The First R. Austin Freeman Megapack: 27 Mystery Tales of Dr. Thorndyke & Others

by R. Austin Freeman

  “Is there no further clue?” asked Thorndyke. “What about the cab, for instance?”

  “Oh, the cab,” groaned Löwe—“that clue failed. The police must have mistaken the number. They telephoned immediately to all the police stations, and a watch was set, with the result that number 72,863 was stopped as it was going home for the night. But it then turned out that the cab had not been off the rank since eleven o’clock, and the driver had been in the shelter all the time with several other men. But there is a clue; I have it here.”

  Mr. Löwe’s face brightened for once as he reached out for the bandbox.

  “The houses in Howard Street,” he explained, as he untied the fastening, “have small balconies to the first-floor windows at the back. Now, the thief entered by one of these windows, having climbed up a rain-water pipe to the balcony. It was a gusty night, as you will remember, and this morning, as I was leaving the house, the butler next door called to me and gave me this; he had found it lying in the balcony of his house.”

  He opened the bandbox with a flourish, and brought forth a rather shabby billycock hat.

  “I understand,” said he, “that by examining a hat it is possible to deduce from it, not only the bodily characteristics of the wearer, but also his mental and moral qualities, his state of health, his pecuniary position, his past history, and even his domestic relations and the peculiarities of his place of abode. Am I right in this supposition?”

  The ghost of a smile flitted across Thorndyke’s face as he laid the hat upon the remains of the newspaper. “We must not expect too much,” he observed. “Hats, as you know, have a way of changing owners. Your own hat, for instance” (a very spruce, hard felt), “is a new one, I think.”

  “Got it last week,” said Mr. Löwe.

  “Exactly. It is an expensive hat, by Lincoln and Bennett, and I see you have judiciously written your name in indelible marking-ink on the lining. Now, a new hat suggests a discarded predecessor. What do you do with your old hats?”

  “My man has them, but they don’t fit him. I suppose he sells them or gives them away.”

  “Very well. Now, a good hat like yours has a long life, and remains serviceable long after it has become shabby; and the probability is that many of your hats pass from owner to owner; from you to the shabby-genteel, and from them to the shabby ungenteel. And it is a fair assumption that there are, at this moment, an appreciable number of tramps and casuals wearing hats by Lincoln and Bennett, marked in indelible ink with the name S. Löwe; and anyone who should examine those hats, as you suggest, might draw some very misleading deductions as to the personal habits of S. Löwe.”

  Mr. Marchmont chuckled audibly, and then, remembering the gravity of the occasion, suddenly became portentously solemn.

  “So you think that the hat is of no use, after all?” said Mr. Löwe, in a tone of deep disappointment.

  “I won’t say that,” replied Thorndyke. “We may learn something from it. Leave it with me, at any rate; but you must let the police know that I have it. They will want to see it, of course.”

  “And you will try to get those things, won’t you?” pleaded Löwe.

  “I will think over the case. But you understand, or Mr. Marchmont does, that this is hardly in my province. I am a medical jurist, and this is not a medico-legal case.”

  “Just what I told him,” said Marchmont. “But you will do me a great kindness if you will look into the matter. Make it a medico-legal case,” he added persuasively.

  Thorndyke repeated his promise, and the two men took their departure.

  For some time after they had left, my colleague remained silent, regarding the hat with a quizzical smile. “It is like a game of forfeits,” he remarked at length, “and we have to find the owner of ‘this very pretty thing.’” He lifted it with a pair of forceps into a better light, and began to look at it more closely.

  “Perhaps,” said he, “we have done Mr. Löwe an injustice, after all. This is certainly a very remarkable hat.”

  “It is as round as a basin,” I exclaimed. “Why, the fellow’s head must have been turned in a lathe!”

  Thorndyke laughed. “The point,” said he, “is this. This is a hard hat, and so must have fitted fairly, or it could not have been worn; and it was a cheap hat, and so was not made to measure. But a man with a head that shape has got to come to a clear understanding with his hat. No ordinary hat would go on at all.

  “Now, you see what he has done—no doubt on the advice of some friendly hatter. He has bought a hat of a suitable size, and he has made it hot—probably steamed it. Then he has jammed it, while still hot and soft, on to his head, and allowed it to cool and set before removing it. That is evident from the distortion of the brim. The important corollary is, that this hat fits his head exactly—is, in fact, a perfect mould of it; and this fact, together with the cheap quality of the hat, furnishes the further corollary that it has probably only had a single owner.

  “And now let us turn it over and look at the outside. You notice at once the absence of old dust. Allowing for the circumstance that it had been out all night, it is decidedly clean. Its owner has been in the habit of brushing it, and is therefore presumably a decent, orderly man. But if you look at it in a good light, you see a kind of bloom on the felt, and through this lens you can make out particles of a fine white powder which has worked into the surface.”

  He handed me his lens, through which I could distinctly see the particles to which he referred.

  “Then,” he continued, “under the curl of the brim and in the folds of the hatband, where the brush has not been able to reach it, the powder has collected quite thickly, and we can see that it is a very fine powder, and very white, like flour. What do you make of that?”

  “I should say that it is connected with some industry. He may be engaged in some factory or works, or, at any rate, may live near a factory, and have to pass it frequently.”

  “Yes; and I think we can distinguish between the two possibilities. For, if he only passes the factory, the dust will be on the outside of the hat only; the inside will be protected by his head. But if he is engaged in the works, the dust will be inside, too, as the hat will hang on a peg in the dust-laden atmosphere, and his head will also be powdered, and so convey the dust to the inside.”

  He turned the hat over once more, and as I brought the powerful lens to bear upon the dark lining, I could clearly distinguish a number of white particles in the interstices of the fabric.

  “The powder is on the inside, too,” I said.

  He took the lens from me, and, having verified my statement, proceeded with the examination. “You notice,” he said, “that the leather head-lining is stained with grease, and this staining is more pronounced at the sides and back. His hair, therefore, is naturally greasy, or he greases it artificially; for if the staining were caused by perspiration, it would be most marked opposite the forehead.”

  He peered anxiously into the interior of the hat, and eventually turned down the head-lining; and immediately there broke out upon his face a gleam of satisfaction.

  “Ha!” he exclaimed. “This is a stroke of luck. I was afraid our neat and orderly friend had defeated us with his brush. Pass me the small dissecting forceps, Jervis.”

  I handed him the instrument, and he proceeded to pick out daintily from the space behind the head-lining some half a dozen short pieces of hair, which he laid, with infinite tenderness, on a sheet of white paper.

  “There are several more on the other side,” I said, pointing them out to him.

  “Yes, but we must leave some for the police,” he answered, with a smile. “They must have the same chance as ourselves, you know.”

  “But surely,” I said, as I bent down over the paper, “these are pieces of horsehair!”

  “I think not,” he replied; “but the microscope will show. At any rate, this is the kind of hair I should expect to find with a head of that shape.”

  “Well, it is extraordinarily coarse,
” said I, “and two of the hairs are nearly white.”

  “Yes; black hairs beginning to turn grey. And now, as our preliminary survey has given such encouraging results, we will proceed to more exact methods; and we must waste no time, for we shall have the police here presently to rob us of our treasure.”

  He folded up carefully the paper containing the hairs, and taking the hat in both hands, as though it were some sacred vessel, ascended with me to the laboratory on the next floor.

  “Now, Polton,” he said to his laboratory assistant, “we have here a specimen for examination, and time is precious. First of all, we want your patent dust-extractor.”

  The little man bustled to a cupboard and brought forth a singular appliance, of his own manufacture, somewhat like a miniature vacuum cleaner. It had been made from a bicycle foot-pump, by reversing the piston-valve, and was fitted with a glass nozzle and a small detachable glass receiver for collecting the dust, at the end of a flexible metal tube.

  “We will sample the dust from the outside first,” said Thorndyke, laying the hat upon the work-bench. “Are you ready, Polton?”

  The assistant slipped his foot into the stirrup of the pump and worked the handle vigorously, while Thorndyke drew the glass nozzle slowly along the hat-brim under the curled edge. And as the nozzle passed along, the white coating vanished as if by magic, leaving the felt absolutely clean and black, and simultaneously the glass receiver became clouded over with a white deposit.

  “We will leave the other side for the police,” said Thorndyke, and as Polton ceased pumping he detached the receiver, and laid it on a sheet of paper, on which he wrote in pencil, “Outside,” and covered it with a small bell-glass. A fresh receiver having been fitted on, the nozzle was now drawn over the silk lining of the hat, and then through the space behind the leather head-lining on one side; and now the dust that collected in the receiver was much of the usual grey colour and fluffy texture, and included two more hairs.

  “And now,” said Thorndyke, when the second receiver had been detached and set aside, “we want a mould of the inside of the hat, and we must make it by the quickest method; there is no time to make a paper mould. It is a most astonishing head,” he added, reaching down from a nail a pair of large callipers, which he applied to the inside of the hat; “six inches and nine-tenths long by six and six-tenths broad, which gives us”—he made a rapid calculation on a scrap of paper—“the extraordinarily high cephalic index of 95·6.”

  Polton now took possession of the hat, and, having stuck a band of wet tissue-paper round the inside, mixed a small bowl of plaster-of-Paris, and very dexterously ran a stream of the thick liquid on to the tissue-paper, where it quickly solidified. A second and third application resulted in a broad ring of solid plaster an inch thick, forming a perfect mould of the inside of the hat, and in a few minutes the slight contraction of the plaster in setting rendered the mould sufficiently loose to allow of its being slipped out on to a board to dry.

  We were none too soon, for even as Polton was removing the mould, the electric bell, which I had switched on to the laboratory, announced a visitor, and when I went down I found a police-sergeant waiting with a note from Superintendent Miller, requesting the immediate transfer of the hat.

  “The next thing to be done,” said Thorndyke, when the sergeant had departed with the bandbox, “is to measure the thickness of the hairs, and make a transverse section of one, and examine the dust. The section we will leave to Polton—as time is an object, Polton, you had better imbed the hair in thick gum and freeze it hard on the microtome, and be very careful to cut the section at right angles to the length of the hair—meanwhile, we will get to work with the microscope.”

  The hairs proved on measurement to have the surprisingly large diameter—fully double that of ordinary hairs, although they were unquestionably human. As to the white dust, it presented a problem that even Thorndyke was unable to solve. The application of reagents showed it to be carbonate of lime, but its source for a time remained a mystery.

  “The larger particles,” said Thorndyke, with his eye applied to the microscope, “appear to be transparent, crystalline, and distinctly laminated in structure. It is not chalk, it is not whiting, it is not any kind of cement. What can it be?”

  “Could it be any kind of shell?” I suggested. “For instance—”

  “Of course!” he exclaimed, starting up; “you have hit it, Jervis, as you always do. It must be mother-of-pearl. Polton, give me a pearl shirt-button out of your oddments box.”

  The button was duly produced by the thrifty Polton, dropped into an agate mortar, and speedily reduced to powder, a tiny pinch of which Thorndyke placed under the microscope.

  “This powder,” said he, “is, naturally, much coarser than our specimen, but the identity of character is unmistakable. Jervis, you are a treasure. Just look at it.”

  I glanced down the microscope, and then pulled out my watch. “Yes,” I said, “there is no doubt about it, I think; but I must be off. Anstey urged me to be in court by 11.30 at the latest.”

  With infinite reluctance I collected my notes and papers and departed, leaving Thorndyke diligently copying addresses out of the Post Office Directory.

  My business at the court detained me the whole of the day, and it was near upon dinner-time when I reached our chambers. Thorndyke had not yet come in, but he arrived half an hour later, tired and hungry, and not very communicative.

  “What have I done?” he repeated, in answer to my inquiries. “I have walked miles of dirty pavement, and I have visited every pearl-shell cutter’s in London, with one exception, and I have not found what I was looking for. The one mother-of-pearl factory that remains, however, is the most likely, and I propose to look in there tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, we have completed our data, with Polton’s assistance. Here is a tracing of our friend’s skull taken from the mould; you see it is an extreme type of brachycephalic skull, and markedly unsymmetrical. Here is a transverse section of his hair, which is quite circular—unlike yours or mine, which would be oval. We have the mother-of-pearl dust from the outside of the hat, and from the inside similar dust mixed with various fibres and a few granules of rice starch. Those are our data.”

  “Supposing the hat should not be that of the burglar after all?” I suggested.

  “That would be annoying. But I think it is his, and I think I can guess at the nature of the art treasures that were stolen.”

  “And you don’t intend to enlighten me?”

  “My dear fellow,” he replied, “you have all the data. Enlighten yourself by the exercise of your own brilliant faculties. Don’t give way to mental indolence.”

  I endeavoured, from the facts in my possession, to construct the personality of the mysterious burglar, and failed utterly; nor was I more successful in my endeavour to guess at the nature of the stolen property; and it was not until the following morning, when we had set out on our quest and were approaching Limehouse, that Thorndyke would revert to the subject.

  “We are now,” he said, “going to the factory of Badcomb and Martin, shell importers and cutters, in the West India Dock Road. If I don’t find my man there, I shall hand the facts over to the police, and waste no more time over the case.”

  “What is your man like?” I asked.

  “I am looking for an elderly Japanese, wearing a new hat or, more probably, a cap, and having a bruise on his right cheek or temple. I am also looking for a cab-yard; but here we are at the works, and as it is now close on the dinner-hour, we will wait and see the hands come out before making any inquiries.”

  We walked slowly past the tall, blank-faced building, and were just turning to re-pass it when a steam whistle sounded, a wicket opened in the main gate, and a stream of workmen—each powdered with white, like a miller—emerged into the street. We halted to watch the men as they came out, one by one, through the wicket, and turned to the right or left towards their homes or some adjacent coffee-shop; but none of them answered to the desc
ription that my friend had given.

  The outcoming stream grew thinner, and at length ceased; the wicket was shut with a bang, and once more Thorndyke’s quest appeared to have failed.

  “Is that all of them, I wonder?” he said, with a shade of disappointment in his tone; but even as he spoke the wicket opened again, and a leg protruded. The leg was followed by a back and a curious globular head, covered with iron-grey hair, and surmounted by a cloth cap, the whole appertaining to a short, very thick-set man, who remained thus, evidently talking to someone inside.

  Suddenly he turned his head to look across the street; and immediately I recognized, by the pallid yellow complexion and narrow eye-slits, the physiognomy of a typical Japanese. The man remained talking for nearly another minute; then, drawing out his other leg, he turned towards us; and now I perceived that the right side of his face, over the prominent cheekbone, was discoloured as though by a severe bruise.

  “Ha!” said Thorndyke, turning round sharply as the man approached, “either this is our man or it is an incredible coincidence.” He walked away at a moderate pace, allowing the Japanese to overtake us slowly, and when the man had at length passed us, he increased his speed somewhat, so as to maintain the distance.

  Our friend stepped along briskly, and presently turned up a side street, whither we followed at a respectful distance, Thorndyke holding open his pocket-book, and appearing to engage me in an earnest discussion, but keeping a sharp eye on his quarry.

  “There he goes!” said my colleague, as the man suddenly disappeared—“the house with the green window-sashes. That will be number thirteen.”

  It was; and, having verified the fact, we passed on, and took the next turning that would lead us back to the main road.