The Heel of Achilles: A Golden Age Mystery

by E.

  “Ghoulish.” The Chief Constable shuddered a little.

  “Self-preservation, Colonel,” corrected Manson. “The man knew more than a little about the methods of police investigation. But his trouble was that he did not know enough; one set of prints, as I have said, was even worse from his point of view, in the circumstances, than no prints at all.

  “Having ‘cooked’ the bottle and the glass, the man next went over the entire surface of the table with his cloth, polishing it carefully, and wiping away any fingermarks which he or Canley had made, or which anybody else might have made—including Mrs. Skelton. He left a little of the cloth behind him—a thread caught on a splinter of the rim of the table. I have not carried out an examination of this yet, so cannot say whether it can help us in any way.

  “The table done, he next went thoroughly over the chairs and, I expect, over practically every piece of furniture in the room, in case he had by chance touched either of them during his stay. He had to be extraordinarily careful you see. The fact is, he was too careful. The furniture finished, he arranged the bottle, now also complete with one set of Canley’s fingerprints—how did he suppose Canley had drawn the cork from the bottle?—and the glass on the table, placed the ashtray close to them, as a proof that Canley had been smoking the cigar found with him on the line, and—I am not sure about this—arranged the chair by the table as though Canley had pushed it aside when he rose from it. The ashtray, by the way was his third mistake, for he had left the ash of the two cigars in it, and also more ash than could have come off the cigar that Canley had half-smoked, or was supposed to have half-smoked.

  “We are now very nearly at the end of the recital.” The doctor paused to light another cigarette, and to marshal his last flight of deduction.

  “Just a minute, Doctor,” chipped in the Chief Constable. “Where was Canley while his assailant was cooking up the lounge?”

  Merry, who had hitherto taken no part in the story, chuckled grimly. “The late Mr. Canley was cooking the accident,” he said. “And when I say cooking, I mean cooking,” he added.

  “What Merry means by that analogical jest, Colonel, is this: Canley was all this time lying in front of a roaring fire, with the idea of keeping the body warm and the blood from congealing so that when it was laid over the rails in front of the advancing train blood would flow.”

  The Chief Constable threw up his arms in surrender. “So that is the reason for the change in the time of death,” he said. “How did you guess?”

  “Guess? Guess?” Doctor Manson raised his voice more in sorrow than in anger. “I never guess, Mainforce. Merry and I deduced it from a line of logical reasoning which we nearly missed. It was, in fact, Canley’s overcoat that put us on the scent.”

  “If I remember rightly, you mentioned the overcoat in this connection before.”

  “We did—a little out of its place in the story. Well, we can pursue it now. The point arose when Merry and I came to test out the fluff found on the overcoat. We had carefully removed a few pieces of it, and had stored them away for analysis. At the same time, in the cottage, as you probably saw, I picked a few strands out of the patterned rug in front of the fireplace. Under the microscope all the fluff was shown to be identical. The fluff therefore, had obviously come from the rug. But why? And how?

  “Merry quite rightly pointed out that Canley would not be wearing his overcoat when he was killed, since no blow could have been fatal through the thickness of it and the jacket and shirt underneath. Yet he was wearing the overcoat on the railway, and it was dotted here and there with these foreign bodies which had been picked up by the rough surface or nap of the coat. And there were no fluffy pieces on Canley’s jacket which he was wearing when he fell under the blow.

  “The peculiarity worried me, and I sat down to think out a possible explanation. It was then that I realized what I have already told you—that since there were only the footsteps of Canley showing, the cottage must have been prepared before the murderer walked down the lane carrying Canley to the railway. That gave me the startling knowledge that at least an hour must have elapsed from the time of death to the journey—and yet blood flowed freely from the severed neck.

  “Once I had reached that stage in thinking, the rest was easy. If Canley did not die at eleven o’clock or eleven-thirty, then some method had been employed by the murderer to keep the blood from congealing. That meant that the body had to be kept warm. There are other ways, such as beating up the blood, but that was obviously not used in this case.

  “There had been a big fire in the cottage grate. What more natural than this man, who knew a little, but not enough about fingerprints, a little but not enough about cigar ash, should know a little but not enough, also, about the action of blood? He knew that it had to be kept warm in order that it might run when the train passed over the neck, and he did not know that if the man had been alive when the head was taken off, the blood would spurt out.

  “How fluff came to be transferred from the rug to the overcoat is now plain. It was, you will remember, only on the back of the overcoat. I do not know when the murderer dressed Canley in the coat—whether it was before he laid him in front of the big fire, or not. Probably he would think that the body would be warmer if it was not in the coat—he was wrong if he did think so. In that case he fitted the overcoat over the dead man. He would, of course, have to pull it underneath the body, and then pull the body along to raise it in order that he could get it across his own shoulders for carrying. That was when the fluff was picked up by the nap of the overcoat.

  “We are now nearing the end of the journey—for Canley as well as for us here. The murderer had removed Canley’s shoes and put them on his own feet. With Canley across his shoulders he left the house—and there he made another mistake in leaving Canley’s hat behind. He walked down the lane and up the path to the railway, leaving the tracks plain for all to see—and for us to realize from the different tread of the heels that it was another person in the shoes.

  “There he waited until the train was due. He probably listened for it, placed the body in the permanent way with the head over the rail, threw the cigar butt some distance down the line to simulate it as being jerked from the mouth by the shock of the train’s blow, and cleared off.

  “And that, Mainforce, is the story of the happenings in your Thames Pagnall cottage on the night of the tragedy,” concluded the scientist.

  CHAPTER XXV

  Colonel Mainforce sat silent for a space after the doctor had concluded his narrative. Then, having digested it in its entirety, he turned to his inspector. He beamed.

  “What do you think about that, Mackenzie?” he asked. “Eh?” His air would have given a newcomer the impression that he himself had accomplished a triumph.

  The local inspector’s eyes were still fixed on Doctor Manson, who was now engaged in the intricate task of fitting an oversized cigarette into an under-sized cigarette holder, leaving, nevertheless, sufficient draught to allow smoke to be pulled through it. He was too engrossed in the pursuit to be aware of the gaze of the officer, staring as incredulously as would an unbeliever at a séance, seeing suddenly a piece of ectoplasm extrude from the medium and assume the face and form of his long-dead aunt who in life had been his bête noir.

  “Deaf, Mackenzie?” roared the Chief Constable.

  The inspector jerked into realization.

  “I asked you what you thought of that?”

  “Kenway said that the doctor would probably learn more in an hour in his laboratory in London than we would learn in a day down here,” Mackenzie said, half to himself. “Looks like he was right, too,” he added, in a sudden burst of relief.

  “Nothing to do with me, Mackenzie,” responded Manson, laughingly. “I am not the wizard, I am merely the disciple of the army of men who in the past have probed the depth and breadth of science, and have applied its principles to criminology. Without Henry and Faulds and Cherrill we would not have known what we know about fingerprin
ts. Without Gross and Taylor we would have been sadly lacking in knowledge of science as applied to the detection of crime, and without Sutherland our expert treatment of bloodstains would be impossible. And, above all, except for Abbe we would never have had the microscope, possibly the greatest detective of any. The point is where do we go from here?”

  “You have no idea of the man’s identity, Doctor?” asked the Chief Constable.

  A soporific atmosphere descended on the scientist and Merry. The keenness evaporated. “Not the slightest, Mainforce. We do not know whether he is tall or short, big or slight, though I incline to the view that he is strong, since he carried Canley fairly easily—at any rate he did not falter sufficiently for his feet in Canley’s shoes to show up. What he did—and it is the only successful thing he did do, so far as I can see at the moment—is not to leave a single personal clue behind him. It is rather remarkable that he did not leave something—a hair from his head on Canley’s coat, for instance.”

  “I think there is an even more remarkable thing,” said Merry, slowly and emphatically.

  The company looked inquiringly.

  “That he has not left behind any clue as to the reason he killed Canley,” the deputy scientist added. “It is a first clue in all murders—the motive. There isn’t a genesis of a motive here, unless we look upon the favours and the possession of Mrs. Andover as a motive. And that gets us back to Appleton, who is the only man we know without an alibi that can be tested.”

  Doctor Manson looked across at Mackenzie. The inspector cleared his throat. “I’ve known Ted Appleton a good few years, Doctor,” he said. “And I don’t think he’s the kind to go murdering people. I should think that if he felt badly against Canley for taking Mrs. Andover he’d have felt it more badly at the time, not twelve months afterwards. Ted has been enjoying himself with quite a number of the village—er—er—”

  “Tarts is perhaps the word you want, Mackenzie,” suggested the Chief Constable; and the inspector nodded in agreement.

  “And I can’t find anyone who has quarrelled with Canley, or uttered threats against him,” the inspector went on.

  “Well, Mackenzie, perhaps the information we now have will help a little,” suggested Doctor Manson. “We have a good idea of the time of the murder, and of the disposal of the body. We know now that the man did not return to the cottage. He must, therefore, have been about the village between eleven-thirty and eleven-forty-five.[VIII] There was no train, so he could not leave that way. He must either have walked, gone on a bicycle, or by car. Now, if you can find someone who saw a car or a cycle, or a stranger wandering around the place at that time, it might help. Are there, by the way, any buses running at that hour?”

  Inspector Mackenzie did not reply. He appeared to be lost in thought. A glimmer of anticipation came into his eyes, which stole a glance at the scientist. Doctor Manson, catching it, came to a sudden alertness. It looked to him mischievous.

  “What have you behind that forehead of your’s, Mackenzie?” he asked.

  A little rumble of satisfaction came from the inspector’s interior. He had come to the conclusion that what had suddenly occurred to him was one up against the doctor. He tried it out.

  “I reckon, sir, as how the man neither went by car, bicycle or bus,” he said.

  “Why not?” asked the doctor, suspiciously.

  “I’ll ask you a question instead, sir.” He propounded it. “Can you tell me how the man got down to a car or a bicycle or the road? Taking what you say to be true as to how he got Canley on the line, I reckon that he put Canley’s shoes on the dead man’s feet again, so that he would then have to wear his own shoes. Now, sir, there isn’t a footstep in the lane except those made by Canley’s shoes. That doesn’t matter since you say he did not go back to the cottage.”

  “But then,” he continued, “there weren’t any footsteps down the other side of the embankment, and if he wasn’t going to leave any cycle tyre marks, he would have had to get down to his cycle which he left there. And he’d have to get down there if he didn’t walk through the lane again. So how did he get on the road?”

  “God bless my soul,” said the Chief Constable; and stared at his inspector as though he were some unbelievable curiosity of the world of nature making its first appearance in a zoo. “God—bless—my—soul,” he said again.

  Doctor Manson also stared. He stared so long that Inspector Mackenzie shifted uncomfortably under the gaze, and wished that he had kept his mouth shut about the whole thing. He gained the impression that he had in some way thrown a spanner in the workings of the scientist’s mind and had, accordingly, veritably committed sabotage.

  When the scientist replied, it was with some self-criticism. “It argues a poverty of imagination on my part that I should have missed so vital a relation of observance,” he said. “Mackenzie is, of course, right. The man would not, in any case, go into the village again if he could help it. If suspicion was aroused, and he had been seen, he would be in a dangerous position.”

  “Suppose he had walked down the embankment as he walked to Canley’s cottage, in his stockinged feet, Doctor, would not that clear the way?” The suggestion came from Merry.

  “It would not clear the way to the peril of leaving a vehicle of any kind in the streets of the village to be noticed, or of boarding a public vehicle in the vicinity of the village, Merry.” The doctor gazed fretfully round the company, and then into space, seeking some thread of clue to get him out of this unexpected maze. “We’ll have to eliminate the circumstance, Merry,” he announced; and proceeded to the intense interest of the inspector to put the operation into practice.

  “Firstly, would he come by car?” The pair, after a weighing of pros and cons agreed on a negative answer. A car would be noticed. There was a possibility that it might be stopped by the police, or have a number taken by some fiend of a number-collecting boy. And it would have to be left for a couple of hours or more. The same thing applied to a bicycle—only more so; the cycle left for that time might get stolen, and the murderer would then be in a parlous plight for a getaway.

  “What about a bus?” asked Merry.

  The scientist looked inquiringly at Inspector Mackenzie “There are buses coming into the place from Kingston, Surbiton, London, and a couple of other places, sir,” was the reply. “But there are not any out of the place after eleven o’clock.”

  “Then that disposes of that,” said the doctor. “He would not place himself in a dead hole like that.”

  “And he didn’t walk,” said the Chief Constable. “He must have had a helicopter.”

  “No, sir,” denied the inspector, promptly. “We should have heard an aeroplane in the district.”

  “It was meant as a jest, Mackenzie,” the Chief Constable explained, rather unnecessarily.

  The inspector subsided quickly. He was feeling no little satisfaction at the disturbance which his suggestion had brought about. During the past twenty-four hours, he had come to a realization that he was not a particularly good detective; it was plain to him that he had missed a great many things in the investigation that he should not have missed. He was beginning to develop an inferiority complex. But now, he was his own blue-eyed baby again, and had put Doctor Manson and his assistant, as well as his own Chief Constable, in a dilemma which might force them to throw back suspicion on one of the people who had appeared on the list of inquiries of himself and Inspector Kenway.

  Because he, Mackenzie, knew from his own thorough inquiries and those of his staff that not one single stranger had been seen in the village on the night of Canley’s death—at least after the time that Canley had died. He said so now, with considerable enjoyment at the effect on the man from London.

  “You sure of that, Mackenzie?” demanded the Chief Constable menacingly.

  “Absolutely positive, sir. More positive than I have ever been of anything in criminal investigation.”

  “Huh!” said the Chief Constable, and looked in perplexity at Doctor
Manson. Inspector Mackenzie was also looking at the doctor. He was saying mentally, ‘now, get out of that one.’

  The reaction completely staggered him. Doctor Manson looked at his fellow officers smilingly. “Well,” he said, “the explanation should now be comparatively simple, requiring only a little concentration. We are stumbling round the same kind of problem as that presented in a famous case in which a crime was committed inside a room which was locked on the inside. When the door was forced a man was found dead there. He had apparently committed suicide by shooting, only there was no pistol in the room. A quarrel had been heard, and when the shot was fired there were people in the passage outside. They raised the alarm and stayed there until the door was broken in; and the room was found empty except for the corpse. The windows were fastened from the inside with screws. There was no way in which the murderer could possibly have made an exit.”

  Inspector Mackenzie pondered the problem. “If he wasn’t there, Doctor, he must have made an exit,” he pronounced.

  “The officers on the case were in exactly the same position as are we now, Mackenzie, when we say that the man could not have reached the roadway because there is no trace of him showing the footsteps he would have to show. In the case of the man in the room, the solution was simple: the murderer was behind the forced door, and when the company of people rushed in as the door was forced, he joined them as one of themselves. Simple, wasn’t it? There is an equally simple solution here. We have exhausted every avenue of escape except the hypothetical door. Our man, it seems, did not go out of the village by car, cycle, bus, or on his feet, because nobody was seen in the village—no stranger that is—at the time he would be making his getaway. And that means, of course, that he did not come to the village in the first place on either of these means of transport—excepting perhaps the buses—or he would have had to take them away with him. He didn’t fly, because nobody, I take it, from Mackenzie’s remark—nobody heard an aeroplane take off. Then where, Mackenzie,” asked Doctor Manson, “where is the door?” He answered the question himself after a few moments’ consideration.