For a while we all stood looking in at the contents of the casket without speaking; and I found myself contrasting them with what would have been revealed by the lifting of a coffin-lid. Truly corruption had put on incorruption. The mass of snow-white, coral-like fragments, delicate, fragile, and lace-like in texture, so far from being repulsive in aspect, were almost attractive. I ran my eye, with an anatomist’s curiosity, over these dazzling remnants of what had lately been a man, half-unconsciously seeking to identify and give a name to particular fragments, and a little surprised at the difficulty of determining that this or that irregularly shaped white object was a part of any one of the bones with which I had thought myself so familiar.
Presently Hemming looked up at Thorndyke and asked: “Do you observe anything abnormal in the appearance of these ashes? I don’t.”
“Perhaps,” replied Thorndyke, “we had better turn them out on to the table, so that we can see the whole of them.”
This was done very gently, and then Thorndyke proceeded to spread out the heap, touching the fragments with the utmost delicacy—for they were extremely fragile and brittle—until the whole collection was visible.
“Well,” said Hemming, when we had once more looked them over critically, “what do you say? I can see no trace of any foreign substance. Can you?”
“No,” replied Thorndyke. “And there are some other things that I can’t see. For instance, the medical referee reported that the proposer had a good set of sound teeth. Where are they? I have not seen a single fragment of a tooth. Yet teeth are far more resistant to fire than bones, especially the enamel caps.”
Hemming ran a searching glance over the mass of fragments and looked up with a perplexed frown.
“I certainly can’t see any sign of teeth,” he admitted; “and it is rather curious, as you say. Does the fact suggest any particular significance to you?”
By way of reply, Thorndyke delicately picked up a flat fragment and silently held it out towards us. I looked at it and said nothing; for a very strange suspicion was beginning to creep into my mind.
“A piece of a rib,” said Hemming. “Very odd that it should have broken across so cleanly. It might have been cut with a saw.”
Thorndyke laid it down and picked up another, larger fragment, which I had already noticed.
“Here is another example,” said he, handing it to our colleague.
“Yes,” agreed Hemming. “It is really rather extraordinary. It looks exactly as if it had been sawn across.”
“It does,” agreed Thorndyke. “What bone should you say it is?”
“That is what I was just asking myself,” replied Hemming, looking at the fragment with a sort of half-vexed smile. “It seems ridiculous that a competent anatomist should be in any doubt with as large a portion as this, but really I can’t confidently give it a name. The shape seems to me to suggest a tibia, but of course it is much too small. Is it the upper end of the ulna?”
“I should say no,” answered Thorndyke. Then he picked out another of the larger fragments, and handing it to Hemming, asked him to name it.
Our friend began to look somewhat worried.
“It is an extraordinary thing, you know,” said he, “but I can’t tell you what bone it is part of. It is clearly the shaft of a long bone, but I’m hanged if I can say which. It is too big for a metatarsal and too small for any of the main limb bones. It reminds one of a diminutive thigh bone.”
“It does,” agreed Thorndyke; “very strongly.” While Hemming had been speaking he had picked out four more large fragments, and these he now laid in a row with the one that had seemed to resemble a tibia in shape. Placed thus together, the five fragments bore an obvious resemblance.
“Now,” said he, “look at these. There are five of them. They are parts of limb bones, and the bones of which they are parts were evidently exactly alike, excepting that three were apparently from the left side and two from the right. Now, you know, Hemming, a man has only four limbs and of those only two contain similar bones. Then two of them show distinct traces of what looks like a saw-cut.”
Hemming gazed at the row of fragments with a frown of deep cogitation.
“It is very mysterious,” he said. “And looking at them in a row they strike me as curiously like tibiae—in shape; not in size.”
“The size,” said Thorndyke, “is about that of a sheep’s tibia.”
“A sheep’s!” exclaimed Hemming, staring in amazement, first at the calcined bones and then at my colleague.
“Yes; the upper half, sawn across in the middle of the shank.”
Hemming was thunderstruck.
“It is an astounding affair!” he exclaimed. “You mean to suggest—”
“I suggest,” said Thorndyke, “that there is not a sign of a human bone in the whole collection. But there are very evident traces of at least five legs of mutton.”
For a few moments there was a profound silence, broken only by a murmur of astonishment from the cemetery official and a low chuckle from Superintendent Miller, who had been listening with absorbed interest. At length Hemming spoke.
“Then, apparently, there was no corpse in the coffin at all?”
“No,” answered Thorndyke. “The weight was made up, and the ashes furnished, by joints of butcher’s meat. I dare say, if we go over the ashes carefully, we shall be able to judge what they were. But it is hardly necessary. The presence of five legs of mutton and the absence of a single recognisable fragment of a human skeleton, together with the forged certificates, gives us a pretty conclusive case. The rest, I think we can leave to Superintendent Miller.”
“I take it, Thorndyke,” said I, as the train moved out of the station, “that you came here expecting to find what you did find?”
“Yes,” he replied. “It seemed to me the only possibility, having regard to all the known facts.”
“When did it first occur to you?”
“It occurred to me as a possibility as soon as we discovered that the cremation certificates had been forged; but it was the undertaker’s statement that seemed to clench the matter.”
“But he distinctly stated that he measured the body.”
“True. But there was nothing to show that it was a dead body. What was perfectly clear was that there was something that must on no account be seen; and when Stalker told us of the embezzlement we had a body of evidence that could point to only one conclusion. Just consider that evidence.
“Here we had a death, preceded by an obviously sham illness and followed by cremation with forged certificates. Now, what was it that had happened? There were four possible hypotheses. Normal death, suicide, murder, and fictitious death. Which of these hypotheses fitted the facts?
“Normal death was apparently excluded by the forged certificates.
“The theory of suicide did not account for the facts. It did not agree with the careful, elaborate preparation. And why the forged certificates? If Ingle had really died, Meeking would have certified the death. And why the cremation? There was no purpose in taking those enormous risks.
“The theory of murder was unthinkable. These certificates were almost certainly forged by Ingle himself, who we know was a practised forger. But the idea of the victim arranging for his own cremation is an absurdity.
“There remained only the theory of fictitious death; and that theory fitted all the facts perfectly. First, as to the motive. Ingle had committed a felony. He had to disappear. But what kind of disappearance could be so effectual as death and cremation? Both the prosecutors and the police would forthwith write him off and forget him. Then there was the bigamy—a criminal offence in itself. But death would not only wipe that off; after ‘death’ he could marry Huggard regularly under another name, and he would have shaken off his deserted wife for ever. And he stood to gain fifteen hundred pounds from the Insurance Company. Then see how this theor
y explained the other facts. A fictitious death made necessary a fictitious illness. It necessitated the forged certificates, since there was no corpse. It made cremation highly desirable; for suspicion might easily have arisen, and then the exhumation of a coffin containing a dummy would have exploded the fraud. But successful cremation would cover up the fraud for ever. It explained the concealment of the corpse from the undertaker, and it even explained the smell of formalin which he noticed.”
“How did it?” I asked.
“Consider, Jervis,” he replied. “The dummy in this coffin had to be a dummy of flesh and bone which would yield the correct kind of ash. Joints of butcher’s meat would fulfil the conditions. But the quantity required would be from a hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds. Now Ingle could not go to the butcher and order a whole sheep to be sent the day before the funeral. The joints would have to be bought gradually and stored. But the storage of meat in warm weather calls for some kind of preservative; and formalin is highly effective, as it leaves no trace after burning.
“So you see that the theory of fictitious death agreed with all the known circumstances, whereas the alternative theories presented inexplicable discrepancies and contradictions. Logically, it was the only possible theory, and, as you have seen, experiment proved it to be the true one.”
As Thorndyke concluded, Dr. Hemming took his pipe from his mouth and laughed softly.
“When I came down today,” said he, “I had all the facts which you had communicated to the Home Office, and I was absolutely convinced that we were coming to examine a mare’s nest. And yet, now I have heard your exposition, the whole thing looks perfectly obvious.”
“That is usually the case with Thorndyke’s conclusions,” said I. “They are perfectly obvious—when you have heard the explanation.”
Within a week of our expedition, Ingle was in the hands of the police. The apparent success of the cremation adventure had misled him to a sense of such complete security that he had neglected to cover his tracks, and he had accordingly fallen an easy prey to our friend Superintendent Miller. The police were highly gratified, and so were the directors of the Griffin Life Assurance Company.
After Death the Doctor
J. J. Connington
J. J. Connington was the literary alias of Alfred Walter Stewart (1880–1947), a Scottish professor of chemistry who turned to dystopian fiction with Nordenholt’s Millions (1923), a novel of ecocatastrophe, but soon decided to concentrate on detective stories. His principal sleuth was Sir Clinton Driffield, a tough-minded Chief Constable, and his plots frequently turn on questions of science or technology. Like Austin Freeman, whose work he admired, he was a founder member of the Detection Club.
In his memoir Alias J. J. Connington, published in the year of his death, the author mused on the contrast between scientific investigation and detective story writing, concluding that: “There is not the slightest parallelism between these two lines, except that in both a logical mind is required.” Warming to his theme, he said that: “In scientific research, the inquirer plays the part of the detective in real life…working from details towards a solution.” In contrast, he thought that the detective writer typically began with a preconceived solution to a puzzle, and worked backwards to the details of his plot; this led him to express the view that “the closest likeness to the writing of a detective story is to be found in the composition of a chess-problem.” Primarily a novelist rather than a writer of short stories, he contributed “After Death the Doctor” to the News Chronicle, and it was subsequently included in The First Class Omnibus (1934). The part played in the plot by a contemporary scientific gadget is typical Connington.
* * *
“BETTER go in, now, doctor?” Sergeant Longridge suggested. “You’ll be here later on?” he added to Jack Sparkford. “I’ll have to ask you a few questions then.”
It was the sergeant’s first murder case, and though outwardly confident, he felt a shade diffident in the presence of the more experienced police surgeon.
Hastily summoned, Longridge had tramped up to the house, breakfastless, planning his procedure as he came. The first thing to do, obviously, was to examine the room and the body, with no outsiders to worry him while he made his notes. It was with some relief that he saw Dr. Shefford’s car drive up to the front door as he reached it himself.
Here was the room, with that comfortless and untidy look which rooms have in the morning, before the disorder of the night has been repaired; the chairs set at odd angles, the ashtrays unemptied, the cushions crumpled and awry, a newspaper thrown carelessly on the floor.
It seemed a cross between a sitting-room and an office, with a wireless set, bookcases, filing cabinets, a couple of occasional tables, and a pedestal desk against the wall in one corner. The furniture was good, but shabby like the clothes of a man who has come down in the world.
“Regular old bachelor’s den,” the doctor observed. “Not a flower anywhere, though they’ve plenty in the garden.”
He put down his bag and went over to the corner of the room. The sergeant was not sensitive, and it cost him no qualms to examine the body of Barnaby Leadburn as it lay back in the office chair before the pedestal desk. A bit weird, he reflected, to see an old gent one knew by sight, lying there with his throat cut.
Dr. Shefford’s interest was more professional.
“Not so much blood as I’d have expected,” he commented.
His examination of the body became more technical; and Longridge, understanding little of what the doctor was doing, bethought himself that he had a task of his own. He opened his note-book and began to jot down things which seemed important.
The French window was open, but only one of the curtains was drawn back from it. The electric light had been switched off. In the empty grate were some ashes of burnt paper, with printing showing black on the grey background: a piece of newspaper, the sergeant guessed. And when he picked up the newspaper from the floor, he found about a quarter of one of the sheets torn away.
The desk bore a neat array of account-books, and on the open pages of the one nearest the body lay a sheet of note-paper. Longridge, craning over the doctor, read on it the words: “I, Barnaby Leadburn…” Then came the regular trail of blotches caused by a pen rolling along the paper; and the pen itself lay on the desk surface to the right of the book.
For some moments Sergeant Longridge puzzled over this sinister hiatus in the manuscript, trying to imagine how the incomplete sentence had been meant to run. At last an idea occurred to him.
“Do you think, sir, that he could have been making his will? I never made a will myself—not worth while, seeing I’ve nothing to leave—but don’t they run: ‘I, So-and-so, hereby give and bequeath…’ That’s how I’ve heard say.”
Dr. Shefford seemed to think that he had enough to do in his own sphere, without entrenching on the sergeant’s.
“They usually start by appointing executors,” he said dryly. “This looks a very clean cut, sergeant. It might almost have been done with a razor, from the look of it.”
“How long do you think he’s been dead, sir?” Longridge inquired, glancing at his watch.
Dr. Shefford shrugged his shoulders rather impatiently.
“He probably died round about midnight, I should guess; but it’s no use pretending that you can tell to a minute from medical evidence alone. Things vary far too much for that. Hadn’t you better hunt about and see if you can find the weapon it was done with, if it happens to be in the room?”
The sergeant’s feelings were ruffled by this reflection on his zeal and efficiency.
“Well, sir, if you’ll stand aside for a moment, I’ll have a look with my flashlamp in the well of the desk. I don’t see any weapon lying about anywhere else.”
Dr. Shefford stood aside; and the sergeant, cautiously grovelling with his flash-lamp, explored the cavity under the desk. An exclamati
on of triumph told the doctor that something had been found.
“Here’s what it was done with, sir. Look! That’s a rummy sort of knife. I’ll fetch it out.”
Gingerly he picked up the weapon and placed it on the desk: a stout blade four or five inches long embedded in a straight wooden handle, with a steel lever at the side.
“It’s the sort of knife artists use for cutting mill-board or for trimming prints,” the doctor explained. “You can alter the amount of blade that sticks out of the handle by setting that steel catch on the side. I rather wondered how that wound was made, but this evidently did it, to judge by the blood on the blade. By the way, sergeant, you’d better inquire if the old man was left-handed. This gash has been made from right to left, by the look of it. If old Leadburn was right-handed, then it isn’t suicide. And you might ask if the light was on or off this morning. Suicides aren’t usually so economical as to switch off before they put their own light out. Though, from what I’ve heard, old Leadburn was mean enough to have taken the precaution.”
“Very good, sir,” the sergeant agreed. “And now, sir, I think I’ll leave you and make some inquiries from the house people.”
“Just pull the curtains before you go, and switch on the lights. It’s hardly decent to carry on further in full view of anyone who happens to cross the lawn.”
Jack Sparkford and his younger brother, Sydney, were in the hall as the sergeant emerged from the room. Between Jack, at twenty-five, and the fifteen-year-old schoolboy, the family likeness was unmistakable even down to the weakly obstinate chins.
“They look bothered, but not just tearful,” Longridge reflected. “Not much wonder, either, if old Leadburn was the tartar he got the name of being. They hadn’t the lives of dogs, if all tales were true.”
“Have you found anything?” Jack demanded anxiously.
The sergeant put up his hand defensively.
“One thing at a time, sir. We’ve got no facts yet. I’d like to see the maid who discovered the…”
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