Toward the Golden Age

by Ashley, Mike;

  At the mention of the hat, the inspector stepped eagerly to the back door, but, finding it bolted, he tried the window. This also was securely fastened and, on Thorndyke’s advice, we went round to the front door.

  “This door is locked too,” said the inspector. “I’m afraid we shall have to break in. It’s a nuisance, though.”

  “Have a look at the window,” suggested Thorndyke.

  The officer did so, struggling vainly to undo the patent catch with his pocket-knife.

  “It’s no go,” he said, coming back to the door. “We shall have to—?” He broke off with an astonished stare, for the door stood open and Thorndyke was putting something in his pocket.

  “Your friend doesn’t waste much time—even in picking a lock,” he remarked to me, as we followed Thorndyke into the house; but his reflections were soon merged in a new surprise. Thorndyke had preceded us into a small sitting-room dimly lighted by a hanging lamp turned down low.

  As we entered he turned up the light and glanced about the room. A whisky-bottle was on the table, with a siphon, a tumbler and a biscuit-box. Pointing to the latter, Thorndyke said to the inspector: “See what is in that box.”

  The inspector raised the lid and peeped in, the station-master peered over his shoulder, and then both stared at Thorndyke.

  “How in the name of goodness did you know that there were whole-meal biscuits in the house, sir?” exclaimed the station-master.

  “You’d be disappointed if I told you,” replied Thorndyke. “But look at this.” He pointed to the hearth, where lay a flattened, half-smoked cigarette and a round wooden vesta. The inspector gazed at these objects in silent wonder, while, as to the station-master, he continued to stare at Thorndyke with what I can only describe as superstitious awe.

  “You have the dead man’s property with you, I believe?” said my colleague.

  “Yes,” replied the inspector; “I put the things in my pocket for safety.”

  “Then,” said Thorndyke, picking up the flattened cigarette, “let us have a look at his tobacco-pouch.”

  As the officer produced and opened the pouch, Thorndyke neatly cut open the cigarette with his sharp pocket-knife. “Now,” said he, “what kind of tobacco is in the pouch?”

  The inspector took out a pinch, looked at it and smelt it distastefully. “It’s one of those stinking tobaccos,” he said, “that they put in mixtures—Latakia, I think.”

  “And what is this?” asked Thorndyke, pointing to the open cigarette.

  “Same stuff, undoubtedly,” replied the inspector.

  “And now let us see his cigarette papers,” said Thorndyke.

  The little book, or rather packet—for it consisted of separated papers—was produced from the officer’s pocket and a sample paper abstracted. Thorndyke laid the half-burnt paper beside it, and the inspector, having examined the two, held them up to the light.

  “There isn’t much chance of mistaking that ‘Zig-Zag’ watermark,” he said. “This cigarette was made by the deceased; there can’t be the shadow of a doubt.”

  “One more point,” said Thorndyke, laying the burnt wooden vesta on the table. “You have his match-box?”

  The inspector brought forth the little silver casket, opened it and compared the wooden vestas that it contained with the burnt end. Then he shut the box with a snap.

  “You’ve proved it up to the hilt,” said he. “If we could only find the hat, we should have a complete case.”

  “I’m not sure that we haven’t found the hat,” said Thorndyke. “You notice that something besides coal has been burned in the grate.”

  The inspector ran eagerly to the fireplace and began with feverish hands, to pick out the remains of the extinct fire. “The cinders are still warm,” he said, “and they are certainly not all coal cinders. There has been wood burned here on top of the coal, and these little black lumps are neither coal nor wood. They may quite possibly be the remains of a burnt hat, but, lord! who can tell? You can put together the pieces of broken spectacle-glasses, but you can’t build up a hat out of a few cinders.” He held out a handful of little, black, spongy cinders and looked ruefully at Thorndyke, who took them from him and laid them out on a sheet of paper.

  “We can’t reconstitute the hat, certainly,” my friend agreed, “but we may be able to ascertain the origin of these remains. They may not be cinders of a hat, after all.” He lit a wax match and, taking up one of the charred fragments, applied the flame to it. The cindery mass fused at once with a crackling, seething sound, emitting a dense smoke, and instantly the air became charged with a pungent, resinous odour mingled with the smell of burning animal matter.

  “Smells like varnish,” the station-master remarked.

  “Yes. Shellac,” said Thorndyke; “so the first test gives a positive result. The next test will take more time.”

  He opened the green case and took from it a little flask, fitted for Marsh’s arsenic test, with a safety funnel and escape tube, a small folding tripod, a spirit lamp and a disc of asbestos to serve as a sand-bath. Dropping into the flask several of the cindery masses, selected after careful inspection, he filled it up with alcohol and placed it on the disc, which he rested on the tripod. Then he lighted the spirit lamp underneath and sat down to wait for the alcohol to boil.

  “There is one little point that we may as well settle,” he said presently, as the bubbles began to rise in the flask. “Give me a slide with a drop of Farrant on it, Jervis.”

  I prepared the slide while Thorndyke, with a pair of forceps, picked out a tiny wisp from the table-cloth. “I fancy we have seen this fabric before,” he remarked, as he laid the little pinch of fluff in the mounting fluid and slipped the slide onto the stage of the microscope. “Yes,” he continued, looking into the eye-piece, “here are our old acquaintances, the red wool fibres, the blue cotton and the yellow jute. We must label this at once or we may confuse it with the other specimens.”

  “Have you any idea how the deceased met his death?” the inspector asked.

  “Yes,” replied Thorndyke. “I take it that the murderer enticed him into this room and gave him some refreshments. The murderer sat in the chair in which you are sitting, Brodski sat in that small arm-chair. Then I imagine the murderer attacked him with that iron bar that you found among the nettles, failed to kill him at the first stroke, struggled with him and finally suffocated him with the table-cloth. By the way, there is just one more point. You recognize this piece of string?” He took from his “collecting-box” the little end of twine that had been picked up by the line. The inspector nodded. “Look behind you, you will see where it came from.”

  The officer turned sharply and his eye lighted on a string-box on the mantelpiece. He lifted it down, and Thorndyke drew out from it a length of white twine with one green strand, which he compared with the piece in his hand. “The green strand in it makes the identification fairly certain,” he said. “Of course the string was used to secure the umbrella and hand-bag. He could not have carried them in his hand, encumbered as he was with the corpse. But I expect our other specimen is ready now.” He lifted the flask off the tripod, and, giving it a vigorous shake, examined the contents through his lens. The alcohol had now become dark-brown in colour, and was noticeably thicker and more syrupy in consistence.

  “I think we have enough here for a rough test,” said he, selecting a pipette and a slide from the case. He dipped the former into the flask and, having sucked up a few drops of the alcohol from the bottom, held the pipette over the slide on which he allowed the contained fluid to drop.

  Laying a cover-glass on the little pool of alcohol, he put the slide on the microscope stage and examined it attentively, while we watched him in expectant silence.

  At length he looked up, and, addressing the inspector, asked: “Do you know what felt hats are made of?”

  “I can’t say that I do, sir,” replied the officer.

  “Well, the better quality hats are made of rabbits’ and hares’
wool—the soft under-fur, you know—cemented together with shellac. Now there is very little doubt that these cinders contain shellac, and with the microscope I find a number of small hairs of a rabbit. I have, therefore, little hesitation in saying that these cinders are the remains of a hard felt hat; and, as the hairs do not appear to be dyed, I should say it was a grey hat.”

  At this moment our conclave was interrupted by hurried footsteps on the garden path and, as we turned with one accord, an elderly woman burst into the room.

  She stood for a moment in mute astonishment, and then, looking from one to the other, demanded: “Who are you? and what are you doing here?”

  The inspector rose. “I am a police officer, madam,” said he. “I can’t give you any further information just now, but, if you will excuse me asking, who are you?”

  “I am Mr. Hickler’s housekeeper,” she replied.

  “And Mr. Hickler; are you expecting him home shortly?”

  “No, I am not,” was the curt reply. “Mr. Hickler is away from home just now. He left this evening by the boat train.”

  “For Amsterdam?” asked Thorndyke.

  “I believe so, though I don’t see what business it is of yours,” the housekeeper answered.

  “I thought he might, perhaps, be a diamond broker or merchant,” said Thorndyke. “A good many of them travel by that train.”

  “So he is,” said the woman, “at least, he has something to do with diamonds.”

  “Ah. Well, we must be going, Jervis,” said Thorndyke. “We have finished here, and we have to find an hotel or inn. Can I have a word with you, inspector?”

  The officer, now entirely humble and reverent, followed us out into the garden to receive Thorndyke’s parting advice.

  “You had better take possession of the house at once, and get rid of the housekeeper. Nothing must be removed. Preserve those cinders and see that the rubbish-heap is not disturbed, and, above all, don’t have the room swept. An officer will be sent to relieve you.”

  With a friendly “good-night” we went on our way, guided by the station-master; and here our connection with the case came to an end. Hickler (whose Christian name turned out to be Silas) was, it is true, arrested as he stepped ashore from the steamer, and a packet of diamonds, subsequently identified as the property of Oscar Brodski, found upon his person. But he was never brought to trial, for on the return voyage he contrived to elude his guards for an instant as the ship was approaching the English coast, and it was not until three days later, when a hand-cuffed body was cast up on the lonely shore by Orfordness, that the authorities knew the fate of Silas Hickler.

  “An appropriate and dramatic end to a singular and yet typical case,” said Thorndyke, as he put down the newspaper. “I hope it has enlarged your knowledge, Jervis, and enabled you to form one or two useful corollaries.”

  “I prefer to hear you sing the medico-legal doxology,” I answered, turning upon him like the proverbial worm and grinning derisively (which the worm does not).

  “I know you do,” he retorted, with mock gravity, “and I lament your lack of mental initiative. However, the points that this case illustrates are these: First, the danger of delay; the vital importance of instant action before that frail and fleeting thing that we call a clue has time to evaporate. A delay of a few hours would have left us with hardly a single datum. Second, the necessity of pursuing the most trivial clue to an absolute finish, as illustrated by the spectacles. Third, the urgent need of a trained scientist to aid the police; and, last,” he concluded, with a smile, “we learn never to go abroad without the invaluable green case.”

  The Tragedy on the London and Mid‑Northern

  Victor L. Whitechurch

  The previous story involved the discovery of a body on a railway line, and the railways have long been a popular venue for crime fiction. Perhaps the best known is Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express published in 1934, and she used the setting in other works such as the Miss Marple novel 4.50 from Paddington (1957). During the Golden Age the best known proponent was Freeman Wills Crofts, who made copious use of railway time tables to check and often break criminals’ alibis. Crofts also used the inverted form in The 12.30 from Croydon (1934). However the early champion of the railway mystery was Victor L. Whitechurch (1868–1933). By vocation he was an Anglican clergyman, and he used the clerical setting in several novels and stories, but he was also a devoted railway fan, writing many articles about new developments on trains and tracks for The Railway Magazine at the turn of the century.

  Conan Doyle—in his hiatus from Sherlock Holmes—helped popularize the railway mystery with a couple of stories published in The Strand in 1898: “The Story of the Man With the Watches” and “The Story of the Lost Special.” In the latter an entire train disappears. This was the type of story that Victor Whitechurch excelled in. He was writing similar stories for the magazines at exactly the same time but developed them much further than Doyle. He created the first railway detective in the form of Godfrey Page in Pearson’s Weekly in 1903. Page wasn’t a formal detective. He was a railway fanatic—Whitechurch coined the word “railwayac”—whose enthusiasm and knowledge of trains enabled him to solve crimes. Whitechurch soon created another fanatic, Thorpe Hazell, whose stories are better developed. Hazell isn’t only a railway devotee, but a health fanatic and vegetarian, always encouraging others to follow his fitness regime. The Hazell stories were collected along with other non-series mysteries in Thrilling Stories of the Railways (1912). The following was the second in the series.

  THORPE Hazell opened his paper lazily as he breakfasted on boiled rice and wholemeal bread in his little West-end flat one very cold winter’s morning in January. His interest in passing events was not very much excited until in turning a page he found himself confronted with the headlines:

  SHOCKING ACCIDENT ON THE RAILWAY SAD FATALITY

  Folding the paper and shifting his seat so that the electric light fell better upon it, for it was rather dark, and his breakfast was an early one, he read as follows:

  A terrible occurrence took place on the London and Mid-Northern Railway last evening. As the express from London, due at Manningford at about a quarter past eight, was entering the station, those on the platform noticed a man leaning out of one of the windows, apparently in the act of opening the door of his compartment, and more than one porter shouted a warning to him to wait until the train stopped.

  When, however, the carriage had come to a standstill, he remained motionless, and those who were near noticed to their horror, that the well-known white panels adopted by this company were stained with an ominous colour, while blood was trickling from the man’s head.

  Assistance was rendered at once, but it was soon seen that the unfortunate passenger was quite beyond the reach of recovery, although it was the opinion of a doctor who happened to be on the platform that life could only have been extinct for a few minutes.

  The victim of this terrible tragedy was, as has been described, leaning out of the window, his arms and head hanging over the door, which had to be unlocked before he could be taken out. There was a bad wound in the back of his head and neck, as though he had received a violent blow, and a piece of one of his ears had been torn off.

  He had been travelling alone in a first-class compartment, and held the return half of a ticket to Manningford. All Manningford tickets are collected at Bridgeworth, about ten miles up the line, the last stopping station before Manningford, and inquiries have shown that the inspector on duty there had duly taken his ticket, so that he must have met with his death during the last ten miles of the journey.

  The guard of the train states that, on his own request, he locked the compartment at the London terminus just before the train started, and declares that the unfortunate passenger was quite alone during the whole of the journey. His identity has not yet been proved, but, apparently, he is a foreigner. He is tall and dark, with a military-looking moustache, is about fifty years of age, and has a sl
ight scar on his right cheek.

  He had no luggage, and the few papers found upon him were, we hear, written in French, but give no clue to his identification. These papers are in the hands of the police, and the body has been removed to one of the company’s offices pending the inquest.

  As to the cause of death, the authorities are inclined to the belief that it was an accident caused by his own carelessness, but nothing definite is yet known. Between Bridgeworth and Manningford there are several bridges over the line, and it is conjectured that his head must have come into collision with the brickwork of one of these structures while looking out of the window.

  It will be remembered that a similar fatality took place near Liverpool some years ago, resulting in the death of a prominent citizen.

  On some of the Continental lines the windows are wisely barred, and in view of the liability to such unfortunate accidents, the railway companies would do well to adopt some means for the prevention of passengers leaning out of windows.

  The inquest will probably be held to-morrow.

  Hazell laid down the paper and sipped his lemonade thoughtfully. It was one of his fads always to take lemonade with his breakfast. Then he read the article through again, and pondered yet more.

  “Struck his head against a bridge, eh?” he said to himself. “That’s very curious. Wound on back of head and ear torn off. Umph, I’d like to know a little more about this. Let’s have a look at Bradshaw—ah! I can catch that easily. It is not very far down to Manningford, and I know something of Rolfe, the divisional superintendent. It’s worth the journey—and there’s plenty of time for ten minutes’ dumb-bell exercise first.”

  Half an hour later he was in an express running down to Manningford. As soon as he had passed Bridgeworth he opened the window and kept a careful look out.

  “Let’s see,” he said, “ah, of course, it would be the left side of the train—here’s the first bridge—” and he put his head out and looked back—“plenty of space there. Well, we shall see presently.”