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

by R. Austin Freeman

  Thorndyke had just brought his stick up against the left horn, and immediately the beast had winced and started back, shaking his head and moaning. There was not, however, room for him to back out of reach, and Thorndyke, by leaning into the pen, was able to inspect the sensitive horn, which he did with the closest attention, while the butcher looked on with obvious perturbation.

  “You don’t think there’s anything wrong with this beast, sir, I hope,” said he.

  “I can’t say without a further examination,” replied Thorndyke. “It may be the horn only that is affected. If you will have it sawn off close to the head, and sent up to me at the hotel, I will look at it and tell you. And, by way of preventing any mistakes, I will mark it and cover it up, to protect it from injury in the slaughter-house.”

  He opened his parcel and produced from it a wide-mouthed bottle labelled “Ox-gall,” a sheet of gutta-percha tissue, a roller bandage, and a stick of sealing-wax. Handing the bottle to Mr. Felton, he encased the distal half of the horn in a covering by means of the tissue and the bandage, which he fixed securely with the sealing-wax.

  “I’ll saw the horn off and bring it up to the hotel myself, with the ox-gall,” said Mr. Felton. “You shall have them in half an hour.”

  He was as good as his word, for in half an hour Thorndyke was seated at a small table by the window of our private sitting-room in the Black Bull Hotel. The table was covered with newspaper, and on it lay the long grey horn and Thorndyke’s travelling-case, now open and displaying a small microscope and its accessories. The butcher was seated solidly in an armchair waiting, with a half-suspicious eye on Thorndyke for the report; and I was endeavouring by cheerful talk to keep Mr. Stopford from sinking into utter despondency, though I, too, kept a furtive watch on my colleague’s rather mysterious proceedings.

  I saw him unwind the bandage and apply the horn to his ear, bending it slightly to and fro. I watched him, as he scanned the surface closely through a lens, and observed him as he scraped some substance from the pointed end on to a glass slide, and, having applied a drop of some reagent, began to tease out the scraping with a pair of mounted needles. Presently he placed the slide under the microscope, and, having observed it attentively for a minute or two, turned round sharply.

  “Come and look at this, Jervis,” said he.

  I wanted no second bidding, being on tenterhooks of curiosity, but came over and applied my eye to the instrument.

  “Well, what is it?” he asked.

  “A multipolar nerve corpuscle—very shrivelled, but unmistakable.”

  “And this?”

  He moved the slide to a fresh spot.

  “Two pyramidal nerve corpuscles and some portions of fibres.”

  “And what do you say the tissue is?”

  “Cortical brain substance, I should say, without a doubt.”

  “I entirely agree with you. And that being so,” he added, turning to Mr. Stopford, “we may say that the case for the defence is practically complete.”

  “What, in Heaven’s name, do you mean?” exclaimed Stopford, starting up.

  “I mean that we can now prove when and where and how Miss Grant met her death. Come and sit down here, and I will explain. No, you needn’t go away, Mr. Felton. We shall have to subpoena you. Perhaps,” he continued, “we had better go over the facts and see what they suggest. And first we note the position of the body, lying with the feet close to the off-side door, showing that, when she fell, the deceased was sitting, or more probably standing, close to that door. Next there is this.” He drew from his pocket a folded paper, which he opened, displaying a tiny blue disc. “It is one of the sequins with which her hat was trimmed, and I have in this envelope several more which I took from the hat itself.

  “This single sequin I picked up on the rear end of the off side footboard, and its presence there makes it nearly certain that at some time Miss Grant had put her head out of the window on that side.

  “The next item of evidence I obtained by dusting the margins of the off-side window with a light powder, which made visible a greasy impression three and a quarter inches long on the sharp corner of the right-hand jamb (right-hand from the inside, I mean).

  “And now as to the evidence furnished by the body. The wound in the skull is behind and above the left ear, is roughly circular, and measures one inch and seven-sixteenths at most, and a ragged scalp-wound runs from it towards the left eye. On the right cheek is a linear contused wound three and a quarter inches long. There are no other injuries.

  “Our next facts are furnished by this.” He took up the horn and tapped it with his finger, while the solicitor and Mr. Felton stared at him in speechless wonder. “You notice it is a left horn, and you remember that it was highly sensitive. If you put your ear to it while I strain it, you will hear the grating of a fracture in the bony core. Now look at the pointed end, and you will see several deep scratches running lengthwise, and where those scratches end the diameter of the horn is, as you see by this calliper-gauge, one inch and seven-sixteenths. Covering the scratches is a dry blood-stain, and at the extreme tip is a small mass of a dried substance which Dr. Jervis and I have examined with the microscope and are satisfied is brain tissue.”

  “Good God!” exclaimed Stopford eagerly. “Do you mean to say—”

  “Let us finish with the facts, Mr. Stopford,” Thorndyke interrupted. “Now, if you look closely at that blood-stain, you will see a short piece of hair stuck to the horn, and through this lens you can make out the root-bulb. It is a golden hair, you notice, but near the root it is black, and our calliper-gauge shows us that the black portion is fourteen sixty-fourths of an inch long. Now, in this envelope are some hairs that I removed from the dead woman’s head. They also are golden hairs, black at the roots, and when I measure the black portion I find it to be fourteen sixty-fourths of an inch long. Then, finally, there is this.”

  He turned the horn over, and pointed to a small patch of dried blood. Embedded in it was a blue sequin.

  Mr. Stopford and the butcher both gazed at the horn in silent amazement; then the former drew a deep breath and looked up at Thorndyke.

  “No doubt,” said he, “you can explain this mystery, but for my part I am utterly bewildered, though you are filling me with hope.”

  “And yet the matter is quite simple,” returned Thorndyke, “even with these few facts before us, which are only a selection from the body of evidence in our possession. But I will state my theory, and you shall judge.” He rapidly sketched a rough plan on a sheet of paper, and continued: “These were the conditions when the train was approaching Woldhurst: Here was the passenger-coach, here was the burning rick, and here was a cattle-truck. This steer was in that truck. Now my hypothesis is that at that time Miss Grant was standing with her head out of the off-side window, watching the burning rick. Her wide hat, worn on the left side, hid from her view the cattle-truck which she was approaching, and then this is what happened.” He sketched another plan to a larger scale. “One of the steers—this one—had thrust its long horn out through the bars. The point of that horn struck the deceased’s head, driving her face violently against the corner of the window, and then, in disengaging, ploughed its way through the scalp, and suffered a fracture of its core from the violence of the wrench. This hypothesis is inherently probable, it fits all the facts, and those facts admit of no other explanation.”

  The solicitor sat for a moment as though dazed; then he rose impulsively and seized Thorndyke’s hands. “I don’t know what to say to you,” he exclaimed huskily, “except that you have saved my brother’s life, and for that may God reward you!”

  The butcher rose from his chair with a slow grin.

  “It seems to me,” said he, “as if that ox-gall was what you might call a blind, eh, sir?”

  And Thorndyke smiled an inscrutable smile.

  * * * *

  When we returned to town on the following day we were a party of four, which included Mr. Harold Stopford. The verdict
of “Death by misadventure,” promptly returned by the coroner’s jury, had been shortly followed by his release from custody, and he now sat with his brother and me, listening with rapt attention to Thorndyke’s analysis of the case.

  “So, you see,” the latter concluded, “I had six possible theories of the cause of death worked out before I reached Halbury, and it only remained to select the one that fitted the facts. And when I had seen the cattle-truck, had picked up that sequin, had heard the description of the steers, and had seen the hat and the wounds, there was nothing left to do but the filling in of details.”

  “And you never doubted my innocence?” asked Harold Stopford.

  Thorndyke smiled at his quondam client.

  “Not after I had seen your colour-box and your sketch,” said he, “to say nothing of the spike.”

  THE MOABITE CIPHER (1909)

  A large and motley crowd lined the pavements of Oxford Street as Thorndyke and I made our way leisurely eastward. Floral decorations and drooping bunting announced one of those functions inaugurated from time to time by a benevolent Government for the entertainment of fashionable loungers and the relief of distressed pickpockets. For a Russian Grand Duke, who had torn himself away, amidst valedictory explosions, from a loving if too demonstrative people, was to pass anon on his way to the Guildhall; and a British Prince, heroically indiscreet, was expected to occupy a seat in the ducal carriage.

  Near Rathbone Place Thorndyke halted and drew my attention to a smart-looking man who stood lounging in a doorway, cigarette in hand.

  “Our old friend Inspector Badger,” said Thorndyke. “He seems mightily interested in that gentleman in the light overcoat. How d’ye do, Badger?” for at this moment the detective caught his eye and bowed. “Who is your friend?”

  “That’s what I want to know, sir,” replied the inspector. “I’ve been shadowing him for the last half-hour, but I can’t make him out, though I believe I’ve seen him somewhere. He don’t look like a foreigner, but he has got something bulky in his pocket, so I must keep him in sight until the Duke is safely past. I wish,” he added gloomily, “these beastly Russians would stop at home. They give us no end of trouble.”

  “Are you expecting any—occurrences, then?” asked Thorndyke.

  “Bless you, sir,” exclaimed Badger, “the whole route is lined with plain-clothes men. You see, it is known that several desperate characters followed the Duke to England, and there are a good many exiles living here who would like to have a rap at him. Hallo! What’s he up to now?”

  The man in the light overcoat had suddenly caught the inspector’s too inquiring eye, and forthwith dived into the crowd at the edge of the pavement. In his haste he trod heavily on the foot of a big, rough-looking man, by whom he was in a moment hustled out into the road with such violence that he fell sprawling face downwards. It was an unlucky moment. A mounted constable was just then backing in upon the crowd, and before he could gather the meaning of the shout that arose from the bystanders, his horse had set down one hind-hoof firmly on the prostrate man’s back.

  The inspector signalled to a constable, who forthwith made a way for us through the crowd; but even as we approached the injured man, he rose stiffly and looked round with a pale, vacant face.

  “Are you hurt?” Thorndyke asked gently, with an earnest look into the frightened, wondering eyes.

  “No, sir,” was the reply; “only I feel queer—sinking—just here.”

  He laid a trembling hand on his chest, and Thorndyke, still eyeing him anxiously, said in a low voice to the inspector: “Cab or ambulance, as quickly as you can.”

  A cab was led round from Newman Street, and the injured man put into it. Thorndyke, Badger, and I entered, and we drove off up Rathbone Place. As we proceeded, our patient’s face grew more and more ashen, drawn, and anxious; his breathing was shallow and uneven, and his teeth chattered slightly. The cab swung round into Goodge Street, and then—suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye—there came a change. The eyelids and jaw relaxed, the eyes became filmy, and the whole form subsided into the corner in a shrunken heap, with the strange gelatinous limpness of a body that is dead as a whole, while its tissues are still alive.

  “God save us! The man’s dead!” exclaimed the inspector in a shocked voice—for even policemen have their feelings. He sat staring at the corpse, as it nodded gently with the jolting of the cab, until we drew up inside the courtyard of the Middlesex Hospital, when he got out briskly, with suddenly renewed cheerfulness, to help the porter to place the body on the wheeled couch.

  “We shall know who he is now, at any rate,” said he, as we followed the couch to the casualty-room. Thorndyke nodded unsympathetically. The medical instinct in him was for the moment stronger than the legal.

  The house-surgeon leaned over the couch, and made a rapid examination as he listened to our account of the accident. Then he straightened himself up and looked at Thorndyke.

  “Internal hemorrhage, I expect,” said he. “At any rate, he’s dead, poor beggar!—as dead as Nebuchadnezzar. Ah! Here comes a bobby; it’s his affair now.”

  A sergeant came into the room, breathing quickly, and looked in surprise from the corpse to the inspector. But the latter, without loss of time, proceeded to turn out the dead man’s pockets, commencing with the bulky object that had first attracted his attention; which proved to be a brown-paper parcel tied up with red tape.

  “Pork-pie, begad!” he exclaimed with a crestfallen air as he cut the tape and opened the package. “You had better go through his other pockets, sergeant.”

  The small heap of odds and ends that resulted from this process tended, with a single exception, to throw little light on the man’s identity; the exception being a letter, sealed, but not stamped, addressed in an exceedingly illiterate hand to Mr. Adolf Schönberg, 213, Greek Street, Soho.

  “He was going to leave it by hand, I expect,” observed the inspector, with a wistful glance at the sealed envelope. “I think I’ll take it round myself, and you had better come with me, sergeant.”

  He slipped the letter into his pocket, and, leaving the sergeant to take possession of the other effects, made his way out of the building.

  “I suppose, Doctor,” said he, as we crossed into Berners Street, “you are not coming our way! Don’t want to see Mr. Schönberg, h’m?”

  Thorndyke reflected for a moment. “Well, it isn’t very far, and we may as well see the end of the incident. Yes; let us go together.”

  No. 213, Greek Street, was one of those houses that irresistibly suggest to the observer the idea of a church organ, either jamb of the doorway being adorned with a row of brass bell-handles corresponding to the stop-knobs.

  These the sergeant examined with the air of an expert musician, and having, as it were, gauged the capacity of the instrument, selected the middle knob on the right-hand side and pulled it briskly; whereupon a first-floor window was thrown up and a head protruded. But it afforded us a momentary glimpse only, for, having caught the sergeant’s upturned eye, it retired with surprising precipitancy, and before we had time to speculate on the apparition, the street-door was opened and a man emerged. He was about to close the door after him when the inspector interposed.

  “Does Mr. Adolf Schönberg live here?”

  The newcomer, a very typical Jew of the red-haired type, surveyed us thoughtfully through his gold-rimmed spectacles as he repeated the name.

  “Schönberg—Schönberg? Ah, yes! I know. He lives on the third-floor. I saw him go up a short time ago. Third-floor back;” and indicating the open door with a wave of the hand, he raised his hat and passed into the street.

  “I suppose we had better go up,” said the inspector, with a dubious glance at the row of bell-pulls. He accordingly started up the stairs, and we all followed in his wake.

  There were two doors at the back on the third-floor, but as the one was open, displaying an unoccupied bedroom, the inspector rapped smartly on the other. It flew open almost immediately, and a
fierce-looking little man confronted us with a hostile stare.

  “Well?” said he.

  “Mr. Adolf Schönberg?” inquired the inspector.

  “Well? What about him?” snapped our new acquaintance.

  “I wished to have a few words with him,” said Badger.

  “Then what the deuce do you come banging at my door for?” demanded the other.

  “Why, doesn’t he live here?”

  “No. First-floor front,” replied our friend, preparing to close the door.

  “Pardon me,” said Thorndyke, “but what is Mr. Schönberg like? I mean—”

  “Like?” interrupted the resident. “He’s like a blooming Sheeny, with a carroty beard and gold gig-lamps!” and, having presented this impressionist sketch, he brought the interview to a definite close by slamming the door and turning the key.

  With a wrathful exclamation, the inspector turned towards the stairs, down which the sergeant was already clattering in hot haste, and made his way back to the ground-floor, followed, as before, by Thorndyke and me. On the doorstep we found the sergeant breathlessly interrogating a smartly-dressed youth, whom I had seen alight from a hansom as we entered the house, and who now stood with a notebook tucked under his arm, sharpening a pencil with deliberate care.

  “Mr. James saw him come out, sir,” said the sergeant. “He turned up towards the Square.”

  “Did he seem to hurry?” asked the inspector.

  “Rather,” replied the reporter. “As soon as you were inside, he went off like a lamplighter. You won’t catch him now.”

  “We don’t want to catch him,” the detective rejoined gruffly; then, backing out of earshot of the eager pressman, he said in a lower tone: “That was Mr. Schönberg, beyond a doubt, and it is clear that he has some reason for making himself scarce; so I shall consider myself justified in opening that note.”

  He suited the action to the word, and, having cut the envelope open with official neatness, drew out the enclosure.