by E.
“The police found the woman dead on the floor with a bullet in her head. Now the room door was locked, with the key still in the lock. And it was bolted from the inside. The window as we have seen was fastened from the inside. There was no way of getting into the room from the outside. A revolver was in the right hand of the dead woman. If ever there was an obvious suicide, this was it. Yet, there was one little mistake on the part of a murderer that gave it away—the revolver was held in such a manner that the woman could not have fired it herself.” Doctor Manson paused for comment.
“There is nobody in the room except the woman, and it was bolted from the inside?” Inspector Mackenzie wrinkled his brows. “Then how was the woman killed, Doctor?”
“By the man who entered by the door, committed the deed, left by the door which he afterwards locked by turning the key with a pair of pliers, Mackenzie.”
“But the shot bolt, sir?” The question came from Sergeant Bunny.
“That, Sergeant, gave the murderer away. There was one person who could logically have shot that bolt, and one person only. It was as logical as the day follows night. It is a nice little problem for you to solve.”
The three men reviewed the circumstances; they wrestled keenly for the key to the riddle; and failed.
“Who was it, Doctor?” asked Kenway. Manson smiled, broadly.
“You, Kenway, ought to have seen it,” he chided. “The only person who could have shot the bolt, and was therefore the murderer, was the helpful man who climbed up to the window with the landlady and the stranger watching, broke the pane, released the window catch, climbed in, reappeared and called for the police to be fetched. During the seconds he was in the room he stepped across to the door and shot the bolt, thus rendering the room inaccessible, seemingly, from the outside.
“He, you see, overstepped himself in his anxiety to show that nobody could have got to the woman.”
He became grimmer. “There is a similar carelessness in the case of Canley,” he added.
“Do you mean that you have found evidence that there was someone with Canley on the line?” demanded Inspector Mackenzie.
“My view, Inspector, is that there is ample evidence.”
The inspector groaned. “You mean it’s a case of murder?” Depression centred over and around him. The last thing he wanted on his hands was a murder investigation.
“Not so far.” The doctor spoke comfortingly, and in reflective tones. “Canley might have died naturally. I can conceive certain circumstances in which he could have come by a natural death in the presence of a companion who did not want to face questioning.”
“Conspiracy in an unlawful act?” queried Kenway.
“It could be, but not necessarily, Kenway. Canley and his companion could have been in some place, and with company or material with which it would have been inconvenient for them both to have been found. To avert such a discovery the companion, it is possible, staged the supposed accident. I am not putting that forward as a definite view,” he warned. “It is merely a reasonable supposition until further investigation supports or destroys it.”
The conversation at this stage was halted by a loud clanging in the roadway, followed by a screeching, and ending with a wail like that of a frightened banshee or a doomed soul in torment. Doctor Manson jerked into involuntary tautness.
“What in God’s name is that?” he gasped.
“Sounds like Ypres.” Inspector Mackenzie giggled.
“Like Ypres! It sounds like the entire battlefield of France in action at one and the same time. What, may I ask, is Ypres?”
“My Chief Constable’s car,” said Mackenzie. He volunteered an explanation. “That’s the name he calls it.”
He walked to the door and looked out. “Yes, that’s him in person,” he announced. “Here he comes—the old warhorse.”
CHAPTER XV
Colonel Mainforce, Chief Constable, ex-Guards officer, stood six feet two inches in his socks, and was broad in proportion. A military moustache bristled white and fiercely above shoulders that were as straight and pretty nearly as powerful as they had been in the war that was to end all wars, and didn’t. He was never tired of telling the story of how he had on one occasion seized two Germans who came at him one in each hand, held them off their feet and cracked their heads together until their skulls were fractured.
Doctor Manson and he had met on a number of occasions, both official and privately. The doctor standing at the back of the hall now watched him emerge from the innards of Ypres. Kenway watched, too, and grinned. “I know now,” he said, “how a chicken gets out of an egg.” The simile was particularly apt. The Colonel’s head first appeared through the crack that was the open door. A breadth of shoulder followed then, at the expense of a variety of contortions, a leg appeared, followed by more body, and another leg, until at last the height of the Colonel stretched out to its full and the breadth spread comfortably.
The Colonel advanced heavily up the path and stood at the door peering into the shadows of the hall. He half-glimpsed the figure of his inspector. He bellowed:
“Ah! There you are, Mackenzie. What the hell is all this fuss and bother over a railway accident? Wasting a whole morning.” He entered the cottage as he was speaking and spotted a second person. He peered again—uttered a sharp exclamation.
“God bless my soul! Is that you, Manson?” he asked. “What the thunder are you doing here?”
The awful thought struck him.
“Hey!” he roared. “You aren’t bringing one of your blasted corpses here, are you?” He glared malignantly. “The last time you were here some damn’ nit-wit saw a magpie flying round the place, and he and you landed us with a murder.[II] You aren’t on the same lay again, are you?” He became entreating. “For the Love of Mike don’t say you are.”
Doctor Manson smiled delightedly. “I am, I fear, an Augury of Desolation, Mainforce. I bring bad tidings.”
“You’ve brought another bloody body, I know it,” he wailed. “What’s it all about?” He pointed an accusing finger at his inspector.
“The doctor says the fellow wasn’t killed by the train,” announced Mackenzie. “He thinks somebody put him there after he was dead.”
“He does? Then he’s dead sure right,” replied the Colonel, and did not see his pun. “What the hell for,” he added, as an afterthought.
Manson, relegated to the role of third person, listened enchantedly to the duologue. The inspector detailed to his chief the extent of the information gleaned from the inspection of the line, the path and the lane.
“Blood on the track did you say, Mackenzie?” he boomed. “Ah, then that makes it all right. Wounds made on dead bodies don’t bleed. Been a soldier too long not to know that.”
“No more they do. But if the blood is still liquid in the arteries, it will leak,” said a voice from behind him. The Chief Constable swung round, to come face to face with Merry, the Yard’s deputy scientist, who had come unheard up the path, and now stood in the doorway.
“Hell’s bells!” roared the Chief Constable. “Here’s the other one of the pair. Now it’s a certainty. There’s trouble . . . there’s bloody murder. And how do you keep the blood liquid?” He reverted to the broken-off discussion.
“There are several ways,” piped up Manson. “If the body is freshly dead, as it were, the blood will still run.”
“And you think this man—what’s his blasted name, Mackenzie?”
“Canley, Colonel.”
“Then you think this man Canley—Lord, what a name!—was but newly dead, Doctor?”
“I didn’t say that, Colonel,” Manson corrected. “I don’t know when he died.”
“Well, anyway, he seems to have walked from here to the line, so he probably died there.”
The doctor put a word in. “Oh, no, he didn’t,” he said.
“Didn’t die on the line?” queried the Colonel.
“No. Didn’t walk from here to the line.” Manson paused for a fraction
of time. “Come to that, I don’t suppose he died on the line, either,” he added.
“What!”
Men on the barrack square had jumped when the Colonel spoke with that inflexion of voice. His moustache was standing as stiffly as soldiers on parade. The hairs always bristled like the quills of a porcupine with the wind up when he was annoyed. They were that way now. He swung round from the doctor to his inspector.
“I thought you wrote in your interim report to me, Mackenzie, that you could trace the path of this man—er—Canley, isn’t it?—from the garden path down the lane and up the embankment of the railway line. Dammit, man, didn’t you check the prints up with his shoes?”
“I did that, Colonel. The shoes match the prints, and the prints match the shoes.” Mackenzie, on safe ground there, passed the can to Doctor Manson. He expected at last to get somewhere in the investigation. The problem of the prints was one which he felt was on his side. The Colonel, still bristling, but not so ferociously, retreated on Manson.
“What the devil is going on here? What’s the matter with my fellow, Manson?” he asked.
The doctor hauled the shoes of Canley from the Box of Tricks, and dangled them under the eyes of the Chief Constable. “Here they are, Mainforce, the identical shoes. I guarantee no deception, eh?” He looked at the inspector.
Mackenzie nodded sourly.
“Now I say that Canley did not walk in them from this cottage to the railway line. Everybody says he did. Very well, you come along to the line, Mainforce, and I’ll prove to you that he didn’t.”
“Now we’re going to get somewhere,” said Kenway.
“And about time, too,” said Sergeant Bunny, who had a secret fear that the Chief Constable, who had also been his commanding officer, was before long going to notice an eighth of an inch of bristle on his chin.
The company trekked down the lane—“on safari,” said Merry, brightly. Twenty yards down it, Doctor Manson called a halt. They had reached the spot where Inspector Mackenzie had set his footprint against that of the Canley impress. The doctor pointed the fact out, and suggested a comparison.
The Chief Constable and Mackenzie regarded the exhibit, with mild interest on the part of the latter. He was a little anxious to reach the embankment. With a sniff of disappointment, the doctor started his convoy off again. He halted them for the second time at the bottom of the path leading up to the metals. The Colonel eyed the footsteps. “These them?” he asked, with a soldierly disregard for the elements of grammar.
“Those are they,” Manson agreed. “I do not think we shall need them again, for we have casts of the more important specimens. So perhaps the inspector will help prove my case by climbing up the path, placing his feet alongside the prints already there.”
“In his steps, or what would Mackenzie do!” Merry quoted disgracefully blasphemous.
“Off you go, Mackenzie,” ordered the Chief Constable.
“We’ll follow up the grass slope,” said Manson.
Safely at the top the Chief Constable, Merry, Kenway and the sergeant gazed at the evidence of the walking.
“Additional evidence,” said the doctor “is the fact that the path is a little less moist and squashy than it was last night, so soon after the cessation of the rain.” He placed Canley’s boots on the bank a foot apart and gazed at them approvingly.
Colonel Mainforce gazed at the boots and from them to Mackenzie and the prints just made, and back again.
“Damned if I can see anything in it, Manson,” he protested. Mackenzie was looking round bewildered as a faun in search of a mother which had suddenly vanished après midi.
“Oh, yes, you can,” retorted Manson. “You don’t know you’re looking at it.” He chuckled. Merry caught his Chief’s eye. He received an almost imperceptible nod and turned to the Chief Constable. “Mackenzie wants us to believe, Colonel,” he said, “that Canley walked in those boots from the cottage and up this path in the same way that he has just walked. Well—look at Mackenzie’s boots.”
The eyes of the company sank from the inspector’s face to his feet. Mackenzie coloured in embarrassment. He felt like a mannequin, and an untidy one at that; his boots were slimed to the thickness of the sole with clayey mud gathered from the lane and the path.
And then, not only Colonel Mainforce, but Mackenzie himself saw the scientist’s point.
The boots of Canley were devoid of mud of any kind. They were dull and smeary, but not muddy.
“By gad! Of course,” blurted the Chief Constable. “Must be losing me powers of observation.” He paused. “But I still don’t get it, Manson.” He produced a cigarette and flipped his lighter. “You agree that the boots fit the prints—Blast the damn thing”—he was still flipping the unflaming lighter. Doctor Manson struck a match. “Thanks,” said the Colonel, and drew a series of puffs.
“I still don’t get it,” he repeated. “You agree that the boots fit the prints. . . .”
“The patch on the sole is marked plainly enough,” Mackenzie said in a highly pitched voice.
“I have never denied it,” protested Manson. “In fact, I reaffirm that the tracks were made by these shoes. Now, what does that tell you?” He challenged with his voice as well as his words.
Inspector Mackenzie projected his mind into the realms of thought over the problem, but found the effort too much and gave it up. The argument he decided, was going haywire again.
“Do you mean,” asked the Chief Constable, who had also engaged himself on the riddle, “do you mean that Canley’s shoes had been wiped clean of mud?”
Doctor Manson clapped his hands in acclamation. “That, Colonel,” he said, “is just what I do mean. The smeary marks are certainly such as would be made by the wiping. You will note,” he added, “that it is the upper part of the shoes that have been wiped.”
“Then that,” said Mackenzie, in tones of deep depression, “answers the other thing of which you were so sure.”
“That would be?” queried the scientist.
“That there was another person on the line at the same time. There’d be no reason for Canley to wipe his own shoes, would there?”
“Why not?” asked Manson, interestedly.
“Well, I don’t suppose he was intending to camp out on the railway all night.” The inspector in a sudden flare of deduction became sardonic. “To get off the track, he had either to cross the rails and go down the bank on the other side, or retrace his steps along the path by which he had climbed up, and return home. Either way the shoes would get muddy again. So why wipe them?”
“Excellent logic, Mackenzie. Now. . . .”
A head appeared with startling suddenness above the top of the embankment. It popped up right under the nose of the Chief Constable gazing, at that moment, into space. He started, slipped and recovered himself with the utmost difficulty from sliding down the bank. He gazed at the apparition, which climbed up with its body and revealed itself as the police surgeon. And he bellowed.
“Damn it all, Gaunt! What the Hades do you mean by popping out of nowhere like that?” he demanded. “Nearly shot my heart through me damn teeth.”
Doctor Gaunt chortled. “Thought I was the ghost of Canley come back, I reckon,” he retorted. “The dead do come back, you know. Sorry, Colonel.” He apologized. “I’d finished the post mortem and went round to the cottage. The constable there said you had all come here, so I followed. Just climbed up the bank naturally. What do you want me to do? Whistle as a warning, or something?”
He blew through his teeth the opening bars of the ‘Dead March’ in Saul, but ceased abruptly on seeing a hue purpling the Chief Constable’s face.
“To business,” he said. “Very interesting corpse, Doctor Manson.” He beamed on the company. “Very elusive one too. Enjoyed the exploration.” He sounded as though he were proposing a vote of thanks to the late Mr. Canley. “You’ll want all the gory details.”
“Let’s hear them, Gaunt,” said Manson, pouring soothing oil on the trou
bled waters.
“First, the cause of death,” said the surgeon.
“Yes?” asked Manson.
“Don’t know.” Gaunt blew out the words. “No idea,” he added.
“What!” The Chief Constable stared. “And him with his head cut off?” he roared.
“Didn’t kill him, Colonel. He was dead before that. Blood wasn’t pumped out of him.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked Mackenzie. “He’d die at once, wouldn’t he, when his head was cut off.”
“Aye, he’d die all right. But heart wouldn’t necessarily stop dead—would make a couple of beats and gush blood through the neck artery. It didn’t—that’s all.” He imparted finality to the words.
“What else?” demanded the Chief Constable.
“Nothing, Colonel. Fellow quite healthy, no sign of disease. Had had some whisky just before he died.”
“Whisky wasn’t doped, I suppose?” asked Mackenzie.
“No. Thought of that, Mac. No poison either, and no sleeping draught. Nothing. That’s all the innards,” he concluded.
“Marks?” suggested Doctor Manson.
“Few abrasions. Four, I think—no, three,” he corrected, looking through his papers. “Made after death, as you suspected”—he nodded at Doctor Manson. “They didn’t bleed, sure certain signs,” he explained for the benefit of the remainder of the company.
Mackenzie scratched his head. He was still fighting hard for natural death. “Suppose, Doctor Gaunt, the man was on the line, hadn’t heard the train and suddenly found it almost on top of him. Would the shock give him heart failure?”
“Aye, it could hae done that tae ony man, if he were a nervous chap.”
“Ah!” said Mackenzie, crescendo.
“Only it didn’t in this case,” chortled Gaunt. “It was a good effort, Mac, but it didn’t work.”
“Why not?” challenged the inspector.
“Heart was natural,” Dr. Gaunt explained. “No rupture, no dilation. Would have been if that had happened.”
