Miraculous Mysteries

by Martin Edwards

  ‘Really!’ exclaimed Marchmont, with a glance of respectful admiration at Polton; ‘it is a perfect replica—and you have made it so quickly, too.’

  ‘It was quite easy to make,’ said Polton, ‘to a man accustomed to work in metal.’

  ‘Which,’ added Thorndyke, ‘is a fact of some evidential value.’

  At this moment a hansom drew up outside. A moment later flying footsteps were heard on the stairs. There was a furious battering at the door, and, as Polton threw it open, Mr. Curtis burst wildly into the room.

  ‘Here is a frightful thing, Marchmont!’ he gasped. ‘Edith—my daughter—arrested for the murder. Inspector Badger came to our house and took her. My God! I shall go mad!’

  Thorndyke laid his hand on the excited man’s shoulder. ‘Don’t distress yourself, Mr. Curtis,’ said he. ‘There is no occasion, I assure you. I suppose,’ he added, ‘your daughter is left-handed?’

  ‘Yes, she is, by a most disastrous coincidence. But what are we to do? Good God! Dr. Thorndyke, they have taken her to prison—to prison—think of it! My poor Edith!’

  ‘We’ll soon have her out,’ said Thorndyke. ‘But listen; there is someone at the door.’

  A brisk rat-tat confirmed his statement, and when I rose to open the door, I found myself confronted by Inspector Badger. There was a moment of extreme awkwardness, and then both the detective and Mr. Curtis proposed to retire in favour of the other.

  ‘Don’t go, inspector,’ said Thorndyke; ‘I want to have a word with you. Perhaps Mr. Curtis would look in again, say, in an hour. Will you? We shall have news for you by then, I hope.’

  Mr. Curtis agreed hastily, and dashed out of the room with his characteristic impetuosity. When he had gone, Thorndyke turned to the detective, and remarked dryly:

  ‘You seem to have been busy, inspector?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Badger; ‘I haven’t let the grass grow under my feet; and I’ve got a pretty strong case against Miss Curtis already. You see, she was the last person seen in the company of the deceased; she had a grievance against him; she is left-handed, and you remember that the murder was committed by a left-handed person.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes. I have seen those Italians, and the whole thing was a put-up job. A woman, in a widow’s dress and veil, paid them to go and play the fool outside the building, and she gave them the letter that was left with the porter. They haven’t identified her yet, but she seems to agree in size with Miss Curtis.’

  ‘And how did she get out of the chambers, with the door bolted on the inside?’

  ‘Ah, there you are! That’s a mystery at present—unless you can give us an explanation.’ The inspector made this qualification with a faint grin, and added: ‘As there was no one in the place when we broke into it, the murderer must have got out somehow. You can’t deny that.’

  ‘I do deny it, nevertheless,’ said Thorndyke. ‘You look surprised,’ he continued (which was undoubtedly true), ‘but yet the whole thing is exceedingly obvious. The explanation struck me directly I looked at the body. There was evidently no practicable exit from the flat, and there was certainly no one in it when you entered. Clearly, then, the murderer had never been in the place at all.’

  ‘I don’t follow you in the least,’ said the inspector.

  ‘Well,’ said Thorndyke, ‘as I have finished with the case, and am handing it over to you, I will put the evidence before you seriatim. Now, I think we are agreed that, at the moment when the blow was struck, the deceased was standing before the fireplace, winding the clock. The dagger entered obliquely from the left, and, if you recall its position, you will remember that its hilt pointed directly towards an open window.’

  ‘Which was forty feet from the ground.’

  ‘Yes. And now we will consider the very peculiar character of the weapon with which the crime was committed.’

  He had placed his hand upon the knob of a drawer, when we were interrupted by a knock at the door. I sprang up, and, opening it, admitted no less a person than the porter of Brackenhurst Chambers. The man looked somewhat surprised on recognising our visitors, but advanced to Thorndyke, drawing a folded paper from his pocket.

  ‘I’ve found the article you were looking for, sir,’ said he, ‘and a rare hunt I had for it. It had stuck in the leaves of one of them shrubs.’

  Thorndyke opened the packet, and, having glanced inside, laid it on the table.

  ‘Thank you,’ said he, pushing a sovereign across to the gratified official. ‘The inspector has your name, I think?’

  ‘He have, sir,’ replied the porter; and, pocketing his fee, he departed, beaming.

  ‘To return to the dagger,’ said Thorndyke, opening the drawer. ‘It was a very peculiar one, as I have said, and as you will see from this model, which is an exact duplicate.’ Here he exhibited Polton’s production to the astonished detective. ‘You see that it is extraordinarily slender, and free from projections, and of unusual materials. You also see that it was obviously not made by an ordinary dagger-maker; that, in spite of the Italian word scrawled on it, there is plainly written all over it “British mechanic.” The blade is made from a strip of common three-quarter-inch tool steel; the hilt is turned from an aluminium rod; and there is not a line of engraving on it that could not be produced in a lathe by any engineer’s apprentice. Even the boss at the top is mechanical, for it is just like an ordinary hexagon nut. Then, notice the dimensions, as shown on my drawing. The parts A and B, which just project beyond the blade, are exactly similar in diameter—and such exactness could hardly be accidental. They are each parts of a circle having a diameter of 10·9 millimetres—a dimension which happens, by a singular coincidence, to be exactly the calibre of the old Chassepôt rifle, specimens of which are now on sale at several shops in London. Here is one, for instance.’

  He fetched the rifle that he had bought, from the corner in which it was standing, and, lifting the dagger by its point, slipped the hilt into the muzzle. When he let go, the dagger slid quietly down the barrel, until its hilt appeared in the open breech.

  ‘Good God!’ exclaimed Marchmont. ‘You don’t suggest that the dagger was shot from a gun?’

  ‘I do, indeed; and you now see the reason for the aluminium hilt—to diminish the weight of the already heavy projectile—and also for this hexagonal boss on the end?’

  ‘No, I do not,’ said the inspector; ‘but I say that you are suggesting an impossibility.’

  ‘Then,’ replied Thorndyke, ‘I must explain and demonstrate. To begin with, this projectile had to travel point foremost; therefore it had to be made to spin—and it certainly was spinning when it entered the body, as the clothing and the wound showed us. Now, to make it spin, it had to be fired from a rifled barrel; but as the hilt would not engage in the rifling, it had to be fitted with something that would. That something was evidently a soft metal washer, which fitted on to this hexagon, and which would be pressed into the grooves of the rifling, and so spin the dagger, but would drop off as soon as the weapon left the barrel. Here is such a washer, which Polton has made for us.’

  He laid on the table a metal disc, with a hexagonal hole through it.

  ‘This is all very ingenious,’ said the inspector, ‘but I say it is impossible and fantastic.’

  ‘It certainly sounds rather improbable,’ Marchmont agreed.

  ‘We will see,’ said Thorndyke. ‘Here is a makeshift cartridge of Polton’s manufacture, containing an eighth charge of smokeless powder for a 20-bore gun.’

  He fitted the washer on to the boss of the dagger in the open breech of the rifle, pushed it into the barrel, inserted the cartridge, and closed the breech. Then, opening the office-door, he displayed a target of padded strawboard against the wall.

  ‘The length of the two rooms,’ said he, ‘gives us a distance of thirty-two feet. Will you shut the windows, Jervis?’
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br />   I complied, and he then pointed the rifle at the target. There was a dull report—much less loud than I had expected—and when we looked at the target, we saw the dagger driven in up to its hilt at the margin of the bull’s-eye.

  ‘You see,’ said Thorndyke, laying down the rifle, ‘that the thing is practicable. Now for the evidence as to the actual occurrence. First, on the original dagger there are linear scratches which exactly correspond with the grooves of the rifling. Then there is the fact that the dagger was certainly spinning from left to right—in the direction of the rifling, that is—when it entered the body. And then there is this, which, as you heard, the porter found in the garden.’

  He opened the paper packet. In it lay a metal disc, perforated by a hexagonal hole. Stepping into the office, he picked up from the floor the washer that he had put on the dagger, and laid it on the paper beside the other. The two discs were identical in size, and the margin of each was indented with identical markings, corresponding to the rifling of the barrel.

  The inspector gazed at the two discs in silence for a while; then, looking up at Thorndyke, he said:

  ‘I give in, Doctor. You’re right, beyond all doubt; but how you came to think of it beats me into fits. The only question now is, Who fired the gun, and why wasn’t the report heard?’

  ‘As to the latter,’ said Thorndyke, ‘it is probable that he used a compressed-air attachment, not only to diminish the noise, but also to prevent any traces of the explosive from being left on the dagger. As to the former, I think I can give you the murderer’s name; but we had better take the evidence in order. You may remember,’ he continued, ‘that when Dr. Jervis stood as if winding the clock, I chalked a mark on the floor where he stood. Now, standing on that marked spot, and looking out of the open window, I could see two of the windows of a house nearly opposite. They were the second-and third-floor windows of No. 6, Cotman Street. The second-floor is occupied by a firm of architects; the third-floor by a commission agent named Thomas Barlow. I called on Mr. Barlow, but before describing my visit, I will refer to another matter. You haven’t those threatening letters about you, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, I have,’ said the inspector; and he drew forth a wallet from his breast-pocket.

  ‘Let us take the first one, then,’ said Thorndyke. ‘You see that the paper and envelope are of the very commonest, and the writing illiterate. But the ink does not agree with this. Illiterate people usually buy their ink in penny bottles. Now, this envelope is addressed with Draper’s dichroic ink—a superior office ink, sold only in large bottles—and the red ink in which the note is written is an unfixed, scarlet ink, such as is used by draughtsmen, and has been used, as you can see, in a stylographic pen. But the most interesting thing about this letter is the design drawn at the top. In an artistic sense, the man could not draw, and the anatomical details of the skull are ridiculous. Yet the drawing is very neat. It has the clean, wiry line of a machine drawing, and is done with a steady, practised hand. It is also perfectly symmetrical; the skull, for instance, is exactly in the centre, and, when we examine it through a lens, we see why it is so, for we discover traces of a pencilled centre-line and ruled cross-lines. Moreover, the lens reveals a tiny particle of draughtsman’s soft, red, rubber, with which the pencil lines were taken out; and all these facts, taken together, suggest that the drawing was made by someone accustomed to making accurate mechanical drawings. And now we will return to Mr. Barlow. He was out when I called, but I took the liberty of glancing round the office, and this is what I saw. On the mantelshelf was a twelve-inch flat boxwood rule, such as engineers use, a piece of soft, red rubber, and a stone bottle of Draper’s dichroic ink. I obtained, by a simple ruse, a specimen of the office notepaper and the ink. We will examine it presently. I found that Mr. Barlow is a new tenant, that he is rather short, wears a wig and spectacles, and always wears a glove on his left hand. He left the office at 8.30 this morning, and no one saw him arrive. He had with him a square case, and a narrow, oblong one about five feet in length; and he took a cab to Victoria, and apparently caught the 8.51 train to Chatham.’

  ‘Ah!’ exclaimed the inspector.

  ‘But,’ continued Thorndyke, ‘now examine those three letters, and compare them with this note that I wrote in Mr. Barlow’s office. You see that the paper is of the same make, with the same water-mark, but that is of no great significance. What is of crucial importance is this: You see, in each of these letters, two tiny indentations near the bottom corner. Somebody has used compasses or drawing-pins over the packet of notepaper, and the points have made little indentations, which have marked several of the sheets. Now, notepaper is cut to its size after it is folded, and if you stick a pin into the top sheet of a section, the indentations on all the underlying sheets will be at exactly similar distances from the edges and corners of the sheet. But you see that these little dents are all at the same distance from the edges and the corner.’ He demonstrated the fact with a pair of compasses. ‘And now look at this sheet, which I obtained at Mr. Barlow’s office. There are two little indentations—rather faint, but quite visible—near the bottom corner, and when we measure them with the compasses, we find that they are exactly the same distance apart as the others, and the same distance from the edges and the bottom corner. The irresistible conclusion is that these four sheets came from the same packet.’

  The inspector started up from his chair, and faced Thorndyke. ‘Who is this Mr. Barlow?’ he asked.

  ‘That,’ replied Thorndyke, ‘is for you to determine; but I can give you a useful hint. There is only one person who benefits by the death of Alfred Hartridge, but he benefits to the extent of twenty thousand pounds. His name is Leonard Wolfe, and I learn from Mr. Marchmont that he is a man of indifferent character—a gambler and a spendthrift. By profession he is an engineer, and he is a capable mechanician. In appearance he is thin, short, fair, and clean-shaven, and he has lost the middle finger of his left hand. Mr. Barlow is also short, thin, and fair, but wears a wig, a beard, and spectacles, and always wears a glove on his left hand. I have seen the handwriting of both these gentlemen, and should say that it would be difficult to distinguish one from the other.’

  ‘That’s good enough for me,’ said the inspector. ‘Give me his address, and I’ll have Miss Curtis released at once.’

  ***

  The same night Leonard Wolfe was arrested at Eltham, in the very act of burying in his garden a large and powerful compressed-air rifle. He was never brought to trial, however, for he had in his pocket a more portable weapon—a large-bore Derringer pistol—with which he managed to terminate an exceedingly ill-spent life.

  ‘And, after all,’ was Thorndyke’s comment, when he heard of the event, ‘he had his uses. He has relieved society of two very bad men, and he has given us a most instructive case. He has shown us how a clever and ingenious criminal may take endless pains to mislead and delude the police, and yet, by inattention to trivial details, may scatter clues broadcast. We can only say to the criminal class generally, in both respects, “Go thou and do likewise.”’

  The Miracle of

  Moon Crescent

  G.K. Chesterton

  Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1870–1936) was fascinated to the point of obsession by the concept of paradox, above all in the context of discussions about Christian faith. When he turned to writing detective stories, he was naturally drawn to the concept of a seemingly impossible crime; Robert Adey’s Locked Room Murders lists no fewer than twenty-six impossible crime stories by Chesterton. Many feature the priest detective Father Brown, whose recent emergence on twenty-first century television, solving crimes in 1950s Britain, is so incongruous that his creator would no doubt have been greatly amused.

  ‘The Miracle of Moon Crescent’ first appeared in the May 1924 issue of Nash’s Magazine, and was collected in The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926). The story is untypical of Chesterton’s work in that it is set in the U.S., but i
t is a fascinating example of his ability to deal with an interesting moral question in the context of an enjoyable work of detective fiction. And his flair as a wordsmith is illustrated in the often-quoted phrase about ‘hard-shelled materialists…all balanced on the very edge of belief—of belief in almost anything.’

  ***

  Moon Crescent was meant in a sense to be as romantic as its name; and the things that happened there were romantic enough in their way. At least it had been an expression of that genuine element of sentiment—historic and almost heroic—which manages to remain side by side with commercialism in the elder cities on the eastern coast of America. It was originally a curve of classical architecture really recalling that eighteenth-century atmosphere in which men like Washington and Jefferson had seemed to be all the more republicans for being aristocrats. Travellers faced with the recurrent query of what they thought of our city were understood to be specially answerable for what they thought of our Moon Crescent. The very contrasts that confuse its original harmony were characteristic of its survival. At one extremity or horn of the crescent its last windows looked over an enclosure like a strip of a gentleman’s park, with trees and hedges as formal as a Queen Anne garden. But immediately round the corner, the other windows, even of the same rooms, or rather ‘apartments’, looked out on the blank, unsightly wall of a huge warehouse attached to some ugly industry. The apartments of Moon Crescent itself were at that end remodelled on the monotonous pattern of an American hotel, and rose to a height, which, though lower than the colossal warehouse, would have been called a skyscraper in London. But the colonnade that ran round the whole frontage upon the street had a grey and weather-stained stateliness suggesting that the ghosts of the Fathers of the Republic might still be walking to and fro in it. The insides of the rooms, however, were as neat and new as the last New York fittings could make them, especially at the northern end between the neat garden and the blank warehouse wall. They were a system of very small flats, as we should say in England, each consisting of a sitting-room, bedroom, and bathroom, as identical as the hundred cells of a hive. In one of these the celebrated Warren Wynd sat at his desk sorting letters and scattering orders with wonderful rapidity and exactitude. He could only be compared to a tidy whirlwind.