“Everyone will say,” Moris Klaw declared, “‘he was a failure, that old
fool from Wapping’--for how can a dead man confess, and what use for
the newspapers to tell the public why this poor Russian leaps from his
window?” He shrugged his shoulders, looking around my study. “You say
to me,” he continued, addressing Grimsby: ‘What is the sound you hear
when you sleep in the studio?’ and I do not tell you because you would
not understand. But now I shall tell you. I hear, my friend, a chord
in G Minor!
“Ah! you wag your head. I knew you would wag your head! But beware
that your brains do not rattle. This is what I hear, and this is the
thing in the mind of the murderer at the moment that he does the
murder--a chord in G Minor, Mr. Grimsby! I, the old fool, have the
music sense, and this chord it intrigues me. Why? because it is not
playable--yet it is a chord upon a piano.”
“Not playable!” Grimsby exclaimed.
“Not playable, my friend, except by a man having enormous hands! And
also, my good Grimsby, the poor Webley could not have been strangled
as he was except by one having enormous hands.
“This is what I first perceive when I see his body, and what for one
absurd moment I dream that you have perceived also. I, myself, have
large hands, but although I try I cannot span within inches of the
marks made upon his throat by the monster who kills him. And so, when
I hear this chord, and I question and I try and I find that it cannot
be played by any normal hand, I say, ‘Yes! it is a musician with
abnormal hands!’ And I look for him and I listen for him. And to him I
have one other clue--a _hashish_ cigarette.”
“_What_ kind of cigarette?” Grimsby muttered.
“I said _hashish_, my friend--a cigarette containing the drug Indian
hemp; a kind of cigarette very rarely met in England. In that ashtray,
among a dozen others, I detect it immediately. Is it not strange”--he
turned to me--“how the murderer is drawn to the place of the murder?
It is why, when I hear of the house-warming, I plan to go. Perhaps it
is accident--perhaps something else.
“He was a mad genius, that Skobolov. He tries to know supreme emotion
that he may write supreme music. Perhaps he succeeds. Who can say? But
his compositions cannot live--for no other man can play them, on the
piano at any rate. Where did he meet the poor Webley? Who can say?
Perhaps they were acquainted, perhaps they met in the street. Webley
was Bohemian. He invites Skobolov into the lonely studio. Good! There
could be no evidence. It was his opportunity--to know the emotion of
_murder_ and to get safe away!
“To-night I hear it again--the dream chord: I see his great hands. But
he smokes no cigarette in the studio, not until he has returned to his
own rooms. For this I waited, this last piece of evidence. Behold!”
From his pocket-case he took out _two_ cigarette stumps.
“To-night, in the studio, at last I hear again my dream chord--the
chord in G, in G Minor; yet when I telephone to you, my good Grimsby,
you think I am the old fool. I say, ‘Hurry to Chelsea. I await.’ You
obey, but you reluct. I say, ‘When at the place we go I send a
message, “the cloak is in the car.” Enter.’ You enter and you permit
the strangler to escape the law.”
He shrugged, stooped to where his brown bowler rested upon the floor
beside him, took out the scent spray and squirted verbena upon his
forehead.
“I have the hot brain,” he explained; “it is the activity. But yours,
my friend”--turning to Grimsby--“is as cool as a lemon.”
EIGHTH EPISODE.
CASE OF THE HEADLESS MUMMIES
I
The mysteries which my eccentric friend, Moris Klaw, was most
successful in handling undoubtedly were those which had their origin
in kinks of the human brain or in the mysterious history of some relic
of ancient times.
I have seen his theory of the Cycle of Crime proved triumphantly time
and time again; I have known him successfully to demonstrate how the
history of a valuable gem or curio automatically repeats itself,
subject, it would seem, to that obscure law of chance into which he
had made particular inquiry. Then his peculiar power--assiduously
cultivated by a course of obscure study--of recovering from the
atmosphere, the ether, call it what you will, the thought-forms--the
ideas thrown out by the scheming mind of the criminal he sought
for--enabled him to succeed where any ordinary investigator must
inevitably have failed.
“They destroy,” he would say in his odd, rumbling voice, “the clumsy
tools of their crime; they hide away the knife, the bludgeon; they sop
up the blood, they throw it, the jemmy, the dead man, the suffocated
poor infant, into the ditch, the pool--and they leave intact the odic
negative, the photograph of their sin, the thought thing in the air!”
He would tap his high yellow brow significantly. “Here upon this
sensitive plate I reproduce it, the hanging evidence! The headless
child is buried in the garden, but the thought of the beheader is left
to lie about. I pick it up. Poof! he swings--that child-slayer! I
triumph. He is a dead man. What an art is the art of the odic
photograph.”
But I propose to relate here an instance of Moris Klaw’s amazing
knowledge in matters of archæology--of the history of relics. In his
singular emporium at Wapping, where dwelt the white rats, the singing
canary, the cursing parrot, and the other stock-in-trade of this
supposed dealer in oddities, was furthermore a library probably
unique. It contained obscure works on criminology; it contained
catalogues of every relic known to European collectors with elaborate
histories of the same. What else it contained I am unable to say, for
the dazzling Isis Klaw was a jealous librarian.
You who have followed these records will have made the acquaintance of
Coram, the curator of the Menzies Museum; and it was through Coram
that I first came to hear of the inexplicable beheading of mummies,
which, commencing with that of Mr. Pettigrew’s valuable mummy of the
priestess Hor-ankhu, developed into a perfect epidemic. No more
useless outrage could well be imagined than the decapitation of an
ancient Egyptian corpse; and if I was surprised when I heard of the
first case, my surprise became stark amazement when yet other mummies
began mysteriously to lose their heads. But I will deal with the first
instance, now, as it was brought under my notice by Coram.
He rang me up early one morning.
“I say, Searles,” he said; “a very odd thing has happened. You’ve
heard me speak of Pettigrew the collector; he lives out Wandsworth
way; he’s one of our trustees. Well, some demented burglar broke into
his house last night, took nothing, but cut off the head of a valuable
mummy!”
“Good Heavens!” I cried. “What an original idea!”
“Highly so,” agreed Coram. “The police are hopelessly mystified, and
as I know you are keen on this class of copy I thought you might like
to run down and have a chat with Pettigrew. Shall I tell him you are
coming?”
“By all means,” I said, and made an arrangement forthwith.
Accordingly, about eleven o’clock, I presented myself at a gloomy
Georgian house standing well back from the high road and screened by
an unkempt shrubbery. Mr. Mark Pettigrew, a familiar figure at Sotheby
auctions, was a little shrivelled man, clean-shaven, and with the
complexion of a dried apricot. His big spectacles seemed to occupy a
great proportion of his face, but his eyes twinkled merrily and his
humour was as dry as his appearance.
“Glad to see you, Mr. Searles,” he said. “You’ve had some experience
of the _outré_, I believe, and where two constables, an imposing
inspector, and a plain-clothes gentleman who looked like a horse have
merely upset my domestic arrangements, you may be able to make some
intelligent suggestion.”
He conducted me to a large gloomy room in which relics, principally
Egyptian, were arranged and ticketed with museum-like precision.
Before a wooden sarcophagus containing the swathed figure of a mummy
he stopped, pointing. He looked as though he had come out of a
sarcophagus himself.
“Hor-ankhu,” he said, “a priestess of Sekhet; a very fine specimen,
Mr. Searles. I was present when it was found. See--here is her head!”
Stooping, he picked up the head of the mummy. Very cleanly and
scientifically it had been unwrapped and severed from the trunk. It
smelt strongly of bitumen, and the shrivelled features reminded me of
nothing so much as of Mr. Mark Pettigrew.
“Did you ever hear of a more senseless thing?” he asked. “Come over
and look at the window where he got in.”
We crossed the dark apartment, and the collector drew my attention to
a round hole which had been drilled in the glass of one of the French
windows opening on a kind of miniature prairie which once had been a
lawn.
“I am having shutters fitted,” he went on. “It is so easy to cut a
hole in the glass and open the catch of these windows.”
“Very easy,” I agreed. “Was any one disturbed?”
“No one,” he replied, excitedly; “that’s the insane part of the thing.
The burglar, with all the night before him and with cases containing
portable and really priceless objects about him, contented himself
with decapitating the priestess. What on earth did he want her head
for? Whatever he wanted it for, why the devil didn’t he _take_ it?”
We stared at each other blankly.
“I fear,” said Pettigrew, “I have been guilty of injustice to my
horsey visitor, the centaur. You look as stupid as the worst of us!”
“I feel stupid,” I said.
“You are!” Pettigrew assured me with cheerful impertinence. “So am I,
so are the police; but the biggest fool of the lot is the fool who
came here last night and cut off the head of my mummy.”
That, then, is all which I have occasion to relate regarding the first
of these mysterious outrages. I was quite unable to propound any
theory covering the facts, to Pettigrew’s evident annoyance; he
assured me that I was very stupid, and insisted upon opening a magnum
of champagne. I then returned to my rooms, and since reflection upon
the subject promised to be unprofitable, had dismissed it from my
mind, when some time during the evening Inspector Grimsby rang me up
from the Yard.
“Hullo, Mr. Searles,” he said; “I hear you called on Mr. Pettigrew
this morning?”