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

by R. Austin Freeman

  The landlady, who had been joined by a white-faced, tremulous man, wiped her eyes, and replied in a shaky voice: “Her name, poor child, was Minna Adler. She was a German. She came from Bremen about two years ago. She had no friends in England—no relatives, I mean. She was a waitress at a restaurant in Fenchurch Street, and a good, quiet, hard-working girl.”

  “When did you discover what had happened?”

  “About eleven o’clock. I thought she had gone to work as usual, but my husband noticed from the back yard that her blind was still down. So I went up and knocked, and when I got no answer, I opened the door and went in, and then I saw—” Here the poor soul, overcome by the dreadful recollection, burst into hysterical sobs.

  “Her door was unlocked, then; did she usually lock it?”

  “I think so,” sobbed Mrs. Goldstein. “The key was always inside.”

  “And the street door; was that secure when you came down this morning?”

  “It was shut. We don’t bolt it because some of the lodgers come home rather late.”

  “And now tell us, had she any enemies? Was there anyone who had a grudge against her?”

  “No, no, poor child! Why should anyone have a grudge against her? No, she had no quarrel—no real quarrel—with anyone; not even with Miriam.”

  “Miriam!” inquired the inspector. “Who is she?”

  “That was nothing,” interposed the man hastily. “That was not a quarrel.”

  “Just a little unpleasantness, I suppose, Mr. Goldstein?” suggested the inspector.

  “Just a little foolishness about a young man,” said Mr. Goldstein. “That was all. Miriam was a little jealous. But it was nothing.”

  “No, no. Of course. We all know that young women are apt to—”

  A soft footstep had been for some time audible, slowly descending the stair above, and at this moment a turn of the staircase brought the newcomer into view. And at that vision the inspector stopped short as if petrified, and a tense, startled silence fell upon us all. Down the remaining stairs there advanced towards us a young woman, powerful though short, wild-eyed, dishevelled, horror-stricken, and of a ghastly pallor: and her hair was a fiery red.

  Stock still and speechless we all stood as this apparition came slowly towards us; but suddenly the detective slipped back into the room, closing the door after him, to reappear a few moments later holding a small paper packet, which, after a quick glance at the inspector, he placed in his breast pocket.

  “This is my daughter Miriam that we spoke about, gentlemen,” said Mr. Goldstein. “Miriam, those are the doctors and the police.”

  The girl looked at us from one to the other. “You have seen her, then,” she said in a strange, muffled voice, and added: “She isn’t dead, is she? Not really dead?” The question was asked in a tone at once coaxing and despairing, such as a distracted mother might use over the corpse of her child. It filled me with vague discomfort, and, unconsciously, I looked round towards Thorndyke.

  To my surprise he had vanished.

  Noiselessly backing towards the head of the stairs, where I could command a view of the hall, or passage, I looked down, and saw him in the act of reaching up to a shelf behind the street door. He caught my eye, and beckoned, whereupon I crept away unnoticed by the party on the landing. When I reached the hall, he was wrapping up three small objects, each in a separate cigarette-paper; and I noticed that he handled them with more than ordinary tenderness.

  “We didn’t want to see that poor devil of a girl arrested,” said he, as he deposited the three little packets gingerly in his pocket-box. “Let us be off.” He opened the door noiselessly, and stood for a moment, turning the latch backwards and forwards, and closely examining its bolt.

  I glanced up at the shelf behind the door. On it were two flat china candlesticks, in one of which I had happened to notice, as we came in, a short end of candle lying in the tray, and I now looked to see if that was what Thorndyke had annexed; but it was still there.

  I followed my colleague out into the street, and for some time we walked on without speaking. “You guessed what the sergeant had in that paper, of course,” said Thorndyke at length.

  “Yes. It was the hair from the dead woman’s hand; and I thought that he had much better have left it there.”

  “Undoubtedly. But that is the way in which well-meaning policemen destroy valuable evidence. Not that it matters much in this particular instance; but it might have been a fatal mistake.”

  “Do you intend to take any active part in this case?” I asked.

  “That depends on circumstances. I have collected some evidence, but what it is worth I don’t yet know. Neither do I know whether the police have observed the same set of facts; but I need not say that I shall do anything that seems necessary to assist the authorities. That is a matter of common citizenship.”

  The inroads made upon our time by the morning’s adventures made it necessary that we should go each about his respective business without delay; so, after a perfunctory lunch at a tea-shop, we separated, and I did not see my colleague again until the day’s work was finished, and I turned into our chambers just before dinner-time.

  Here I found Thorndyke seated at the table, and evidently full of business. A microscope stood close by, with a condenser throwing a spot of light on to a pinch of powder that had been sprinkled on to the slide; his collecting-box lay open before him, and he was engaged, rather mysteriously, in squeezing a thick white cement from a tube on to three little pieces of moulding-wax.

  “Useful stuff, this Fortafix,” he remarked; “it makes excellent casts, and saves the trouble and mess of mixing plaster, which is a consideration for small work like this. By the way, if you want to know what was on that poor girl’s pillow, just take a peep through the microscope. It is rather a pretty specimen.”

  I stepped across, and applied my eye to the instrument. The specimen was, indeed, pretty in more than a technical sense. Mingled with crystalline grains of quartz, glassy spicules, and water-worn fragments of coral, were a number of lovely little shells, some of the texture of fine porcelain, others like blown Venetian glass.

  “These are Foraminifera!” I exclaimed.

  “Yes.”

  “Then it is not silver sand, after all?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “But what is it, then?”

  Thorndyke smiled. “It is a message to us from the deep sea, Jervis; from the floor of the Eastern Mediterranean.”

  “And can you read the message?”

  “I think I can,” he replied, “but I shall know soon, I hope.”

  I looked down the microscope again, and wondered what message these tiny shells had conveyed to my friend. Deep-sea sand on a dead woman’s pillow! What could be more incongruous? What possible connection could there be between this sordid crime in the east of London and the deep bed of the “tideless sea”?

  Meanwhile Thorndyke squeezed out more cement on to the three little pieces of moulding-wax (which I suspected to be the objects that I had seen him wrapping up with such care in the hall of the Goldsteins’ house); then, laying one of them down on a glass slide, with its cemented side uppermost, he stood the other two upright on either side of it. Finally he squeezed out a fresh load of the thick cement, apparently to bind the three objects together, and carried the slide very carefully to a cupboard, where he deposited it, together with the envelope containing the sand and the slide from the stage of the microscope.

  He was just locking the cupboard when a sharp rat-tat on our knocker sent him hurriedly to the door. A messenger-boy, standing on the threshold, held out a dirty envelope.

  “Mr. Goldstein kept me a awful long time, sir,” said he; “I haven’t been a-loitering.”

  Thorndyke took the envelope over to the gas-light, and, opening it, drew forth a sheet of paper, which he scanned quickly and almost eagerly; and, though his face remained as inscrutable as a mask of stone, I felt a conviction that the paper had told him something th
at he wished to know.

  The boy having been sent on his way rejoicing, Thorndyke turned to the bookshelves, along which he ran his eye thoughtfully until it alighted on a shabbily-bound volume near one end. This he reached down, and as he laid it open on the table, I glanced at it, and was surprised to observe that it was a bi-lingual work, the opposite pages being apparently in Russian and Hebrew.

  “The Old Testament in Russian and Yiddish,” he remarked, noting my surprise. “I am going to get Polton to photograph a couple of specimen pages—is that the postman or a visitor?”

  It turned out to be the postman, and as Thorndyke extracted from the letter-box a blue official envelope, he glanced significantly at me.

  “This answers your question, I think, Jervis,” said he. “Yes; coroner’s subpoena and a very civil letter: ‘sorry to trouble you, but I had no choice under the circumstances’—of course he hadn’t—‘Dr. Davidson has arranged to make the autopsy tomorrow at 4 p.m., and I should be glad if you could be present. The mortuary is in Barker Street, next to the school.’ Well, we must go, I suppose, though Davidson will probably resent it.” He took up the Testament, and went off with it to the laboratory.

  We lunched at our chambers on the following day, and, after the meal, drew up our chairs to the fire and lit our pipes. Thorndyke was evidently preoccupied, for he laid his open notebook on his knee, and, gazing meditatively into the fire, made occasional entries with his pencil as though he were arranging the points of an argument. Assuming that the Aldgate murder was the subject of his cogitations, I ventured to ask:

  “Have you any material evidence to offer the coroner?”

  He closed his notebook and put it away. “The evidence that I have,” he said, “is material and important; but it is disjointed and rather inconclusive. If I can join it up into a coherent whole, as I hope to do before I reach the court, it will be very important indeed—but here is my invaluable familiar, with the instruments of research.” He turned with a smile towards Polton, who had just entered the room, and master and man exchanged a friendly glance of mutual appreciation. The relations of Thorndyke and his assistant were a constant delight to me: on the one side, service, loyal and whole-hearted; on the other, frank and full recognition.

  “I should think those will do, sir,” said Polton, handing his principal a small cardboard box such as playing-cards are carried in. Thorndyke pulled off the lid, and I then saw that the box was fitted internally with grooves for plates, and contained two mounted photographs. The latter were very singular productions indeed; they were copies each of a page of the Testament, one Russian and the other Yiddish; but the lettering appeared white on a black ground, of which it occupied only quite a small space in the middle, leaving a broad black margin. Each photograph was mounted on a stiff card, and each card had a duplicate photograph pasted on the back.

  Thorndyke exhibited them to me with a provoking smile, holding them daintily by their edges, before he slid them back into the grooves of their box.

  “We are making a little digression into philology, you see,” he remarked, as he pocketed the box. “But we must be off now, or we shall keep Davidson waiting. Thank you, Polton.”

  The District Railway carried us swiftly eastward, and we emerged from Aldgate Station a full half-hour before we were due. Nevertheless, Thorndyke stepped out briskly, but instead of making directly for the mortuary, he strayed off unaccountably into Mansell Street, scanning the numbers of the houses as he went. A row of old houses, picturesque but grimy, on our right seemed specially to attract him, and he slowed down as we approached them.

  “There is a quaint survival, Jervis,” he remarked, pointing to a crudely painted, wooden effigy of an Indian standing on a bracket at the door of a small old-fashioned tobacconist’s shop. We halted to look at the little image, and at that moment the side door opened, and a woman came out on to the doorstop, where she stood gazing up and down the street.

  Thorndyke immediately crossed the pavement, and addressed her, apparently with some question, for I heard her answer presently: “A quarter-past six is his time, sir, and he is generally punctual to the minute.”

  “Thank you,” said Thorndyke; “I’ll bear that in mind;” and, lifting his hat, he walked on briskly, turning presently up a side-street which brought us out into Aldgate. It was now but five minutes to four, so we strode off quickly to keep our tryst at the mortuary; but although we arrived at the gate as the hour was striking, when we entered the building we found Dr. Davidson hanging up his apron and preparing to depart.

  “Sorry I couldn’t wait for you,” he said, with no great show of sincerity, “but a post-mortem is a mere farce in a case like this; you have seen all that there was to see. However, there is the body; Hart hasn’t closed it up yet.”

  With this and a curt “good-afternoon” he departed.

  “I must apologize for Dr. Davidson, sir,” said Hart, looking up with a vexed face from the desk at which he was writing out his notes.

  “You needn’t,” said Thorndyke; “you didn’t supply him with manners; and don’t let me disturb you. I only want to verify one or two points.”

  Accepting the hint, Hart and I remained at the desk, while Thorndyke, removing his hat, advanced to the long slate table, and bent over its burden of pitiful tragedy. For some time he remained motionless, running his eye gravely over the corpse, in search, no doubt, of bruises and indications of a struggle. Then he stooped and narrowly examined the wound, especially at its commencement and end. Suddenly he drew nearer, peering intently as if something had attracted his attention, and having taken out his lens, fetched a small sponge, with which he dried an exposed process of the spine. Holding his lens before the dried spot, he again scrutinized it closely, and then, with a scalpel and forceps, detached some object, which he carefully washed, and then once more examined through his lens as it lay in the palm of his hand. Finally, as I expected, he brought forth his “collecting-box,” took from it a seed-envelope, into which he dropped the object—evidently something quite small—closed up the envelope, wrote on the outside of it, and replaced it in the box.

  “I think I have seen all that I wanted to see,” he said, as he pocketed the box and took up his hat. “We shall meet tomorrow morning at the inquest.” He shook hands with Hart, and we went out into the relatively pure air.

  On one pretext or another, Thorndyke lingered about the neighbourhood of Aldgate until a church bell struck six, when he bent his steps towards Harrow Alley. Through the narrow, winding passage he walked, slowly and with a thoughtful mien, along Little Somerset Street and out into Mansell Street, until just on the stroke of a quarter-past we found ourselves opposite the little tobacconist’s shop.

  Thorndyke glanced at his watch and halted, looking keenly up the street. A moment later he hastily took from his pocket the cardboard box, from which he extracted the two mounted photographs which had puzzled me so much. They now seemed to puzzle Thorndyke equally, to judge by his expression, for he held them close to his eyes, scrutinizing them with an anxious frown, and backing by degrees into the doorway at the side of the tobacconist’s. At this moment I became aware of a man who, as he approached, seemed to eye my friend with some curiosity and more disfavour; a very short, burly young man, apparently a foreign Jew, whose face, naturally sinister and unprepossessing, was further disfigured by the marks of smallpox.

  “Excuse me,” he said brusquely, pushing past Thorndyke; “I live here.”

  “I am sorry,” responded Thorndyke. He moved aside, and then suddenly asked: “By the way, I suppose you do not by any chance understand Yiddish?”

  “Why do you ask?” the newcomer demanded gruffly.

  “Because I have just had these two photographs of lettering given to me. One is in Greek, I think, and one in Yiddish, but I have forgotten which is which.” He held out the two cards to the stranger, who took them from him, and looked at them with scowling curiosity.

  “This one is Yiddish,” said he, raising his
right hand, “and this other is Russian, not Greek.” He held out the two cards to Thorndyke, who took them from him, holding them carefully by the edges as before.

  “I am greatly obliged to you for your kind assistance,” said Thorndyke; but before he had time to finish his thanks, the man had entered, by means of his latchkey, and slammed the door.

  Thorndyke carefully slid the photographs back into their grooves, replaced the box in his pocket, and made an entry in his notebook.

  “That,” said he, “finishes my labours, with the exception of a small experiment which I can perform at home. By the way, I picked up a morsel of evidence that Davidson had overlooked. He will be annoyed, and I am not very fond of scoring off a colleague; but he is too uncivil for me to communicate with.”

  * * * *

  The coroner’s subpoena had named ten o’clock as the hour at which Thorndyke was to attend to give evidence, but a consultation with a well-known solicitor so far interfered with his plans that we were a quarter of an hour late in starting from the Temple. My friend was evidently in excellent spirits, though silent and preoccupied, from which I inferred that he was satisfied with the results of his labours; but, as I sat by his side in the hansom, I forbore to question him, not from mere unselfishness, but rather from the desire to hear his evidence for the first time in conjunction with that of the other witnesses.

  The room in which the inquest was held formed part of a school adjoining the mortuary. Its vacant bareness was on this occasion enlivened by a long, baize-covered table, at the head of which sat the coroner, while one side was occupied by the jury; and I was glad to observe that the latter consisted, for the most part, of genuine working men, instead of the stolid-faced, truculent “professional jurymen” who so often grace these tribunals.

  A row of chairs accommodated the witnesses, a corner of the table was allotted to the accused woman’s solicitor, a smart dapper gentleman in gold pince-nez, a portion of one side to the reporters, and several ranks of benches were occupied by a miscellaneous assembly representing the public.