Dr. Thorndyke Omnibus Vol 4

by R. Austin Freeman

  "For a very good reason," said Mr. Penfield. "I am not enlightened myself. I am, I believe, in possession of most of the material facts. But I have not the special knowledge that is necessary to interpret them. I am still unable to trace the connection between the evidence and the conclusion. Dr. Thorndyke's methods are, to me, a source of endless wonder."

  "And yet," said Thorndyke, "they are perfectly normal and simple. They differ from the methods of an orthodox lawyer merely in this: that whereas the issues that I have to try are usually legal issues, the means which I employ are those proper to scientific research."

  "But surely," Betty interposed, "the purposes of legal and scientific research are essentially the same. Both aim at arrive at the truth."

  "Certainly," he replied. "The purposes are identical. But the procedure is totally different. In legal practice the issues have to be decided by persons who have no first-hand knowledge of the facts—by the judge and jury. To them the facts are furnished by other persons—the witnesses—who have such first-hand knowledge and who are sworn to give it truly and completely. And on such sworn testimony the judges form their decision. The verdict has to be 'according to the evidence,' and its truth is necessarily subject to the truth of the testimony and the competence of the witnesses.

  "But in scientific research there is no such division of function. The investigator is at once judge, jury, and witness. His knowledge is first-hand, and hence he knows the exact value of his evidence. He can hold a suspended judgment. He can form alternative opinions and act upon both alternatives. He can construct hypotheses and try them out. He is hampered by no rules but those of his own making. Above all, he is able to interrogate things as well as persons."

  "Yes," agreed Mr. Penfield, "that is what has impressed me. You are independent of witnesses. Instead of having to seek somebody who can give evidence in respect of certain facts, you obtain the facts yourself and become your own witness. No doubt this will become evident in your exposition of this case, to which I—and our friends too, I am sure—are looking forward with eager interest."

  "You are paying me a great compliment," said Thorndyke; "and as I hear Polton approaching with the coffee, I need not keep you waiting any longer. By the way, how much may I assume that our friends know?"

  "They know all that I know," replied Mr. Penfield. "We have had a long talk and I have told them everything I have learned and that you have told me."

  "Then I shall assume that they have all the main facts, and they must stop me if I assume too much." He paused while Polton poured out the coffee and partially disencumbered the table. Then as his familiar retired, he continued: "I think that the clearest and most interesting way for me to present the case will be by recounting the investigation as it actually occurred, giving the facts observed and the inferences from them in their actual order of occurrence."

  "That will certainly be the easiest plan for us to follow," said Osmond, "if it will not be too wearisome for you."

  "On the contrary," replied Thorndyke, "it will be quite interesting to me to reconstitute the case as a whole; and the best way will be to treat it in the successive stages into which the inquiry naturally fell. I will begin with the information which was given to me when the case was placed in my hands.

  "A number of sealed boxes had been deposited by Mr. Hollis in the custody of Mr. Woodstock, who placed them in his strong-room. These boxes were stated by Hollis to contain a number of valuable gems, but the nature of the contents was actually known only to Hollis, who had packed the boxes himself. After an interval the boxes were returned to Hollis; and it was agreed by all the parties, including Hollis, that all the seals were then intact. Nevertheless, on opening the boxes, Hollis found that most of the gems had been abstracted and replaced by counterfeits. Thereupon he declared that a robbery had been committed while the boxes were reposing in the strong room; and this view was, strange to say, accepted by Mr. Woodstock.

  "Now, it was perfectly obvious that these statements of alleged fact were mutually irreconcilable. They could not possibly be all true. The question was, which of them was untrue? If the stones were in the boxes when they were handed to Woodstock and were not there when he returned them to Hollis, then the boxes must have been opened in the interval. But in that case the seals must have been broken. On the other hand, if the seals were really intact, the boxes could not have been opened while they were in Woodstock's custody. Woodstock's position—which was also that of Hollis—was a manifest absurdity. What they alleged to have happened was a physical impossibility.

  "So far, however, the legal position was quite simple, if Woodstock had accepted it. The seals were admitted to be intact. Therefore no robbery could have occurred in Woodstock's office. But Woodstock accepted the impossible; and thereupon a certain Mr. John Osmond proceeded very deliberately to tip the fat into the fire."

  "Yes, didn't he?" agreed Betty with a delighted gurgle. "You were an old guffin, Jack! Still, it was all for the best, wasn't it?

  "It was, indeed," assented Osmond. "Best stroke of work I ever did. You see, I knew that there is a Providence that watches over fools. But we mustn't interrupt the exposition."

  "Well," continued Thorndyke, "the disappearance of Mr. Osmond settled the matter so far as Mr. Woodstock was concerned. He swore an information forthwith, and must have grossly misled the police, for they immediately obtained a warrant, which they certainly would not have done if they had known the real facts. Then Woodstock, distrusting his own abilities—very justly, but too late—consulted Mr. Penfield. But Mr. Penfield took the perfectly sound legal view of the case. The seals were admittedly unbroken. Therefore the boxes had been returned intact and there had been no robbery in the office. But if there had been no robbery, the disappearance of Osmond had no bearing on the case. Of course, neither Woodstock nor Hollis would agree to this view, and Mr. Penfield then recommended that the case should be put in my hands.

  "Now it was obvious that the whole case turned on the seals. They had been accepted as intact without—in spite of the absurdity—any kind of inquiry or examination. But were they really intact? If they were, the case was against Hollis; and I could see that my friend Professor Eccles suspected him of having engineered a sham robbery to evade a bequest to the nation. But this seemed to me a wild and unfair suspicion, and for my own part I strongly suspected the seals. Accordingly, I examined a whole series of them, minutely and exhaustively, with the result that they proved to be impressions, not of the matrix in Mr. Hollis's ring, but of an electrotype matrix made from a wax impression.

  "This new fact brought the inquiry to the next stage. It proved that the boxes had been opened and that they had been opened in Woodstock's office. For when they came there they were sealed with Hollis's seal, but when they left the office they were sealed with the forged seal. Things began to look rather black as regards Osmond; but, although I was retained ostensibly to work up a case against him, I kept an open mind and proceeded with the investigation as if he did not exist.

  "The second stage, then, started with the establishment of these facts: a robbery had really occurred; it had occurred in Woodstock's office; and, since the boxes had been kept in the strong-room, it was from thence that they had been abstracted. The next question was, By whom had the robbery been committed? Now, since the property had been taken from the strong-room, and since the strong-room had not been broken into, it followed that the thief must have had, or obtained, access to it. Now, there were three persons who had easy access to it: Woodstock who possessed the key, Hepburn and Osmond, both of whom occasionally had the key in their custody: There might be others, but if so, they were at present unknown to me. But of the three who were known, one, Osmond, had apparently absconded as soon as the robbery was discovered and connected with the office. Moreover, the commencement of the robberies apparently coincided in time with the date on which he joined the staff.

  "Evidently, then, everything that was known pointed to Osmond as the delinquent. But t
here was no positive case against him, and I decided to proceed as if nothing at all were known and seek for fresh data. And my first proceeding was to make an exhaustive examination of the boxes, the wrapping-paper, and the inside packing. As to the paper, I may say that I developed up a large number of finger-prints—on the outside surface only—I never examined, as the occasion did not arise. The investigation really concerned itself with the dust from the insides of the boxes and from the packing material. Of this I collected every particle that I could extract and put it aside in pill-boxes numbered in accordance with the boxes from which it was obtained. When I came to examine systematically the contents of the pill-boxes, I made two very curious discoveries.

  "First, every pill-box—representing, you will remember, one of the gem-boxes—contained one or more hairs; usually one only and never more than three. They were all alike. Each was a hair from a moustache of a light-brown colour and cut quite short, and there could be no doubt that they were all from the same individual. Consequently they could not be chance hairs which had blown in accidentally. The gem-boxes had been packed at various times, and hence the uniformity of the hairs connected them definitely with the person who packed the boxes. In short, it seemed at first sight practically certain that they were the hairs of the actual robber; in which case we could say that the robber was a man with a short light-brown moustache.

  "But when I came to reflect on the facts observed I was struck by their singularity. Moustache hairs are shed very freely, but they do not drop out at regular intervals. One, two, or more hairs in any one box would not have been surprising. A man who was in the habit of pulling at or stroking his moustache might dislodge two or three at once. The surprising thing was the regularity with which these hairs occurred; one, and usually one only, in each box, and no complete box in which there was none. It was totally opposed to the laws of probability.

  "The point was highly significant. Anyone can recognize a hair. Most men can recognize a moustache hair. A detective certainly could. If these boxes had been opened by the police, as Hollis had originally intended, these hairs would almost certainly have been seen and eagerly fastened on as giving what would amount to a description of the thief. They would have been put in evidence at the trial and would have been perfectly convincing to the jury.

  "The more I reflected on the matter the more did I suspect those hairs. If one assumed that they had been planted deliberately, say by a clean-shaved or dark-haired criminal, their regular occurrence in every box would be quite understandable. It would be a necessary precaution against their being overlooked. Otherwise it was unaccountable. Still, the fact of their presence had to be noted and the individual from whom they came identified, if possible.

  "The second discovery that I made was, perhaps, even more odd. In every one of the boxes I found particles of the fine dust which falls out of the holes in worm-eaten wood; sometimes only a few grains, sometimes quite a large number of grains, and in the aggregate a really considerable quantity."

  "But how astonishing," exclaimed Betty, "that you should be able to tell at once that these tiny grains came from worm-eaten wood."

  "I make it my business," he replied, "to be able to recognize the microscopical appearances of the different forms of dust. But your remark indicates a very significant point. I imagine that there will be very few persons in the world who could identify these particles in a collection of miscellaneous dust. And therein lay the value of this discovery; for if the significance of the hairs was open to doubt, that of the wood certainly was not. There was no question of its having been purposely planted. It had certainly found its way into the boxes accidentally, and the person who had unconsciously introduced it was pretty certainly unaware of its presence. It was undoubtedly a genuine clue.

  "The discovery of this characteristic dust raised several questions. In the first place, how came it into the boxes? Dust from worm-eaten furniture falls on the floor and remains there. It is too coarse and heavy to float in the air like the finer kinds of dust. In a room in which there is worm-eaten furniture, you will find the particles of dust all over the floor; but you will not find any on the tables or chair-rails or mantelpiece. But these boxes must have stood on a table or bench when they were being packed and when the dust got into them. Then the dust must have been on the table or bench. But how could it have got there? It was possible that the bench, itself, might have been worm-eaten. But that was not a probable explanation, for the dust tends to fall, not to rise. It would have fallen, for the most part, from the under surface on to the floor. The most likely explanation emerged from a consideration of the next question; which was, how could one account for the large quantity that was found?

  "The quantity was extraordinarily large. From the whole set of boxes we collected something approaching a quarter of a thimbleful; which seems an enormous amount if you consider that it must all have got into the boxes during the short time that they were open for packing. What could be the explanation?

  "There were two factors which had to be considered: the nature of the wood and the nature of the object which had been fashioned from it; and both were important for purposes of identification. Let us consider the first factor—material. Now, these wood-boring insects do not bore through wood as the bookworm bores through paper, to get at something else. They actually feed upon the wood. Naturally, then, they tend to select the kind of wood which contains the most nourishment and which, incidentally, is usually the softest. But of all woods those of the fruit trees are richest in gum and sap and are most subject to the attacks of the worm. Walnut, pear, apple, plum, and cherry all have this drawback, and of these cherry is so inveterately 'wormy' that it has usually been shunned by the cabinet-maker. Now, the quantity of the wood-dust pointed to some excessively worm-eaten object and suggested one of the fruit woods as the probable material, and the balance of probability was in favour of cherry; and this was supported by the pinkish colour of the dust. But, of course, this inference was purely hypothetical. It represented the general probabilities and nothing more.

  "And now we come to the second factor. What was the nature of this wooden object? A piece of ordinary furniture we could dismiss for two reasons: first, the dust from such a piece will ordinarily fall upon the floor, from whence it could hardly have got into the boxes; and, second, no matter how badly wormed a piece of furniture may be, the quantity of dust which falls from it is relatively small and accumulates quite slowly, being practically confined to that which is pushed out of the holes by the movements of the insects within. This process would not account for the great quantity indicated by these samples of ours. My feeling was that this worm-eaten object was an appliance of some sort, subject to frequent and violent disturbance. Let us take an imaginary case as an illustration. Let us imagine a mallet with an excessively worm-eaten head. Whenever that mallet is used, the shock of the impact will send a shower of wood-dust flying out on the bench, where it will rapidly accumulate.

  "But, of course, this object of ours could not be a mallet for the reason that mallets are always made of hard wood; and jewellers' mallets are usually made of box-wood, lignum vitae or horn, none of which is subject to 'the worm.' Thinking over the various appliances used by jewellers—since it was with a jeweller we were dealing—I suddenly bethought me of one which seemed to fulfil the conditions exactly. Jewellers and goldsmiths, as you probably know, use a variety of miniature anvils, known as stakes, bec irons, sparrowhawks, etc. Now, these little anvils are usually stuck in a block of wood, just as a smith's anvil is planted on a tree-stump. These blocks are not usually hard wood; indeed, soft wood is preferable as it absorbs the shock better. A favourite plan is to get a little log of wood and set the spike of the stake or sparrow-hawk in a hole bored in the end grain; and the most abundant source of these little logs—at least in the country—is the pile of trimmings from old fruit trees. Such a log would tend very soon to become worm-eaten; and if it did, every time it was used a ring of wood-dust would form aroun
d its base and would soon spread all over the bench, sticking to everything on it and straying on to the hands, arms, and clothing of the workman.

  "This inference, you will observe, was, like the previous one, purely hypothetical. But it agreed perfectly with the observed facts and accounted for them in a reasonable way; and as I could think of no other that did, I adopted it with the necessary reservations. But, in fact, the correctness or incorrectness of this hypothesis was at present of no great importance. Apart from any question as to its exact origin, the wood-dust was an invaluable clue. We now knew that the unknown robber was a person whose clothing was more or less impregnated with wood-dust; that any places that he had frequented would yield traces of wood-dust from the floors, and that the place where the boxes had been packed abounded in wood-dust and contained a badly worm-eaten wooden object of some kind.

  "The next proceeding was obvious. It was to find the places which had been frequented by that unknown person, to seek for the worm-eaten object, and, if possible, to identify the individual who appeared to be connected with it. The suspected places were two: Mr. Hollis's house and Mr. Woodstock's office. I did not, myself, suspect Hollis; but nevertheless I determined to examine his house as narrowly as the other. Accordingly I asked Mr. Penfield to obtain facilities for me to visit both places to make inquiries on the spot; which he did.

  "Perhaps, before I describe that voyage of exploration, it may be as well to pause and consider what knowledge I now possessed and what I was going to look for. There was the wood-dust, of course. That was the visible trail that I hoped to pick up. But there were other matters. I knew that there was a man, in some way connected with the robbery, who had a short, fair moustache. I had to find out who he was. Also if there was any source from which some other person might collect specimen hairs from that moustache—a hair-brush, for instance—and if such source existed, who had access to it.