Thorndyke Challenges the Evidence
My relations with Thorndyke were rather peculiar and a little
inconsistent. I had commissioned him, somewhat against his
inclination, to investigate the circumstances connected with the death
of Harold Monkhouse. I was, in fact, his employer. And yet, in a
certain subtle sense, I was his antagonist. For I held certain beliefs
which I, half-unconsciously, looked to him to confirm. But apparently
he did not share those beliefs. As his employer, it was clearly my
duty to communicate to him any information which he might think
helpful or significant, even if I considered it irrelevant. He had, in
fact, explicitly pointed this out to me; and he had specially warned
me to refrain from sifting or selecting facts which might become known
to me according to my view of their possible bearing on the case.
But yet this was precisely what I felt myself constantly tempted to
do; and as we sat at lunch in his chambers on the day after my visit
to Barbara, I found myself consciously suppressing certain facts which
had then come to my knowledge. And it was not that those facts
appeared to me insignificant. On the contrary, I found them rather
surprising. Only I had the feeling that they would probably convey to
Thorndyke a significance that would be erroneous and misleading.
There was, for instance, the appearance of Wallingford in Kensington
Gardens. Could it have been sheer chance? If so, it was a most
remarkable coincidence; and one naturally tends to look askance at
remarkable coincidences. In fact, I did not believe it to be a
coincidence at all. I felt little doubt that Wallingford had been
lurking about the neighbourhood of Barbara’s flat and had followed us,
losing sight of us temporarily, when we turned into the by-path. But,
knowing Wallingford as I did, I attached no importance to the
incident. It was merely a freak of an unstable, emotional man impelled
by jealousy to make a fool of himself. Again, there was Wallingford’s
terror of Thorndyke and his ridiculous delusions on the subject of the
“shadowings.” How easy it would be for a person unacquainted with
Wallingford’s personality to read into them a totally misleading
significance! Those were the thoughts that drifted half-consciously
through my mind as I sat opposite my friend at the table. So, not
without some twinges of conscience, I held my peace.
But I had not allowed for Thorndyke’s uncanny capacity for inferring
what was passing in another person’s mind. Very soon it became evident
to me that he was fully alive to the possibility of some reservations
on my part; and when one or two discreet questions had elicited some
fact which I ought to have volunteered, he proceeded to something like
definite cross-examination.
“So the household has broken up and the inmates scattered?” he began,
when I had told him that I had obtained possession of the keys. “And
Mabel Withers seems to have vanished, unless the police have kept her
in view. Did you hear anything about Miss Norris?”
“Not very much. Barbara and she have exchanged visits once or twice,
but they don’t seem to see much of each other.”
“And what about Wallingford? Does he seem to have been much disturbed
by Miller’s descent on him?”
I had to admit that he was in a state bordering on panic.
“And what did Mrs. Monkhouse think of the forged orders on Dimsdale’s
headed paper?”
“He hadn’t disclosed that. She thinks that he bought the cocaine at a
druggist’s in the ordinary way, and I didn’t think it necessary to
undeceive her.”
“No. The least said the soonest mended. Did you gather that she sees
much of Wallingford?”
“Yes, rather too much. He was haunting her flat almost daily until she
gave him a hint not to make his visits too noticeable.”
“Why do you suppose he was haunting her flat? So far as you can judge,
Mayfield—that is in the strictest confidence, you understand—does
there seem to be anything between them beyond ordinary friendliness?”
“Not on her side, certainly, but on his—yes, undoubtedly. His devotion
to her amounts almost to infatuation, and has for a long time past. Of
course, she realizes his condition, and though he is rather a nuisance
to her, she takes a very kindly and indulgent view of his vagaries.”
“Naturally, as any well-disposed woman would. I suppose you didn’t see
anything of him yesterday?”
Of course I had to relate the meeting in Kensington Gardens, and I
could see by the way Thorndyke looked at me that he was wondering why
I had not mentioned the matter before.
“It almost looks,” said he, “as if he had followed you there. Was
there anything in his manner of approach that seemed to support that
idea?”
“I think there was, for I saw him at some distance,” and here I felt
bound to describe Wallingford’s peculiar tactics.
“But,” said Thorndyke, “why was he looking about behind him? He must
have known that you were in front.”
“It seems,” I explained, feebly, “that he has some ridiculous idea
that he is being watched and followed.”
“Ha!” said Thorndyke. “Now I wonder who he supposes is watching and
following him.”
“I fancy he suspects you,” I replied. And so the murder was out, with
the additional fact that I had not been very ready with my
information.
Thorndyke, however, made no comment on my reticence beyond a steady
and significant look at me.
“So,” said he, “he suspects me of suspecting him. Well, he is giving
us every chance. But I think, Mayfield, you would do well to put Mrs.
Monkhouse on her guard. If Wallingford makes a public parade of his
feelings towards her, he may put dangerous ideas into the head of Mr.
Superintendent Miller. You must realize that Miller is looking for a
motive for the assumed murder. And if it comes to his knowledge that
Harold Monkhouse’s secretary was in love with Harold Monkhouse’s wife,
he will think that he has found a motive that is good enough.”
“Yes, that had occurred to me; and in fact, I did give her a hint to
that effect, but it was hardly necessary. She had seen it for
herself.”
As we now seemed to have exhausted this topic, I ventured to make a
few enquiries about the rather farcical infernal machine.
“Did your further examination of it,” I asked, “yield any new
information?”
“Very little,” Thorndyke replied, “but that little was rather curious.
There were no finger-prints at all. I examined both the pistol and the
jar most thoroughly, but there was not a trace of a finger-mark, to
say nothing of a print. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that
the person who sent the machine wore gloves while he was putting it
together.”
“But isn’t that a rather natural precaution in these days?” I asked.
“A perfectly natural precaution, in itself,” he replied, “but not
quite consistent with some other features. For instance, the wadding
with which the pistol-barrel was plugged consisted of a little ball of
knitting-wool of a rather characteristic green. I will show it to you,
and you will see that it would be quite easy to match and therefore
possible to trace. But you see that there are thus shown two contrary
states of mind. The gloves suggest that the sender entertained the
possibility that the machine might fail to explode, whereas the wool
seems to indicate that no such possibility was considered.”
He rose from the table—lunch being now finished—and brought from a
locked cabinet a little ball of wool of a rather peculiar greenish
blue. I took it to the window and examined it carefully, impressed by
the curious inconsistency which he had pointed out.
“Yes,” I agreed, “there could be no difficulty in matching this. But
as to tracing it, that is a different matter. There must have been
thousands of skeins of this sold to, at least, hundreds of different
persons.”
“Very true,” said he. “But I was thinking of it rather as a
corroborating item in a train of circumstantial evidence.”
He put the “corroborating item” back in the cabinet and as, at this
moment a taxi was heard to draw up at our entry, he picked up a large
attaché case and preceded me down the stairs.
During the comparatively short journey I made a few not very
successful efforts to discover what was Thorndyke’s real purpose in
making this visit of inspection to the dismantled house. But his
reticence and mine were not quite similar. He answered all my
questions freely. He gave me a wealth of instances illustrating the
valuable evidence obtained by the inspection of empty houses. But none
of them seemed to throw any light on his present proceedings. And when
I pointed this out, he smilingly replied that I was in precisely the
same position as himself.
“We are not looking for corroborative evidence,” said he. “That
belongs to a later stage of the inquiry. We are looking for some
suggestive fact which may give us a hint where to begin. Naturally we
cannot form any guess as to what kind of fact that might be.”
It was not a very illuminating answer, but I had to accept it,
although I had a strong suspicion that Thorndyke’s purpose was not
quite so vague as he represented it to be, and determined
unobtrusively to keep an eye on his proceedings.
“Can I give you any assistance?” I enquired, craftily, when I had let
him into the hall and shut the outer door.
“Yes,” he replied, “there is one thing that you can do for me which
will be very helpful. I have brought a packet of cards with me”—here
he produced from his pocket a packet of stationer’s post-cards. “If
you will write on each of them the description and particulars of one
room with the name of the occupant in the case of bedrooms, and lay
the card on the mantelpiece of the room which it describes, I shall be
able to reconstitute the house as it was when it was inhabited. Then
we can each go about our respective businesses without hindering one
another.”
I took the cards—and the fairly broad hint—and together we made a
preliminary tour of the house, which, now that the furniture, carpets
and pictures were gone, looked very desolate and forlorn; and as it
had not been cleaned since the removal, it had a depressingly dirty
and squalid appearance. Moreover, in each room, a collection of
rubbish and discarded odds and ends had been roughly swept up on the
hearth, converting each fireplace into a sort of temporary dust-bin.
After a glance around the rooms on the ground floor, I made my way up
to the room in which Harold Monkhouse had died, which was my principal
concern as well as Thorndyke’s.
“Well, Mayfield,” the latter remarked, running a disparaging eye round
the faded, discoloured walls and the blackened ceiling, “you will have
to do something here. It is a shocking spectacle. Would you mind
roughly sketching out the position of the furniture? I see that the
bedstead stood by this wall with the head, I presume, towards the
window, and the bedside table about here, I suppose, at his right
hand. By the way, what was there on that table? Did he keep a supply
of food of any kind for use at night?”
“I think they usually put a little tin of sandwiches on the table when
the night preparations were made.”
“You say ‘they.’ Who put the box there?”
“I can’t say whose duty it was in particular. I imagine Barbara would
see to it when she was at home. In her absence it would be done by
Madeline or Mabel.”
“Not Wallingford?”
“No. I don’t think Wallingford ever troubled himself about any of the
domestic arrangements excepting those that concerned Barbara.”
“Do you know who made the sandwiches?”
“I think Madeline did, as a rule. I know she did sometimes.”
“And as to drink? I suppose he had a water-bottle, at any rate.”
“Yes, that was always there, and a little decanter of whiskey. But he
hardly ever touched that. Very often a small flagon of lemonade was
put on the table with the sandwiches.”
“And who made the lemonade?”
“Madeline. I know that, because it was a very special brand which no
one else could make.”
“And supposing the sandwiches and the lemonade were not consumed, do
you happen to know what became of the remainder?”
“I have no idea. Possibly the servants consumed them, but more
probably they were thrown away. Well-fed servants are not partial to
remainders from a sick-room.”
“You never heard of any attacks of illness among any of the servants?”
“Not to my knowledge. But I shouldn’t be very likely to, you know.”
“No. You notice, Mayfield, that you have mentioned one or two rather
material facts that were not disclosed at the inquest?”
“Yes. I was observing that. And it is just as well that they were not
disclosed. There were enough misleading facts without them.”
Thorndyke smiled indulgently. “You seem to have made up your mind
pretty definitely, on the negative side, at least,” he remarked; and
then, looking round once more at the walls with their faded, loosened
paper, he continued: “I take it that Mr. Monkhouse was not a fresh-air
enthusiast.”
“He was not,” I replied. “He didn’t much care for open windows,
especially at night. But how did you arrive at that fact?”
“I was looking at the wall-paper. This is not a damp house, but yet
the paper on the walls of this room is loosening and peeling off in
all directions. And if you notice the distribution of this tendency
you get the impression that the moisture which loosened the paper
proceeded from the neighbourhood of the bed. The wall which is most
affected is the one against which the bed stood; and the part of that
wall that has suffered most is that which was nearest to the occupant
of the bed, and especially to his head. That large piece, hanging
down, is just where the main stream of his breath would have
impinged.”
“Yes, I see the connection now you mention it; and yet I am surprised
that his breath alone should have made the air of the room so damp.
All through the winter season, when the window would be shut most
closely, the gas was burning; and at night, when the gas was out, he
commonly had his candle-lamp alight. I should have thought that the
gas and the candle together would have kept the air fairly dry.”
“That,” said Thorndyke, “is a common delusion. As a matter of fact
they would have quite the opposite effect. You have only to hold an
inverted tumbler over a burning candle to realize, from the moisture
which immediately condenses on the inside of the tumbler, that the
candle, as it burns, gives off quite a considerable volume of steam.
But of course, the bulk of the moisture which has caused the paper to
peel in this room came from the man’s own breath. However, we didn’t
come here for debating purposes. Let us complete our preliminary tour,
and when we have seen the whole house we can each make such more
detailed inspection as seems necessary for our particular purposes.”
We accordingly resumed our perambulation (but I noticed that Thorndyke
deposited his attaché case in Monkhouse’s room with the evident
intention of returning thither), both of us looking about narrowly:
Thorndyke, no doubt, in search of the mysterious “traces” of which he
had spoken, and I with an inquisitive endeavour to ascertain what kind
of objects or appearances he regarded as “traces.”
We had not gone very far before we encountered an object that even I
was able to recognize as significant. It was in a corner of the long
corridor that we came upon a little heap of rubbish that had been
swept up out of the way; and at the very moment when Thorndyke stopped
short with his eyes fixed on it, I saw the object—a little wisp of
knitting-wool of the well-remembered green colour. Thorndyke picked it
up, and, having exhibited it to me, produced from his letter-case a
little envelope such as seedsmen use, in which he put the treasure
trove, and as he uncapped his fountain pen, he looked up and down the
corridor.
“Which is the nearest room to this spot?” he asked.
“Madeline’s,” I replied. “That is the door of her bedroom, on the
right. But all the principal bedrooms are on this floor and Barbara’s
boudoir as well. This heap of rubbish is probably the sweepings from
all the rooms.”
“That is what it looks like,” he agreed as he wrote the particulars on
the envelope and slipped the latter in his letter-case. “You notice
that there are some other trifles in this heap—some broken glass, for
instance. But I will go through it when we have finished our tour,
though I may as well take this now.”
As he spoke, he stooped and picked up a short piece of rather
irregularly shaped glass rod with a swollen, rounded end.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It is a portion of a small glass pestle and it belongs to one of
those little glass mortars such as chemists use in rubbing up powders
into solutions or suspensions. You had better not touch it, though it
has probably been handled pretty freely. But I shall test it on the
chance of discovering what it was last used for.”
He put it away carefully in another seed-envelope and then looked down
thoughtfully at the miniature dust-heap; but he made no further
investigations at the moment and we resumed the perambulation, I
placing the identification card on the mantelpiece of each room while
he looked sharply about him, opening all cupboards and receptacles and
peering into their, usually empty, interiors.
When we had inspected the servants’ bedrooms and the attics—leaving
the indispensable cards—we went down to the basement and visited the
kitchen, the scullery, the servants’ parlour and the cellars; and this
brought our tour to an end.
“Now,” said Thorndyke, “we proceed from the general to the particular.
While you are drawing up your schedule of dilapidations I will just
browse about and see if I can pick up any stray crumbs in which
inference can find nourishment. It isn’t a very hopeful quest, but you
observe that we have already lighted on two objects which may have a
meaning for us.”
“Yes, we have ascertained that some one in this house used a
particular kind of wool and that some one possessed a glass mortar.
Those do not seem to me very weighty facts.”
“They are not,” he agreed; “indeed, they are hardly facts at all. The
actual fact is that we have found the things here. But trifles light
as air sometimes serve to fill up the spaces in a train of
circumstantial evidence. I think I will go and have another look at
that rubbish-heap.”
I was strongly tempted to follow him, but could hardly do so in face
of his plainly expressed wish to make his inspection alone. Moreover,
I had already seen that there was more to be done than I had supposed.
The house was certainly not in bad repair, but neither did it look
very fresh nor attractive. Furniture and especially pictures have a
way of marking indelibly the walls of a room, and the paintwork in
several places showed disfiguring traces of wear. But I was anxious to
let this house, even at a nominal rent, so that, by a few years’
normal occupation its sinister reputation might be forgotten and its
value restored.
As a result, I was committed to a detailed inspection of the whole
house and the making of voluminous notes on the repairs and
re-decorations which would be necessary to tempt even an impecunious
tenant to forget that this was a house in which a murder had been
committed. For that was the current view, erroneous as I believed it
to be. Note-book in hand, I proceeded systematically from room to room
and from floor to floor, and became so engrossed with my own business
that I almost forgot Thorndyke; though I could hear him moving about
the house, and once I met him—on the first floor, with a couple of
empty medicine bottles and a small glass jar in his hands, apparently
making his way to Harold’s room, where, as I have said, he had left
his attaché case.
That room I left to the last, as it was already entered in my list and
I did not wish to appear to spy upon Thorndyke’s proceedings. When, at
length, I entered the room I found that he, like myself, had come to
the end of his task. On the floor his attaché case lay open, crammed
with various objects, several of which appeared to be bottles, wrapped
in oddments of waste paper (including some pieces of wall paper which
he had apparently stripped off _ad hoc_ when the other supplies
failed) and among which I observed a crumpled fly-paper. Respecting
this I remarked: “I don’t see why you are burdening yourself with
this. A fly-paper is in no sense an incriminating object, even though
such things have, at times, been put to unlawful use.”
“Very true,” he replied as he peeled off the rubber gloves which he
had been wearing during the search. “A fly-paper is a perfectly normal
domestic object. But, as you say, it can on occasion be used as a
source of arsenic for criminal purposes; and a paper that has been so
used will be found to have had practically the whole of the arsenic
soaked out of it. As I happened to find this in the servants’ parlour,
it seemed worth while to take it to see whether its charge of arsenic
had or had not been extracted.”
“But,” I objected, “why on earth should the poisoner—if there really
is such a person—have been at the trouble of soaking out fly-papers
when, apparently he was able to command an unlimited supply of
Fowler’s Solution?”
“Quite a pertinent question, Mayfield,” he rejoined. “But may I ask my
learned friend whether he found the evidence relating to the Fowler’s
Solution perfectly satisfactory?”
“But surely!” I exclaimed. “You had the evidence of two expert
witnesses on the point. What more would you require? What is the
difficulty?”
“The difficulty is this. There were several witnesses who testified
that when they saw the bottle of medicine, the Fowler’s Solution had
not yet been added; but there was none who saw the bottle after the
addition had been made.”
“But it must have been added before Mabel gave the patient the last
dose.”
“That is the inference. But Mabel said nothing to that effect. She was
not asked what colour the medicine was when she gave the patient that
dose.”
“But what of the analysts and the post mortem?”
“As to the post mortem, the arsenic which was found in the stomach was
not recognized as being in the form of Fowler’s Solution; and as to
the analysts, they made their examination three days after the man
died.”
“Still, the medicine that they analysed was the medicine that deceased
had taken. You don’t deny that, do you?”
“I neither deny it nor affirm it. I merely say that no evidence was
given that proved the presence of Fowler’s Solution in that bottle
before the man died; and that the bottle which was handed to the
analysts was one that had been exposed for three days in a room which
had been visited by a number of persons, including Mrs. Monkhouse,
Wallingford, Miss Norris, Mabel Withers, Amos Monkhouse, Dr. Dimsdale
and yourself.”
“You mean to suggest that the bottle might have been tampered with or
changed for another? But, my dear Thorndyke, why in the name of God
should any one want to change the bottle?”
“I am not suggesting that the bottle actually was changed. I am merely
pointing out that the evidence of the analysts is material only
subject to the conditions that the bottle which they examined was the
bottle from which the last dose of medicine was given and that its
contents were the same as on that occasion; and that no conclusive
proof exists that it was the same bottle or that the contents were
unchanged.”
“But what reason could there be for supposing that it might have been
changed?”
“There is no need to advance any reason. The burden of proof lies on
those who affirm that it was the same bottle with the same contents.
It is for them to prove that no change was possible. But obviously a
change was possible.”
“But still,” I persisted, “there seems to be no point in this
suggestion. Who could have had any motive for making a change? And
what could the motive have been? It looks to me like mere
logic-chopping and hair-splitting.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you were for the defence,” chuckled
Thorndyke. “You would not let a point of first-rate importance pass on
a mere assumption, no matter how probable. And as to a possible
motive, surely a most obvious one is staring us in the face. Supposing
some person in this household had been administering arsenic in the
food. If it could be arranged that a poisonous dose could be
discovered in the medicine, you must see that the issue would be at
once transferred from the food to the medicine, and from those who
controlled the food to those who controlled the medicine. Which is, in
fact, what happened. As soon as the jury heard about the medicine,
their interest in the food became extinct.”
I listened to this exposition with a slightly sceptical smile. It was
all very ingenious but I found it utterly unconvincing.
“You ought to be pleading in court, Thorndyke,” I said, “instead of
grubbing about in empty houses and raking over rubbish-heaps. By the
way, have you found anything that seems likely to yield any
suggestions?”
“It is a little difficult to say,” he replied. “I have taken
possession of a number of bottles and small jars for examination as to
their contents, but I have no great expectation in respect of them. I
also found some fragments of the glass mortar—an eight-ounce mortar it
appears to have been.”
“Where did you find those?” I asked.
“In Miss Norris’s bedroom, in a little pile of rubbish under the
grate. They are only tiny fragments, but the curvature enables one to
reconstruct the vessel pretty accurately.”
It seemed to me a rather futile proceeding, but I made no comment. Nor
did I give utterance to a suspicion which had just flashed into my
mind, that it was the discovery of these ridiculous fragments of glass
that had set my learned friend splitting straws on the subject of the
medicine bottle. I had not much liked his suggestion as to the
possible motive of that hypothetical substitution, and I liked it less
now that he had discovered the remains of the mortar in Madeline’s
room. There was no doubt that Thorndyke had a remarkable constructive
imagination; and, as I followed him down the stairs and out into the
square, I found myself faintly uneasy lest that lively imagination
should carry him into deeper waters than I was prepared to navigate in
his company.