'Now that the main difficulty was disposed of, I began to consider the further difficulty to which you, sir, have alluded with such admirable perspicuity. It was necessary that John Bellingham should make one more appearance in public before sinking into final oblivion.
'Accordingly, I devised the visit to Hurst's house, which was calculated to serve two purposes. It created a satisfactory date for the disappearance, eliminating me from any connection with it, and by throwing some suspicion on Hurst it would make him more amenable—less likely to dispute my claim when he learned the provisions of the will.
'The affair was quite simple. I knew that Hurst had changed his servants since I was last at his house, and I knew his habits. On that day I took the suit-case to Charing Cross and deposited it in the cloak-room, called at Hurst's office to make sure that he was there, and went from thence direct to Cannon Street and caught the train to Eltham. On arriving at the house, I took the precaution to remove my spectacles—the only distinctive feature of my exterior—and was duly shown into the study at my request. As soon as the housemaid had left the room I quietly let myself out by the French window, which I closed behind me but could not fasten, went out at the side gate and closed that also behind me, holding the bolt of the latch back with my pocket-knife so that I need not slam the gate to shut it.
'The other events of that day, including the dropping of the scarab, I need not describe, as they are known to you. But I may fitly make a few remarks on the unfortunate tactical error into which I fell in respect of the bones. That error arose, as you have doubtless perceived, from the lawyer's incurable habit of underestimating the scientific expert. I had no idea mere bones were capable of furnishing so much information to a man of science.
'The way in which the affair came about was this: the damaged mummy of Sebekhotep, perishing gradually by exposure to the air, was not only an eyesore to me: it was a definite danger. It was the only remaining link between me and the disappearance. I resolved to be rid of it and cast about for some means of destroying it. And then, in an evil moment, the idea of utilising it occurred to me.
'There was an undoubted danger that the Court might refuse to presume death after so short an interval; and if the permission should be postponed, the will might never be administered during my lifetime. Hence, if these bones of Sebekhotep could be made to simulate the remains of the deceased testator, a definite good would be achieved. But I knew that the entire skeleton could never be mistaken for his. The deceased had broken his knee-caps and damaged his ankle, injuries which I assumed would leave some permanent trace. But if a judicious selection of the bones were deposited in a suitable place, together with some object clearly identifiable as appertaining to the deceased, it seemed to me that the difficulty would be met. I need not trouble you with details. The course which I adopted is known to you with the attendant circumstances, even to the accidental detachment of the right hand—which broke off as I was packing the arm in my handbag. Erroneous as that course was, it would have been successful but for the unforeseen contingency of your being retained in the case.
'Thus, for nearly two years, I remained in complete security. From time to time I dropped in at the Museum to see if the deceased was keeping in good condition; and on those occasions I used to reflect with satisfaction on the gratifying circumstance—accidental though it was—that his wishes, as expressed (very imperfectly) in clause two, had been fully complied with, and that without prejudice to my interests.
'The awakening came on that evening when I saw you at the Temple gate talking with Doctor Berkeley. I suspected immediately that something was gone amiss and that it was too late to take any useful action. Since then, I have waited here in hourly expectation of this visit. And now the time has come. You have made the winning move and it remains only for me to pay my debts like an honest gambler.'
He paused and quietly lit his cigarette. Inspector Badger yawned and put away his notebook.
'Have you done, Mr. Jellicoe?' the inspector asked. 'I want to carry out my contract to the letter, you know, though it's getting devilish late.'
Mr. Jellicoe took his cigarette from his mouth and drank a glass of water.
'I forgot to ask,' he said, 'whether you unrolled the mummy—if I may apply the term to the imperfectly treated remains of my deceased client.'
'I did not open the mummy-case,' replied Thorndyke.
'You did not!' exclaimed Mr. Jellicoe. 'Then how did you verify your suspicions?'
'I took an X-ray photograph.'
'Ah! Indeed!' Mr. Jellicoe pondered for some moments. 'Astonishing!' he murmured; 'and most ingenious. The resources of science at the present day are truly wonderful.'
'Is there anything more that you want to say?' asked Badger; 'because if you don't, time's up.'
'Anything more?' Mr. Jellicoe repeated slowly; 'anything more? No—I—think—think—the time—is—up. Yes—the—the—time——'
He broke off and sat with a strange look fixed on Thorndyke.
His face had suddenly undergone a curious change. It looked shrunken and cadaverous and his lips had assumed a peculiar cherry-red colour.
'Is anything the matter, Mr. Jellicoe?' Badger asked uneasily. 'Are you not feeling well, sir?'
Mr. Jellicoe did not appear to have heard the question, for he returned no answer, but sat motionless, leaning back in his chair, with his hands spread out on the table and his strangely intent gaze bent on Thorndyke.
Suddenly his head dropped on his breast and his body seemed to collapse; and as with one accord we sprang to our feet, he slid forward off his chair and disappeared under the table.
'Good Lord! The man's fainted!' exclaimed Badger.
In a moment he was down on his hands and knees, trembling with excitement, groping under the table. He dragged the unconscious lawyer out into the light and knelt over him, staring into his face.
'What's the matter with him, Doctor?' he asked, looking up at Thorndyke. 'Is it apoplexy? Or is it a heart attack, think you?'
Thorndyke shook his head, though he stooped and put his fingers on the unconscious man's wrist.
'Prussic acid or potassium cyanide is what the appearances suggest,' he replied.
'But can't you do anything?' demanded the inspector.
Thorndyke dropped the arm, which fell limply to the floor.
'You can't do much for a dead man,' he said.
'Dead! Then he has slipped through our fingers after all!'
'He has anticipated the sentence. That is all.' Thorndyke spoke in an even, impassive tone which struck me as rather strange, considering the suddenness of the tragedy, as did also the complete absence of surprise in his manner. He seemed to treat the occurrence as a perfectly natural one.
Not so Inspector Badger; who rose to his feet and stood with his hands thrust into his pockets scowling sullenly down at the dead lawyer.
'I was an infernal fool to agree to his blasted conditions,' he growled savagely.
'Nonsense,' said Thorndyke. 'If you had broken in you would have found a dead man. As it was you found a live man and obtained an important statement. You acted quite properly.'
'How do you suppose he managed it?' asked Badger.
Thorndyke held out his hand.
'Let us look at his cigarette case,' said he.
Badger extracted the little silver case from the dead man's pocket and opened it. There were five cigarettes in it, two of which were plain, while the other three were gold-tipped. Thorndyke took out one of each kind and gently pinched their ends. The gold-tipped one he returned; the plain one he tore through, about a quarter of an inch from the end; when two little black tabloids dropped out on to the table. Badger eagerly picked one up and was about to smell it when Thorndyke grasped his wrist. 'Be careful,' said he; and when he had cautiously sniffed at the tabloid—held at a safe distance from his nose—he added: 'Yes, potassium cyanide. I thought so when his lips turned that queer colour. It was in that last cigarette; you can see that he has
bitten the end off.'
For some time we stood silently looking down at the still form stretched on the floor. Presently Badger looked up.
'As you pass the porter's lodge on your way out,' said he, 'you might just drop in and tell him to send a constable to me.'
'Very well,' said Thorndyke. 'And by the way, Badger, you had better tip that sherry back into the decanter and put it under lock and key, or else pour it out of the window.'
'Gad, yes!' exclaimed the inspector. 'I'm glad you mentioned it. We might have had an inquest on a constable as well as a lawyer. Good-night, gentlemen, if you are off.'
We went out and left him with his prisoner—passive enough, indeed, according to his ambiguously worded promise. As we passed through the gateway Thorndyke gave the inspector's message, curtly and without comment, to the gaping porter, and then we issued forth into Chancery Lane.
We were all silent and very grave, and I thought that Thorndyke seemed somewhat moved. Perhaps Mr. Jellicoe's last intent look—which I suspect he knew to be the look of a dying man—lingered in his memory as it did in mine. Halfway down Chancery Lane he spoke for the first time; and then it was only to ejaculate, 'Poor devil!'
Jervis took him up. 'He was a consummate villain, Thorndyke.'
'Hardly that,' was the reply. 'I should rather say that he was non-moral. He acted without malice and without scruple or remorse. His conduct exhibited a passionateless expediency which was dreadful because utterly unhuman. But he was a strong man—a courageous, self-contained man, and I had been better pleased if it could have been ordained that some other hand than mine should let the axe fall.'
Thorndyke's compunction may appear strange and inconsistent, but yet his feeling was also my own. Great as was the misery and suffering that this inscrutable man had brought into the lives of those I loved, I forgave him; and in his downfall forgot the callous relentlessness with which he had pursued his evil purpose. For it was he who had brought Ruth into my life; who had opened for me the Paradise of Love into which I had just entered. And so my thoughts turned away from the still shape that lay on the floor of the stately old room in Lincoln's Inn, away to the sunny vista of the future, where I should walk hand in hand with Ruth until my time, too, should come; until I, too, like the grim lawyer, should hear the solemn evening bell bidding me put out into the darkness of the silent sea.
THE END
The Mystery of 31 New Inn
First Published 1912
TO MY FRIEND
BERNARD E. BISHOP
Contents
Preface
I. The Mysterious Patient
II. Thorndyke Devises A Scheme
III. "A Chiel's Amang Ye Takin' Notes"
IV. The Official View
V. Jeffrey Blackmore's Will
VI. Jeffrey Blackmore, Deceased
VII. The Cuneiform Inscription
VIII. The Track Chart
IX. The House of Mystery
X. The Hunter Hunted
XI. The Blackmore Case Reviewed
XII. The Portrait
XIII. The Statement of Samuel Wilkins
XIV. Thorndyke Lays the Mine
XV. Thorndyke Explodes the Mine
XVI. An Exposition and a Tragedy
Preface
Commenting upon one of my earlier novels, in respect of which I had claimed to have been careful to adhere to common probabilities and to have made use only of really practicable methods of investigation, a critic remarked that this was of no consequence whatever, so long as the story was amusing.
Few people, I imagine, will agree with him. To most readers, and certainly to the kind of reader for whom an author is willing to take trouble, complete realism in respect of incidents and methods is an essential factor in maintaining the interest of a detective story. Hence it may be worth while to mention that Thorndyke's method of producing the track chart, described in Chapters II and III, has been actually used in practice. It is a modification of one devised by me many years ago when I was crossing Ashanti to the city of Bontuku, the whereabouts of which in the far interior was then only vaguely known. My instructions were to fix the positions of all towns, villages, rivers and mountains as accurately as possible; but finding ordinary methods of surveying impracticable in the dense forest which covers the whole region, I adopted this simple and apparently rude method, checking the distances whenever possible by astronomical observation.
The resulting route-map was surprisingly accurate, as shown by the agreement of the outward and homeward tracks, It was published by the Royal Geographical Society, and incorporated in the map of this region compiled by the Intelligence Branch of the War Office, and it formed the basis of the map which accompanied my volume of Travels in Ashanti and Jaman. So that Thorndyke's plan must be taken as quite a practicable one.
New Inn, the background of this story, and one of the last surviving inns of Chancery, has recently passed away after upwards of four centuries of newness. Even now, however, a few of the old, dismantled houses (including perhaps, the mysterious 31) may be seen from the Strand peeping over the iron roof of the skating rink which has displaced the picturesque hall, the pension-room and the garden. The postern gate, too, in Houghton Street still remains, though the arch is bricked up inside. Passing it lately, I made the rough sketch which appears on next page, and which shows all that is left of this pleasant old London backwater.
R. A. F.
GRAVESEND
I. The Mysterious Patient
As I look back through the years of my association with John Thorndyke, I am able to recall a wealth of adventures and strange experiences such as falls to the lot of very few men who pass their lives within hearing of Big Ben. Many of these experiences I have already placed on record; but it now occurs to me that I have hitherto left unrecorded one that is, perhaps, the most astonishing and incredible of the whole series; an adventure, too, that has for me the added interest that it inaugurated my permanent association with my learned and talented friend, and marked the close of a rather unhappy and unprosperous period of my life.
Memory, retracing the journey through the passing years to the starting-point of those strange events, lands me in a shabby little ground-floor room in a house near the Walworth end of Lower Kennington Lane. A couple of framed diplomas on the wall, a card of Snellen's test-types and a stethoscope lying on the writing-table, proclaim it a doctor's consulting-room; and my own position in the round-backed chair at the said table, proclaims me the practitioner in charge.
It was nearly nine o'clock. The noisy little clock on the mantelpiece announced the fact, and, by its frantic ticking, seemed as anxious as I to get the consultation hours over. I glanced wistfully at my mud-splashed boots and wondered if I might yet venture to assume the slippers that peeped coyly from under the shabby sofa. I even allowed my thoughts to wander to the pipe that reposed in my coat pocket. Another minute and I could turn down the surgery gas and shut the outer door. The fussy little clock gave a sort of preliminary cough or hiccup, as if it should say: "Ahem! ladies and gentlemen, I am about to strike." And at that moment, the bottle-boy opened the door and, thrusting in his head, uttered the one word: "Gentleman."
Extreme economy of words is apt to result in ambiguity. But I understood. In Kennington Lane, the race of mere men and women appeared to be extinct. They were all gentlemen—unless they were ladies or children—even as the Liberian army was said to consist entirely of generals. Sweeps, labourers, milkmen, costermongers—all were impartially invested by the democratic bottle-boy with the rank and title of armigeri. The present nobleman appeared to favour the aristocratic recreation of driving a cab or job-master's carriage, and, as he entered the room, he touched his hat, closed the door somewhat carefully, and then, without remark, handed me a note which bore the superscription "Dr. Stillbury."
"You understand," I said, as I prepared to open the envelope, "that I am not Dr. Stillbury. He is away at present and I am looking after his patients."
&
nbsp; "It doesn't signify," the man replied. "You'll do as well."
On this, I opened the envelope and read the note, which was quite brief, and, at first sight, in no way remarkable.
"DEAR SIR," it ran, "Would you kindly come and see a friend of mine who is staying with me? The bearer of this will give you further particulars and convey you to the house. Yours truly, H. WEISS."
There was no address on the paper and no date, and the writer was unknown to me.
"This note," I said, "refers to some further particulars. What are they?"
The messenger passed his hand over his hair with a gesture of embarrassment. "It's a ridicklus affair," he said, with a contemptuous laugh. "If I had been Mr. Weiss, I wouldn't have had nothing to do with it. The sick gentleman, Mr. Graves, is one of them people what can't abear doctors. He's been ailing now for a week or two, but nothing would induce him to see a doctor. Mr. Weiss did everything he could to persuade him, but it was no go. He wouldn't. However, it seems Mr. Weiss threatened to send for a medical man on his own account, because, you see, he was getting a bit nervous; and then Mr. Graves gave way. But only on one condition. He said the doctor was to come from a distance and was not to be told who he was or where he lived or anything about him; and he made Mr. Weiss promise to keep to that condition before he'd let him send. So Mr. Weiss promised, and, of course, he's got to keep his word."
"But," I said, with a smile, "you've just told me his name—if his name really is Graves."
"You can form your own opinion on that," said the coachman.
"And," I added, "as to not being told where he lives, I can see that for myself. I'm not blind, you know."
"We'll take the risk of what you see," the man replied. "The question is, will you take the job on?"
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