Hitherto Unpublished
My Dear Molloy:—This is in case I don’t find you at your office. I have
found out who killed Manderson, as this dispatch will show. This was my
problem; yours is to decide what use to make of it. It definitely
charges an unsuspected person with having a hand in the crime, and
practically accuses him of being the murderer, so I don’t suppose you
will publish it before his arrest, and I believe it is illegal to do so
afterwards until he has been tried and found guilty. You may decide to
publish it then; and you may find it possible to make some use or other
before then of the facts I have given. That is your affair. Meanwhile,
will you communicate with Scotland Yard, and let them see what I have
written? I have done with the Manderson mystery, and I wish to God I
had never touched it. Here follows my dispatch. P.T.
Marlstone, _June_ 16_th_.
I begin this, my third and probably my final dispatch to the _Record_
upon the Manderson murder, with conflicting feelings. I have a strong
sense of relief, because in my two previous dispatches I was obliged,
in the interests of justice, to withhold facts ascertained by me which
would, if published then, have put a certain person upon his guard and
possibly have led to his escape; for he is a man of no common boldness
and resource. These facts I shall now set forth. But I have, I confess,
no liking for the story of treachery and perverted cleverness which I
have to tell. It leaves an evil taste in the mouth, a savour of
something revolting in the deeper puzzle of motive underlying the
puzzle of the crime itself, which I believe I have solved.
It will be remembered that in my first dispatch I described the
situation as I found it on reaching this place early on Tuesday
morning. I told how the body was found, and in what state; dwelt upon
the complete mystery surrounding the crime, and mentioned one or two
local theories about it; gave some account of the dead man’s domestic
surroundings; and furnished a somewhat detailed description of his
movements on the evening before his death. I gave, too, a little fact
which may or may not have seemed irrelevant: that a quantity of whisky
much larger than Manderson habitually drank at night had disappeared
from his private decanter since the last time he was seen alive. On the
following day, the day of the inquest, I wired little more than an
abstract of the proceedings in the coroner’s court, of which a verbatim
report was made at my request by other representatives of the _Record_.
That day is not yet over as I write these lines; and I have now
completed an investigation which has led me directly to the man who
must be called upon to clear himself of the guilt of the death of
Manderson.
Apart from the central mystery of Manderson’s having arisen long before
his usual hour to go out and meet his death, there were two minor
points of oddity about this affair which, I suppose, must have occurred
to thousands of those who have read the accounts in the newspapers:
points apparent from the very beginning. The first of these was that,
whereas the body was found at a spot not thirty yards from the house,
all the people of the house declared that they had heard no cry or
other noise in the night. Manderson had not been gagged; the marks on
his wrists pointed to a struggle with his assailant; and there had been
at least one pistol-shot. (I say at least one, because it is the fact
that in murders with firearms, especially if there has been a struggle,
the criminal commonly misses his victim at least once.) This odd fact
seemed all the more odd to me when I learned that Martin the butler was
a bad sleeper, very keen of hearing, and that his bedroom, with the
window open, faced almost directly toward the shed by which the body
was found.
The second odd little fact that was apparent from the outset was
Manderson’s leaving his dental plate by the bedside. It appeared that
he had risen and dressed himself fully, down to his necktie and watch
and chain, and had gone out of doors without remembering to put in this
plate, which he had carried in his mouth every day for years, and which
contained all the visible teeth of the upper jaw. It had evidently not
been a case of frantic hurry; and even if it had been, he would have
been more likely to forget almost anything than this denture. Any one
who wears such a removable plate will agree that the putting it in on
rising is a matter of second nature. Speaking as well as eating, to say
nothing of appearances, depend upon it.
Neither of these queer details, however, seemed to lead to anything at
the moment. They only awakened in me a suspicion of something lurking
in the shadows, something that lent more mystery to the already
mysterious question how and why and through whom Manderson met his end.
With this much of preamble I come at once to the discovery which, in
the first few hours of my investigation, set me upon the path which so
much ingenuity had been directed to concealing.
I have already described Manderson’s bedroom, the rigorous simplicity
of its furnishing, contrasted so strangely with the multitude of
clothes and shoes, and the manner of its communication with Mrs.
Manderson’s room. On the upper of the two long shelves on which the
shoes were ranged I found, where I had been told I should find them,
the pair of patent leather shoes which Manderson had worn on the
evening before his death. I had glanced over the row, not with any idea
of their giving me a clue, but merely because it happens that I am a
judge of shoes, and all these shoes were of the very best workmanship.
But my attention was at once caught by a little peculiarity in this
particular pair. They were the lightest kind of lace-up dress shoes,
very thin in the sole, without toe-caps, and beautifully made, like all
the rest. These shoes were old and well worn; but being carefully
polished, and fitted, as all the shoes were, upon their trees, they
looked neat enough. What caught my eye was a slight splitting of the
leather in that part of the upper known as the vamp—a splitting at the
point where the two laced parts of the shoe rise from the upper. It is
at this point that the strain comes when a tight shoe of this sort is
forced upon the foot, and it is usually guarded with a strong stitching
across the bottom of the opening. In both the shoes I was examining
this stitching had parted, and the leather below had given way. The
splitting was a tiny affair in each case, not an eighth of an inch
long, and the torn edges having come together again on the removal of
the strain, there was nothing that a person who was not something of a
connoisseur of shoe-leather would have noticed. Even less noticeable,
and indeed not to be seen at all unless one were looking for it, was a
slight straining of the stitches uniting the upper to the sole. At the
toe and on the outer side of each shoe this stitching had been dragged
until it was visible on a close inspection of the join.
These indications, of course, could mean only one thing—the shoes had
been worn by some one for whom they were too small.
Now it was clear at a glance that Manderson was always thoroughly well
shod, and careful, perhaps a little vain, of his small and narrow feet.
Not one of the other shoes in the collection, as I soon ascertained,
bore similar marks; they had not belonged to a man who squeezed himself
into tight shoe-leather. Someone who was not Manderson had worn these
shoes, and worn them recently; the edges of the tears were quite fresh.
The possibility of some one having worn them since Manderson’s death
was not worth considering; the body had only been found about
twenty-six hours when I was examining the shoes; besides, why should
any one wear them? The possibility of some one having borrowed
Manderson’s shoes and spoiled them for him while he was alive seemed
about as negligible. With others to choose from he would not have worn
these. Besides, the only men in the place were the butler and the two
secretaries. But I do not say that I gave those possibilities even as
much consideration as they deserved, for my thoughts were running away
with me, and I have always found it good policy, in cases of this sort,
to let them have their heads. Ever since I had got out of the train at
Marlstone early that morning I had been steeped in details of the
Manderson affair; the thing had not once been out of my head. Suddenly
the moment had come when the daemon wakes and begins to range.
Let me put it less fancifully. After all, it is a detail of psychology
familiar enough to all whose business or inclination brings them in
contact with difficult affairs of any kind. Swiftly and spontaneously,
when chance or effort puts one in possession of the key-fact in any
system of baffling circumstances, one’s ideas seem to rush to group
themselves anew in relation to that fact, so that they are suddenly
rearranged almost before one has consciously grasped the significance
of the key-fact itself. In the present instance, my brain had scarcely
formulated within itself the thought, “Somebody who was not Manderson
has been wearing these shoes,” when there flew into my mind a flock of
ideas, all of the same character and all bearing upon this new notion.
It was unheard-of for Manderson to drink much whisky at night. It was
very unlike him to be untidily dressed, as the body was when found—the
cuffs dragged up inside the sleeves, the shoes unevenly laced; very
unlike him not to wash when he rose, and to put on last night’s evening
shirt and collar and underclothing; very unlike him to have his watch
in the waistcoat pocket that was not lined with leather for its
reception. (In my first dispatch I mentioned all these points, but
neither I nor any one else saw anything significant in them when
examining the body.) It was very strange, in the existing domestic
situation, that Manderson should be communicative to his wife about his
doings, especially at the time of his going to bed, when he seldom
spoke to her at all. It was extraordinary that Manderson should leave
his bedroom without his false teeth.
All these thoughts, as I say, came flocking into my mind together,
drawn from various parts of my memory of the morning’s enquiries and
observations. They had all presented themselves, in far less time than
it takes to read them as set down here, as I was turning over the
shoes, confirming my own certainty on the main point. And yet when I
confronted the definite idea that had sprung up suddenly and
unsupported before me—“_It was not Manderson who was in the house that
night_”—it seemed a stark absurdity at the first formulating. It was
certainly Manderson who had dined at the house and gone out with
Marlowe in the car. People had seen him at close quarters. But was it
he who returned at ten? That question too seemed absurd enough. But I
could not set it aside. It seemed to me as if a faint light was
beginning to creep over the whole expanse of my mind, as it does over
land at dawn, and that presently the sun would be rising. I set myself
to think over, one by one, the points that had just occurred to me, so
as to make out, if possible, why any man masquerading as Manderson
should have done these things that Manderson would not have done.
I had not to cast about very long for the motive a man might have in
forcing his feet into Manderson’s narrow shoes. The examination of
footmarks is very well understood by the police. But not only was the
man concerned to leave no footmarks of his own: he was concerned to
leave Manderson’s, if any; his whole plan, if my guess was right, must
have been directed to producing the belief that Manderson was in the
place that night. Moreover, his plan did not turn upon leaving
footmarks. He meant to leave the shoes themselves, and he did so. The
maidservant had found them outside the bedroom door, as Manderson
always left his shoes, and had polished them, replacing them on the
shoe-shelves later in the morning, after the body had been found.
When I came to consider in this new light the leaving of the false
teeth, an explanation of what had seemed the maddest part of the affair
broke upon me at once. A dental plate is not inseparable from its
owner. If my guess was right, the unknown had brought the denture to
the house with him, and left it in the bedroom, with the same object as
he had in leaving the shoes: to make it impossible that any one should
doubt that Manderson had been in the house and had gone to bed there.
This, of course, led me to the inference that _Manderson was dead
before the false Manderson came to the house_; and other things
confirmed this.
For instance, the clothing, to which I now turned in my review of the
position. If my guess was right, the unknown in Manderson’s shoes had
certainly had possession of Manderson’s trousers, waistcoat, and
shooting jacket. They were there before my eyes in the bedroom; and
Martin had seen the jacket—which nobody could have mistaken—upon the
man who sat at the telephone in the library. It was now quite plain (if
my guess was right) that this unmistakable garment was a cardinal
feature of the unknown’s plan. He knew that Martin would take him for
Manderson at the first glance.
And there my thinking was interrupted by the realization of a thing
that had escaped me before. So strong had been the influence of the
unquestioned assumption that it was Manderson who was present that
night, that neither I nor, as far as I know, any one else had noted the
point. _Martin had not seen the man’s face, nor had Mrs. Manderson._
Mrs. Manderson (judging by her evidence at the inquest, of which, as I
have said, I had a full report made by the _Record_ stenographers in
court) had not seen the man at all. She hardly could have done, as I
shall show presently. She had merely spoken with him as she lay half
asleep, resuming a conversation which she had had with her living
husband about an hour before. Martin, I perceived, could only have seen
the man’s back, as he sat crouching over the telephone; no doubt a
characteristic pose was imitated there. And the man had worn his hat,
Manderson’s broad-brimmed hat! There is too much character in the back
of a head and neck. The unknown, in fact, supposing him to have been of
about Manderson’s build, had had no need for any disguise, apart from
the jacket and the hat and his powers of mimicry.
I paused there to contemplate the coolness and ingenuity of the man.
The thing, I now began to see, was so safe and easy, provided that his
mimicry was good enough, and that his nerve held. Those two points
assured, only some wholly unlikely accident could unmask him.
To come back to my puzzling out of the matter as I sat in the dead
man’s bedroom with the tell-tale shoes before me. The reason for the
entrance by the window instead of by the front door will already have
occurred to any one reading this. Entering by the door, the man would
almost certainly have been heard by the sharp-eared Martin in his
pantry just across the hall; he might have met him face to face.
Then there was the problem of the whisky. I had not attached much
importance to it; whisky will sometimes vanish in very queer ways in a
household of eight or nine persons; but it had seemed strange that it
should go in that way on that evening. Martin had been plainly quite
dumbfounded by the fact. It seemed to me now that many a man—fresh, as
this man in all likelihood was, from a bloody business, from the
unclothing of a corpse, and with a desperate part still to play—would
turn to that decanter as to a friend. No doubt he had a drink before
sending for Martin; after making that trick with ease and success, he
probably drank more.
But he had known when to stop. The worst part of the enterprise was
before him: the business—clearly of such vital importance to him, for
whatever reason—of shutting himself in Manderson’s room and preparing a
body of convincing evidence of its having been occupied by Manderson;
and this with the risk—very slight, as no doubt he understood, but how
unnerving!—of the woman on the other side of the half-open door awaking
and somehow discovering him. True, if he kept out of her limited field
of vision from the bed, she could only see him by getting up and going
to the door. I found that to a person lying in her bed, which stood
with its head to the wall a little beyond the door, nothing was visible
through the doorway but one of the cupboards by Manderson’s bed-head.
Moreover, since this man knew the ways of the household, he would think
it most likely that Mrs. Manderson was asleep. Another point with him,
I guessed, might have been the estrangement between the husband and
wife, which they had tried to cloak by keeping up, among other things,
their usual practice of sleeping in connected rooms, but which was well
known to all who had anything to do with them. He would hope from this
that if Mrs. Manderson heard him, she would take no notice of the
supposed presence of her husband.
So, pursuing my hypothesis, I followed the unknown up to the bedroom,
and saw him setting about his work. And it was with a catch in my own
breath that I thought of the hideous shock with which he must have
heard the sound of all others he was dreading most: the drowsy voice
from the adjoining room.
What Mrs. Manderson actually said, she was unable to recollect at the
inquest. She thinks she asked her supposed husband whether he had had a
good run in the car. And now what does the unknown do? Here, I think,
we come to a supremely significant point. Not only does he—standing
rigid there, as I picture him, before the dressing-table, listening to
the sound of his own leaping heart—not only does he answer the lady in
the voice of Manderson; he volunteers an explanatory statement. He
tells her that he has, on a sudden inspiration, sent Marlowe in the car
to Southampton; that he has sent him to bring back some important
information from a man leaving for Paris by the steamboat that morning.
Why these details from a man who had long been uncommunicative to his
wife, and that upon a point scarcely likely to interest her? Why these
details _about Marlowe?_
Having taken my story so far, I now put forward the following definite
propositions: that between a time somewhere about ten, when the car
started, and a time somewhere about eleven, Manderson was shot—probably
at a considerable distance from the house, as no shot was heard; that
the body was brought back, left by the shed, and stripped of its outer
clothing; that at some time round about eleven o’clock a man who was
not Manderson, wearing Manderson’s shoes, hat, and jacket, entered the
library by the garden window; that he had with him Manderson’s black
trousers, waistcoat, and motor-coat, the denture taken from Manderson’s
mouth, and the weapon with which he had been murdered; that he
concealed these, rang the bell for the butler, and sat down at the
telephone with his hat on and his back to the door; that he was
occupied with the telephone all the time Martin was in the room; that
on going up to the bedroom floor he quietly entered Marlowe’s room and
placed the revolver with which the crime had been committed—Marlowe’s
revolver—in the case on the mantelpiece from which it had been taken;
and that he then went to Manderson’s room, placed Manderson’s shoes
outside the door, threw Manderson’s garments on a chair, placed the
denture in the bowl by the bedside, and selected a suit of clothes, a
pair of shoes, and a tie from those in the bedroom.
Here I will pause in my statement of this man’s proceedings to go into
a question for which the way is now sufficiently prepared:
_Who was the false Manderson?_
Reviewing what was known to me, or might almost with certainty be
surmised, about that person, I set down the following five conclusions:
(1.) He had been in close relations with the dead man. In his acting
before Martin and his speaking to Mrs. Manderson he had made no
mistake.
(2.) He was of a build not unlike Manderson’s, especially as to height
and breadth of shoulder, which mainly determine the character of the
back of a seated figure when the head is concealed and the body loosely
clothed. But his feet were larger, though not greatly larger, than
Manderson’s.
(3.) He had considerable aptitude for mimicry and acting—probably some
experience too.
(4.) He had a minute acquaintance with the ways of the Manderson
household.
(5.) He was under a vital necessity of creating the belief that
Manderson was alive and in that house until some time after midnight on
the Sunday night.
So much I took as either certain or next door to it. It was as far as I
could see. And it was far enough.
I proceed to give, in an order corresponding with the numbered
paragraphs above, such relevant facts as I was able to obtain about Mr.
John Marlowe, from himself and other sources:
(1.) He had been Mr. Manderson’s private secretary, upon a footing of
great intimacy, for nearly four years.
(2.) The two men were nearly of the same height, about five feet eleven
inches; both were powerfully built and heavy in the shoulder. Marlowe,
who was the younger by some twenty years, was rather slighter about the
body, though Manderson was a man in good physical condition. Marlowe’s
shoes (of which I examined several pairs) were roughly about one
shoemaker’s size longer and broader than Manderson’s.
(3.) In the afternoon of the first day of my investigation, after
arriving at the results already detailed, I sent a telegram to a
personal friend, a Fellow of a college at Oxford, whom I knew to be
interested in theatrical matters, in these terms:
_Please wire John Marlowe’s record in connection with acting at Oxford
some time past decade very urgent and confidential._
My friend replied in the following telegram, which reached me next
morning (the morning of the inquest):
_Marlowe was member O.U.D.S for three years and president 19— played
Bardolph Cleon and Mercutio excelled in character acting and imitations
in great demand at smokers was hero of some historic hoaxes._
I had been led to send the telegram which brought this very helpful
answer by seeing on the mantel-shelf in Marlowe’s bedroom a photograph
of himself and two others in the costume of Falstaff’s three followers,
with an inscription from _The Merry Wives_, and by noting that it bore
the imprint of an Oxford firm of photographers.
(4.) During his connection with Manderson, Marlowe had lived as one of
the family. No other person, apart from the servants, had his
opportunities for knowing the domestic life of the Mandersons in
detail.
(5.) I ascertained beyond doubt that Marlowe arrived at a hotel in
Southampton on the Monday morning at 6.30, and there proceeded to carry
out the commission which, according to his story, and according to the
statement made to Mrs. Manderson in the bedroom by the false Manderson,
had been entrusted to him by his employer. He had then returned in the
car to Marlstone, where he had shown great amazement and horror at the
news of the murder.
These, I say, are the relevant facts about Marlowe. We must now examine
fact number 5 (as set out above) in connection with conclusion number 5
about the false Manderson.
I would first draw attention to one important fact. _The only person
who professed to have heard Manderson mention Southampton at all before
he started in the car was Marlowe_. His story—confirmed to some extent
by what the butler overheard—was that the journey was all arranged in a
private talk before they set out, and he could not say, when I put the
question to him, why Manderson should have concealed his intentions by
giving out that he was going with Marlowe for a moonlight drive. This
point, however, attracted no attention. Marlowe had an absolutely
air-tight alibi in his presence at Southampton by 6.30; nobody thought
of him in connection with a murder which must have been committed after
12.30—the hour at which Martin the butler had gone to bed. But it was
the Manderson who came back from the drive who went out of his way to
mention Southampton openly to two persons. _He even went so far as to
ring up a hotel at Southampton and ask questions which bore out
Marlowe’s story of his errand._ This was the call he was busy with when
Martin was in the library.
Now let us consider the alibi. If Manderson was in the house that
night, and if he did not leave it until some time after 12.30, Marlowe
could not by any possibility have had a direct hand in the murder. It
is a question of the distance between Marlstone and Southampton. If he
had left Marlstone in the car at the hour when he is supposed to have
done so—between 10 and 10.30—with a message from Manderson, the run
would be quite an easy one to do in the time. But it would be
physically impossible for the car—a 15 h.p. four-cylinder
Northumberland, an average medium-power car—to get to Southampton by
half-past six unless it left Marlstone by midnight at latest. Motorists
who will examine the road-map and make the calculations required, as I
did in Manderson’s library that day, will agree that on the facts as
they appeared there was absolutely no case against Marlowe.
But even if they were not as they appeared; if Manderson was dead by
eleven o’clock, and if at about that time Marlowe impersonated him at
White Gables; if Marlowe retired to Manderson’s bedroom—how can all
this be reconciled with his appearance next morning at Southampton? _He
had to get out of the house, unseen and unheard, and away in the car by
midnight._ And Martin, the sharp-eared Martin, was sitting up until
12.30 in his pantry, with the door open, listening for the telephone
bell. Practically he was standing sentry over the foot of the
staircase, the only staircase leading down from the bedroom floor.
With this difficulty we arrive at the last and crucial phase of my
investigation. Having the foregoing points clearly in mind, I spent the
rest of the day before the inquest in talking to various persons and in
going over my story, testing it link by link. I could only find the one
weakness which seemed to be involved in Martin’s sitting up until
12.30; and since his having been instructed to do so was certainly a
part of the plan, meant to clinch the alibi for Marlowe, I knew there
must be an explanation somewhere. If I could not find that explanation,
my theory was valueless. I must be able to show that at the time Martin
went up to bed the man who had shut himself in Manderson’s bedroom
might have been many miles away on the road to Southampton.
I had, however, a pretty good idea already—as perhaps the reader of
these lines has by this time, if I have made myself clear—of how the
escape of the false Manderson before midnight had been contrived. But I
did not want what I was now about to do to be known. If I had chanced
to be discovered at work, there would have been no concealing the
direction of my suspicions. I resolved not to test them on this point
until the next day, during the opening proceedings at the inquest. This
was to be held, I knew, at the hotel, and I reckoned upon having White
Gables to myself so far as the principal inmates were concerned.
So in fact it happened. By the time the proceedings at the hotel had
begun I was hard at work at White Gables. I had a camera with me. I
made search, on principles well known to and commonly practised by the
police, and often enough by myself, for certain indications. Without
describing my search, I may say at once that I found and was able to
photograph two fresh fingerprints, very large and distinct, on the
polished front of the right-hand top drawer of the chest of drawers in
Manderson’s bedroom; five more (among a number of smaller and less
recent impressions made by other hands) on the glasses of the French
window in Mrs. Manderson’s room, a window which always stood open at
night with a curtain before it; and three more upon the glass bowl in
which Manderson’s dental plate had been found lying.
I took the bowl with me from White Gables. I took also a few articles
which I selected from Marlowe’s bedroom, as bearing the most distinct
of the innumerable fingerprints which are always to be found upon
toilet articles in daily use. I already had in my possession, made upon
leaves cut from my pocket diary, some excellent fingerprints of
Marlowe’s which he had made in my presence without knowing it. I had
shown him the leaves, asking if he recognized them; and the few seconds
during which he had held them in his fingers had sufficed to leave
impressions which I was afterwards able to bring out.
By six o’clock in the evening, two hours after the jury had brought in
their verdict against a person or persons unknown, I had completed my
work, and was in a position to state that two of the five large prints
made on the window-glasses, and the three on the bowl, were made by the
left hand of Marlowe; that the remaining three on the window and the
two on the drawer were made by his right hand.
By eight o’clock I had made at the establishment of Mr. H. T. Copper,
photographer, of Bishopsbridge, and with his assistance, a dozen
enlarged prints of the finger-marks of Marlowe, clearly showing the
identity of those which he unknowingly made in my presence and those
left upon articles in his bedroom, with those found by me as I have
described, and thus establishing the facts that Marlowe was recently in
Manderson’s bedroom, where he had in the ordinary way no business, and
in Mrs Manderson’s room, where he had still less. I hope it may be
possible to reproduce these prints for publication with this dispatch.
At nine o’clock I was back in my room at the hotel and sitting down to
begin this manuscript. I had my story complete. I bring it to a close
by advancing these further propositions: that on the night of the
murder the impersonator of Manderson, being in Manderson’s bedroom,
told Mrs Manderson, as he had already told Martin, that Marlowe was at
that moment on his way to Southampton; that having made his
dispositions in the room, he switched off the light, and lay in the bed
in his clothes; that he waited until he was assured that Mrs. Manderson
was asleep; that he then arose and stealthily crossed Mrs. Manderson’s
bedroom in his stocking feet, having under his arm the bundle of
clothing and shoes for the body; that he stepped behind the curtain,
pushing the doors of the window a little further open with his hands,
strode over the iron railing of the balcony, and let himself down until
only a drop of a few feet separated him from the soft turf of the lawn.
All this might very well have been accomplished within half an hour of
his entering Manderson’s bedroom, which, according to Martin, he did at
about half-past eleven.
What followed your readers and the authorities may conjecture for
themselves. The corpse was found next morning clothed—rather untidily.
Marlowe in the car appeared at Southampton by half-past six.
I bring this manuscript to an end in my sitting-room at the hotel at
Marlstone. It is four o’clock in the morning. I leave for London by the
noon train from Bishopsbridge, and immediately after arriving I shall
place these pages in your hands. I ask you to communicate the substance
of them to the Criminal Investigation Department.
PHILIP TRENT.