Dr. Thorndyke Omnibus Vol 7

by R. Austin Freeman

  "I happened to notice," he said, rather dryly, "as I passed, that the shutters of one window were open; and as the only key of these premises is at this moment hanging on the key-board in the lodge, I concluded that some person, or persons, had obtained access to the said premises without authority and by some irregular means. Apparently I was right."

  "You were perfectly right, Mr. Weech," said Thorndyke, "as you always are. We are entirely unauthorised intruders. I ought to have applied to you for authority to inspect this room, but as I happened to have a key that fitted the lock, and as I merely wanted to look round, I—well, I waived the formality, thinking that I would mention the matter the next time we met."

  "Yes," said Mr. Weech, fixing a stony gaze on the pieces of board under Polton's arm. "Quite so. Perhaps it would have been more regular to obtain the authority before the event rather than after. May I ask why you wished to inspect this room?"

  Now this was precisely the question that I had been asking myself. But I had not the slightest hope of enlightenment. My learned senior was not in the least addicted to disclosing his motives. Nevertheless, I was curious to see how he would avoid this rather awkward question.

  "I wished," he replied, "for certain reasons connected with my inquiries, to ascertain whether this apparently disused room is, in fact, really disused, or whether it is ever visited or made use of."

  "I could have told you that if you had asked me," said Weech. "It is not. I could have told you that nobody has entered this room for several years."

  "Then, Mr. Weech," Thorndyke retorted, "you would have told me what is not true. For I have just ascertained that it has been entered within the last six months; and that it was entered, apparently, for the purpose of depositing these remains of an obviously new box or case."

  "Which," said Weech, with a sly smile, "I see you have taken possession of and are carrying away without authority. However," he concluded with a return to his usual geniality, "I raise no objection. The things are of no value, and de minimus non curat lex. I don't understand what you want them for, but that is your affair. Have you finished your explorations?"

  "Yes," replied Thorndyke, "we were just about to retire; and you had better let me hand you your umbrella when you are safely at the bottom of the steps."

  Mr. Weech gratefully accepted this offer, and, when he had closed the shutters, he embarked on the perilous descent and we followed. He lingered on the landing to wait for us, and, when Polton had let himself into the chambers, he strolled in and looked round.

  "I see you are having a spring clean," said he, glancing at the vacuum cleaner. "Not very necessary, I should think, but perhaps just as well after what has happened."

  He wandered through the rooms while Thorndyke retired to the bedroom—where I caught a glimpse of him making a survey of the late John Gillum's shoes—and eventually accompanied us down to the court yard, when we departed for home and a rather belated lunch, attended by Polton with the camera and the purloined wood. We paused for a minute or so outside the entry to exchange a few final words with Mr. Weech, and it was at this moment that a rather curious thing happened.

  As we were standing there, almost facing the covered passage that connected the two courtyards, I saw a man come through it and appear at the arched entrance. And there he halted. But only for a moment. For, having taken a single quick glance at us, he turned about, looked at his watch, and hurried away back through the passage. It was but an instantaneous glimpse that I had of him; but yet, in that instant, it seemed to me that the man was extraordinarily like Dr. Peck. Obviously, it could be no more than a chance resemblance, for we had left that gentleman established in his consulting-room waiting for the arrival of patients. But yet his was a face that one would remember, and the resemblance had certainly been rather remarkable.

  I was still reflecting on the coincidence when another man came up the passage and emerged from the arch. Preoccupied as I was with the first man, I hardly noticed him, for, unlike the other, he was quite, undistinctive—he might have been a solicitor's clerk or a superior type of traveller. Subconsciously, I was aware that he wore horn-rimmed spectacles, that he carried a small bag and an umbrella and that he walked with a slight limp. Only as he passed close to us on his way to the Fetter Lane gate did I become conscious of a feeling that I had seen him somewhere before; and that feeling might have been due to the fact that, as he passed us, he gave a quick look at Thorndyke, who seemed to return an instantaneous glance of recognition.

  When we had shaken off Mr. Weech at the door of the lodge, I raised the question. "Did you recognise that man who passed us in the Inn?"

  "Hardly," Thorndyke replied with a laugh. "Not until he looked at me. Did you?"

  "I seemed to have seen him before, but I can't give him a name."

  "You weren't meant to," Thorndyke chuckled. "That was our invaluable and Protean friend, Mr. Snuper."

  "Of course!" I exclaimed. "But I never can spot that fellow. He looks different every time I see him. But there was another man who came up the passage and who produced exactly the opposite effect. I thought I recognised him though I must have been mistaken. Did you notice him?"

  "Yes," he replied. "What was your impression of him?"

  "I thought he was extraordinarily like Dr. Peck."

  "So I thought," said Thorndyke.

  "Then it was a real resemblance and not a mere illusion. But it is a queer coincidence; for, of course, the man couldn't have been Peck. The thing is impossible."

  "It isn't impossible," he replied. "Only wildly improbable. He had no apparent reason for following us as he had our cards and knew where we lived. But if he had wanted to follow us, it was actually possible for him to have done it. Snuper did."

  "Snuper!" I exclaimed. "You say that Snuper followed us! How do you know that he did?"

  "I saw him in Whitechapel High Street as we came away from Peck's."

  XV. SERMONS IN DUST

  The appearance of the party that gathered that same evening round the table in our sitting-room to examine Polton's gleanings from John Gillum's chambers struck me at the time as slightly ludicrous. And that is still my impression when I recall the scene. In the middle of the table was a collection of the labelled bags, containing the floor-sweepings, or vacuum-cleanings, from the respective rooms. Before each of the three investigators was a microscope with triple nose-piece, flanked by a large photographic dish, a jar for waste, and a small covered glass pot for "reserved specimens"; and the appointed procedure consisted in scanning the material with a very low magnifying power, examining objects of interest with the higher powers, and the preservation of special "finds" for subsequent consideration.

  We began by each taking a bag and turning out its contents on to the dish; the said contents forming an unsavoury heap of the material known to housewives as "flue"—the sort of stuff that you can rake out from under a chest of drawers or a neglected bedstead. From the heap a pinch was taken up with forceps, spread out on the glass plate and rapidly inspected through the microscope. If it contained nothing of interest, it was cast into the waste jar and a fresh pinch taken.

  "Are we looking for anything in particular?" I asked as I turned out my mass of flue into the dish; "or do we report everything?"

  "You know what is likely to turn up in a floor sweeping," Thorndyke replied. "We can ignore the inevitable wool fibres from the carpet, and cotton and linen fibres. Everything else had better be noted."

  With this we all fell to work, stimulated at first by the hope of turning up something interesting or curious. But, as the things which we were to ignore appeared to be the only things discoverable, the occupation began presently to pall, and I don't mind admitting that I found it rather tedious. By the time that my heap was reduced to a mere handful, I had observed—apart from the ubiquitous fibres—nothing more thrilling than a few minute particles of what looked like broken glass.

  "Yes," said Thorndyke, when I mentioned my discovery, "I have found some, too.
It isn't quite obvious what they are, but we had better keep them. Possibly we may come on a larger fragment with a more definite character."

  Accordingly, I picked out the grains with fine forceps, aided by a pointed sable brush, moistened at the tip, and deposited them in the glass pot. Having done this, I was about to reach for a second bag when Polton announced a discovery.

  "I've found a hair," said he. "It looks like a moustache hair, but it must have been a funny sort of moustache. It seems to have been dyed. Must have been. But did you ever see a man with a violet moustache?"

  He passed the slide to Thorndyke, who confirmed the discovery.

  "Yes," said he, "it is a moustache hair—a rather fair one—dyed black."

  But," protested Polton, "it's violet."

  "Hardly violet," said Thorndyke. "A dull, bluish purple, I should call it. That is the appearance of a single hair, seen under the microscope by a strong transmitted light. Seen in a mass by the naked eye and by reflected light, it would appear jet black."

  "Would it, now," said Polton. "Think of that. The microscope is a wonderful instrument, but you mustn't believe all that it tells you."

  He took back his slide, and picking the hair out daintily with his forceps, deposited it in the glass pot, while I, encouraged by his success, began an attack on a fresh bagful of flue.

  This time, I had considerably better luck. At the first cast I struck an object which looked like a coarse and rather irregular thread of glass; and, as I could make nothing more of it than that, I passed the slide to Thorndyke for a "further opinion."

  "Ha!" said he, when he had taken a look at it, "now we know what those other particles were. This is undoubtedly a fibre of silicate wool, or slag-wool, as it is sometimes called. It is made from the slag from the smelting furnaces, which is really a kind of crude glass."

  "And what is it used for?"

  "For a variety of purposes. As it is cheap and incombustible, is unaffected by acids—excepting hydrofluoric acid—or by moisture, and is a bad conductor of heat, it is useful for packing, and especially for packing hot or cold substances."

  "I wonder what Gillum used it for," said I.

  "We had better defer speculations and inferences," Thorndyke replied, "until we have examined the whole of the material"; and with this he took a fresh bag and resumed his observations.

  My good fortune did not stop at the slag-wool fibre. Presently there came into the field of the microscope a hair, obviously a scalp hair and probably from a man's head, though the sex is not so easy to decide in these days of shingling and Eton cropping. At any rate, it was a short hair and had been recently cut; and as it had been dyed the same dull purple colour as Polton's moustache hair, it was reasonable to infer that it came from the same person. Accordingly, I considered it attentively in its bearing on that person's natural characteristics. The dye did not, of course, extend to the root. There was a space of, perhaps, a twelfth of an inch above the neck of the bulb—representing the growth since the last application of the dye—which was of the natural colour; and from this I was able to infer that the man was of a medium complexion, inclining to be fair rather than dark; that the hair had been originally of a somewhat light brown tint. This was also Thorndyke's opinion, based on an inspection of my "find" and of another scalp hair which he had found in his own material.

  "So," he concluded, "we now know that this was a rather blond man who wore a moustache. What we don't know is whether he shaved his chin or wore a beard."

  "Begging your pardon, sir," Polton interposed, "I think we do. I have just found another hair, a thick, rather wavy one. It isn't a moustache hair and it doesn't look like a hair of the head. I think it must be a beard hair. Will you just take a look at it, sir?"

  Thorndyke took the slide from him, and having made a brief examination of the specimen, decided that it was undoubtedly a beard hair; a decision that I confirmed when the slide had been submitted to me.

  "So," said I, "we now have a fairly complete picture of this man, and the question is: Who can he have been? Do you think it possible that Benson could have been mistaken? That what he took for natural black hair was really dyed hair?"

  "No," Thorndyke replied, decidedly. "That is impossible for two reasons. First, Benson had known Gillum since his boyhood—practically the whole of his life. But the second reason is absolutely conclusive. You remember that Benson described Gillum's hair as being slightly streaked with grey; that is to say, there was a slight sprinkling of white hairs among the black. And he expressly stated that he had examined the hair of the corpse to see whether the proportion of white hairs had increased, and that he found them apparently unchanged. Moreover, there are the hairbrushes that we found in the chambers—apparently Gillum's brushes. I have examined some of the hairs from those brushes and found them to be natural black hairs with a very few white ones. So these dyed hairs are not Gillum's, but those of some other person who had frequented those chambers."

  "Yes," I agreed, "that is perfectly clear. I wonder who he can have been. Is it possible that we have struck the actual villain—the blackmailer, himself?"

  "It seems quite possible," Thorndyke replied; "but we had better get on with our search and see what the other bags have to tell us."

  We worked on steadily for another hour, making no further comments but transferring all new finds to the glass pots. By this time we had dealt with all the bags excepting the two small ones containing the material from the sweeper and the coal-bin; and the net result was, five more dyed hairs, one natural black hair and seven fibres of slag-wool. Of the two small bags, I took the one labelled "coal-bin," while the other was divided between Polton and Thorndyke, the latter taking the extracted dust while Polton was awarded the fibrous mass that he had so industriously combed from the sweeper's brushes.

  As for my material, I approached it with no expectation of any discovery, whatever. In a coal-bin one may reasonably anticipate the presence of coal. And coal there certainly was. When I turned the bag out into my dish, the contents presented an undeniable heap of coal-dust, a trial sample of which I took up with the blade of my pocket-knife and sprinkled over the glass plate. But when I applied my eye to the microscope, the appearance of that sprinkling came as a considerable surprise. Undoubtedly there was coal galore; a scattered mass of black, opaque, characterless fragments. But everywhere in the spaces between the particles of coal, the glass surface was covered with a multitude of slag-wool fragments of all sizes from quite considerable lengths of thread down to mere grains of glassy dust. I announced my discovery to Thorndyke and passed the slide to him, but when he had examined it, with evident interest, he handed it back to me with no comment beyond the suggestion that it seemed desirable to preserve the whole of the material from the bin.

  His own portion of sweeper dust yielded nothing but a single dyed hair and a few particles of slag-wool, but Polton's combings from the sweeper-brushes were quite rich in material so far as quantity went. But they contained nothing new. There were no less than seven hairs, all dyed, one or two threads of slag-wool, and a number of particles of no interest such as crumbs of bread or biscuit, tobacco ash, a piece of cotton thread and some shavings from a lead pencil. The combings were, in fact, but a sort of condensed epitome of the general "floor-sweep."

  "Well, Thorndyke," I said, as I rose and stretched myself, "I think my brilliant and original idea has justified itself by the results. But I'm hanged if I understand them. The gent with the purple hair has deposited well over a dozen samples in different parts of the premises, including the sweeper, whereas John Gillum has dropped only one. But Gillum was the resident. The other fellow could only have been a visitor, even if Gillum put him up. It seems quite inconsistent, unless we assume that the purple chappie was moulting; which I am not prepared to do."

  "No," Thorndyke agreed, "we shall have to find some explanation more plausible than that. And now, if you and Polton will clear away the remains while I jot down a few particulars of the evening's w
ork, we shall all be ready for supper. I presume," he added, addressing Polton, "that the contingency has been foreseen."

  It had. There could be no doubt of that, though Polton's only reply was a smile which converted his countenance into the likeness of one of good Abbot Mendel's famous wrinkled peas. But even that smile understated the gorgeous reality. A cold boiled fowl and a ham were mere incidents in the Sybaritic menu. As Polton deposited "the goods" on the table with another smile—which left the Mendelian pea nowhere—I was once more impressed by the queer contradictions in his character. For Polton, himself a spare-living, almost ascetic little man, was apt, when Thorndyke was concerned, to manifest his devotion by developing a sort of vicarious gluttony. He would contemplate Thorndyke's robust appreciation of good food and wine with the sympathetic joy of a fond mother administering delicacies to a beloved child.

  Of course, we made him join us at the feast. He could not be allowed to go away and feed in the laboratory, as he had proposed; and when he had taken his place at the table and I had filled his glass with Chambertin (I believe he would rather have had ginger beer), the cup of his happiness was literally full. It was a glorious ending to what had been, for him, a red-letter day.

  When the banquet had passed through its final stages and Polton had retired triumphant to his own dominions, Thorndyke and I drew up our chairs to a rather premature but highly acceptable fire and filled our pipes. And, naturally, my thoughts reverted to the evening's researches and their rather surprising results. My colleague had seemed unwilling to discuss them at the time, though we had few secrets from Polton in these days, but now that we were alone, I thought he might be less reticent, and accordingly I ventured to reopen the topic.