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

by R. Austin Freeman

  “You are hardly fair to the coast-guard,” said Thorndyke, laughing at the captain’s vehemence. “The duty of a witness is to give all the facts, not a judicious selection.”

  “But, my dear sir,” said Captain Grumpass, “what the deuce can it matter what the poor devil filled his pipe from?”

  “Who can say?” answered Thorndyke. “It may turn out to be a highly material fact. One never knows beforehand. The value of a particular fact depends on its relation to the rest of the evidence.”

  “I suppose it does,” grunted the captain; and he continued to smoke in reflective silence until we opened Black-wall Point, when he suddenly stood up.

  “There’s a steam trawler alongside our wharf,” he announced. “Now what the deuce can she be doing there?” He scanned the little steamer attentively, and continued:

  “They seem to be landing something, too. Just pass me those glasses, Polton. Why, hang me! It’s a dead body! But why on earth are they landing it on our wharf? They must have known you were coming, doctor.”

  As the launch swept alongside the wharf, the captain sprang up lightly and approached the group gathered round the body. “What’s this?” he asked. “Why have they brought this thing here?”

  The master of the trawler, who had superintended the landing, proceeded to explain.

  “It’s one of your men, sir,” said he. “We saw the body lying on the edge of the South Shingles Sand, close to the beacon, as we passed at low water, so we put off the boat and fetched it aboard. As there was nothing to identify the man by, I had a look in his pockets and found this letter.”

  He handed the captain an official envelope addressed to: “Mr. J. Brown, care of Mr. Solly, Shepherd, Reculver, Kent.”

  “Why, this is the man we were speaking about, doctor,” exclaimed Captain Grumpass. “What a very singular coincidence. But what are we to do with the body?”

  “You will have to write to the coroner,” replied Thorndyke. “By the way, did you turn out all the pockets?” he asked, turning to the skipper of the trawler.

  “No, sir,” was the reply. “I found the letter in the first pocket that I felt in, so I didn’t examine any of the others. Is there anything more that you want to know, sir?”

  “Nothing but your name and address, for the coroner,” replied Thorndyke, and the skipper, having given this information and expressed the hope that the coroner would not keep him “hanging about,” returned to his vessel and pursued his way to Billingsgate.

  “I wonder if you would mind having a look at the body of this poor devil, while Polton is showing us his contraptions,” said Captain Grumpass.

  “I can’t do much without a coroner’s order,” replied Thorndyke; “but if it will give you any satisfaction, Jervis and I will make a preliminary inspection with pleasure.”

  “I should be glad if you would,” said the captain. “We should like to know that the poor beggar met his end fairly.”

  The body was accordingly moved to a shed, and, as Polton was led away, carrying the black bag that contained his precious model, we entered the shed and commenced our investigation.

  The deceased was a small, elderly man, decently dressed in a somewhat nautical fashion. He appeared to have been dead only two or three days, and the body, unlike the majority of sea-borne corpses, was uninjured by fish or crabs. There were no fractured bones or other gross injuries, and no wounds, excepting a rugged tear in the scalp at the back of the head.

  “The general appearance of the body,” said Thorndyke, when he had noted these particulars, “suggests death by drowning, though, of course, we can’t give a definite opinion until a post mortem has been made.”

  “You don’t attach any significance to that scalp-wound, then?” I asked.

  “As a cause of death? No. It was obviously inflicted during life, but it seems to have been an oblique blow that spent its force on the scalp, leaving the skull uninjured. But it is very significant in another way.”

  “In what way?” I asked.

  Thorndyke took out his pocket-case and extracted a pair of forceps. “Consider the circumstances,” said he. “This man put off from the shore to go to the lighthouse, but never arrived there. The question is, where did he arrive?” As he spoke he stooped over the corpse and turned back the hair round the wound with the beak of the forceps. “Look at those white objects among the hair, Jervis, and inside the wound. They tell us something, I think.”

  I examined, through my lens, the chalky fragments to which he pointed. “These seem to be bits of shells and the tubes of some marine worm,” I said.

  “Yes,” he answered; “the broken shells are evidently those of the acorn barnacle, and the other fragments are mostly pieces of the tubes of the common serpula. The inference that these objects suggest is an important one. It is that this wound was produced by some body encrusted by acorn barnacles and serpula; that is to say, by a body that is periodically submerged. Now, what can that body be, and how can the deceased have knocked his head against it?”

  “It might be the stem of a ship that ran him down,” I suggested.

  “I don’t think you would find many serpulae on the stem of a ship,” said Thorndyke. “The combination rather suggests some stationary object between tidemarks, such as a beacon. But one doesn’t see how a man could knock his head against a beacon, while, on the other hand, there are no other stationary objects out in the estuary to knock against except buoys, and a buoy presents a flat surface that could hardly have produced this wound. By the way, we may as well see what there is in his pockets, though it is not likely that robbery had anything to do with his death.”

  “No,” I agreed, “and I see his watch is in his pocket; quite a good silver one,” I added, taking it out. “It has stopped at 12.13.”

  “That may be important,” said Thorndyke, making a note of the fact; “but we had better examine the pockets one at a time, and put the things back when we have looked at them.”

  The first pocket that we turned out was the left hip-pocket of the monkey jacket. This was apparently the one that the skipper had rifled, for we found in it two letters, both bearing the crest of the Trinity House. These, of course, we returned without reading, and then passed on to the right pocket. The contents of this were common-place enough, consisting of a briar pipe, a moleskin pouch and a number of loose matches.

  “Rather a casual proceeding, this,” I remarked, “to carry matches loose in the pocket, and a pipe with them, too.”

  “Yes,” agreed Thorndyke; “especially with these very inflammable matches. You notice that the sticks had been coated at the upper end with sulphur before the red phosphorous heads were put on. They would light with a touch, and would be very difficult to extinguish; which, no doubt, is the reason that this type of match is so popular among seamen, who have to light their pipes in all sorts of weather.” As he spoke he picked up the pipe and looked at it reflectively, turning it over in his hand and peering into the bowl. Suddenly he glanced from the pipe to the dead man’s face and then, with the forceps, turned back the lips to look into the mouth.

  “Let us see what tobacco he smokes,” said he.

  I opened the sodden pouch and displayed a mass of dark, fine-cut tobacco. “It looks like shag,” I said.

  “Yes, it is shag,” he replied; “and now we will see what is in the pipe. It has been only half-smoked out.” He dug out the “dottle” with his pocket-knife onto a sheet of paper, and we both inspected it. Clearly it was not shag, for it consisted of coarsely-cut shreds and was nearly black.

  “Shavings from a cake of ‘hard,’” was my verdict, and Thorndyke agreed as he shot the fragments back into the pipe.

  The other pockets yielded nothing of interest, except a pocket-knife, which Thorndyke opened and examined closely. There was not much money, though as much as one would expect, and enough to exclude the idea of robbery.

  “Is there a sheath-knife on that strap?” Thorndyke asked, pointing to a narrow leather belt. I turne
d back the jacket and looked.

  “There is a sheath,” I said, “but no knife. It must have dropped out.”

  “That is rather odd,” said Thorndyke. “A sailor’s sheath-knife takes a deal of shaking out as a rule. It is intended to be used in working on the rigging when the man is aloft, so that he can get it out with one hand while he is holding on with the other. It has to be and usually is very secure, for the sheath holds half the handle as well as the blade. What makes one notice the matter in this case is that the man, as you see, carried a pocket-knife; and, as this would serve all the ordinary purposes of a knife, it seems to suggest that the sheath-knife was carried for defensive purposes: as a weapon, in fact. However, we can’t get much further in the case without a post mortem, and here comes the captain.”

  Captain Grumpass entered the shed and looked down commiseratingly at the dead seaman.

  “Is there anything, doctor, that throws any light on the man’s disappearance?” he asked.

  “There are one or two curious features in the case,” Thorndyke replied; “but, oddly enough, the only really important point arises out of that statement of the coastguard’s, concerning which you were so scornful.”

  “You don’t say so!” exclaimed the captain.

  “Yes,” said Thorndyke; “the coast-guard states that when last seen deceased was filling his pipe from his tobacco-pouch. Now his pouch contains shag; but the pipe in his pocket contains hard cut.”

  “Is there no cake tobacco in any of the pockets?”

  “Not a fragment. Of course, it is possible that he might have had a piece and used it up to fill the pipe; but there is no trace of any on the blade of his pocket-knife, and you know how this juicy black cake stains a knife-blade. His sheath-knife is missing, but he would hardly have used that to shred tobacco when he had a pocket-knife.”

  “No,” assented the captain; “but are you sure he hadn’t a second pipe?”

  “There was only one pipe,” replied Thorndyke, “and that was not his own.”

  “Not his own!” exclaimed the captain, halting by a huge, chequered buoy, to stare at my colleague. “How do you know it was not his own?”

  “By the appearance of the vulcanite mouthpiece,” said Thorndyke. “It showed deep tooth-marks; in fact, it was nearly bitten through. Now a man who bites through his pipe usually presents certain definite physical peculiarities, among which is, necessarily, a fairly good set of teeth. But the dead man had not a tooth in his head.”

  The captain cogitated a while, and then remarked: “I don’t quite see the bearing of this.”

  “Don’t you?” said Thorndyke. “It seems to me highly suggestive. Here is a man who, when last seen, was filling his pipe with a particular kind of tobacco. He is picked up dead, and his pipe contains a totally different kind of tobacco. Where did that tobacco come from? The obvious suggestion is that he had met some one.”

  “Yes, it does look like it,” agreed the captain.

  “Then,” continued Thorndyke, “there is the fact that his sheath-knife is missing. That may mean nothing, but we have to bear it in mind. And there is another curious circumstance: there is a wound on the back of the head caused by a heavy bump against some body that was covered with acorn barnacles and marine worms. Now there are no piers or stages out in the open estuary. The question is, what could he have struck?”

  “Oh, there is nothing in that,” said the captain. “When a body has been washing about in a tide-way for close on three days—”

  “But this is not a question of a body,” Thorndyke interrupted. “The wound was made during life.”

  “The deuce it was!” exclaimed the captain. “Well, all I can suggest is that he must have fouled one of the beacons in the fog, stove in his boat and bumped his head, though, I must admit, that’s rather a lame explanation.” He stood for a minute gazing at his toes with a cogitative frown and then looked up at Thorndyke.

  “I have an idea,” he said. “From what you say, this matter wants looking into pretty carefully. Now, I am going down on the tender today to make inquiries on the spot. What do you say to coming with me as adviser—as a matter of business, of course—you and Dr. Jervis? I shall start about eleven; we shall be at the lighthouse by three o’clock, and you can get back to town tonight, if you want to. What do you say?”

  “There’s nothing to hinder us,” I put in eagerly, for even at Bugsby’s Hole the river looked very alluring on this summer morning.

  “Very well,” said Thorndyke, “we will come. Jervis is evidently hankering for a sea-trip, and so am I, for that matter.”

  “It’s a business engagement, you know,” the captain stipulated.

  “Nothing of the kind,” said Thorndyke; “it’s unmitigated pleasure; the pleasure of the voyage and your high well-born society.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” grumbled the captain, “but, if you are coming as guests, send your man for your nightgear and let us bring you back tomorrow evening.”

  “We won’t disturb Polton,” said my colleague; “we can take the train from Blackwall and fetch our things ourselves. Eleven o’clock, you said?”

  “Thereabouts,” said Captain Grumpass; “but don’t put yourselves out.”

  The means of communication in London have reached an almost undesirable state of perfection. With the aid of the snorting train and the tinkling, two-wheeled “gondola,” we crossed and re-crossed the town with such celerity that it was barely eleven when we re-appeared on Trinity Wharf with a joint Gladstone and Thorndyke’s little green case.

  The tender had hauled out of Bow Creek, and now lay alongside the wharf with a great striped can buoy dangling from her derrick, and Captain Grumpass stood at the gangway, his jolly, red face beaming with pleasure. The buoy was safely stowed forward, the derrick hauled up to the mast, the loose shrouds rehooked to the screw-lanyards, and the steamer, with four jubilant hoots, swung round and shoved her sharp nose against the incoming tide.

  For near upon four hours the ever-widening stream of the “London River” unfolded its moving panorama. The smoke and smell of Woolwich Reach gave place to lucid air made soft by the summer haze; the grey huddle of factories fell away and green levels of cattle-spotted marsh stretched away to the high land bordering the river valley. Venerable training ships displayed their chequered hulls by the wooded shore, and whispered of the days of oak and hemp, when the tall three-decker, comely and majestic, with her soaring heights of canvas, like towers of ivory, had not yet given place to the mud-coloured saucepans that fly the white ensign now-a-days and devour the substance of the British taxpayer: when a sailor was a sailor and not a mere seafaring mechanic. Sturdily breasting the flood tide, the tender threaded her way through the endless procession of shipping; barges, billy-boys, schooners, brigs; lumpish Black-seamen, blue-funnelled China tramps, rickety Baltic barques with twirling windmills, gigantic liners, staggering under a mountain of top-hamper. Erith, Purfleet, Greenhithe, Grays greeted us and passed astern. The chimneys of Northfleet, the clustering roofs of Gravesend, the populous anchorage and the lurking batteries, were left behind, and, as we swung out of the Lower Hope, the wide expanse of sea reach spread out before us like a great sheet of blue-shot satin.

  About half-past twelve the ebb overtook us and helped us on our way, as we could see by the speed with which the distant land slid past, and the freshening of the air as we passed through it.

  But sky and sea were hushed in a summer calm. Balls of fleecy cloud hung aloft, motionless in the soft blue; the barges drifted on the tide with drooping sails, and a big, striped bell buoy—surmounted by a staff and cage and labelled, “Shivering Sand”—sat dreaming in the sun above its motionless reflection, to rouse for a moment as it met our wash, nod its cage drowsily, utter a solemn ding-dong, and fall asleep again.

  It was shortly after passing the buoy that the gaunt shape of a screw-pile lighthouse began to loom up ahead, its dull-red paint turned to vermilion by the early afternoon sun. As we drew nearer, the n
ame Girdler, painted in huge, white letters, became visible, and two men could be seen in the gallery around the lantern, inspecting us through a telescope.

  “Shall you be long at the lighthouse, sir?” the master of the tender inquired of Captain Grumpass; “because we’re going down, to the North-East Pan Sand to fix this new buoy and take up the old one.”

  “Then you’d better put us off at the lighthouse and come back for us when you’ve finished the job,” was the reply. “I don’t know how long we shall be.”

  The tender was brought to, a boat lowered, and a couple of hands pulled us across the intervening space of water.

  “It will be a dirty climb for you in your shore-going clothes,” the captain remarked—he was as spruce as a new pin himself, “but the stuff will all wipe off.” We looked up at the skeleton shape. The falling tide had exposed some fifteen feet of the piles, and piles and ladder alike were swathed in sea-grass and encrusted with barnacles and worm-tubes. But we were not such town-sparrows as the captain seemed to think, for we both followed his lead without difficulty up the slippery ladder, Thorndyke clinging tenaciously to his little green case, from which he refused to be separated even for an instant.

  “These gentlemen and I,” said the captain, as we stepped on the stage at the head of the ladder, “have come to make inquiries about the missing man, James Brown. Which of you is Jeffreys?”

  “I am, sir,” replied a tall, powerful, square-jawed, beetle-browed man, whose left hand was tied up in a rough bandage.

  “What have you been doing to your hand?” asked the captain.

  “I cut it while I was peeling some potatoes,” was the reply. “It isn’t much of a cut, sir.”

  “Well, Jeffreys,” said the captain, “Brown’s body has been picked up and I want particulars for the inquest. You’ll be summoned as a witness, I suppose, so come in and tell us all you know.”