Murder in the Basement

by Anthony Berkeley

  “But he says he can’t identify her. That’s so, Moresby?”

  “Yes, sir. Inspector Fox and Sergeant Afford have worked through not only the whole of last year’s lists of missing women and girls, but the last six months of the year before that.”

  “You don’t think they can have missed her?”

  “I don’t think so, sir. They’ve been very careful. Every single woman who’s been found to be missing still has had her description compared with the dead girl’s, and we’ve interviewed any number of the relations; and in each case there was some vital point of difference. I checked all their results myself. I’m satisfied that this girl was never reported as missing at all.”

  “And you got no help from the appeals through the Press?”

  Moresby sighed as he thought of all the strenuous work to which those appeals had led, but all he said was: “None at all, sir.”

  There was a despairing little silence.

  Superintendent Green broke it by saying, quite simply:

  “That woman must be identified, Moresby.”

  Moresby said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  But for all that the superintendent and the assistant commissioner said it. They said it at considerable length; but when Moresby left them half an hour later it had all amounted to nothing more than a repetition of Green’s ultimatum: the woman must be identified.

  It was an unhappy chief inspector who was allowed at last to retire to the refuge of his own room. That his position depended on a successful solution of the crime he knew was not the case; but that his prestige with his superiors did, had been made only too plain. There had been too many unsolved murders during the last couple of years, had been the burden of the assistant commissioner’s dirge; the papers had taken to printing a list of them whenever a new crime was announced, not with a comment but with comments very obviously omitted; this case had attracted even more of the public attention than usual; it must be solved.

  That his superiors had been demanding the almost impossible from him, they had not hidden; but nevertheless they had demanded it.

  His head on his knuckles, Moresby flogged his brains to find a way of identifying a totally unidentifiable corpse.

  It was nearly an hour before an idea came to him. It was not a very promising idea, but at any rate it was an idea, and as such would show zeal if nothing else. He seized his telephone and put through a call to the surgeon who had conducted the post-mortem.

  “Doctor,” he said, “you remember that woman we found in the cellar in Lewisham?”

  “Do I not!” replied the other, with feeling.

  “You didn’t by any chance X-ray the body, did you?”

  “I did not. Why should I? You don’t imagine,” said the surgeon humorously, “that she’d been swallowing nails you could trace, or anything like that, do you? Because if so I can tell you at once that she hadn’t.”

  “I only wanted to make sure you hadn’t X-rayed her, sir,” replied Moresby mildly.

  He followed the call with one to the assistant commissioner, and put his request.

  “An exhumation order?” repeated that gentleman, more than a little dubiously. “But what good do you think an X-ray photograph will do, chief inspector?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Moresby said with candour. “But you never know, do you? There might be a knitting-needle in her arm, or a bit of something in her foot for which she’d had treatment. It’s clutching at a straw, I admit, but it can’t do any harm and there doesn’t seem to me much else than straws left to clutch at.”

  “Well, as you say, it can’t do any harm, and I agree with you that we’re rather reduced to straws. Anyhow, I’ll put in for an order, but don’t be surprised if the Home Secretary won’t grant one, as we’ve no definite reason for wanting the X-ray.”

  The Home Secretary however did grant one; he was just as worried over the lists of unsolved murders as the assistant commissioner, and in any case, the woman not having been identified, there was no relation to make a fuss about exhumation. Besides, had Moresby but known it, he too realised that it showed zeal, and zeal was at any rate something to offer the public.

  The corpse was disinterred, X-rayed and photographed from all angles, and retained in the mortuary pending Moresby’s pleasure before being returned to its unnamed grave.

  Moresby talked over the results with the doctor, poring over the eerie photographs in an effort to pick out something which might conceivably serve his purpose.

  “My dear chief inspector, there’s nothing,” he was assured. “I told you it would be a waste of time, and a waste of time of course it was. All we’ve learnt is that once she broke her leg, and what use you can make of that I’d be glad to hear.”

  Moresby jabbed a large forefinger at one of the photographs. “You mean this dark thing here?”

  “I do. That dark thing is what is known as a plate; that is, a strip of metal used to hold the splintered ends of bone together if they don’t unite by natural means. You screw it on to the bone. Remember I told you there were signs of a scar five or six inches long on the right thigh? That’s where the incision was made.”

  “Very interesting, sir. Wonderful what you doctors can do nowadays. Quite a common thing, I suppose?”

  “Oh, quite; you can hardly get a clue out of that. As a matter of fact it isn’t quite so common with the femur as with some of the other bones, but far too ordinary for you to be able to isolate any individual case. It might have been done at any time, you see.”

  “There wouldn’t be anything to show how long ago? Or how old she was, even?”

  “How old? No, not possibly; except that she was an adult. As to when it was done, I could probably tell, if I opened it up, whether it had been fractured within twelve months or so of death, from the extent and consistency of the callus; but once that’s fully formed, it’s out of the question even to make a guess.”

  “I see. So if she was forty years old, and it wasn’t done within twelve months of death, it might have been done any time since she was eighteen?”

  “It might. And though I wouldn’t like to make a guess at how many fractured femurs are set with plates in the British Isles in the course of a year, I can tell you at once that there are a good many more than you could trace out with all the inspectors and sergeants in this place to help you, if you’re to cover a period of only ten years.”

  “And we don’t even know that it was done in the British Isles,” mourned the chief inspector, and then stiffened as if a sudden idea had occurred to him.

  The doctor’s next words caused him to relax again.

  “Oh, the plate would probably tell you that,” he said carelessly. “They’re usually stamped with the manufacturing firm’s mark, or initials.”

  “They are, are they, sir?” Moresby said briskly. “Then that settles it. I’d like that plate, if you please, doctor.”

  “Eh? But what on earth do you imagine you could do with it? The hospitals keep no record of what particular maker’s plate was used in a case.”

  “But they do keep a record of whether a plate was used at all?”

  “Oh, yes; they record that. But as I said just now, the amount of investigation would be impossible; and even if you could do it, the chances are thousands to one against your getting any result. Ten to fifteen years! Why, a large proportion of the patients would be dead and buried in that time; and I hardly suppose you’re going to apply for exhumation orders for the lot of them.”

  “Nevertheless, I think I’ll have that plate, sir,” replied Moresby doggedly. “You never know.”

  “I do,” the doctor retorted, with some annoyance. He had wanted never to see that body again.

  Secretly, Moresby knew that the doctor must be right. On the other hand the plate was a definite, visible, tangible clue—the only one, apart from the useless gloves, that th
e case had offered, and as such he felt that he must have it. Though what he expected to do with it when he had got it he would have had some difficulty in saying just then.

  What he did do with it, twenty-four hours later, was to take it to the firm who had made it and, knowing that he was going to be laughed at but prepared to brave even that in the cause of duty, ask them what idea they could give him of its adventures since it was on their premises last.

  He was laughed at.

  Then the manager suddenly stopped laughing and began to examine the plate more closely.

  “Well,” he said at last, “you’re in luck, chief inspector. In nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand it would be simply impossible to give you an answer, beyond a list of the hospitals that we’ve supplied with that type of plate for the last twenty years. But in this case, just as it happens . . .”

  “Yes?” Moresby prompted eagerly.

  “Well, the odds aren’t quite so much against you.”

  The manager, a dry little man with a Scotch accent, settled his spectacles on his nose with much deliberation, and scrutinised the plate again in an affectionate way.

  “How does that come about?” Moresby prompted again.

  “Why, in this way. About five or six years ago, so far as I remember—or maybe only four: anyhow I can find that out from the books. A few years ago we made a batch of plates out of a new alloy that we hadn’t used before. I can’t rightly remember what the components were, and no doubt the question won’t interest you; but the thing is that we didn’t make very many of them. It was in the nature of an experiment, you see. And it wasn’t very successful. We got reports that the plates weren’t sufficiently malleable. So we didn’t use that alloy any more.”

  “And this is one of them?”

  “On each of them,” pursued the manager, who was a man not to be hurried, “we put a special sign after our initials, seeing that it was by way of an experiment, you understand. I recognise that mark here.”

  “And how many did you make of them?”

  “One hundred. One hundred exactly, no more and no less. I remember perfectly.”

  “This is going to help me a lot,” said Moresby with enthusiasm. “I was wondering whether I was ever going to have the bit of luck with this case that we nearly always do get in the ones we’re successful with. One per cent luck and ninety-nine per cent hard work, Mr. Ferguson, that’s what detecting is; and neither of them a bit of use without the other. Now I take it that as this was an experiment of yours, the hospitals will for once have kept a record of the cases in which these plates were used?”

  Mr. Ferguson shook his head and looked less elated. “No, they won’t have done that. And for this reason: we didn’t tell them it was an experiment. It doesn’t concern them what alloy is used so long as the plate is satisfactory; and with our reputation, any plate we supply is bound to be that. These just weren’t perfection. So I don’t see that this is going to help you much after all.”

  “Oh, yes, it is, sir,” replied Moresby benignly. “You just look up in your books the date when you sent the first of these out, and the date of the last, and I think I can tell you that it’s going to help me very considerably.”

  CHAPTER IV

  The dates which Moresby triumphantly carried away with him were the 27th April, 1927, and the 14th July of the same year. Before he left he asked the little manager how long a hospital might be expected to keep a plate in stock, and was told that it was impossible to say; once a plate was put into the permanent stock it might stay there indefinitely.

  Nevertheless Moresby was triumphant. His possible twenty years had been reduced to far more manageable dimensions. The date of the discovery of the body was the 22nd of February, 1931. The doctor had now guaranteed that the body had been in the ground for not less than four months. When removing the plate he had examined the callus and was able to affirm that the fracture was not less than a year old. That took one back sixteen months, say to the end of August, 1929. Moresby had not the least idea how many fractured femurs had been set with plates in Great Britain between the 27th April, 1927, and the 31st August, 1929, but he was going to make it his business to find out.

  As soon as he got back to Scotland Yard he drafted out an urgent letter of which a copy was sent to every hospital and nursing-home in the British Isles. There was still the possibility that the operation had not been performed in the British Isles at all and that the unknown woman was a foreigner, since the little manager had stated that his firm did quite a considerable export business; but Moresby considered Great Britain enough for a beginning. Also that sixth sense of the experienced detective told him that he was firmly on the trail of the girl’s identity at last.

  As the replies to his letter began to come in, there followed for Moresby and the officers working under him a period of that unremitting, dogged routine labour of which the public hears nothing and to which no reference is ever made at the trial, but which to the Scotland Yard man constitutes nine-tenths of his normal work. It was found that during the period in question, six hundred and forty-one women had had fractured right femurs set with plates. Of these it was possible to eliminate, under age or other headings, two hundred and nineteen. Each single one of the remaining four hundred and twenty-two had to be traced from hospital to home, to lodging, or to present abode of whatever description, from place to place, often with the greatest difficulty and necessitating a dozen interviews to establish a single move, until finally run to earth and proved to be alive, or run to earth and proved to be legally and innocently dead.

  Whenever possible, and of course there was a fairly large proportion of simple cases, the work was entrusted to the local detective forces of the districts and counties concerned; but even so the amount of it which fell directly on Moresby’s shoulders was prodigious. For nearly three months he was constantly on the move, travelling up and down the country in search personally of the most elusive cases (and it was astonishing how many of them had removed themselves so far and so frequently in less than four years), now and then taking a swoop right across England to the rescue of the less experienced Inspector Fox and Sergeant Afford, who were working with him, when either found himself baffled, keeping in continual touch with Scotland Yard, and altogether behaving with an energy and agility not in the least to be looked for in a middle-aged man of his appearance and bulk.

  Gradually references to the case in the Press grew shorter and fewer, and finally appeared no more; gradually it slipped out of the untenacious memory of the public. And while those who did still remember it added it automatically to London’s formidable list of unsolved mysteries, the beaver-like work went on and on until one afternoon in late June, Chief Inspector Moresby, sitting in his room in Scotland Yard, was able to cross off his list four hundred and twenty-one names, so that only one was left.

  “ . . . last heard of in Allingford,” wrote the chief inspector in his report, “where she——” He stopped writing and began to chew the end of his pen. What particular connection with Allingford was hiding somewhere in his mind?

  Allingford, of course, is on the borders of the metropolitan police district, a good twelve miles from Charing Cross. It is not a suburb of London, for there is open country between the two. Moresby was not sure that he had ever been in the place at all before this enquiry took him there. Why then did it now occur to him all of a sudden that there was some particular significance in the girl having been traced to Allingford—yes, and to that particular school in Allingford, too?

  He remembered. Mr. Sheringham had mentioned casually last summer that he had been deputising, more for a joke than anything for he had no need to do anything of the sort, for a master who had gone sick, at his old preparatory school of Roland House, in Allingford. Moresby had only listened perfunctorily, as he did to most of Mr. Sheringham’s chatter (that is, when Mr. Sheringham was not chattering very much to the point about
a case in which Moresby was interested), but now the remark took on a very great importance. Last summer . . . and at Roland House too. . . .

  Moresby reached for his telephone and gave Mr. Sheringham’s number.

  Mr. Sheringham was out.

  Moresby, who was a man of very great patience, took up his pen again and went on with his report.

  After he had had his dinner that evening he tried again, this time with better luck. Mr. Sheringham was in, and would be delighted to receive Moresby.

  “I got a new cask in three days ago,” he said with enthusiasm. “It’s the real stuff—Berkshire XXXXX, and better beer there never was. It should have settled by now. We’ll broach it together.”

  “I’ll be along in fifteen minutes, Mr. Sheringham,” said Moresby, with scarcely less enthusiasm.

  A bus took him to the Albany, and with a nod to the porter he made his way to Roger Sheringham’s rooms.

  Roger was looking through a batch of American press-cuttings on his last book when Moresby arrived, and appeared to be considerably entertained by them. For a few minutes the author in him ousted the detective, while he read out to the chief inspector some of the choicer extracts,

  “Listen, Moresby. The Outlook and Independent: ‘We were puzzled by the use in conversation of the phrase “I’ll buy it” until it occurred to us that it was probably an English author’s rendering of the American slang “I’ll bite.” ’ Rather pleasant, that. It doesn’t occur to the man that it might be an English author’s rendering of English slang you see; it just simply doesn’t occur to him.

  “The Chicago News is terribly severe with me. It bumps me off in the most approved fashion. ‘An ingenious plot, woefully overstuffed with ponderous attempts at humour by a thoroughly unhumorous author.’ No taking the Chicago News for a joy-ride, you see. Personally, I prefer the New York Herald-Tribune which says, only ten days after I’ve been bumped off in Chicago: ‘His mischievous manner is a godsend for the less owlish addicts.’ Can it be, Moresby, do you think,” asked Roger with awe, “that the Chicago News is an owlish addict?”