by Lord Dunsany
Well, about that story I have to tell. And you mightn’t think that a little man like me could make you shudder. I soon forgot about the Oxford manner when we settled down in our flat. I forgot it in the sheer wonder of the man himself. He had a mind like an acrobat’s body, like a bird’s body. It didn’t want education. You didn’t notice whether he was educated or not. Ideas were always leaping up in him, things you’d never have thought of. And not only that, but if any ideas were about, he’d sort of catch them. Time and again I’ve found him knowing just what I was going to say. Not thought-reading, but what they call intuition. I used to try to learn a bit about chess,1 just to take my thoughts off Numnumo in the evening, when I’d done with it. But problems I never could do. Yet he’d come along and glance at my problem and say, “You probably move that piece first,” and I’d say, “But where?” and he’d say, “Oh, one of those three squares.” And I’d say, “But it will be taken on all of them.” And the piece a queen all the time, mind you. And he’d say, “Yes, it’s doing no good there: you’re probably meant to lose it.”
And, do you know, he’d be right.
You see, he’d been following out what the other man had been thinking. That’s what he’d been doing.
Well, one day there was that ghastly murder at Unge. I don’t know if you remember it. But Steeger had gone down to live with a girl in a bungalow on the North Downs, and that was the first we had heard of him.
The girl had £200, and he got every penny of it and she utterly disappeared. And Scotland Yard couldn’t find her.
Well I’d happened to read that Steeger had bought two bottles of Numnumo; for the Otherthorpe police had found out everything about him, except what he did with the girl; and that of course attracted my attention, or I should have never thought again about the case or said a word of it to Linley. Numnumo was always on my mind, as I always spent every day pushing it, and that kept me from forgetting the other thing. And so one day I said to Linley, “I wonder with all that knack you have for seeing through a chess problem, and thinking of one thing and another, that you don’t have a go at that Otherthorpe mystery. It’s a problem as much as chess,” I said.
“There’s not the mystery in ten murders that there is in one game of chess,” he answered.
“It’s beaten Scotland Yard,” I said.
“Has it?” he asked.
“Knocked them endwise,” I said.
“It shouldn’t have done that,” he said. And almost immediately after he said, “What are the facts?”
We were both sitting at supper and I told him the facts, as I had them straight from the papers. She was a pretty blonde, she was small, she was called Nancy Elth, she had £200, they lived at the bungalow for five days. After that he stayed there for another fortnight, but nobody ever saw her alive again. Steeger said she had gone to South America, but later said he had never said South America, but South Africa. None of her money remained in the Bank, where she had kept it, and Steeger was shewn to have come by at least £150 just at that time. Then Steeger turned out to be a vegetarian, getting all his food from the greengrocer; and that made the constable in the village of Unge suspicious of him, for a vegetarian was something new to the constable. He watched Steeger after that, and it’s well he did, for there was nothing that Scotland Yard asked him that he couldn’t tell them about him, except of course the one thing. And he told the police at Otherthorpe five or six miles away, and they came and took a hand at it too. They were able to say for one thing that he never went outside the bungalow and its tidy garden ever since she disappeared. You see, the more they watched him the more suspicious they got, as you naturally do if you’re watching a man; so that very soon they were watching every move he made, but if it hadn’t been for his being a vegetarian they’d never have started to suspect him, and there wouldn’t have been enough evidence even for Linley. Not that they found out anything much against him, except that £150 dropping in from nowhere; and it was Scotland Yard that found that, not the police of Otherthorpe. No, what the constable of Unge found out was about the larch-trees, and that beat Scotland Yard utterly, and beat Linley up to the very last, and of course it beat me. There were ten larch-trees in the bit of a garden, and he’d made some sort of an arrangement with the landlord, Steeger had, before he took the bungalow, by which he could do what he liked with the larch-trees. And then, from about the time that little Nancy Elth must have died, he cut every one of them down. Three times a day he went at it for nearly a week, and when they were all down he cut them all up into logs no more than two foot long and laid them all in neat heaps. You never saw such work. And what for? To give an excuse for the axe was one theory. But the excuse was bigger than the axe: it took him a fortnight, hard work every day. And he could have killed a little thing like Nancy Elth without an axe, and cut her up too. Another theory was that he wanted firewood, to make away with the body. But he never used it. He left it all standing there in those neat stacks. It fairly beat everybody.
Well, those are the facts I told Linley. Oh, yes, and he bought a big butcher’s knife. Funny thing, they all do. And yet it isn’t so funny after all; if you’ve got to cut a woman up, you’ve got to cut her up; and you can’t do that without a knife. Then, there were some negative facts. He hadn’t burned her. Only had a fire in the small stove now and then, and only used it for cooking. They got on to that pretty smartly, the Unge constable did, and the men that were lending him a hand from Otherthorpe. There were some little woody places lying round, shaws they call them in that part of the country, the country people do, and they could climb a tree handy and unobserved and get a sniff at the smoke in almost any direction it might be blowing. They did that now and then and there was no smell of flesh burning, just ordinary cooking. Pretty smart of the Otherthorpe police that was, though of course it didn’t help to hang Steeger. Then later on the Scotland Yard men went down and got another fact, negative but narrowing things down all the while. And that was that the chalk under the bungalow and under the little garden had none of it been disturbed. And he’d never been outside it since Nancy disappeared. Oh, yes, and he had a big file besides the knife. But there was no sign of any ground bones found on the file, or any blood on the knife. He’d washed them of course. I told all that to Linley.
Now I ought to warn you before I go any further; I am a small man myself and you probably don’t expect anything horrible from me. But I ought to warn you this man was a murderer, or at any rate somebody was; the woman had been made away with, a nice pretty little girl too, and the man that had done that wasn’t necessarily going to stop at things you might think he’d stop at. With the mind to do a thing like that, and with the long thin shadow of the rope to drive him further, you can’t say what he’d stop at. Murder tales seem nice things sometimes for a lady to sit and read all by herself by the fire. But murder isn’t a nice thing, and when a murderer’s desperate and trying to hide his tracks he isn’t even as nice as he was before. I’ll ask you to bear that in mind. Well, I’ve warned you.
So I says to Linley, “And what do you make of it?”
“Drains?” said Linley.
“No,” I says, “you’re wrong there. Scotland Yard has been into that. And the Otherthorpe people before them. They’ve had a look in the drains, such as they are, a little thing running into a cesspool beyond the garden; and nothing has gone down it, nothing that oughtn’t to have, I mean.”
He made one or two other suggestions, but Scotland Yard had been before him in every case. That’s really the crab of my story, if you’ll excuse the expression.2 You want a man who sets out to be a detective to take his magnifying glass and go down to the spot; to go to the spot before everything; and then to measure the footmarks and pick up the clues and find the knife that the police have overlooked. But Linley never even went near the place and he hadn’t got a magnifying glass, not as I ever saw, and Scotland Yard were before him every time.
In fact they had more clues than anybody could make head or tai
l of. Every kind of clue to show that he’d murdered the poor little girl; every kind of clue to show that he hadn’t disposed of the body; and yet the body wasn’t there. It wasn’t in South America either, and not much more likely in South Africa. And all the time, mind you, that enormous bunch of chopped larch wood, a clue that was staring everyone in the face and leading nowhere. No, we didn’t seem to want any more clues, and Linley never went near the place. The trouble was to deal with the clues we’d got. I was completely mystified; so was Scotland Yard; and Linley seemed to be getting no for-warder; and all the while the mystery was hanging on me. I mean, if it were not for the trifle I’d chanced to remember, and if it were not for one chance word I said to Linley, that mystery would have gone the way of all the other mysteries that men have made nothing of, a darkness, a little patch of night in history.
Well, the fact was Linley didn’t take much interest in it at first, but I was so absolutely sure that he could do it, that I kept him to the idea. “You can do chess problems,” I said.
“That’s ten times harder,” he said sticking to his point.
“Then why don’t you do this?” I said.
“Then go and take a look at the board for me,” said Linley.
That was his way of talking. We’d been a fortnight together, and I knew it by now. He meant go down to the bungalow at Unge. I know you’ll say why didn’t he go himself, but the plain truth of it is that if he’d been tearing about the countryside he’d never have been thinking, whereas sitting there in his chair by the fire in our flat there was no limit to the ground he could cover, if you follow my meaning. So down I went by train next day, and got out at Unge station. And there were the North Downs rising up before me, somehow like music.
“It’s up there, isn’t it?” I said to the porter.
“That’s right,” he said. “Up there by the lane; and mind to turn to your right when you get to the old yew-tree, a very big tree, you can’t mistake it, and then . . .” and he told me the way so that I couldn’t go wrong. I found them all like that, very nice and helpful. You see it was Unge’s day at last; everyone had heard of Unge now; you could have got a letter there any time just then without putting the county or post-town; and this was what Unge had to show. I dare say if you tried to find Unge now . . . ; well, anyway, they were making hay while the sun shone.
Well, there the hill was, going up into sunlight, going up like a song. You don’t want to hear about the Spring, and all the may rioting, and the colour that came down over everything later on in the day, and all those birds; but I thought, “What a nice place to bring a girl to.” And then when I thought that he’d killed her there, well, I’m only a small man, as I said, but when I thought of her on that hill with all the birds singing, I said to myself, “Wouldn’t it be odd if it turned out to be me after all that got that man killed, if he did murder her.” So I soon found my way up to the bungalow and began prying about, looking over the hedge into the garden. And I didn’t find much, and I found nothing at all that the police hadn’t found already, but there were those heaps of larch-logs staring me in the face and looking very queer.
I did a lot of thinking, leaning against the hedge, breathing the smell of the may, and looking over the top of it at the larch-logs, and the neat little bungalow the other side of the garden. Lots of theories I thought of; till I came to the best thought of all; and that was that if I left the thinking to Linley, with his Oxford-and-Cambridge education, and only brought him the facts, as he had told me, I should be doing more good in my way than if I tried to do any big thinking. I forgot to tell you that I had gone to Scotland Yard in the morning. Well, there wasn’t really much to tell. What they asked me was, what I wanted. And, not having an answer exactly ready, I didn’t find out very much from them. But it was quite different at Unge; everyone was most obliging; it was their day there, as I said. The constable let me go indoors, so long as I didn’t touch anything, and he gave me a look at the garden from the inside. And I saw the stumps of the ten larch-trees, and I noticed one thing that Linley said was very observant of me, not that it turned out to be any use, but any way I was doing my best; I noticed that the stumps had been all chopped anyhow. And from that I thought that the man that did it didn’t know much about chopping. The constable said that was a deduction. So then I said that the axe was blunt when he used it; and that certainly made the constable think, though he didn’t actually say I was right this time. Did I tell you that Steeger never went outdoors, except to the little garden to chop wood, ever since Nancy disappeared? I think I did. Well, it was perfectly true. They’d watched him night and day, one or another of them, and the Unge constable told me that himself. That limited things a good deal. The only thing I didn’t like about it was that I felt Linley ought to have found all that out instead of ordinary policemen, and I felt that he could have too. There’d have been romance in a story like that. And they’d never have done it if the news hadn’t gone round that the man was a vegetarian and only dealt at the greengrocers. Likely as not even that was only started out of pique by the butcher. It’s queer what little things may trip a man up. Best to keep straight is my motto. But perhaps I’m straying a bit away from my story. I should like to do that for ever; forget that it ever was; but I can’t.
Well, I picked up all sorts of information; clues I suppose I should call it in a story like this; though they none of them seemed to lead anywhere. For instance, I found out everything he ever bought at the village, I could even tell you the kind of salt he bought, quite plain with no phosphates in it, that they sometimes put in to make it tidy. And then he got ice from the fishmongers, and plenty of vegetables, as I said, from the greengrocer, Mergin and Sons. And I had a bit of a talk over it all with the constable. Slugger he said his name was. I wondered why he hadn’t come in and searched the place as soon as the girl was missing. “Well, you can’t do that,” he said. “And besides, we didn’t suspect at once, not about the girl that is. We only suspected there was something wrong about him on account of him being a vegetarian. He stayed a good fortnight after the last that was seen of her. And then we slipped in like a knife. But, you see, no one had been enquiring about her, there was no warrant out.”
“And what did you find,” I asked Slugger, “when you went in?”
“Just a big file,” he said, “and the knife and the axe that he must have got to chop her up with.”
“But he got the axe to chop trees with,” I said.
“Well, yes,” he said, but rather grudgingly.
“And what did he chop them for?” I asked.
“Well of course, my superiors has theories about that,” he said, “that they mightn’t tell to everybody.”
You see, it was those logs that were beating them.
“But did he cut her up at all?” I asked.
“Well, he said that she was going to South America,” he answered. Which was really very fair-minded of him.
I don’t remember now much else that he told me. Steeger left the plates and dishes all washed up and very neat, he said.
Well, I brought all this back to Linley, going up by the train that started just about sunset. I’d like to tell you about the late Spring evening, so calm over that grim bungalow, closing in with a glory all round it, as though it were blessing it; but you’ll want to hear of the murder. Well, I told Linley everything, though much of it didn’t seem to me to be worth the telling. The trouble was that the moment I began to leave anything out, he’d know it, and make me drag it in. “You can’t tell what may be vital,” he’d say. “A tin-tack swept away by a house-maid might hang a man.”
All very well, but be consistent even if you are educated at Eton and Harrow, and whenever I mentioned Numnumo, which after all was the beginning of the whole story, because he wouldn’t have heard of it if it hadn’t been for me, and my noticing that Steeger had bought two bottles of it, why then he said that things like that were trivial and we should keep to the main issues. I naturally talked a bit about Num
numo, because only that day I had pushed close on fifty bottles of it in Unge. A murder certainly stimulates people’s minds, and Steeger’s two bottles gave me an opportunity that only a fool could have failed to make something of. But of course all that was nothing at all to Linley.
You can’t see a man’s thoughts and you can’t look into his mind, so that all the most exciting things in the world can never be told of. But what I think happened all that evening with Linley, while I talked to him before supper, and all through supper, and sitting smoking afterwards in front of our fire, was that his thoughts were stuck at a barrier there was no getting over. And the barrier wasn’t the difficulty of finding ways and means by which Steeger might have made away with the body, but the impossibility of finding why he chopped those masses of wood every day for a fortnight, and paid as I’d just found out, £25 to his landlord to be allowed to do it. That’s what was beating Linley. As for the ways by which Steeger might have hidden the body, it seemed to me that every way was blocked by the police. If you said he buried it they said the chalk was undisturbed, if you said he carried it away they said he never left the place, if you said he burned it they said no smell of burning was ever noticed when the smoke blew low, and when it didn’t they climbed trees after it. I’d taken to Linley wonderfully, and I didn’t have to be educated to see there was something big in a mind like his, and I thought that he could have done it. When I saw the police getting in before him like that, and no way that I could see of getting past them, I felt real sorry.
Did anyone come to the house? he asked me once or twice. Did anyone take anything away from it? But we couldn’t account for it that way. Then perhaps I made some suggestion that was no good, or perhaps I started talking of Numnuno again, and he interrupted me rather sharply.
“But what would you do, Smethers?” he said. “What would you do yourself?”
“If I’d murdered poor Nancy Elth?” I asked.
