Thorndyke Proposes a New Move
On the following morning, in order to make sure of arriving before the
detective officer, I presented myself at King’s Bench-walk a good
half-hour before I was due. The door was opened by Thorndyke himself,
and as we shook hands he said: “I am glad you have come early, Gray.
No doubt Polton explained the programme to you, but I should like to
make our position quite clear. The officer who is coming here
presently is Detective-Superintendent Miller, of the Criminal
Investigation Department. He is quite an old friend, and he is coming
at my request to give me certain information. But, of course, he is a
detective officer, with his own duties to his department, and an
exceedingly shrewd, capable man. Naturally, if he can pick up any
crumbs of information from us, he will; and I don’t want him to learn
more, at present, than I choose to tell him.”
“Why do you want to keep him in the dark?” I asked.
“Because,” he replied, “we are doing quite well, and I want to get the
case complete before I call in the police. If I were to tell him all I
know and all I think, he might get too busy, and scare our man away
before we have enough evidence to justify an arrest. As soon as the
investigation is finished, and we have such evidence as will secure a
conviction, I shall turn the case over to him; meanwhile, we keep our
own counsel. Your rôle this morning will be that of listener. Whatever
happens, make no comment. Act as if you knew nothing that is not of
public knowledge.”
I promised to follow his directions to the letter, though I could not
get rid of the feeling that all this secrecy was somewhat futile. Then
I began to tell him of my experiences of the previous night, to which
he listened at first with grave interest, but with growing amusement
as the story developed. When I came to the final chase and the
pursuing policeman, he leaned back in his chair and laughed heartily.
“Why,” he exclaimed, wiping his eyes, “it was a regular procession! It
only wanted a string of sausages and a harlequin to bring it up to
pantomime form.”
“Yes,” I admitted with a grin, “it was a ludicrous affair. But it was
a mighty mysterious affair too. You see, neither of the men was the
man I had expected. There must be more people in this business than we
had supposed. Have you any idea who these men can be?”
“It isn’t much use making vague guesses,” he replied. “The important
point to note is that this incident, farcical as it turned out, might
easily have taken a tragical turn; and the moral is that for the
present you can’t be too careful in keeping out of harm’s way.”
It was obvious to me that he was evading my question; that those two
sinister strangers were not the mystery to him that they were to me,
and I was about to return to the charge with a more definitely pointed
question when an elaborate flourish on the little brass knocker of the
inner door announced a visitor.
The tall, military-looking man whom Thorndyke admitted was evidently
the Superintendent, as I gathered from the mutual greetings. He looked
rather hard at me until Thorndyke introduced me, which he did with
characteristic reticence.
“This is Dr. Gray, Miller; you may remember his name. It was he who
discovered the body of Mr. D’Arblay.”
“Yes, I remember,” said the Superintendent, shaking my hand
unemotionally and still looking at me with a slightly dubious air.
“He is a good deal interested in the case,” Thorndyke continued, “not
only professionally, but as a friend of the family—since the
catastrophe.”
“I see,” said the Superintendent, taking a final inquisitive look at
me and obviously wondering why the deuce I was there. “Well, there is
nothing of a very secret nature in what I have to tell you, and I
suppose you can rely on Dr. Gray to keep his own counsel and ours.”
“Certainly,” replied Thorndyke. “He quite understands that our talk is
confidential, even if it is not secret.”
The officer nodded, and, having been inducted into an easy chair, by
the side of which a decanter, a siphon, and a box of cigars had been
placed, settled himself comfortably, lit a cigar, mixed himself a
modest refresher, and drew from his pocket a bundle of papers secured
with red tape.
“You asked me, Doctor,” he began, “to get you all particulars up to
date of the Van Zellen case. Well, I can do that without difficulty as
the case—or at least what is left of it—is in my hands. The
circumstances of the actual crime I think you know already, so I will
take up the story from that point.
“Van Zellen, as you know, was found dead in his room, poisoned with
prussic acid, and a quantity of very valuable portable property was
missing. It was not clear whether the murderer had let himself in with
false keys or whether Van Zellen had let him in; but the place hadn’t
been broken into. The job had been done with remarkable skill, so that
not a trace of the murderer was left. Consequently, all that was left
for the police to do was to consider whether they knew of any one
whose methods agreed with those of this murderer.
“Well, they did know of such a person, but they had nothing against
him but suspicion. He had never been convicted of any serious crime,
though he had been in chokee once or twice for receiving. But there
had been a number of cases of robbery with murder—or rather murder
with robbery, for this man seemed to have committed the murder as a
preliminary precaution—and they were all of this kind; a solitary
crime, very skilfully carried out by means of poison. There was never
any trace of the criminal; but gradually the suspicions of the police
settled down on a rather mysterious individual of the name of
Bendelow; Simon Bendelow. Consequently, when the Van Zellen crime came
to light, they were inclined to put it on this man Bendelow, and they
began making fresh inquiries about him. But presently it transpired
that some one had seen a man, on the morning of the crime, coming away
from the neighbourhood of Van Zellen’s house just about the time when
the murder must have been committed.”
“Was there anything to connect him with the crime?” Thorndyke asked.
“Well, there was the time—the small hours of the morning—and the man
was carrying a good-sized hand-bag, which seemed to be pretty heavy
and which would have held the stuff that was missing. But the most
important point was the man’s appearance. He was described as a
smallish man, clean-shaved, with a big hooked nose and very heavy
eyebrows set close down over his eyes.
“Now this put Bendelow out of it as the principal suspect, because the
description didn’t fit him at all” (here I caught Thorndyke’s eye for
an instant and was warned afresh, and not unnecessarily, to make no
comment); “but,” continued the Superintendent, “it didn’t put him out
altogether. For the man whom the description did fit—and it fitted him
to a T—was a fellow named Crile—Jonathan Crile—who was a pal of
Bendelow’s and was known to have worked with him as a confederate in
the receiving business and had been in prison once or twice. So the
police started to make inquiries about Crile, and before long they
were able to run him to earth. But that didn’t do them much good; for
it turned out that Crile wasn’t in New York at all. He was in
Philadelphia; and it was clearly proved that he had been there on the
day of the murder, on the day before and the day after. So they seemed
to have drawn a blank; but they were still a bit suspicious of Mr.
Crile, who seems to have been as downy a bird as his friend Bendelow,
and of the other chappie, too. But they hadn’t a crumb of evidence
against either.
“So there the matter stuck. A complete deadlock. There was nothing to
be done; for you can’t arrest a man on mere suspicion with not a
single fact to support it. But the police kept their eye on both
gents, so far as they could, and presently they got a chance. Bendelow
made a slip—or, at any rate, they said he did. It was a little
trumpery affair, something in the receiving line, and of no importance
at all. Probably, a faked charge, too. But they thought that if they
could get him arrested they might be able to squeeze something out of
him—the police in America can do things that we aren’t allowed to. So
they tried to pounce on him. But Mr. Bendelow was a slippery customer,
and he got wind of their intentions just in time. When they got into
his rooms they found that he had left—in a deuce of a hurry, too, and
only a few minutes before they arrived. They searched the place, but
found nothing incriminating, and they tried to get on Bendelow’s
track, but they didn’t succeed. He had managed to get clear away, and
Crile seemed to have disappeared, too.
“Well, that seemed to be the end of the affair. Both of these crooks
had made off without leaving a trace, and the police—having no
evidence—didn’t worry any more about them. And so things went on for
about a year, until the Van Zellen case had been given up and nearly
forgotten. Then something happened quite recently that gave the police
a fresh start.
“It appears that there was a fire in the house in which Bendelow’s
rooms were, and a good deal of damage was done, so that they had to do
some rebuilding; and in the course of the repairs, the builder’s men
found, hidden under the floor-boards, a small parcel containing part
of the Van Zellen swag. There was nothing of real value; just coins
and medals and seal-rings and truck of that kind. But the things were
all identified by means of Van Zellen’s catalogue, and, of course, the
finding of them in what had been Bendelow’s rooms put the murder
pretty clearly on to him.
“On this, as you can guess, the police and the detective agencies got
busy. They searched high and low for the missing man, but for a long
time they could pick up no traces of him. At last they discovered that
he and Crile had taken a passage nearly a year ago on a tramp steamer
bound for England. Thereupon they sent a very smart, experienced
detective over to work at the case in conjunction with our own
detective department.
“But we didn’t have much to do with it. The American—Wilson was his
name—had all the particulars, with the prison photographs and
finger-prints of both the men, and he made most of the inquiries
himself. However, there were two things that we did for him. We handed
over to him the Van Zellen guinea and the particulars of the D’Arblay
murder; and we were able to inform him that his friend, Bendelow, was
dead.”
“How did you find that out?” Thorndyke asked.
“Oh, quite by chance. One of our men happened to be at Somerset House
looking up some details of a will when in the list of wills he came
across the name of Simon Bendelow, which he had heard from Wilson
himself. He at once got out the will, copied out the address of the
executrix and the names and addresses of the witnesses, and handed
them over to Wilson, who was mightily taken aback, as you may suppose.
However, he wasn’t taking anything for granted. He set off instantly
to look up the executrix—a Mrs. Morris. But there he got another
disappointment, for the Morrises had gone away and no one knew where
they had gone.”
“I take it,” said Thorndyke, “that probate of the will had been
granted.”
“Yes; everything in that way had been finished up. Well, on this,
Wilson went off in search of the witnesses, and he had better luck
this time. They were two elderly spinsters who lived together in a
house in Turnpike-lane, Hornsey. They didn’t know much about Bendelow,
for they had only made his acquaintance after he had taken to his bed.
They were introduced to him by his friend and landlady, Mrs. Morris,
who used to take them up to his room to talk to him and cheer him up a
bit. However, they knew all about his death, for they had seen him in
his coffin and they followed him to the Ilford Crematorium.”
“Ha!” said Thorndyke. “So he was cremated.”
“Yes,” chuckled the Superintendent, with a sly look at Thorndyke. “I
thought that would make you prick up your ears, Doctor. Yes, there
were no half measures for Mr. Bendelow. He had gone literally to
ashes. But it was all right, you know. There couldn’t have been any
hanky panky. These two ladies had not only seen him in his coffin;
they actually had a last look at him through a little celluloid window
in the coffin-lid, just before the coffin was passed through into the
cremation furnace.”
“And there was no doubt as to his identity?”
“None whatever. Wilson showed the old ladies his photograph, and they
recognized him instantly; picked his photograph out of a dozen
others.”
“Where was Bendelow living when they made his acquaintance?”
“Not far from their house; in Abbey-road, Hornsey. But the Morrises
moved afterwards to Market-street, Hoxton, and that is where he died
and where the will was signed.”
“I suppose Wilson ascertained the cause of death?”
“Oh, yes. The old ladies told him that. But he went to Somerset House
and got a copy of the death certificate. I haven’t got that, as he
took it back with him; but the cause of death was cancer of the
pylorus—that’s some part of the gizzard, I believe, but you’ll know
all about it. At any rate, there was no doubt on the subject, as the
two doctors made a post-mortem before they signed the death
certificate. It was all perfectly plain and straightforward.
“Well, so much for Mr. Bendelow. When Wilson had done with him, he
turned his attention to Crile. And then he really did get a proper
shake-up. When he was at Somerset House, looking up Bendelow’s death
certificate, it occurred to him just to run his eye down the list and
make sure that Crile was still in the land of the living. And there,
to his astonishment, he found Crile’s name. He was dead, too! And not
only was he dead: he, also, had died of cancer—it was the pancreas
this time; another part of the gizzard—and he had died at Hoxton, too,
and he had died just four days before Bendelow. The thing was
ridiculous. It looked like a conspiracy. But here again everything was
plain and above-board. Wilson got a copy of the certificate and called
on the doctor who had signed it, a man named Usher. Of course, Dr.
Usher remembered all about the case as it had occurred quite recently.
There was not a shadow of doubt that Crile was dead. Usher had helped
to put him in his coffin and had attended at his funeral; and he, too,
had no difficulty in picking out Crile’s photograph, and he had no
doubt at all as to what Crile died of. So there it was. Queer as it
looked, there was no denying the plain facts. Those two crooks had
slipped through the fingers of the law, so far as it was possible to
see.
“But I must admit that I was not quite satisfied; the circumstances
were so remarkably odd. I told Wilson so, and I advised him to look
further into the matter. I reminded him of the D’Arblay murder and the
finding of that guinea, but he said that the murder was our affair,
that the men he had come to look for were dead, and that was all that
concerned him. So back he went to New York, taking with him the death
certificates and the two photographs with the certificates of
recognition on the backs of them. But he left the notes of the case
with me, on the chance that they might be useful to me, and the two
sets of finger-prints, which certainly don’t seem likely to be of much
use under the circumstances.”
“You never know,” said Thorndyke, with an enigmatical smile.
The Superintendent gave him a quick, inquisitive look and agreed: “No,
you don’t, especially when you are dealing with Dr. John Thorndyke.”
He pulled out his watch, and, staring at it anxiously, exclaimed:
“What a confounded nuisance! I’ve got an appointment at the Law Courts
in five minutes. It is quite a small matter. Won’t take me more than
half an hour. May I come back when I have finished? I should like to
hear what you think of this extraordinary story.”
“Come back, by all means,” said Thorndyke, “and I will turn over the
facts in my mind while you are gone. Possibly some suggestion may
present itself in the interval.”
He let the officer out, and when the hurried footsteps had died away
on the stairs he closed the door and turned to me with a smile.
“Well, Gray,” he said, “what do you think of that? Isn’t it a very
pretty puzzle for a medical jurist?”
“It is a hopeless tangle to me,” I replied. “My brain is in a whirl.
You can’t dispute the facts, and yet you can’t believe them. I don’t
know what to make of the affair.”
“You note the fact that, whoever may be dead, there is somebody
alive—very much alive, and that that somebody is the murderer of
Julius D’Arblay.”
“Yes, I realize that. But obviously he can’t be either Crile or
Bendelow. The question is: Who is he?”
“You note the link between him and the Van Zellen murder; I mean the
electrotype guinea?”
“Yes, there is evidently some connexion, but I can’t imagine what it
can be. By the way, you noticed that the American police had got
muddled about the personal appearance of these two men. The
description of that man who was seen coming away from Van Zellen’s
house, and who was said to be quite unlike Bendelow, actually fitted
him perfectly. They had evidently made a mistake of some kind.”
“Yes, I noticed that. But the description may have fitted Crile
better. We must get into touch with this man, Usher. I wonder if he
will be the Usher who used to attend at St. Margaret’s.”
“He is; and I am in touch with him already. In fact, he was telling me
about this very patient, Jonathan Crile.”
“Indeed! Can you remember the substance of what he told you?”
“I think so. It wasn’t very thrilling.” And here I gave him, as well
as I could remember them, the details with which Usher had entertained
me of his attendance on the late Jonathan Crile, his dealings with the
landlady, Mrs. Pepper, and the incidents of the funeral, including
Usher’s triumphant return in the mourning coach. It seemed a dull and
trivial story, but Thorndyke listened to it with the keenest interest,
and when I had finished he asked: “He didn’t happen to mention where
Crile lived, I suppose?”
“Yes, curiously enough, he did. The address, I remember, was 52,
Field-street, Hoxton.”
“Ha!” said Thorndyke. “You are a mine of information, Gray.”
He rose and, taking down from the bookshelves Phillip’s Atlas of
London, opened it and pored over one of the maps. Then, replacing the
Atlas, he got out his notes of the D’Arblay case and searched for a
particular entry. It was evidently quite a short one, for when he had
found it he gave it but a single glance and closed the portfolio.
Then, returning to the bookshelves, he took out the Post Office
Directory and opened it at the “streets” section. Here also his search
was but a short one though it appeared to be concerned with two
separate items; for, having examined one, he turned to a different
part of the section to find the other. Finally he closed the unwieldy
volume and, having replaced it on the shelf, turned and once more
looked at me inquiringly.
“Reflecting on what Miller has told us,” he said, “does anything
suggest itself to you? Any sort of hypothesis as to what the real
facts may be?”
“Nothing whatever,” I replied. “The confusion that was already in my
mind is only the worse confounded. But that is not your case, I take
it.”
“Not entirely,” he admitted. “The fact is that I had already formed a
hypothesis as to the motives and circumstances which lay behind the
murder of Julius D’Arblay, and I find this new matter not inconsistent
with it. But that hypothesis may, nevertheless, turn out to be quite
wrong when we put it to the test of further investigation.”
“You have some further investigation in view, then.”
“Yes. I am going to make a proposal to Superintendent Miller—and here
he comes, before his time; by which I judge that he, also, is keen on
the solution of this puzzle.”
Thorndyke’s opinion seemed to be justified, for the Superintendent
entered all agog, and opened the subject at once.
“Well, Doctor, I suppose you have been thinking over Wilson’s story?
How does it strike you? Have you come to any conclusion?”
“Yes,” replied Thorndyke. “I have come to the conclusion that I can’t
accept that story at its face value as representing the actual facts.”
Miller laughed with an air of mingled amusement and vexation. “That is
just my position,” said he. “The story seems incredible, but yet you
can’t raise any objection. The evidence in support of it is absolutely
conclusive at every point. There isn’t a single weak spot in it—at
least, I haven’t found one. Perhaps you have?” And here he looked at
Thorndyke with eager inquiry in his eyes.
“I won’t say that,” Thorndyke replied. “But I put it to you, Miller,
that the alleged facts that are offered are too abnormal to be
entertained. We cannot accept that string of coincidences. It must be
obvious to you that there is a fallacy somewhere and that the actual
facts are not what they seem.”
“Yes, I feel that, myself,” rejoined Miller. “But what are we to do?
How are we to find the flaw in the evidence, if there is one? Can you
see where to look for it? I believe you can.”
“I think there is one point which ought to be verified,” said
Thorndyke. “The identification of Crile doesn’t strike me as perfectly
convincing.”
“How does his case differ from Bendelow’s?” Miller demanded.
“In two respects,” was the reply. “First, Bendelow was identified by
two persons who had known him well for some time and who gave a most
circumstantial account of his illness, his death, and the disposal of
his body; and second, Bendelow’s remains have been cremated and are
therefore, presumably, beyond our reach for purposes of
identification.”
“Well,” Miller objected, “Crile isn’t so very accessible, being some
few feet under ground.”
“Still, he is there; and he has been buried only a few weeks. It would
be possible to exhume the body and settle the question of his identity
once for all.”
“Then you are not satisfied with Dr. Usher’s identification?”
“No. Usher saw him only after a long, wasting illness, which must have
altered his appearance very greatly; whereas the photograph was taken
when Crile was in his normal health. It couldn’t have been so very
like Usher’s patient.”
“That’s true,” said Miller; “and I remember that Usher wasn’t so very
positive, according to Wilson. But he agreed that it seemed to be the
same man; and all the other facts seemed to point to the certainty
that it was really Crile. Still, you are not satisfied? It’s a pity
Wilson took the photograph back with him.”
“The photograph is of no consequence,” said Thorndyke. “You have the
finger-prints; properly authenticated finger-prints, actually taken
from the man in the presence of witnesses. After this short time it
will be possible to get perfectly recognizable finger-prints from the
body, and those finger-prints will settle the identity of Usher’s
patient beyond any possible doubt.”
The Superintendent scratched his chin thoughtfully. “It’s a bit of a
job to get an exhumation order,” said he. “Before I raise the question
with the Commissioner, I should like to have a rather more definite
opinion from you. Do you seriously doubt that the man in that coffin
is Jonathan Crile?”
“It is my opinion,” replied Thorndyke—“of course, I may be wrong—but
it is my considered opinion that the Crile who is in that coffin is
not the Crile whose finger-prints are in your possession.”
“Very well, Doctor,” said Miller, rising and picking up his hat, “that
is good enough for me. I won’t ask you for your reasons because I know
you won’t give them. But I have known you long enough to feel sure
that you wouldn’t give a definite opinion like that unless you had got
something pretty solid to go on. And I don’t think we shall have any
difficulty about the exhumation order after what you have said.”
With this the Superintendent took his leave, and very shortly
afterwards Thorndyke carried me off to lunch at his club before
dismissing me to take up my duties at the studio.