Blood on the Tracks

by Martin Edwards

  ‘I am a little in the dark about this affair,’ I said, when we had allowed the two officials to draw ahead out of earshot; ‘you came to a conclusion remarkably quickly. What was it that so immediately determined the opinion of murder as against suicide?’

  ‘It was a small matter but very conclusive,’ replied Thorndyke. ‘You noticed a small scalp-wound above the left temple? It was a glancing wound, and might easily have been made by the engine. But—the wound had bled; and it had bled for an appreciable time. There were two streams of blood from it, and in both the blood was firmly clotted and partially dried. But the man had been decapitated; and this wound if inflicted by the engine, must have been made after the decapitation, since it was on the side most distant from the engine as it approached. Now a decapitated head does not bleed. Therefore this wound was inflicted before the decapitation.

  ‘But not only had the wound bled: the blood had trickled down in two streams at right angles to one another. First, in the order of time as shown by the appearance of the stream, it had trickled down the side of the face and dropped on the collar. The second stream ran from the wound to the back of the head. Now, you know, Jervis, there are no exceptions to the law of gravity. If the blood ran down the face towards the chin, the face must have been upright at the time; and if the blood trickled from the front to the back of the head, the head must have been horizontal and face upwards. But the man, when he was seen by the engine-driver, was lying face downwards. The only possible inference is that when the wound was inflicted, the man was in the upright position—standing or sitting; and that subsequently, and while he was still alive, he lay on his back for a sufficiently long time for the blood to have trickled to the back of his head.’

  ‘I see. I was a duffer not to have reasoned this out for myself,’ I remarked contritely.

  ‘Quick observation and rapid inference come by practice,’ replied Thorndyke. ‘But, tell me, what did you notice about the face?’

  ‘I thought there was a strong suggestion of asphyxia.’

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ said Thorndyke. ‘It was the face of a suffocated man. You must have noticed, too, that the tongue was very distinctly swollen and that on the inside of the upper lip were deep indentations made by the teeth, as well as one or two slight wounds, obviously caused by heavy pressure on the mouth. And now observe how completely these facts and inferences agree with those from the scalp wound. If we knew that the deceased had received a blow on the head, had struggled with his assailant and been finally borne down and suffocated, we should look for precisely those signs which we have found.’

  ‘By the way, what was it that you found wedged between the teeth? I did not get a chance to look through the microscope.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Thorndyke, ‘there we not only get confirmation, but we carry our inferences a stage further. The object was a little tuft of some textile fabric. Under the microscope I found it to consist of several different fibres, differently dyed. The bulk of it consisted of wool fibres dyed crimson, but there were also cotton fibres dyed blue and a few which looked like jute, dyed yellow. It was obviously a parti-coloured fabric and might have been part of a woman’s dress, though the presence of the jute is much more suggestive of a curtain or rug of inferior quality.’

  ‘And its importance?’

  ‘Is that, if it is not part of an article of clothing, then it must have come from an article of furniture, and furniture suggests a habitation.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem very conclusive,’ I objected.

  ‘It is not; but it is valuable corroboration.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of the suggestion offered by the soles of the dead man’s boots. I examined them most minutely and could find no trace of sand, gravel or earth, in spite of the fact that he must have crossed fields and rough land to reach the place where he was found. What I did find was fine tobacco ash, a charred mark as if a cigar or cigarette had been trodden on, several crumbs of biscuit, and, on a projecting brad, some coloured fibres, apparently from a carpet. The manifest suggestion is that the man was killed in a house with a carpeted floor, and carried from thence to the railway.’

  I was silent for some moments. Well as I knew Thorndyke, I was completely taken by surprise; a sensation, indeed, that I experienced anew every time that I accompanied him on one of his investigations. His marvellous power of co-ordinating apparently insignificant facts, of arranging them into an ordered sequence and making them tell a coherent story, was a phenomenon that I never got used to; every exhibition of it astonished me afresh.

  ‘If your inferences are correct,’ I said, ‘the problem is practically solved. There must be abundant traces inside the house. The only question is, which house is it?’

  ‘Quite so,’ replied Thorndyke; ‘that is the question, and a very difficult question it is. A glance at that interior would doubtless clear up the whole mystery. But how are we to get that glance? We cannot enter houses speculatively to see if they present traces of a murder. At present, our clue breaks off abruptly. The other end of it is in some unknown house, and, if we cannot join up the two ends, our problem remains unsolved. For the question is, you remember, Who killed Oscar Brodski?’

  ‘Then what do you propose to do?’ I asked.

  ‘The next stage of the inquiry is to connect some particular house with this crime. To that end, I can only gather up all available facts and consider each in all its possible bearings. If I cannot establish any such connection, then the inquiry will have failed and we shall have to make a fresh start—say, at Amsterdam, if it turns out that Brodski really had diamonds on his person, as I have no doubt he had.’

  Here our conversation was interrupted by our arrival at the spot where the body had been found. The station-master had halted, and he and the inspector were now examining the near rail by the light of their lanterns.

  ‘There’s remarkably little blood about,’ said the former. ‘I’ve seen a good many accidents of this kind and there has always been a lot of blood, both on the engine and on the road. It’s very curious.’

  Thorndyke glanced at the rail with but slight attention: that question had ceased to interest him. But the light of his lantern flashed on to the ground at the side of the track—a loose, gravelly soil mixed with fragments of chalk—and from thence to the soles of the inspector’s boots, which were displayed as he knelt by the rail.

  ‘You observe, Jervis?’ he said in a low voice, and I nodded. The inspector’s boot-soles were covered with adherent particles of gravel and conspicuously marked by the chalk on which he had trodden.

  ‘You haven’t found the hat, I suppose?’ Thorndyke asked, stooping to pick up a short piece of string that lay on the ground at the side of the track.

  ‘No,’ replied the inspector, ‘but it can’t be far off. You seem to have found another clue, sir,’ he added, with a grin, glancing at the piece of string.

  ‘Who knows?’ said Thorndyke. ‘A short end of white twine with a green strand in it. It may tell us something later. At any rate we’ll keep it,’ and, taking from his pocket a small tin box containing, among other things, a number of seed envelopes, he slipped the string into one of the latter and scribbled a note in pencil on the outside. The inspector watched his proceedings with an indulgent smile, and then returned to his examination of the track, in which Thorndyke now joined.

  ‘I suppose the poor chap was near-sighted,’ the officer remarked, indicating the remains of the shattered spectacles; ‘that might account for his having strayed on to the line.’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Thorndyke. He had already noticed the fragments scattered over a sleeper and the adjacent ballast, and now once more produced his ‘collecting-box,’ from which he took another seed envelope. ‘Would you hand me a pair of forceps, Jervis,’ he said; ‘and perhaps you wouldn’t mind taking a pair yourself and helping me to gather up these fragments.’

  As I compl
ied, the inspector looked up curiously.

  ‘There isn’t any doubt that these spectacles belonged to the deceased, is there?’ he asked. ‘He certainly wore spectacles, for I saw the mark on his nose.’

  ‘Still, there is no harm in verifying the fact,’ said Thorndyke, and he added to me in a lower tone, ‘Pick up every particle you can find, Jervis. It may be most important.’

  ‘I don’t quite see how,’ I said, groping amongst the shingle by the light of the lantern in search of the tiny splinters of glass.

  ‘Don’t you?’ returned Thorndyke. ‘Well, look at these fragments; some of them are a fair size, but many of these on the sleeper are mere grains. And consider their number. Obviously, the condition of the glass does not agree with the circumstances in which we find it. These are thick concave spectacle-lenses broken into a great number of minute fragments. Now how were they broken? Not merely by falling, evidently: such a lens, when it is dropped, breaks into a small number of large pieces. Nor were they broken by the wheel passing over them, for they would then have been reduced to fine powder, and that powder would have been visible on the rail, which it is not. The spectacle-frames, you may remember, presented the same incongruity: they were battered and damaged more than they would have been by falling, but not nearly so much as they would have been if the wheel had passed over them.’

  ‘What do you suggest, then?’ I asked.

  ‘The appearances suggest that the spectacles had been trodden on. But, if the body was carried here, the probability is that the spectacles were carried here too, and that they were then already broken; for it is more likely that they were trodden on during the struggle than that the murderer trod on them after bringing them here. Hence the importance of picking up every fragment.’

  ‘But why?’ I inquired, rather foolishly I must admit.

  ‘Because, if, when we have picked up every fragment that we can find, there still remains missing a larger portion of the lenses than we could reasonably expect, that would tend to support our hypothesis and we might find the missing remainder elsewhere. If, on the other hand, we find as much of the lenses as we could expect to find, we must conclude that they were broken on this spot.’

  While we were conducting our search, the two officials were circling around with their lanterns in quest of the missing hat; and, when we had at length picked up the last fragment, and a careful search, even aided by a lens, failed to reveal any other, we could see their lanterns moving, like will-o’-the-wisps, some distance down the line.

  ‘We may as well see what we have got before our friends come back,’ said Thorndyke, glancing at the twinkling lights. ‘Lay the case down on the grass by the fence; it will serve for a table.’

  I did so, and Thorndyke, taking a letter from his pocket, opened it, spread it out flat on the case, securing it with a couple of heavy stones, although the night was quite calm. Then he tipped the contents of the seed envelope out on the paper, and, carefully spreading out the pieces of glass, looked at them for some moments in silence. And, as he looked, there stole over his face a very curious expression; with sudden eagerness he began picking out the larger fragments and laying them on two visiting-cards which he had taken from his card-case. Rapidly and with wonderful deftness he fitted the pieces together, and, as the reconstituted lenses began gradually to take shape on their cards I looked on with growing excitement, for something in my colleague’s manner told me that we were on the verge of a discovery.

  At length the two ovals of glass lay on their respective cards, complete save for one or two small gaps; and the little heap that remained consisted of fragments so minute as to render further reconstruction impossible. Then Thorndyke leaned back and laughed softly.

  ‘This is certainly an unlooked-for result,’ said he.

  ‘What is?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t you see, my dear fellow? There’s too much glass. We have almost completely built up the broken lenses, and the fragments that are left over are considerably more than are required to fill up the gaps.’

  I looked at the little heap of small fragments and saw at once that it was as he had said. There was a surplus of small pieces.

  ‘This is very extraordinary,’ I said. ‘What do you think can be the explanation?’

  ‘The fragments will probably tell us,’ he replied, ‘if we ask them intelligently.’

  He lifted the paper and the two cards carefully on to the ground, and, opening the case, took out the little microscope, to which he fitted the lowest-power objective and eye-piece—having a combined magnification of only ten diameters. Then he transferred the minute fragments of glass to a slide, and, having arranged the lantern as a microscope-lamp, commenced his examination.

  ‘Ha!’ he exclaimed presently. ‘The plot thickens. There is too much glass and yet too little; that is to say, there are only one or two fragments here that belong to the spectacles; not nearly enough to complete the building up of the lenses. The remainder consists of a soft, uneven, moulded glass, easily distinguished from the clear, hard optical glass. These foreign fragments are all curved, as if they had formed part of a cylinder, and are, I should say, portions of a wineglass or tumbler.’ He moved the slide once or twice, and then continued: ‘We are in luck, Jervis. Here is a fragment with two little diverging lines etched on it, evidently the points of an eight-rayed star—and here is another with three points—the ends of three rays. This enables us to reconstruct the vessel perfectly. It was a clear, thin glass—probably a tumbler—decorated with scattered stars; I dare say you know the pattern. Sometimes there is an ornamented band in addition, but generally the stars form the only decoration. Have a look at the specimen.’

  I had just applied my eye to the microscope when the station-master and the inspector came up. Our appearance, seated on the ground with the microscope between us, was too much for the police officer’s gravity, and he laughed long and joyously.

  ‘You must excuse me, gentlemen,’ he said apologetically, ‘but really, you know, to an old hand, like myself, it does look a little—well—you understand—I dare say a microscope is a very interesting and amusing thing, but it doesn’t get you much forrader in a case like this, does it?’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ replied Thorndyke. ‘By the way, where did you find the hat, after all?’

  ‘We haven’t found it,’ the inspector replied, a little sheepishly.

  ‘Then we must help you to continue the search,’ said Thorndyke. ‘If you will wait a few moments, we will come with you.’ He poured a few drops of xylol balsam on the cards to fix the reconstituted lenses to their supports and then, packing them and the microscope in the case, announced that he was ready to start.

  ‘Is there any village or hamlet near?’ he asked the station-

  master.

  ‘None nearer than Corfield. That is about half-a-mile from here.’

  ‘And where is the nearest road?’

  ‘There is a half-made road that runs past a house about three hundred yards from here. It belonged to a building estate that was never built. There is a footpath from it to the station.’

  ‘Are there any other houses near?’

  ‘No. That is the only house for half-a-mile round, and there is no other road near here.’

  ‘Then the probability is that Brodski approached the railway from that direction, as he was found on that side of the permanent way.’

  The inspector agreeing with this view, we all set off slowly towards the house, piloted by the station-master and searching the ground as we went. The waste land over which we passed was covered with patches of docks and nettles, through each of which the inspector kicked his way, searching with feet and lantern for the missing hat. A walk of three hundred yards brought us to a low wall enclosing a garden, beyond which we could see a small house; and here we halted while the inspector waded into a large bed of nettles beside the wall and kicked vigorously. Sud
denly there came a clinking sound mingled with objurgations, and the inspector hopped out holding one foot and soliloquising profanely.

  ‘I wonder what sort of a fool put a thing like that into a bed of nettles!’ he exclaimed, stroking the injured foot. Thorndyke picked the object up and held it in the light of the lantern, displaying a piece of three-quarter inch rolled iron bar about a foot long. ‘It doesn’t seem to have been there very long,’ he observed, examining it closely; ‘there is hardly any rust on it.’

  ‘It has been there long enough for me,’ growled the inspector, ‘and I’d like to bang it on the head of the blighter that put it there.’

  Callously indifferent to the inspector’s sufferings, Thorndyke continued calmly to examine the bar. At length, resting his lantern on the wall, he produced his pocket-lens, with which he resumed his investigation, a proceeding that so exasperated the inspector that that afflicted official limped off in dudgeon, followed by the station-master, and we heard him, presently, rapping at the front door of the house.

  ‘Give me a slide, Jervis, with a drop of Farrant on it,’ said Thorndyke. ‘There are some fibres sticking to this bar.’

  I prepared the slide, and, having handed it to him together with a cover-glass, a pair of forceps and a needle, set up the microscope on the wall.

  ‘I’m sorry for the inspector,’ Thorndyke remarked, with his eye applied to the little instrument, ‘but that was a lucky kick for us. Just take a look at the specimen.’

  I did so, and, having moved the slide about until I had seen the whole of the object, I gave my opinion. ‘Red wool fibres, blue cotton fibres and some yellow, vegetable fibres that look like jute.’