A Hot Scent
“Come in!” called Trent.
Mr. Cupples entered his sitting-room at the hotel. It was the early
evening of the day on which the coroner’s jury, without leaving the
box, had pronounced the expected denunciation of a person or persons
unknown. Trent, with a hasty glance upward, continued his intent study
of what lay in a photographic dish of enamelled metal, which he moved
slowly about in the light of the window. He looked very pale, and his
movements were nervous.
“Sit on the sofa,” he advised. “The chairs are a job lot bought at the
sale after the suppression of the Holy Inquisition in Spain. This is a
pretty good negative,” he went on, holding it up to the light with his
head at the angle of discriminating judgement. “Washed enough now, I
think. Let us leave it to dry, and get rid of all this mess.”
Mr. Cupples, as the other busily cleared the table of a confusion of
basins, dishes, racks, boxes, and bottles, picked up first one and then
another of the objects and studied them with innocent curiosity.
“That is called hypo-eliminator,” said Trent, as Mr. Cupples uncorked
and smelt at one of the bottles. “Very useful when you’re in a hurry
with a negative. I shouldn’t drink it, though, all the same. It
eliminates sodium hypophosphite, but I shouldn’t wonder if it would
eliminate human beings too.” He found a place for the last of the
litter on the crowded mantel-shelf, and came to sit before Mr. Cupples
on the table. “The great thing about a hotel sitting-room is that its
beauty does not distract the mind from work. It is no place for the
mayfly pleasures of a mind at ease. Have you ever been in this room
before, Cupples? I have, hundreds of times. It has pursued me all over
England for years. I should feel lost without it if, in some fantastic,
far-off hotel, they were to give me some other sitting-room. Look at
this table-cover; there is the ink I spilt on it when I had this room
in Halifax. I burnt that hole in the carpet when I had it in Ipswich.
But I see they have mended the glass over the picture of ‘Silent
Sympathy’, which I threw a boot at in Banbury. I do all my best work
here. This afternoon, for instance, since the inquest, I have finished
several excellent negatives. There is a very good dark room
downstairs.”
“The inquest—that reminds me,” said Mr. Cupples, who knew that this
sort of talk in Trent meant the excitement of action, and was wondering
what he could be about. “I came in to thank you, my dear fellow, for
looking after Mabel this morning. I had no idea she was going to feel
ill after leaving the box; she seemed quite unmoved, and, really, she
is a woman of such extraordinary self-command, I thought I could leave
her to her own devices and hear out the evidence, which I thought it
important I should do. It was a very fortunate thing she found a friend
to assist her, and she is most grateful. She is quite herself again
now.”
Trent, with his hands in his pockets and a slight frown on his brow,
made no reply to this. “I tell you what,” he said after a short pause,
“I was just getting to the really interesting part of the job when you
came in. Come; would you like to see a little bit of high-class police
work? It’s the very same kind of work that old Murch ought to be doing
at this moment. Perhaps he is; but I hope to glory he isn’t.” He sprang
off the table and disappeared into his bedroom. Presently he came out
with a large drawing-board on which a number of heterogeneous objects
was ranged.
“First I must introduce you to these little things,” he said, setting
them out on the table. “Here is a big ivory paper-knife; here are two
leaves cut out of a diary—my own diary; here is a bottle containing
dentifrice; here is a little case of polished walnut. Some of these
things have to be put back where they belong in somebody’s bedroom at
White Gables before night. That’s the sort of man I am—nothing stops
me. I borrowed them this very morning when every one was down at the
inquest, and I dare say some people would think it rather an odd
proceeding if they knew. Now there remains one object on the board. Can
you tell me, without touching it, what it is?”
“Certainly I can,” said Mr. Cupples, peering at it with great interest.
“It is an ordinary glass bowl. It looks like a finger-bowl. I see
nothing odd about it,” he added after some moments of close scrutiny.
“I can’t see much myself,” replied Trent, “and that is exactly where
the fun comes in. Now take this little fat bottle, Cupples, and pull
out the cork. Do you recognize that powder inside it? You have
swallowed pounds of it in your time, I expect. They give it to babies.
Grey powder is its ordinary name—mercury and chalk. It is great stuff.
Now, while I hold the basin sideways over this sheet of paper, I want
you to pour a little powder out of the bottle over this part of the
bowl—just here.... Perfect! Sir Edward Henry himself could not have
handled the powder better. You have done this before, Cupples, I can
see. You are an old hand.”
“I really am not,” said Mr. Cupples seriously, as Trent returned the
fallen powder to the bottle. “I assure you it is all a complete mystery
to me. What did I do then?”
“I brush the powdered part of the bowl lightly with this camel-hair
brush. Now look at it again. You saw nothing odd about it before. Do
you see anything now?”
Mr. Cupples peered again. “How curious!” he said. “Yes, there are two
large grey finger-marks on the bowl. They were not there before.”
“I am Hawkshaw the detective,” observed Trent. “Would it interest you
to hear a short lecture on the subject of glass finger-bowls? When you
take one up with your hand you leave traces upon it, usually
practically invisible, which may remain for days or months. You leave
the marks of your fingers. The human hand, even when quite clean, is
never quite dry, and sometimes—in moments of great anxiety, for
instance, Cupples—it is very moist. It leaves a mark on any cold smooth
surface it may touch. That bowl was moved by somebody with a rather
moist hand quite lately.” He sprinkled the powder again. “Here on the
other side, you see, is the thumb-mark—very good impressions all of
them.” He spoke without raising his voice, but Mr. Cupples could
perceive that he was ablaze with excitement as he stared at the faint
grey marks. “This one should be the index finger. I need not tell a man
of your knowledge of the world that the pattern of it is a
single-spiral whorl, with deltas symmetrically disposed. This, the
print of the second finger, is a simple loop, with a staple core and
fifteen counts. I know there are fifteen, because I have just the same
two prints on this negative, which I have examined in detail. Look!”—he
held one of the negatives up to the light of the declining sun and
demonstrated with a pencil point. “You can see they’re the same. You
see the bifurcation of that ridge. There it is in the other. You see
that little scar near the centre. There it is in the other. There are a
score of ridge-characteristics on which an expert would swear in the
witness-box that the marks on that bowl and the marks I have
photographed on this negative were made by the same hand.”
“And where did you photograph them? What does it all mean?” asked Mr
Cupples, wide-eyed.
“I found them on the inside of the left-hand leaf of the front window
in Mrs. Manderson’s bedroom. As I could not bring the window with me, I
photographed them, sticking a bit of black paper on the other side of
the glass for the purpose. The bowl comes from Manderson’s room. It is
the bowl in which his false teeth were placed at night. I could bring
that away, so I did.”
“But those cannot be Mabel’s finger-marks.”
“I should think not!” said Trent with decision. “They are twice the
size of any print Mrs. Manderson could make.”
“Then they must be her husband’s.”
“Perhaps they are. Now shall we see if we can match them once more? I
believe we can.” Whistling faintly, and very white in the face, Trent
opened another small squat bottle containing a dense black powder.
“Lamp-black,” he explained. “Hold a bit of paper in your hand for a
second or two, and this little chap will show you the pattern of your
fingers.” He carefully took up with a pair of tweezers one of the
leaves cut from his diary, and held it out for the other to examine. No
marks appeared on the leaf. He tilted some of the powder out upon one
surface of the paper, then, turning it over, upon the other; then shook
the leaf gently to rid it of the loose powder. He held it out to Mr.
Cupples in silence. On one side of the paper appeared unmistakably,
clearly printed in black, the same two finger-prints that he had
already seen on the bowl and on the photographic plate. He took up the
bowl and compared them. Trent turned the paper over, and on the other
side was a bold black replica of the thumb-mark that was printed in
grey on the glass in his hand.
“Same man, you see,” Trent said with a short laugh. “I felt that it
must be so, and now I know.” He walked to the window and looked out.
“Now I know,” he repeated in a low voice, as if to himself. His tone
was bitter. Mr. Cupples, understanding nothing, stared at his
motionless back for a few moments.
“I am still completely in the dark,” he ventured presently. “I have
often heard of this fingerprint business, and wondered how the police
went to work about it. It is of extraordinary interest to me, but upon
my life I cannot see how in this case Manderson’s fingerprints are
going—”
“I am very sorry, Cupples,” Trent broke in upon his meditative speech
with a swift return to the table. “When I began this investigation I
meant to take you with me every step of the way. You mustn’t think I
have any doubts about your discretion if I say now that I must hold my
tongue about the whole thing, at least for a time. I will tell you
this: I have come upon a fact that looks too much like having very
painful consequences if it is discovered by any one else.” He looked at
the other with a hard and darkened face, and struck the table with his
hand. “It is terrible for me here and now. Up to this moment I was
hoping against hope that I was wrong about the fact. I may still be
wrong in the surmise that I base upon that fact. There is only one way
of finding out that is open to me, and I must nerve myself to take it.”
He smiled suddenly at Mr. Cupples’s face of consternation. “All
right—I’m not going to be tragic any more, and I’ll tell you all about
it when I can. Look here, I’m not half through my game with the
powder-bottles yet.”
He drew one of the defamed chairs to the table and sat down to test the
broad ivory blade of the paper knife. Mr. Cupples, swallowing his
amazement, bent forward in an attitude of deep interest and handed
Trent the bottle of lamp-black.