Written Evidence
Inspector Flamborough had to wait a couple of days before his unknown
ally, Justice, made any further move. It so happened that Sir Clinton
was not at headquarters when the post brought the expected
communication; and the Inspector had plenty of time to consider the
fresh evidence, unbiased by his superior's comments. As soon as the
Chief Constable reappeared, Flamborough went to him to display the
latest document in the case.
“This came by the midday post, sir,” he explained, laying some papers
on the table. “It's Mr. Justice again. The results of his raid on the
Deepcar house, it seems.”
Sir Clinton picked up the packet and opened out the papers. Some
photographic prints attracted his attention, but he laid them aside
and turned first to a plain sheet of paper on which the now familiar
letters from telegraph forms had been gummed. With some deliberation
he read the message.
“I enclose photographs of part of the correspondence which has
recently taken place between Dr. Silverdale and Miss Deepcar.
“Justice.”
Sir Clinton gazed at the sheet for a moment or two, as though
considering some matter unconnected with the message. At last he
turned to the Inspector.
“I suppose you've tried this thing for finger-prints? No good, eh? I
can still smell a faint whiff of rubber from it—off his gloves, I
suppose.”
Flamborough shook his head in agreement with Sir Clinton's surmise.
“Nothing on it whatever, sir,” he confirmed.
The Chief Constable laid down the sheet of paper and took up one of
the photographs. It was of ordinary half-plate size and showed a
slightly reduced copy of one page of a letter.
that things cannot go on any
longer in this way.
The plan we talked over last
seems the best. When I have given
Hassendean hints about the use of
hyoscine, he will probably see for
himself how to get what he wants.
After that, it merely means watching
them, and I am sure that we shall soon
have her out of our way. It will be
very easy to make it seem intentional
on their part; and no one is likely
to look further than that.
Flamborough watched the Chief Constable's face as he read the message,
and as soon as he saw that Sir Clinton had completed his perusal of
it, the Inspector put in his word.
“I've checked the writing, sir. It's Silverdale's beyond any doubt.”
The Chief Constable nodded rather absent-mindedly and took up another
of the prints. This showed a largely-magnified reproduction of the
first two lines of the document; and for a minute or so Sir Clinton
subjected the print to a minute scrutiny with a magnifying glass.
“It's an original, right enough,” Flamborough ventured to comment at
last. “Mr. Justice has been very thorough, and he's given us quite
enough to prove that it isn't a forgery. You can see there's no sign
of erasing or scraping of any sort on the paper of the original; and
the magnification's big enough to show up anything of that sort.”
“That's true,” Sir Clinton admitted. “And so far as one can see, the
lines of the writing are normal. There are none of those
halts-in-the-wrong-place that a forger makes if he traces a
manuscript. The magnification's quite big enough to show up anything
of that sort. I guess you're right, Inspector, it's a photograph of
part of a real document in Silverdale's own handwriting.”
“The rest of the things make that clear enough,” Flamborough said,
indicating several other prints which showed microphotographic
reproductions of a number of other details of the document. “There's
no doubt whatever that these are all genuine bits of Silverdale's
handwriting. There's been no faking of the paper or anything like
that.”
Sir Clinton continued his study of the photographs, evidently with
keen interest; but at last he put all the prints on his desk and
turned to the Inspector.
“Well, what do you make of it?” he demanded.
“It seems clear enough to me,” Flamborough answered. “Look at the
contents of that page as a whole. It's as plain as one could wish.
Silverdale and the Deepcar girl have had enough of waiting. Things
can't go on any longer in this way. They've been discussing various
ways of getting rid of Mrs. Silverdale. ‘The plan we talked over last
seems the best.’ That's the final decision, evidently. Then you get a
notion of what the plan was. Silverdale was going to prime Hassendean
with information about hyoscine, and practically egg him on to drug
Mrs. Silverdale so as to get her into his power. Then when the trap
was ready, Silverdale and the Deepcar girl were to be on the alert to
take advantage of the situation. And the last sentence makes it clear
enough that they meant to go the length of murder and cover it up by
making it look like a suicide-pact between young Hassendean and Mrs.
Silverdale. That's how I read it, sir.”
Sir Clinton did not immediately endorse this opinion. Instead, he
picked up the full copy of the manuscript page and studied it afresh
as though searching for something in particular. At last he appeared
to be satisfied; and he slid the photograph across the desk to the
Inspector.
“I don't wish to bias you, Inspector, so I won't describe what I see
myself. But will you examine the word ‘probably’ in that text and tell
me if anything whatever about it strikes you as peculiar—anything
whatever, remember.”
Flamborough studied the place indicated, first with his naked eye and
then with the magnifying glass.
“There's no sign of any tampering with the paper that I can see, sir.
The surface is intact and the ink lines run absolutely freely, without
the halts and shakes one would expect in a forgery. The only thing I
do notice is that the word looks just a trifle cramped.”
“That's what I wanted. Note that it's in the middle of a line,
Inspector. Now look at the word ‘shall’ in the fifth line from the
bottom of the page.”
“One might say it was a trifle cramped too,” Flamborough admitted.
“And the ‘it’ in the third line from the foot?”
“It looks like the same thing.”
Flamborough relapsed into silence and studied the photograph word by
word while Sir Clinton waited patiently.
“The word ‘the’ in the phrase ‘about the use of hyoscine’ seems
cramped too; and the ‘to’ at the start of the last line suffers in the
same way. It's so slight in all these cases that one wouldn't notice
it normally. I didn't see it till you pointed it out. But if you're
going to suggest that there's been any erasing and writing in fresh
words to fit the blank space, I'll have to disagree with you, sir. I
simply don't believe there's been any thing of the sort.”
“I shan't differ from you over that,” Sir Clinton assured him blandly.
“Now let's think of something else for a change. Did it never occur to
you, Inspector, how much the English language depends on the relative
positions of words? If I say: ‘It struck you,’ that means something
quite different from: ‘You struck it.’ And yet each sentence contains
exactly the same words.”
“That's plain enough,” Flamborough admitted, “though I never thought
of it in that way. And,” he added in a dubious tone, “I don't see what
it's got to do with the case, either.”
“That's a pity,” Sir Clinton observed with a sympathy which hardly
sounded genuine. “Suppose we think it over together. Where does one
usually cramp words a trifle when one is writing?”
“At the end of a line,” Flamborough suggested. “But these crampings
seem to be all in the middle of the lines of that letter.”
“That's what seems to me interesting about them,” Sir Clinton
explained drily. “And somehow it seems to associate itself in my mind
with the fact that Mr. Justice hasn't supplied us with the original
document, but has gone to all the trouble of taking photographs of
it.”
“I wondered at that, myself,” the Inspector confessed. “It seems a bit
futile, true enough.”
“Try a fresh line, Inspector. We learned on fairly good authority that
Mr. Justice took away a number of letters from Miss Deepcar's house.
And yet he only sends us a single page out of the lot. If the rest
were important, why doesn't he send them. If they aren't important,
why did he take them away?”
“He may be holding them up for use later on, sir.”
Sir Clinton shook his head.
“My reading of the business is different. I think this is Mr.
Justice's last reserve. He's throwing his last forces into the battle
now.”
“There seems to be something behind all this,” Flamborough admitted,
passing his hand over his hair as though to stimulate his brain by the
action, “but I can't just fit it all together as you seem to have
done, sir. You can say what you like, but that handwriting's genuine;
the paper's not been tampered with; and I can't see anything wrong
with it.”
Sir Clinton took pity on the inspector's obvious anxiety.
“Look at the phrasing of the whole document, Inspector. If you cared
to do so, you could split it up into a set of phrases something after
this style: ‘that things cannot go on any longer in this way. . . .
The plan we talked over last seems the best. . . . When I have
given . . . Hassendean . . . hints . . . about the . . . use of . . .
hyoscine . . . he will probably see for himself how . . . to get what
he wants. . . . After that, it merely means . . . watching them . . .
and I am sure that . . . we shall soon have . . . her . . . out of our
way. . . . It will be very easy . . . to make it seem . . .
intentional . . . on their part . . . and no one is likely . . . to
look further than that.’ Now, Inspector, if you met any one of these
phrases by itself, would you infer from it inevitably that a murder
was being planned? ‘Things cannot go on any longer in this way.’ If
you consider how Mrs. Silverdale was behaving with young Hassendean,
it's not astonishing to find a phrase like that in a letter from
Silverdale to the girl he was in love with. ‘The plan we talked over
last seems the best.’ It might have been a day's outing together that
he was talking about for all one can tell. ‘He will probably see for
himself how my wife is playing with him.’ And so forth.”
“Yes, that's all very well,” Flamborough put in, “but what about the
word ‘hyoscine?’ That's unusual in love-letters.”
“Miss Deepcar was working on hyoscine under Silverdale's directions,
remember. It's quite possible that he might have mentioned it
incidentally.”
“Now I think I see what you mean, sir. You think that this document
that Mr. Justice has sent us is a patchwork—bits cut out of a lot of
different letters and stuck together and then photographed?”
“I'm suggesting it as a possibility, Inspector. See how it fits the
facts. Here are a set of phrases, each one innocuous in itself, but
with a cumulative effect of suggestion when you string them together
as in this document. If the thing is a patchwork, then a number of
real letters must have been used in order to get fragments which would
suit. So Mr. Justice took a fair selection of epistles with him when
he raided Miss Deepcar's house. Further, in snipping out a sentence
here and there from these letters, he sometimes had to include a
phrase running on from one line to another in the original letter; but
when he came to paste his fragments together, the original hiatus at
the end of a line got transferred to the middle of a line in the final
arrangement made to fit the page of the faked letter. That's what
struck me to begin with. For example, suppose that in the original
letter you had the phrase: ‘he will probably see for himself how’; and
the original line ended with ‘probably.’ That word might be a bit
cramped at the end of the line. But in reconstructing the thing,
‘probably’ got into the middle of the line, and so you get this
apparently meaningless cramping of the word when there was space
enough for it to be written uncramped under normal conditions. Just
the same with the other cases you spotted for yourself. They represent
the ends of lines in the original letters, although they all occur in
the middle of lines in the fake production.”
“That sounds just as plausible as you like, sir. But you've got the
knack of making things sound plausible. You're not pulling my leg, are
you?” the Inspector demanded suspiciously. “Besides, what about there
being no sign of the paper having been tampered with?”
“Look at what he's given us,” Sir Clinton suggested. “The only case
where he's given a large-scale reproduction of a whole phrase is at
the top of the letter: ‘Things cannot go on any longer in this way.’
That's been complete in the original, and he gives you a large-scale
copy of it showing that the texture of the paper is intact. Of course
it is, since he cut the whole bit out of the letter _en bloc_. When it
comes to the microphotographs, of course he only shows you small bits
of the words and so there's no sign of the cutting that was needed at
the end of each fragment. And in the photograph of the full text,
there's no attempt to show you fine details. He simply pasted the
fragments in their proper order on to a real sheet of note-paper,
filled up the joins with Chinese White to hide the solutions of
continuity, and used a process plate which wouldn't show the slight
differences in the shades of the whites where the Chinese White
overlay the white of the note-paper. If you have a drawing to make for
black-and-white reproduction in a book, you can mess about with
Chinese White as much as you like, and it won't show up in the final
result at all.”
Flamborough, with a gesture, admitted the plausibility of Sir
Clinton's hypothesis.
“And you think that explains why he didn't send us the original
document, sir?”
“Since I'm sure he hadn't an original to send, it's hard to see how he
could have sent it, Inspector.”
Flamborough did not contest this reading of the case. Instead, he
passed to a fresh aspect of the subject.
“Mr. Justice is evidently ready to go any length to avenge
somebody—and that somebody can hardly have been young Hassendean,
judging from what we've heard about his character.”
Sir Clinton refused the gambit offered by the Inspector.
“Mr. Justice is a very able person,” he observed, “even though he does
make a mistake now and again, as in this last move.”
“You said you'd some idea who he was, sir?” Flamborough said with an
interrogative note in his voice.
The Chief Constable showed no desire to be drawn. He glanced rather
quizzically at his subordinate for a moment before speaking.
“I'll give you the points which strike me in that connection,
Inspector; and then you'll be just as well placed as I am myself in
the matter of Mr. Justice. First of all, if you compare the time of
publication of the morning newspapers with the time, at which Mr.
Justice's telegram was collected from the pillar-box, I think it's
fairly evident that he didn't depend on the journalists for his first
information about the affair. Even the Ivy Lodge news wasn't printed
until after he had despatched his message.”
“That's true, sir,” Flamborough admitted.
His manner showed that he expected a good deal more than this tittle
of information.
“Therefore he must have had some direct information about the bungalow
business. Either he was on the spot when the affair occurred, or else
he was told about it almost immediately by someone who was on the
spot.”
“Admitted,” the inspector confirmed.
“Then he obviously—or is it ‘she obviously,’ Inspector?—saw the
importance of hyoscine as a clue as soon as any word about it got into
the newspapers. Immediately, in comes the code advertisement, giving
us—rather unnecessarily I think—the tip to inquire at the
Croft-Thornton Institute.”
Flamborough's face showed that he felt Sir Clinton was merely
recapitulating very obvious pieces of evidence.
“Then there was the writing on the advertisements which he sent to the
papers—Mrs. Silverdale's writing rather neatly forged, if you
remember.”
“Yes,” said the Inspector, showing by his tone that at this point he
was rather at sea.
“Then there was the fact that he managed to choose his time most
conveniently for his raid on Miss Deepcar's house.”
“You mean he made his visit when only the maid was at home, sir?”
“Precisely. I rather admire his forethought all through the business.
But there's more in it than that, if you think it over, Inspector?”
“Well, sir, if your reading's correct, he wanted some of Silverdale's
letters to serve as a basis for these photographs.”
“Something even more obvious than that, Inspector. Now, with all that
evidence in front of you, can't you build up some sort of picture of
Mr. Justice? You ought to be able to come fairly near it, I think.”
“Somebody fairly in the swim with the Silverdale crowd, at any rate. I
can see that. And someone who knew the Croft-Thornton by hearsay, at
any rate. Is that what you mean, sir?”
Sir Clinton betrayed nothing in his expression, though the Inspector
scrutinised his face carefully; but he added something which
Flamborough had not expected.
“Final points. The date on the fragment of an envelope that I found in
the drawer in Mrs. Silverdale's room was 1925. The date inside that
signet-ring on her finger was 5–11–25. And there was the initial ‘B’
engraved alongside the date.”
Inspector Flamborough quite obviously failed to see the relevancy of
these details. His face showed it in the most apparent way.
“I don't see what you're getting at there, sir,” he said rather
shamefacedly. “These things never struck me; and even now I don't see
what they've got to do with Mr. Justice.”
If he expected to gain anything by this frank confession, he was
disappointed. Sir Clinton had evidently no desire to save his
subordinate the trouble of thinking, and his next remark left
Flamborough even deeper in bewilderment.
“Ever read anything by Dean Swift, Inspector?”
“I read _Gulliver's Travels_ when I was a kid, sir,” Flamborough
admitted, with the air of deprecating any investigation into his
literary tastes.
“You might read his _Journal to Stella_ some time. But I guess you'd
find it dull. It's a reprint of his letters to Esther Johnson. He
called her ‘Stella,’ and it's full of queer abbreviations and phrases
like ‘Night, dear MD. Love Pdfr.’ It teems with that sort of stuff.
Curious to see the human side of a man like Swift, isn't it?”
“In love with her, you mean, sir?”
“Well, it sounds like it,” Sir Clinton replied cautiously. “However,
we needn't worry over Swift. Let's see if we can't do something with
this case, for a change.”
He glanced at his watch.
“Half-past five. We may be able to get hold of her.”
He picked up the telephone from his desk and asked for a number while
Flamborough waited with interest to hear the result.
“Is that the Croft-Thornton Institute?” Sir Clinton demanded at
length. “Sir Clinton Driffield speaking. Can you ask Miss Hailsham to
come to the telephone?”
There was a pause before he spoke once more.
“Miss Hailsham? I'm sorry to trouble you, but can you tell me if
there's a microphotographic camera in the Institute? I'd like to
know.”
Flamborough, all ears, waited for the next bit of the one-sided
conversation which was reaching him.
“You have two of them? Then I suppose I might be able to get
permission to use one of them, perhaps, if we need it. . . . Thanks,
indeed. By the way, I suppose you're just leaving the Institute
now. . . . I thought so. Very lucky I didn't miss you by a minute or
two. I mustn't detain you. Thanks again. Good-bye.”
He put down the telephone and turned to Flamborough.
“You might ask Miss Morcott to come here, Inspector.”
Flamborough, completely puzzled by this move, opened the door of the
adjoining room and summoned Sir Clinton's typist.
“I want you to telephone for me, Miss Morcott,” the Chief Constable
explained. “Ring up Dr. Trevor Markfield at his house. When you get
through, say to his housekeeper: ‘Miss Hailsham speaking. Please tell
Dr. Markfield that I wish to see him to-night and that I shall come
round to his house at nine o’clock.’ Don't say any more than that, and
get disconnected before there's any chance of explanations.”
Miss Morcott carried out Sir Clinton's orders carefully and then went
back to her typing. As soon as the door closed behind her, the
Inspector's suppressed curiosity got the better of him.
“I don't quite understand all that, sir. I suppose you asked about the
photomicrographic affair just to see if these prints could have been
made at the Croft-Thornton?”
“I hadn't much doubt on that point. Photomicrographic apparatus isn't
common among amateur photographers, but it's common enough in
scientific institutes. No, I was really killing two birds with one
stone: finding out about the micro-camera and making sure that Miss
Hailsham was leaving the place for the night and wouldn't have a
chance to speak to Markfield before she went.”
“And what about her calling on Markfield to-night, sir?”
“She'll have to do it by proxy, I'm afraid. We'll represent her,
however inefficiently, Inspector. The point is that I wanted to be
sure that Markfield would be at home when we called; and I wished to
avoid making an appointment in my own name lest it should put him too
much on his guard. The time's come when we'll have to persuade Dr.
Markfield to be a bit franker than he's been, hitherto. I think I see
my way to getting out of him most of what he knows; and if I can
succeed in that, then we ought to have all the evidence we need.”
He paused, as though not very sure about something.
“He's been bluffing us all along the line up to the present,
Inspector. It's a game two can play at; and you'll be good enough to
turn a deaf ear occasionally if I'm tempted out of the straight path.
And whatever happens, don't look over-surprised at anything I may say.
If you can contrive to look thoroughly stupid, it won't do any harm.”