The Rasp

by Philip MacDonald

  ‘His object achieved, he carried out the plan he has been hatching for weeks. He sets the scene, overturning chairs, spilling papers, dragging the body to the hearth—and all as quietly as you please. He steps back, to regard with pleasure the results of his labours.

  ‘He overturns the clock, having moved the sofa to rest it upon. He moves back the hands of the clock until they stand at 10.45. A quarter to eleven, mark you! Not ten to, not twenty to, not twenty-three and a half minutes to—but a quarter to!

  ‘He gives a hasty glance round the room. Everything is in order. He thrusts his head cautiously from the window. All is as he had calculated: there is nobody about; the night is sufficiently dark. He goes up his rope again and through that first-floor window.

  II

  ‘Having established our criminal as at least a monomaniac and an inhabitant—permanent or temporary—of the house, let us go further into detail.

  ‘First, as regards the fingerprints of which so much has been heard and so few have seen.

  ‘Everyone is satisfied that the murderer wore gloves, because nowhere else in the study, where he must have handled one thing after another, were any fingerprints found. They are found, these important pieces of evidence, upon the one object where their presence is utterly damning—and there only!

  ‘The spirals, whorls, and what-nots which compose these marks correspond exactly with those to be found in the skin of the thumb and first two fingers of Archibald Deacon’s right hand. Ergo, say the Police and Public, Archibald Deacon is the murderer. But I say that these fingerprints go a long way to prove (even without the rest of my evidence) that Deacon cannot be the murderer.

  ‘Here is the one really clever murder (of those discovered) committed within the past fifteen years. Yet, if one takes the popular view, one has to believe that the murderer, who was wise enough to wear gloves during the greater part of the time he was in the study, actually removed one of them and carefully pressed his thumb and fingers upon the highly receptive surface of his weapon’s handle before leaving that weapon in a nice easy place for the first policeman to find!

  ‘Surely the fallacy of blindly accepting as the murderer the man who made those prints is obvious? Consider the position of the marks. They point down the handle, towards the blade! It is almost incredible that at any time would the murderer have held the weapon as a Regency buck dandled his tasselled cane.

  ‘My difficulty was to reconcile with Deacon’s innocence of the murder the presence of his fingerprints upon the tool with which it was committed. That the prints were his I had too much respect for the efficacy of the Scotland Yard system to doubt.

  ‘A possible solution came to me from memory of a detective storyfn2 I once read, in which the murderer, something of a practical scientist, made by means of an ingenious and practicable photographical process, a die of another man’s thumb-print. This he used to incriminate the innocent owner of the thumb.

  ‘For a while I cherished this theory, so vivid was my recollection of the possibility of the method; but I was never really satisfied. Then, suddenly, I found the explanation which I was afterwards to prove true.

  ‘Instead of going to the immense trouble of making a stamp or die, why not obtain beforehand upon the desired object the actual fingerprints of the chosen scapegoat?

  ‘After consideration, I accepted this idea. It fitted well enough with my murderer—a fellow of infinite cunning. I proceeded with the work of reconstruction. Thus:

  ‘Since Deacon had no knowledge of the crime, the murderer must have induced him, in circumstances so ordinary or usual as to be likely to escape his memory, to take hold of the wood-rasp by its handle at some time before the murder; perhaps eight hours, probably not more. For this clever murderer would realise the difficulty of retaining the fingerprints unspoiled.

  ‘When, after obtaining the fingerprints, he had got rid of Deacon, he must have removed with gloved hands—taking care not to touch those parts of the handle where the prints must be—the handle he had loosened before Deacon had held it. Then that handle must have been packed (say in a small box with cork wedges) in such a way as to ensure that its carriage in the pocket for the descent of the wall and subsequent activities could be effected without those beautiful marks being spoiled. The reassembling of the tool must have been done after the murder; and the whole Deacon-damning bit of evidence then planted for the police to find.

  ‘In the study, on a later visit, I found confirmation of the accuracy of my deductions. It will be remembered that when the wood-rasp was produced at the inquest, it was proved to the satisfaction of the court that it was indeed the weapon which had caused Hoode’s death. This proof lay pre-eminently in the condition of the blade, which was far from nice. But it was also pointed out by the police, to make the jury’s assurance doubly sure, that on a little rosewood table in the study there was a scar on the polish, known not to have existed before, which had obviously been made by the blade of just such a wood-rasp as this wood-rasp. Superintendent Boyd gave it as his opinion that the murderer had laid the wood-rasp on this table after he had killed Hoode, and while he was arranging the appearance of a struggle.

  ‘I agree with the superintendent—but only up to a point. Where he was wrong was in assuming that the scar had been made by the murderer having put down on the table the whole wood-rasp.

  ‘That scar is of exactly the same length as the blade of the rasp, and is in the centre of the table, having on every side of it some six inches of unscarred table-top.

  ‘Do you see? That scar could not have been made by the complete tool! The handle is two and a half to three inches in circumference, and if it had been joined to the blade would, by reason of its far greater thickness, have allowed no more than an inch of so of the blade’s tip to touch and scar the table. Had the complete rasp been laid down at the edge of the table with the handle projecting into space, the full-length scar would have been possible. But the scar, as I have described, is in the middle of the table, and could therefore only have been made by the blade without its handle.

  ‘Here, then, was the justification of my theory. Further proof came later. With full official permission I examined the wood-rasp. It was as it had been found. I held it in my hand. I shook it—and the blade flew off. Two small wooden wedges fell to the floor. I picked a shred of linen from the tang of the blade.

  ‘Obviously, the use of the little wedges had been to hold the tang of the blade in the enlarged socket of the handle. And the fact that the socket had been enlarged, added to the inadequacy of the wedges, is surely proof enough that the blows which killed Hoode were struck with the blade alone. There is, however, yet more—the shred of linen. It came, I should say, from a handkerchief, the use of which had been, I take it, to get a better grip of the thin tang when striking. The glove the murderer was undoubtedly wearing probably proved insufficient to ensure against a slipping grip. So he wrapped a handkerchief about his gloved hand. An inequality in the surface of the steel caught some loose thread. This he did not notice when hastily ramming handle and blade together after the kill.

  ‘The wedges and the shred of linen are in the keeping of Superintendent Boyd, to whom I gave them at the time of my discovery. I could not, my case being incomplete, explain then their significance.

  ‘My next step was to question Deacon. To my surprise and consternation I found that although he was a man for whom tools had neither interest nor meaning and for whom therefore the handling of any such implement might be so much out of the ordinary as to impress itself upon his memory, he had no recollection of ever seeing, before the inquest, any wood-rasp. He even suggested that until now he had not known such a tool to exist.

  ‘I will not deny that Deacon’s emphatic assertion that he had never even seen the rasp until it was exhibited at the inquest gave me a shaking. It did, and a bad one. I tested all the links in my chain, only to find each sound and the whole most obviously right—until this blind alley.

  ‘Then it struc
k me, and I laughed at myself as those who read are probably already laughing at me. I saw that I was committing the grave error of underrating my man. I saw that so far from having received a check I had really been advanced.

  ‘The fingerprints were on the handle of the rasp, and the handle—had I not been at much pains to prove it?—had been separated from the blade by the murderer. The murderer—being an intelligent murderer—would certainly never have been such a fool as to let the fearsome and so-likely-to-be-remembered blade come within Deacon’s sight. No, it was far more likely that he had disguised the handle as the handle of something else.

  ‘Having got thus far, I progressed at speed. As what could he have disguised the handle? With efficacy, only as that of another tool. But he probably knew Deacon as a man who had no truck with tools. How, then, did he get the so-ordinary surroundings necessary to prevent awkward memories arising afterwards in the mind of Deacon? The answer is that they were there, ready-made, to his hand. In order to avoid obscurity, I will elucidate this.

  ‘The indication all through had been that the murderer was a man accustomed to the use of carpenter’s tools. The murderer was an inmate of the house. But one and two together and you will see that he would very possibly be known to the household as one who was “always messing about at that there carpent’ring”. Deacon was also of the household, and would therefore see nothing unusual in, say, being asked to “hold this chisel (or gouge, or anything else you like) for just half a second”. If this seems far-fetched, remember that from the beginning I felt the murderer as one who had been preparing his work for some long time.

  ‘It was almost at the moment when I reached this stage of thought that a number of hitherto insufficiently substantiated suspicions which had been steadily massing in my mind suddenly re-arranged themselves in such a manner as to become extra links in my chain of reasoning rather than the wild plungings of a mind tired of logic. This merging of reason with intuition (they are twins, those two) left me certain that I should know who I was trying to prove guilty if Deacon gave me the name of the man against whom these suspicions of mine had been directed in answer to the question: “Who, at any time within the twenty-four hours preceding the murder, induced you to hold in your right hand an implement with a short, thick wooden handle of the same appearance as the handle you have seen on the wood-rasp?”

  ‘You see, I had already learned that of the Abbotshall menagé four men frequently used, and had consequent access to, carpenter’s tools. These were the gardener, the chauffeur, the murdered man, and the guest from whom I had the information.

  ‘Hoode, the gardener, and the chauffeur I disregarded. The first because he was not his own murderer; the second because at the time of the murder he was in bed at the Cottage Hospital in Marling; and the third because he has respectable and trustworthy friends to swear that he spent the evening of the crime in their company.

  ‘Remained the guest—that enthusiastic amateur Daedalus—and he the man that from the beginning had excited those nebulous suspicions I have mentioned. He was living in the house at the time when the murder was committed. He was, by his own showing, an amateur carpenter of experience and enthusiasm. (Early he simulated ignorance as to the name of a wood-rasp. Later, by his voluntary statement, he showed that he could not have been ignorant of it. This was the only slip he made when talking with me.)

  ‘Before I took opportunity to ask Deacon the all-important question, I did much and thought more. With one exception, these thoughts and actions are proper to the next part of this report, and accordingly are dealt with there. The exception is this:

  ‘I became aware that of the two first-floor windows of Abbotshall which (see Part I) are over the window through which the murderer entered the study, the more easterly must have been the one used by the murderer. For I saw that I had not seen at first, that it would be almost an impossibility for a man descending by a rope from the other window to swing his legs, at the end of the descent, on to the sill of the study-window, since that window is not exactly, as one would find in a house younger and less altered than Abbotshall, between the two first-floor windows above it but has most of its length beneath the more easterly. Moreover, although a man descending from the less easterly window might possibly have struck with his foot that one shoot of creeper in the cleared space beside the drain-pipe (see Part I), he would also be bound to do damage to the main body of the creeper—and that is uninjured.

  ‘It was, in fact, obvious that the murderer had come out of the room with the more easterly window. (I was annoyed with myself for not having seen this sooner.)

  ‘That window is to the room occupied as a sitting-room by Sir Arthur Digby-Coates.

  ‘My suspect amateur carpenter was Sir Arthur Digby-Coates.

  ‘When at last I put to Deacon my question of who had given him any implement with a wooden handle to hold, the answer was “Sir Arthur Digby-Coates”.

  ‘(Note—Before going on to Part III, it might be well to explain briefly the circumstances in which Deacon was induced to leave the prints of his fingers on the handle. It is not essential, but may be of interest. Deacon, when I asked him my question, explained that on the morning of the day of the murder he passed by Digby-Coates’s sitting-room. The door was open. Digby-Coates called to him to come in. He entered to find, as on several previous occasions, that Digby-Coates was amusing himself with the completing of an excellent carved cabinet he had been engaged on for many weeks. Digby-Coates was in difficulties, having, he explained, too few hands. Deacon was asked to stand by. He did so, and assisted the enthusiast by handing from the carpenter’s bench near the window one tool after the other. Among them was one, he just remembered, with a handle such as I have described and such as he remembered the wood-rasp handle to be now that he came to think of it.)

  ‘So there you are. When I heard the story I felt, I confess, no little admiration for Digby-Coates. He is so thorough! You see, this was not the first time Deacon had given such assistance. And he knew Deacon thought little and cared less about the whole business of cabinet-making.

  III

  ‘It is evidence purely of trivialities which has put Deacon in a cell awaiting trial; yet I am convinced that did I attempt to establish his innocence merely by the means I have employed so far, the very people who already accept his guilt as certain would accuse me of having nothing but trivialities upon which to base my version of the affair. Further, it could be said—and would be—that I have read between the lines writing which was not there; that I have so ingeniously twisted the interpretation of what are, in fact, merely ordinarily meaningless signs as to make them appear a grim and coherent indictment against another man; that I have seen an anarchist bomb in a schoolboy’s snowball and a Bolshevik outrage in a ’varsity rag.

  ‘So I must strengthen my case; for the truth is that this evidence of trivialities is good, but not nearly good enough. It must have a backing to it.

  ‘Now, there is, if you look at it, a complete absence of any backing to the case against Deacon. “What about the money?” you say. “What about that hundred pounds belonging to Hoode? There’s motive for you!” “Nonsense!” say I. Deacon was paid six hundred pounds a year. He had also an allowance from his only living relative. He had been, it is true, a little shorter of money than usual lately; but to suggest that he would commit murder for a hundred pounds is absurd. A man in his position could have raised the money in a thousand safer and less energetic ways. No, Deacon’s story that the money was a birthday gift from Hoode is, besides being more likely, true. Further, it is easy of proof that Deacon and Hoode were on the best of terms: for corroboration apply to the Minister of Imperial Finance and the household of Abbotshall and 12 Seymour Square. Further still, look at Deacon’s record and see how rash it is to condemn him murderer with nothing more to go upon than those too-beautiful fingerprints and a few ragged pieces of circumstantial evidence, the two best of which were supplied—oh! so ingenuously—by Sir Arthur Digby-Coates.
For it was from him that the police first learnt that Hoode had drawn a hundred pounds in notes from his bank. And it was through him that it became known that Deacon had asked him the time at ten forty-five on the night of the murder—the time to which the hands of the clock in the study had been moved by the murderer.

  ‘There being no backing to the case of the Crown against Deacon, I saw that if I could find a stout one for mine against Digby-Coates I should score heavily.

  ‘The first thing to be found was motive. What I asked myself, could it be? Money? No. Digby-Coates is a wealthier man by far than ever was Hoode. Revenge for some particular ill turn? Hardly that, since Hoode, though a politician, bore all his life the stamp of honesty and straight dealing. A woman? I was not prepared to accept one as the sole cause. She might, of course, be contributory, but I wanted something more likely. Middle-aged men of the social and intellectual standing of these two do not often, in this age of decrees nisi and cold love, go about killing each other over a woman if she is only the first blot upon the fair sea of friendship.

  ‘I was forced back, in this search for motive, upon the deductions I had made from those little material signs, and remembered that I had determined, before ever I thought of putting a name to the murderer, that John Hoode was killed by a man insane; not mad in the gibbering, straws-in-the-hair sense, but mentally unbalanced by a kind of ingrowing, self-nourishing hatred.

  ‘I took this as my starting point and asked myself how I could find corroboration of and reason for this hatred having existed in the heart of a man ostensibly the closest friend of its object. The answer was: look at their past history; as much of it as is available in books of record. I did so, using Hoode’s own books.

  ‘I found soon enough reason for the hatred. Look as I looked. You will see that always, always, always was Digby-Coates beaten by the man he killed. Were the race one of scholarship, sport, politics, social advancement, honours, the result was the same. Hoode first; Digby-Coates second. Look in Who’s Who, Hansard, the records of Upchester School and Magdalen, the Honours Lists. Look in the minds of the men’s colleagues and contemporaries. Always will you find the same story. Look at this, the slightest extract from the list: