Mycroft Holmes 03 - The Notched Hairpin

by H. F. Heard

  “I don’t quite know if you would put it that way if you knew what it actually was,” replied Millum.

  “I’m not sure I wouldn’t,” replied Mr. M., very sure of himself.

  But this was such a common state with him that I ventured out of my humble ignorance and its need for enlightenment to take his usual response and say, “Please go on!”

  “What I saw seemed to make the thing not only simple but to get rid of my last hesitation. Anyhow, after that I felt under a real compulsion at least to try. I had to, if I may use the term, cast the die. Whether I failed or no, I now had the sensation that I was simply a tool, a surgical instrument, a lance being used for medical purpose …”

  He stopped, almost started again, thought better of it, and then said briefly, “There, that’s my story,” and was silent.

  “A very incomplete one, if I may say so,” I started up.

  Mr. M. waved me down. “No,” he remarked, “no, the only omissions I can see are two, and quite small: the incident of which Jane has told us, that in one of your kindly efforts to distract the almost insane Sankey you lent him that charming collection of classic literature that opens—to give the mise en scène—with the extraordinary crime stories of a family, six of whom became masters of the world, five of whom went off their heads, and four of whom were murdered. The other small omission, and I think perhaps more important, is the second visit which you made to your own roof.”

  Millum nodded, adding, “But do these matter? It was motive you were after; method, by some reason best known to yourself, you knew. After all, I threw in my hand, didn’t I, when I saw your exhibit? And I think you may allow, all the more because of what I’ve told you, that I was ready enough to surrender to anyone who could bring it home, and,” he paused, “more than willingly, to one who brought it home in the way you did.”

  It was Mr. M. who now was looking at the ground.

  Then, after quite a long silence, during which my patience was not improving (but neither of the others seemed to care or think of me), at last Mr. M. said, “Now for our third problem, that third act, up to which it is so easy to write the two pointing acts, but which is itself so hard.”

  But there Mr. Millum broke in and, to my pleasure, was on my side. I was in the dark, and whether Mr. M.’s idea of a denouement was as interesting as he fancied, for me to judge I must have some notion of what had actually taken place; and I still had only the foggiest. To find, then, that Millum, with whom I had grown impatient—he seemed so blindly to back up all Mr. M.’s hints at it all being clear as daylight—to find him on my side and bewildered after all, made me feel a fellow sympathy for him, whether he was or was not a murderer of a man who certainly was a most unpleasant person.

  So when Millum said, “May we go back a little?” I joined in with a hearty, “Hear, hear.”

  “I’ve put my cards on the table,” he continued, “and I don’t want to make out that it is anything but a pretty grim hand. And I repeat that I am ready to pay the stakes, even if that should include hanging. I have given you the motive. It is for you to judge whether you think I have been truthful and, if so, would human life be safer if Sankey were alive or if I were hanged. I can now say I really and literally don’t care a hang. I can’t see that he had not become a kind of human cancer, but equally I can now see that so cutting him out was a false stroke. I’m at the end of my tether, you see. But before I go, just to get that surface part of my mind at ease and leave it free for the main problem, which is, of course, motive and whether means do cover ends, I would be grateful if you’d tell me the steps by which you came to—” and he pointed at the table, “to collect that bouquet of such telling arrangement that the moment I saw it I knew the game was up. I have given you the motive, the ‘Why,’ now, show me how you found the ‘How.’”

  Chapter IV

  MR. MYCROFT’S “HOW?”

  Mr. Mycrgft rose and stretched himself. He seemed wonderfully at his ease; indeed, had he been that sort, I would have said he was almost in a kind of high spirits. He seemed quite ready to fall in with our wishes—perhaps flattered that we wanted to know. It crossed my mind, too, that maybe he wanted to use the back of his mind in the way in which he and Millum had been speaking of it, while he ran through with us the past moves he had made. He could not, however, avoid the traditional cliche at the start, that “patter” opening of all these old hands at juggling.

  “Quite simple, really. ‘Quite obvious,’ you’ll say, when I’ve put the cards out. Yes, I’d like to run through the steps of the approach with the two of you. For, in the first two acts is always the secret of the third, or there’s no secret at all. All we have to do is to understand what has been put before us. And there you can help me as much as I can help you.

  “But once more, refreshment. We took your ‘Why’ in two helpings, with lunch sandwiched in between. Now permit me, in vulgar British parlance, to wet my whistle before I give you my obbligato on the ‘How.’”

  He turned to me, “Mr. Silchester, I, as an amateur detective, am going to make an olfactory deduction. I am certain I scent muffins on the afternoon air. I deduce that they are preparing for our tea. Will you, acting on that clue, see if your eyes can confirm my flair?”

  I did not, however, have to move. For on looking toward the dining room I heard a sound, and a moment after, like a richly laden ship, Jane sailed into view complete with what the French call thé complet, but, if I may be provincial for once, only the English can really equip. Millum and I rose to relieve her, and there was enough to load the three of us. For accompanying the muffins Mr. M. had scented was a dish of some excellent light pastries and also on a noble platter an equally good, massive plum cake.

  “Tea,” pronounced Mr. Mycroft, when I had given each of us a cup, a fine oolong made more fragrant because drunk from fine Spode, “tea is the most social of all meals. It puts us at our ease, as all meals tend, but being the lightest of all meals,” and he took a muffin and eyed the cake appreciatively, “it leaves the mind free. Tea is always so important to English people because they need this, the gentlest of the drug stimulants, before they can relax.”

  Certainly China tea always showed the master at his best, and, as I only had to listen, I saw no reason why I should stress the meal’s liquid against its solid side.

  We were well on the way to a threesome friendship by the time it closed, and Jane was carting back the relics to show in joint triumph with the cook what devastation we had made of her munitions. Millum proved quite delightful, and time and again gave me fresh points for my essay, now almost a thesis, on “1760, the Climax of Our Culture.” So I was really ready to rest my mind and give my whole attention to Mr. M. when he leaned back, fingered the “Gasper” which again had been offered, and launched so swiftly into his narrative that once more he never lit it.

  “I’ll begin at that part of the story where it began for me, that morning that Mr. Silchester recalls—so little a while back, but so much has taken place in between—when I received a small package by mail. With it had come a letter from a professional friend of mine, to say that he had been sent here on duty to clear an issue on which a little doubt had been raised. He added that he had looked into it, and, after seeing the grounds on which the superstition had grown, he had by a full and thorough investigation come to the conclusion that there were really no grounds, only an ingenious fancy, for disturbing or doubting the coroner’s verdict at the inquest. The whole matter had turned, he concluded, on the one piece of material evidence which he was pleased to say he could send by mail. Should I reach his conclusion by an examination of it, then would I return it with my confirmation. Should there occur to me any further details on which I might require more information, would I come down and see him on the spot. He would be there one day more anyhow, seeing the local authorities so as to conclude the matter properly. ‘Anyhow,’ he added, ‘the country is now at its best, the place itself has real quality, and an accident of such a sort does not s
poil permanent charm for either of us old hands!’

  “I like that about Sark: he is a highly placed specialist who has never let his specialized professional interests spoil his sense of the whole, but rather aid his work. He will retire well and then, I hope, employ that fine natural talent for painting which you saw, Mr. Silchester, he could, like all general talents, deploy in the service of his vacation.

  “I asked Mr. Silchester to view the little problem with me. He agreed with the expert.” (This was certainly a mellow way of putting my rather hurried reaction, and one which had proved evidently to be wholly mistaken.) “He saw in the object nothing but what it appeared to be, a piece of old-fashioned decorative metal, now being used—as modern poor taste loves to do—for another purpose than that for which it was made. My lens confirmed him and Inspector Sark. For on the handle of this soi-disant paper knife were copious fingerprints, all of the same pattern and all vouched by Sark to be Sankey’s. They were well-marked, and there was not a trace of any others. The handle had been gripped firmly.

  “But as I studied them a doubt arose in my mind. Well-gripped, yes, but gripped what way? The pad of the finger is a wonderful device for gripping, because, like the tread of a motor tire, it is toughly elastic. When a car turns a corner too quickly, you’ve noticed that the treads make marks on the road not of a rightly formed impress, but distorted. They are pulled away toward the direction in which the car, by its momentum, was lunging, as they grip the road to save the car from leaving it. Now, it was precisely for that effect that I knew I ought to look. I ought to find in miniature that same displacement-effect on the butt of this handle.”

  Mr. M. raised up his bundle of relics to the table—whence tea had for a time denied them pride of place—and laid them out again, picking up the paper knife.

  “That distortion of the fingerpad whorls would be quite clear, if Sankey … the last time he used this, used it with such effect. To change my simile to make my meaning quite clear, if the knife had been used only as a paper cutter and for no other purpose, never as a dagger, then the finger whorls would appear like a series of ripples on a still pool. But if the paper knife was ever thrust home not between the pages of a book, but between human ribs and by a human hand, then all these ripples would be as though a wind had blown them and they were swaying away from the point and direction toward which the point of the dagger was being plunged. I hope I have made that plain!”

  Millum turned away and drew hard on his cigarette.

  “That was enough to make me wonder whether I could know more. And then, as I looked up and down this small shaft or haft, I did catch sight of something else. This little handle has on it two metals, a common device of silversmiths to vary the appearance of their work. And this was an authentic piece, undoubtedly, a small Renaissance toy, one of those fantastic hairpins from that fantastic age, made of silver when the silversmiths counted among themselves artists as competent as Cellini. The shaft of now almost black silver—we know the late master of this house respected patina, if nothing else—has had added lengthwise, you see, to its upper part, three small flukes or flutings which no doubt add to the design. But the odd thing was that, when I touched this other dulled metal, which you see is a deep gray, not black, the small file mark showed that it was aluminum—a metal which Cellini and his peers might well have loved but no one had seen till he and his had been in their graves some four centuries.

  “But all that proved nothing. It did, however, make one’s mind all the less inclined to sit down and say ditto to Mr. Sark. I felt no more at this point than that I could ask our inspector some questions which would amuse him and no doubt rouse him to a fairly matched argument such as we unravelers love. So I went on studying this piece till Mr. Silchester—who is an intuitional type—became almost vexed. For I had to bring out my heavyweight piece, my large microscope, which always appears to him, as I dare say it must look to any novelist’s eye, a piece of drama rather than a necessary process of detection. It repaid me. For on working my way along the stem I found, on reaching the end, if not one more clue, at least another challenge to the authoritative verdict.

  “You see, the top of this hairpin now turned paper knife is a flat capital—the conventional Renaissance conclusion to any such little columnar composition. I was looking at that to see whether I could find any faint, half-obliterated traces of the thumb, which might and ought to be there if this knife was driven home by a man striking at his own breast. There weren’t. But then, such traces on such an exposed area might possibly have been wiped off or never have made a clear impression. And, moreover, I had to allow that the blow could have been given without the thumb being in that position. But while I looked and failed to find what I was looking for, I was rewarded by another doubt. Across the top, you see, is a shallow groove.”

  I certified that was so; Mr. Millum did not. It did not seem important to me, I must say. Mr. M. read my thoughts.

  “And why not? you rightly ask. Yes,” he allowed, “it wouldn’t have held me, if I had not seen in the magnification of the microscope that this groove was holding something. Again, nothing of note. But in case of suspicion, everything must be made to answer who and what it is, even if what it says is quite aboveboard. The groove was clogged; natural enough in an old object and one which, as we happen now to know, was never permitted to be cleaned, but which might be touched unintentionally by duster and cleaning rag. I picked out the contents of the groove and had little difficulty in recognizing them as common gum—resin. I cleared the whole groove and stored my minute specimen on the chance that it might prove helpful. But when I had done that I found I had raised another little question—again no answer, but a fresh query from the groove itself. When it was emptied, I noticed that though the silver was darkened, it was much less dark there than the silver of the rest of the piece. In other words, that cleft looked unmistakably as though it had been made much later than the rest of the workmanship and its chasing. So I was certain of two things: the groove and the aluminum fluke fittings were additions to the piece and lately made. Now, why someone should so trouble to toy with such a toy—that, certainly, was a small mystery.

  “But my work in the groove had given me another indication. It began to point to the sort of man I might be needing to find and, further, it told me he would be one possessed of no little antiquarian knowledge.

  “So, putting my witness again under the microscope’s penetrating eye, using the finest point I could handle, I made a series of small scores on the groove’s sides. Then, under the power of magnification I was using, the verdict stood out, plainly written.

  “One of the most active and lucrative fields of detection—for the sums of money involved are high—is in the judgment of ancient bronzes. The market is large, because so many cultures wrought their most enduring works in this metal. ‘Perennial bronze’—the phrase itself is now a venerable antique. More lasting than iron, less likely to be melted down than gold. The prices are often very big because such work is not seldom of supreme mastery. And where there’s money value there’ll be sharks to prey on gulls. The forgers, it must be owned, have done wonders and, on the other hand, the detectors of forgeries have been as resourceful. It has been a worldwide underground battle, both sides using all the science they can summon. The great triumph of the forgers was their discovering how to make that patina so prized by collectors and so puzzling to Jane. Between the two, I, a mere scientist, have no wish to judge. De gustibus always closes such controversies for me.

  “But what did catch my attention and was laid aside in my memory for future possible use was the reply of the museums to this attack on their treasures, this subtle flooding of their market. They found that though to the keenest naked eye a patina of yesterday chemically produced looked indistinguishable from one which two or three thousand years of quiet burial were needed to produce naturally, yet, under the microscope, a touch of the file (unnoticeable to unaided sight) showed up the lie. As the oxidation of the copp
er (which is, of course, the patina) proceeds, fine fissures of decomposition eat into the metal, making patterns like a tree and hence called dendrition. But the important point is that if time and nature produce such tree patterns they are wild, like forest trees; while when man produces them artificially and hurriedly, the patterns look actually artificial—they are stiff and mechanical, like trees from round a doll’s house! And the same is true of silver. What I saw under the microscope were these small formal tree patterns.

  “It was while I was trying to put these two or three small anomalies together with the doubt that I had about the fingerprints that I was helped by Mr. Silchester, who thought I ought to close the act I was playing and put on another. As you may have gathered, he is developing a theme of which I hope we shall hear more—‘1760, the Climax of Culture’—and in running out his first bright ideas he fell upon the word ‘balance.’ Then, as so often happens with him and me, his repetition of the word gave me an idea almost before I could see what it would mean, an idea for an experiment. While I gave him another form of provocation, which no doubt will prove as stimulating to his creative faculty in the field of history, I took the paper knife from the field of the microscope and began to judge its balance. As it showed where its center of gravity lay and toppled over toward its pointed end,” and Mr. M. illustrated it for us, “something went into place in my mind. Of course such pins are, as we have said, weighted in that way so as to keep them from toppling out of the coiled hair of their wearer. I knew also that I must not jump to conclusions. And the best way not to do that is just not to look at what is forming in your mind, and the best way to do that is to jump up and do something else. So I suggested to Mr. Silchester that we should catch the train and come here.

  “On our arrival, Sark made fine play with his conviction based on evidence. Several times I felt that I would look pretty foolish if I ventured to go against him. But I still felt it would be safe for me to check up on every one of the doubts which I had. First, that admirable Jane, admirable in her loquacity as in her other services—believe me, it is not that people talk too much that bores us, it is that we listen too little—Jane told me that she never used any of the resins as a polish. Whence, then, had the resin in this groove come? Next, when we were in the garden, we were shown how impossible it was for anyone to have entered by the garden door—and indeed it was—and how the notion that one could was all an illusion of sight, a thing which only an artist combined with a detective would have noticed. That’s exactly the kind of proof that knocks a jury flat with admiration—showing, as they always wish to believe, the uselessness of all evidence. For remember, juries are always against the court. That’s the strength of the system and the safety of democracy—the common man let in to watch the experts at their game and to have the ruling voice if the experts overplay their clever hand so that it becomes pure sleight of hand.