large magnifying glass which lay on the table beside him and focused it on the body of the insect. His knowledge of bees was not extensive but he recognised that this was not the ordinary brown English type. He set the glass down again and leaned back in his chair.
“It is certainly very extraordinary,” he declared. “Have you any theory?”
Biles shook his head. “None. Beyond the supposition that the shock caused by the sting was probably the occasion for the woman’s sudden collapse. She was seen to pull quickly into the side of the road to stop the car, so she must have had a presentiment of what was coming. I suppose heart failure might be induced by a sting?”
“It is just possible.” Doctor Hailey took more snuff. “Once, long ago,” he said, “I had personal experience of a rather similar case; that of a bee-keeper who was stung some years after he had given up his own apiary. He died in about five minutes. But that was a clear case of anaphylaxis.”
“I don’t understand.”
Doctor Hailey thought a moment. “Anaphylaxis,” he explained, “is the name given to one of the most amazing phenomena in the whole of medical science. If a human being receives an injection of serum or blood or any extract or fluid from the animal body, a tremendous sensitiveness is apt to develop, afterwards, towards that particular substance. For example, an injection of the white of a duck’s egg will, after the lapse of a week or so, render a man so intensely sensitive to this particular egg white, that, if a further injection is given, instant death may result. Even if a duck’s egg is eaten there may be violent sickness and collapse, though hens’ eggs will cause no ill effect. Queerly enough, however, if the injection is repeated within, say a day of its first administration, no trouble occurs. For the sensitiveness to develop it is essential that time should elapse between the first injection and the second one. Once the sensitiveness has developed it remains active for years. The bee-keeper, whose death I happened to witness, had often been stung before: but he had not been stung for a very long time.”
“Good God!” Biles’ face wore an expression of keen interest. “So it’s possible that this may actually be a case of murder.”
He pronounced the word in tones of awe. Doctor Hailey saw that already his instincts as a man hunter were quickening.
“It is just possible. But do not forget, my dear Biles, that the murderer using this method would require to give his victim a preliminary dose—by inoculation—of bee-poison, because a single sting would scarcely be enough to produce the necessary degree of sensitiveness. That is to say he would require to exercise an amount of force which would inevitably defeat his purpose, unless he happened to be a doctor.”
“Ah! the wooden serum box!”
The detective’s voice thrilled.
“Possibly! A doctor undoubtedly could inject bee-poison, supposing he possessed it, instead of ordinary serum or an ordinary vaccine. It would hurt a good deal—but patients expect inoculations to hurt them.”
Biles rose. “There is no test—is there,” he asked, “by which it would be possible to detect the presence of this sensitiveness you speak of, in a dead body?”
“None.”
“So we can only proceed by means of circumstantial evidence.” He drew a sharp breath. “The woman has been identified as the widow of an artist, named Bardwell. She had a flat, a luxurious one, in Park Mansions, and seems to have been well off. But we have not been able to find any of her relatives so far.” He glanced at his watch. “I am going there now. I suppose I couldn’t persuade you to accompany me?”
Doctor Hailey’s rather listless eyes brightened. For answer he rose, towering above the detective in that act.
“My dear Biles, you know that you can always persuade me.”
The flat in Park Mansions was rather more, and yet rather less, than luxurious. It bespoke prodigality, but it bespoke also restlessness of mind, as though its owner had felt insecure in her enjoyment of its comforts. The rooms were too full, and their contents were saved from vulgarity only by the sheer carelessness of their bestowal. This woman seemed to have bought anything and to have cared for nothing. Thus, in her dining-room, an exquisite Queen Anne sideboard was set, cheek by jowl, with a most
horrible Victorian armchair made of imitation walnut. In the drawing-room there were flower glasses of the noblest period of Venetian craftsmanship, in which Beauty was held captive in wonderful strands of gold, and, beside these, shocking and obscene examples of “golden glass” ware from some third-rate Bohemian factory. Doctor Hailey began to form a mental picture of the dead woman. He saw her changeable, greedy, gaudy, yet with a certain instinctive charm; the kind of woman who, if she is young and beautiful, gobbles a man up. Women of that sort, his experience had shown him, were apt to drive their lovers to despair with their extravagance or their infidelities. Had the owner of the bees embarked on his terrible course in order to secure himself against the mortification of being supplanted by some more attractive rival? Or was he merely removing from his path a woman of whom he had grown tired? In any case, if the murder theory was correct, he must have stood in the relationship to the dead girl of doctor to patient and he must have possessed an apiary of his own.
A young detective, whom Biles introduced as Todcaster, had already made a careful examination of the flat. He had found nothing, not even a photograph. Nor had the owners of neighbouring flats been able to supply any useful information. Mrs. Bardwell, it appeared, had men friends who had usually come to see her after dark. They had not, apparently, been in the habit of writing to her, or if they had—she had destroyed all their letters. During the last few weeks she seemed to have been without a servant.
“So you have found nothing?” Biles’ tones were full of disappointment.
“Nothing, sir. Unless, indeed, this is of any importance.”
Todcaster held out a crumpled piece of paper. It was a shop receipt, bearing the name of the Times Book Club, for a copy of The Love Songs of Robert Browning. There was no name on it. Biles handed it to Doctor Hailey, who regarded it for a few moments in silence and then asked:
“Where did you find this?”
“In the fireplace of the bedroom.”
The doctor’s eyes narrowed.
The Measure of Malice Page 11