The Mad Hatter Mystery

by The Mad Hatter Mystery (retail) (epub)

  Rampole made two crosses and a squiggle.

  “Occupation?”

  “I am employed by Sir William Bitton, of Berkeley Square, sir. I—I hope, sir,” said Marks, swallowing, “that this is not in connection with that dreadful business, sir, of Mr. Philip—”

  “Do I take that down, too?” inquired Rampole.

  “Certainly,” said the doctor. Obediently, Rampole made a furious row of loops, and ended with a severe flourish. Dr. Fell had for the moment forgotten the voice of Hamlet’s father’s Ghost. He resumed it with a jerk that made Hadley jump.

  “Your last position?”

  “For fifteen years, sir, I had the honor to serve Lord Sandival,” Marks said, eagerly, “and I’m sure, sir—”

  “Aha!” rumbled the doctor, closing one eye. He looked rather as the Ghost would have looked had he caught Hamlet playing pinochle when he should have been attending to business. “Why did you leave your last place? Sacked?”

  “No, sir! It was the death of His Lordship, sir.”

  “H’m. Murdered, I suppose?” inquired the Ghost.

  “Good Heavens, no, sir!”

  Marks was visibly wilting. The Ghost became practical. “Now, look here, Marks, I don’t mind telling you you’re in a very bad corner. You’ve got a good position, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, sir. And I’m sure Sir William will give me the highest—”

  “He won’t, Marks, if he knows what we know. Would you like to lose your position, and go to jail besides? Think of it, Marks!” rumbled Dr. Fell, picking up the handcuffs.

  Marks moved backwards, his forehead damp. He tried to keep the light out of his eyes with a nervous hand. “Marks,” said the Ghost, “give me your hat!”

  “My what, sir?”

  “Your hat. The one you’ve got there. Quickly!” As the valet held out his bowler, they could see under the light the large gold letters Bitton on the inside of the white lining in the crown. “Aha!” said the Ghost. “Pinching Sir William’s hats, eh? That’ll be another five years. Write it down, Sergeant Rampole.”

  “No, sir!” Marks cried, through a gulp. “I swear it, sir. I can prove it, Sir William gave me that hat. I wear the same size as he does. And he gave me that because he bought two new hats only recently, and if you’ll only let me prove it, sir—”

  “I’ll give you your chance,” said the Ghost, ominously. He thrust his hand across the table. It held something round and flat and black; there was a click, and it leaped full-grown into an opera hat. “Put this hat on, Marks!”

  By this time Rampole was so bewildered that he almost expected to see Dr. Fell take from the hat several yards of colored ribbon and a brace of rabbits. Marks stared.

  “This is Sir William’s hat!” shouted the Ghost. “Put it on. If it fits you, I’ll believe what you say.”

  Without further ado he began to stab with the hat in the direction of Marks’s forehead. The valet was compelled to put it on. It was too large; not so large as it had been on the body of Driscoll, but still too large.

  “So-ho!” rumbled the Ghost, standing up behind the table. Absently he had been fumbling in his pockets; the Ghost was excited, and making gestures with anything he could lay hold of. Dr. Fell lifted his hand and shook it in the air. “Confess, Marks!” he thundered. “Miserable wretch, your guilt has found you out!”

  He crashed his hand down on the table. To Marks’s stupefaction, and Dr. Fell’s own irritation at the anticlimax, a large rubber mouse with white whiskers popped out of his hand and ambled slowly across the table towards Hadley. Dr. Fell snatched it up hastily and put it into his pocket.

  “Hem!” observed the Ghost. Then he paused, and added something which really brought Hadley out of his chair.

  “Marks,” said Dr. Fell, “you stole Sir William’s manuscript.”

  For a moment it looked as though the other were going to faint.

  “I—I didn’t! I swear I didn’t! But I didn’t know, and I was afraid to tell when he explained it to me!”

  “I’ll tell you what you did, Marks,” said Dr. Fell, forgetting all about the Ghost and threatening in a natural voice. “Sir William gave me all the facts. You’re a good valet, Marks, but you’re one of the stupidest creatures in God’s world. Sir William bought two new hats on Saturday. One of the opera hats he tried on at the shop was too large for him. But a mistake was made, and they sent the large one to him along with the Homburg, which was of the right size. Ha? You saw it. You would, immediately. You wear the same size. But Sir William was going out to the theatre that night. You know what sort of temper he has. If he found a hat that slid down over his forehead, he’d make it hot for the first person he could lay hands on.

  “Naturally you wanted his hat to be the right size, didn’t you, Marks? Otherwise your soul would have been shocked. But there wasn’t time to get another hat; it was Saturday evening. So you did the natural thing. You used the same quick makeshift people have been using since hats were invented. You neatly stuffed the band on the inside with paper, the first harmless-looking paper you could find—”

  Hadley flung the tin revolver on the table. “Good God!” he said, “do you seriously mean to tell us that Marks tightened up the fit of that hat with Sir William’s manuscript?”

  “Sir William,” the doctor said, amiably, “gave us two clues himself which were absolutely revealing. Do you remember what he said? He said that the manuscript consisted of thin sheets of paper folded several times lengthwise, and rather long. Try folding over any piece of paper that way, and you’ll get a long, narrow, compact set, admirably suited for stuffing the lining of a hat. And do you remember what he said besides? The manuscript was wrapped in tissue paper. Taken all together, it was the obvious thing for Marks to use. Like the two laborers in the house where Bitton found it, and the owner of the house himself, Marks couldn’t see any importance in a piece of tissue paper lying idly about—”

  “But Bitton said it was in the drawer.”

  “I doubt that,” said Dr. Fell. “Was it, Marks?”

  Marks brushed a handkerchief over his damp forehead. “N-no, sir,” he faltered. “It was lying there on the desk. I—I didn’t think it was important. It was tissue paper with some crackly stuff inside, the sort of thing they use to pack objects in cardboard boxes. I thought it was something he’d discarded, sir. I swear I did! If it had been correspondence, or any other piece of paper, I take my oath I wouldn’t have thought of going near it. But—”

  “And then,” said Dr. Fell, rattling the handcuffs, “you learned next day what you’d done. You learned it was worth thousands of pounds. And so you were afraid to tell Sir William what you’d done, because in the meantime the hat had been stolen.” He turned to Hadley. “I rather thought this was the case, from Sir William’s description of Marks’s behavior when he interviewed him afterwards. Sir William made us an invaluable suggestion, which he thought was satiric. He said, ‘Do you think I go about carrying valuable manuscripts in my hat?’ And that’s precisely what he did.”

  “And that,” Hadley said in a queer voice, “that was why Sir William’s hat fitted him. It’s what you meant by your ‘hint.’”

  “It’s what I meant by telling you we had got to clear away all the nonsense from this case before we could see the truth. That one little accident precipitated a whole series of ghastly events, like the loss of the horseshoe nail. It was the only point I wasn’t sure of. I was staking everything on my belief that that’s what had happened. Now I know the whole truth. But you can see for yourself why I couldn’t have Sir William with me when I was questioning Marks.”

  The valet removed the opera hat and was holding it like a bomb. His face was dull and helpless.

  “All right,” he said in a normal, human, almost even tone. “All right, gents. You’ve got me. That means my job. What are you going to do with me? I’ve got a sister and three cousins I’m supporting; and respectable, too. But it’s all up now.”

  “Eh?” said Dr
. Fell. “Oh! No, Marks. You’re safe enough. Now you walk out to the car again, and sit there till you’re called. You did a stupid thing, but there’s no reason why you should lose your place. I won’t tell Sir William.”

  The mild little man thrust himself out violently.

  “Honest to God?” he demanded. “Do you mean it?”

  “I mean it, Marks.”

  There was a pause. Marks drew himself up and adjusted his impeccable coat. “Very good, sir,” he said in a precise tone. “I’m sure I’m very grateful, sir.”

  “Turn on the center lights,” Dr. Fell suggested to Rampole, “and give Hadley’s notebook back before he gets apoplexy.” Beaming, the doctor sat down behind the table and produced the rubber mouse. He pushed his shovel hat to the back of his head, and set the mouse to running in circles over the table. “This almost marred my effect. I say, Hadley, I’m devilish sorry I didn’t think to buy a pair of false whiskers.”

  As the lights went on, Hadley, Rampole, and a very excited Dalrye almost literally seized him.

  “Let me get all this straight,” the chief inspector said, heavily. “On Saturday night Bitton walked out of his house with that manuscript in his hat. And this Mad Hatter chap stole the hat.”

  “Ah,” said the doctor, somberly. He stopped the mouse and scowled at it. “And there you have the inception of the crazy comedy, Hadley. There’s where everything started to go wrong. If there’s one thing in the world young Philip Driscoll wouldn’t have done, it was offend his uncle. Over and over, with tears in my eyes, I’ve implored you to believe that the last thing in the world Driscoll wanted to do was even touch Bitton’s beloved manuscript. And so what must have been his horror when he discovered he’d done the one thing in the world he didn’t want to do!”

  During a frozen silence Dr. Fell picked up the mouse, put it down, and glanced thoughtfully at his companions. “Oh yes,” he said. “Driscoll was the hat thief, you see.”

  XV

  The Affair of the Rubber Mouse

  “WAIT A minute!” protested Rampole. “Wait a minute. They’re coming over the plate too fast for me. You mean—“

  “Just what I say,” the doctor answered, testily. “If you didn’t see that, I’m surprised you didn’t. Nobody could have doubted it from the first. I had proof of it here tonight; but I had to come here and get the proof before you would have believed me. Got a cigar, Hadley?”

  He sat back comfortably when the cigar was lighted, the large gold badge still stuck on his lapel and the rubber mouse within reach.

  “Consider. Here’s a crazy young fellow with a sense of humor and lots of intelligence. I think myself that he was a good deal of a sneak and skunk; but we’ve got to allow him the nerve, the humor, and the intelligence. He wants to make a name for himself as a newspaperman. He can turn out a good, vivid news story when he has the facts; but he has so little news-sense that one managing editor swears he wouldn’t scent a wedding if he walked through an inch of rice in front of a church.

  “That’s not only understandable, Hadley, but it’s a further clue to his character. His long suit was imagination. The very imaginative people never make good straight reporters; they’re looking for the picturesque, the bizarre, the ironic incident; and very often they completely neglect to bother about essential facts. Doing the routine work of covering regular news isn’t in their line. Driscoll would have made a thundering good columnist, but as a reporter he was a failure. So he resolved to do what many a reporter has done before him—to create news, and the sort of news that would appeal to him. If you’ll just think back over everything we know of his character, you’ll see what he was up to.

  “In every one of these important hat thefts there was a sort of ironic symbolism, as though the stage had been arranged by an actor. Driscoll loved gestures, and he loved symbolism. A policeman’s helmet is propped on a lamp-standard outside Scotland Yard; ‘Behold the power of the police!’ says the Byronic Mr. Driscoll, with the usual cynicism of very young people. A barrister’s wig is put on a cab horse, which was the nearest approach Driscoll could get towards underlining Mr. Bumble’s opinion that the law is an ass. And next the hat of a well-known Jewish war profiteer is stolen and placed on one of the lions in Trafalgar Square. Now, Driscoll is really in his most Byronic vein. ‘Behold!’ he cries—and it’s genuinely comical, as I tried to point out to you—‘behold, in these degenerate days, the British lion’s crown!’”

  Dr. Fell paused to settle more comfortably. Hadley stared at him, and then the chief inspector nodded.

  “Now I shouldn’t go into this so thoroughly,” the doctor went on, “except that it’s a clue to the murder, as you’ll see. He was preparing for another coup, a real and final coup, which couldn’t help making—in his eyes—the whole of England sit up.” The doctor wheezed and chuckled. Putting down his cigar, he pawed among the papers he had taken from Hadley’s briefcase. “Here’s his notebook, with those notes which puzzled you so much. Before I read them to you again, let me remind you that Driscoll himself gave the whole show away. You recall that drunken evening with Mrs. Bitton, which Mrs. Larkin described for us, when Driscoll prophesied what was going to happen a week before it did begin to happen? He mentioned events which were shortly to occur, and which would make his name as a newspaperman. An artist, when comfortably filled with beer, can talk at length about the great picture he intends to paint, without exciting the least surprise. A writer is practically bound to mention the great novel he will one day write. But when a newspaperman casually mentions what corking stories he is going to turn out about the murder which is to take place next week, there is likely to be considerable curiosity about his powers of foresight.

  “But let’s return to this big stroke Driscoll was planning, after having built up to it by degrees with lesser hats. First, you see, he carefully stole the crossbow bolt out of Bitton’s house—”

  “He did what?” shouted the chief inspector. Dalrye sat down suddenly in a chair by the table, and Rampole found another.

  “Oh yes; I must tell you about that,” Dr. Fell said, frowning as though he were a trifle annoyed with himself. “But I tried to give you a hint, you know, this afternoon. It was Driscoll who stole it. By the way—” he rummaged on the floor at the side of his chair, and brought up the tool-basket. After fumbling inside it, he produced what he wanted. “By the way, here’s the file he used to sharpen it. It’s rather an old file, so you can see the oblique lines in the dirt-coating where he sawed at the barbs of the head. And here are the straighter marks to show where he had started effacing the Souvenir de Carcassonne, before somebody stole the bolt from him to use for another purpose.”

  Hadley took the file and turned it over. “Then—” he said.

  “I asked you, you know, why that engraving hadn’t been entirely obliterated, provided the person who had sharpened the bolt was really the murderer. Let’s suppose it had been the murderer. He started in to do it, so why in the name of madness didn’t he go on? It was obvious that he didn’t want the bolt traced, as it would have been and as it was. But he stopped after a neat, thorough job on just three letters. It was only when I realized what was up—an explanation provided by those abstruse notes in Driscoll’s notebook—that I realized it wasn’t the murderer’s doing at all. It was Driscoll’s. He hadn’t finished his job of effacing when along came the murderer: who didn’t care where the bolt came from, or whose it was. But actually this bolt was planned as a part of Driscoll’s most daring venture.”

  “But, good God! What venture?” demanded Hadley. “There’s no way to associate it with the hats.”

  “Oh yes, there is,” said Dr. Fell.

  After he had puffed thoughtfully for a moment he went on. “Hadley, who is the man, above all you can think of, who ranks in the popular eye as England’s leading jingo? Who is the man who still makes speeches in private life, as he used to do in public life, about the might of the sword, the longbow, the crossbow, and the stout hearts of old? Who
is always agitating for bigger armaments? Who is forever attacking the Prime Minister as a dangerous pacifist? Who, at any rate, is inevitably the person Driscoll would think of in that rôle?”

  “You mean—Sir William Bitton?”

  “I mean just that,” nodded the doctor. A grin creased up his chins. “And that insane nephew of his had conceived a design which satisfied all the demands of his sensation-loving soul. He was going to steal Sir William Bitton’s hat and nail it with a crossbow bolt to the door of Number 10, Downing Street.”

  Hadley was more than shocked. He was genuinely outraged. For a moment he could only splutter; and Dr. Fell contemplated him with amiable mockery.

  “Tut, tut!” said the doctor. “I warned you, Hadley, when the general and I were outlining fantastic schoolboy pranks and you were not amused. I was sure you would never see the back of the design unless you could put yourself into the place of the schoolboy. You’ve got too much common sense. But, you see, Driscoll hadn’t. You don’t appreciate dummy pistols and rubber mice. That’s your trouble. But I do appreciate them, and I can become even as Driscoll.

  “Look here.” He opened Driscoll’s notebook. “See how he’s musing about this scheme. He hasn’t quite worked it out yet. All he has is the idea of fastening Sir William’s hat with this warlike instrument in some public place. So he writes, inquiringly, ‘Best place? Tower?’ But, of course, that won’t do; it’s much too easy, and a crossbow bolt in the Tower would be as conspicuous as a small bit of coal at Newcastle. However, he’s got to have his properties first, and he writes, ‘Track down hat,’ which is obvious. Then he thinks about Trafalgar Square again, as he inevitably must. But that won’t do, because he certainly can’t drive his bolt into the stone of the Nelson monument. So he writes, ‘Unfortunate Trafalgar, can’t transfix!’ But it wasn’t so unfortunate, for his burst of inspiration comes—and you note the exclamation points to denote it. He’s got it now. He notes down Number Ten, home of the Prime Minister. The next words you can easily see. Is the door made of wood? If it’s steel-bound, or something of the sort, the scheme won’t work; he doesn’t know. He must find out. Is there a hedge, or anything that will screen him from observation while he does it? Are there guards about, as there are likely to be? He doesn’t know this, either. It’s a long chance, and a risky one; but he’s jubilant about the possibility, and he means to find out.”