Toward the Golden Age

by Ashley, Mike;

  “An excellent suggestion, Jervis,” answered Thorndyke. “Let us see what he has to tell us.” We approached the porter and found him, as I had anticipated, bursting to unburden himself of the tragic story.

  “The way the thing happened, sir, was this,” he said, in answer to Thorndyke’s question: “There’s a sharpish bend in the road just at that place, and the goods train was just rounding the curve when the driver suddenly caught sight of something lying across the rails. As the engine turned, the head-lights shone on it and then he saw it was a man. He shut off steam at once, blew his whistle, and put the brakes down hard, but, as you know, sir, a goods train takes some stopping; before they could bring her up, the engine and half-a-dozen trucks had gone over the poor beggar.”

  “Could the driver see how the man was lying?” Thorndyke asked.

  “Yes, he could see him quite plain, because the headlights were full on him. He was lying on his face with his neck over the near rail on the downside. His head was in the four-foot and his body by the side of the track. It looked as if he had laid himself out a-purpose.”

  “Is there a level crossing thereabouts?” asked Thorndyke.

  “No, sir. No crossing, no road, no path, no nothing,” said the porter, ruthlessly sacrificing grammar to emphasis. “He must have come across the fields and climbed over the fence to get onto the permanent way. Deliberate suicide is what it looks like.”

  “How did you learn all this?” Thorndyke inquired.

  “Why, the driver, you see, sir, when him and his mate had lifted the body off the track, went on to the next signal-box and sent in his report by telegram. The station-master told me all about it as we walked down the line.”

  Thorndyke thanked the man for his information, and, as we strolled back toward the lamp-room, discussed the bearing of these new facts.

  “Our friend is unquestionably right in one respect,” he said; “this was not an accident. The man might, if he were near-sighted, deaf or stupid, have climbed over the fence and got knocked down by the train. But his position, lying across the rails, can only be explained by one of two hypotheses: either it was, as the porter says, deliberate suicide, or else the man was already dead or insensible. We must leave it at that until we have seen the body, that is, if the police will allow us to see it. But here comes the stationmaster and an officer with him. Let us hear what they have to say.”

  The two officials had evidently made up their minds to decline any outside assistance. The divisional surgeon would make the necessary examination, and information could be obtained through the usual channels. The production of Thorndyke’s card, however, somewhat altered the situation. The police inspector hummed and hawed irresolutely, with the card in his hand, but finally agreed to allow us to view the body, and we entered the lamp-room together, the station-master leading the way to turn up the gas.

  The stretcher stood on the floor by one wall, its grim burden still hidden by the tarpaulin, and the hand-bag and umbrella lay on a large box, together with the battered frame of a pair of spectacles from which the glasses had fallen out.

  “Were these spectacles found by the body?” Thorndyke inquired.

  “Yes,” replied the station-master. “They were close to the head and the glass was scattered about on the ballast.”

  Thorndyke made a note in his pocket-book, and then, as the inspector removed the tarpaulin, he glanced down on the corpse, lying limply on the stretcher and looking grotesquely horrible with its displaced head and distorted limbs. For fully a minute he remained silently stooping over the uncanny object, on which the inspector was now throwing the light of a large lantern; then he stood up and said quietly to me: “I think we can eliminate two out of the three hypotheses.”

  The inspector looked at him quickly, and was about to ask a question, when his attention was diverted by the travelling-case which Thorndyke had laid on a shelf and now opened to abstract a couple of pairs of dissecting forceps.

  “We’ve no authority to make a post mortem, you know,” said the inspector.

  “No, of course not,” said Thorndyke. “I am merely going to look into the mouth.” With one pair of forceps he turned back the lip and, having scrutinized its inner surface, closely examined the teeth.

  “May I trouble you for your lens, Jervis?” he said; and, as I handed him my doublet ready opened, the inspector brought the lantern close to the dead face and leaned forward eagerly. In his usual systematic fashion, Thorndyke slowly passed the lens along the whole range of sharp, uneven teeth, and then, bringing it back to the centre, examined with more minuteness the upper incisors. At length, very delicately, he picked out with his forceps some minute object from between two of the upper front teeth and held it in the focus of the lens. Anticipating his next move, I took a labelled microscope-slide from the case and handed it to him together with a dissecting needle, and, as he transferred the object to the slide and spread it out with the needle, I set up the little microscope on the shelf.

  “A drop of Farrant and a cover-glass, please, Jervis,” said Thorndyke.

  I handed him the bottle, and, when he had let a drop of the mounting fluid fall gently on the object and put on the cover-slip, he placed the slide on the stage of the microscope and examined it attentively.

  Happening to glance at the inspector, I observed on his countenance a faint grin, which he politely strove to suppress when he caught my eye.

  “I was thinking, sir,” he said apologetically, “that it’s a bit off the track to be finding out what he had for dinner. He didn’t die of unwholesome feeding.”

  Thorndyke looked up with a smile. “It doesn’t do, inspector, to assume that anything is off the track in an inquiry of this kind. Every fact must have some significance, you know.”

  “I don’t see any significance in the diet of a man who has had his head cut off,” the inspector rejoined defiantly.

  “Don’t you?” said Thorndyke. “Is there no interest attaching to the last meal of a man who has met a violent death? These crumbs, for instance, that are scattered over the dead man’s waistcoat. Can we learn nothing from them?”

  “I don’t see what you can learn,” was the dogged rejoinder.

  Thorndyke picked off the crumbs, one by one, with his forceps, and having deposited them on a slide, inspected them, first with the lens and then through the microscope.

  “I learn,” said he, “that shortly before his death, the deceased partook of some kind of whole-meal biscuits, apparently composed partly of oatmeal.”

  “I call that nothing,” said the inspector. “The question that we have got to settle is not what refreshments had the deceased been taking, but what was the cause of his death: did he commit suicide? was he killed by accident? or was there any foul play?”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Thorndyke, “the questions that remain to be settled are, who killed the deceased and with what motive? The others are already answered as far as I am concerned.”

  The inspector stared in sheer amazement not unmixed with incredulity.

  “You haven’t been long coming to a conclusion, sir,” he said.

  “No, it was a pretty obvious case of murder,” said Thorndyke. “As to the motive, the deceased was a diamond merchant and is believed to have had a quantity of stones about his person. I should suggest that you search the body.”

  The inspector gave vent to an exclamation of disgust. “I see,” he said. “It was just a guess on your part. The dead man was a diamond merchant and had valuable property about him; therefore he was murdered.” He drew himself up, and, regarding Thorndyke with stern reproach, added: “But you must understand, sir, that this is a judicial inquiry, not a prize competition in a penny paper. And, as to searching the body, why, that is what I principally came for.” He ostentatiously turned his back on us and proceeded systematically to turn out the dead man’s pockets, laying the articles, as he removed them, on the box by the side of the hand-bag and umbrella.

  While he was thus occupied,
Thorndyke looked over the body generally, paying special attention to the soles of the boots, which, to the inspector’s undissembled amusement, he very thoroughly examined with the lens.

  “I should have thought, sir, that his feet were large enough to be seen with the naked eye,” was his comment; “but perhaps,” he added, with a sly glance at the station-master, “you’re a little near-sighted.”

  Thorndyke chuckled good-humouredly, and, while the officer continued his search, he looked over the articles that had already been laid on the box. The purse and pocket-book he naturally left for the inspector to open, but the reading-glasses, pocket-knife and card-case and other small pocket articles were subjected to a searching scrutiny. The inspector watched him out of the corner of his eye with furtive amusement; saw him hold up the glasses to the light to estimate their refractive power, peer into the tobacco pouch, open the cigarette book and examine the watermark of the paper, and even inspect the contents of the silver match-box.

  “What might you have expected to find in his tobacco pouch?” the officer asked, laying down a bunch of keys from the dead man’s pocket.

  “Tobacco,” Thorndyke replied stolidly; “but I did not expect to find fine-cut Latakia. I don’t remember ever having seen pure Latakia smoked in cigarettes.”

  “You do take an interest in things, sir,” said the inspector, with a side glance at the stolid station-master.

  “I do,” Thorndyke agreed; “and I note that there are no diamonds among this collection.”

  “No, and we don’t know that he had any about him; but there’s a gold watch and chain, a diamond scarf-pin, and a purse containing”— he opened it and tipped out its contents into his hand—”twelve pounds in gold. That doesn’t look much like robbery, does it? What do you say to the murder theory now?”

  “My opinion is unchanged,” said Thorndyke, “and I should like to examine the spot where the body was found. Has the engine been inspected?” he added, addressing the station-master.

  “I telegraphed to Bradfield to have it examined,” the official answered. “The report has probably come in by now. I’d better see before we start down the line.”

  We emerged from the lamp-room and, at the door, found the station-inspector waiting with a telegram. He handed it to the station-master, who read it aloud.

  “The engine has been carefully examined by me. I find small smear of blood on near leading wheel and smaller one on next wheel following. No other marks.” He glanced questioningly at Thorndyke, who nodded and remarked: “It will be interesting to see if the line tells the same tale.”

  The station-master looked puzzled and was apparently about to ask for an explanation; but the inspector, who had carefully pocketed the dead man’s property, was impatient to start and, accordingly, when Thorndyke had repacked his case and had, at his own request, been furnished with a lantern, we set off down the permanent way, Thorndyke carrying the light and I the indispensable green case.

  “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 upward. But the man when he was seen by the engine-driver, was lying face downward. 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. “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 onto 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.