Mycroft Holmes 03 - The Notched Hairpin

by H. F. Heard

  “But I mustn’t run on. We were shown, as I’ve just said, how the illusion of sight built up the proof which really wasn’t there. Just because Jane wanted a murder—for murder is always more appealing to active people than suicide—she found the proof. She didn’t want it to be suicide because you can’t catch a suicide—he’s slipped through your fingers. But you can have a hue and cry after a murderer, especially if he’s a tramp—someone who won’t work when the rest of us do. Yes, Jane’s motive is clear enough, though …” and Mr. M. paused and the younger Mr. M. shifted uneasily, “had she seen clearly enough then, I feel sure even she would have preferred suicide as the explanation.

  “Still, to return to the facts, to my mind Jane stood her ground. I’d seen that she was a really good reporter, and though she was caught by the trick or play of the light on that door (not being a careful student of the Impressionists, those great questioners of what we really see) yet she did not only see: she heard.

  “Now I know that hearing can be more of a nuisance than seeing. If seeing is a shaky sort of thing on which to build belief, the ear is even more flimsy. We know that even courts of law don’t allow hearsay! But here we come to the real problem of all the senses which Mr. Silchester raised some while back and to which we can now fruitfully return. Our great Ionian father of detection and analysis, Heraclitus, said, ‘The senses are bad witnesses.’ He put them all in a bunch. I think he was mainly right. But, if I may patronize one of the source thinkers of mankind, I would venture to go a little further. I’d certainly agree that the senses may be pretty poor guides on the immense trail of detection on which Heraclitus and the first Greek scientists were setting out. They were seeking the prints of a hand as ubiquitous as it is invisible. But in the humdrum matters of lying, murder, and theft—in short, in what goes on on the surface of life—it is not so much our sensory witnesses, our expert reporters who are at fault, but ourselves, as cross-examiners. Beside the mistakes they make, ours are monstrous.”

  Mr. M. paused and laughed. “I am sorry to seem to be getting my second wind in the far past. You will think that I am like the classic French lawyer who could never begin placing his case before the court without going back to the Fall, and finally made as a concession a datum line with the Deluge. But, Mr. Silchester, you raised the point, and in point of fact—it is a tribute to your unanalytic intuition—the case largely turns on it. At least, if that seems too much for me to claim yet, I can tell you that at that point my vague questing turned into what I believe is called, in hunting circles, a breast-high scent.

  “Let me, then, say one more thing about the senses, and then we’ll get straight back to the story. When we sense something, experience anything, I believe that nine times out of ten the sense which calls our attention gives us a perfectly sound report. The mischief is that we are in such a hurry and so careless that we don’t distinguish between what it actually tells us and the ‘sense’ we want to make of it. The worst judge on the bench, dozing and bored, hardly handles evidence so carelessly as we do matters of life and death being given to us by our only messengers, the senses. For they alone can tell us of what we call the world round us through which we are running blind.

  “Now, the basis of good cross-examining is to take one question at a time and one witness at a time. So as soon as I’d talked to Jane I saw, as I’ve said, that she was a good reporter—vivid, alive, interested, observant. You say she was caught out by the door seeming to move, and I have granted that. But I ask myself what made her first think that the door had opened, what called her attention so that she looked down in that direction? Quite another sense: hearing. Now, hearing is a most troublesome sense, but it’s mainly because we really won’t give our attention to it when it is speaking to us. We immediately turn aside and ask our eyes to go and see what hearing is talking about. That’s no way to treat a witness, and we get what we deserve—a muddle. That’s what Jane did. Unfortunately it’s become the standard human reaction; our eyes have run away with us. That’s why we say seeing is believing—and sight has treated the rest of the senses with a contempt they do not deserve. It is quite amazing how much, how intensively and diagnostically, people can hear, if they try and notice that they are hearing and are not just getting ready to see. And then there’s scent too, even more neglected and one which I have found, as I hope to show in a moment, a useful tracker also. After all, the French say of a man of great artistic acumen, one who seems to go beyond sight, that he has a flair—he has some kind of power to smell out a masterpiece under a disguise that would throw sight completely off the track.

  “Well, I maintain that Jane heard something. Our inspector friend could explain away her misinterpretation of sight. But having done that, he was content. He did not try to explain why she thought she heard the door open as well as saw it. Having shown that it couldn’t have been opened that day, he left that other little problem, which was really the big clue, lying neglected. He could see, being an artist, that there was a sight; she did see something, which she misinterpreted. Perhaps had he been instead a musician he would have asked: ‘Even if she misinterpreted it, what could she have actually heard?’ If he had asked that, I believe he would have known as much as I learned.”

  He paused and added, “Considering how things have turned out, I think it was providential that his hobby was painting and not music. Of course, I had one advantage to start with. Being an amateur, I have been able to pursue detection just because of its interest and not as part of a social system for catching criminals. The police can never become real artists at their task,” he sighed, “because it is at best a weary effort to stop things when they have already gone too far, to kill because you can’t cure, to overthrow but not to understand. They can’t prevent because they are not really interested in the great problems of all detection—human motive, human desire, and the greatest of all tragedies, our vast desires and our mean, inadequate, hopeless means. I know this sounds like rambling moralizing but, believe me, it is because these were my premises when I began to take an interest in the problems of detection that I have on a number of occasions been able to see deeper into a problem than my official colleagues. And, moreover, that point of view was precisely what gave me the viewpoint from which I was able to oversee the whole of this problem.

  “In my interest in the pure problem of detection I had noticed this matter—over which we have had to take all this time because all the rest turns on it—the problem of the senses, how easily we let ourselves be confused when we are trying to decode their messages. And sound is the first that I started with, because of its notorious difficulty. Bats have a perfect system of biaural hearing—that is to say, they use their ears as we should, but as a matter of fact as we only use our eyes. They judge where an object is by echo sounding, by sending out their incessant squeak and judging with such precision that they can fly blindfolded through a maze of wires and touch none. We judge the place and distance of an object by the same triangulation done through our eyes—binocular vision. We could do the same with our ears no doubt, if we chose. But we are lazy. Hence we hear but don’t really attend, and, not giving right attention, we are self-deceived.

  “So years ago, seeing this gap in our power of detection, I made a small dictionary for myself, like those dictionaries of synonyms—but mine was what I rightly called a dictionary of symphonies.”

  At that, even the obedient Millum looked up, his face showing as much polite protest as mine.

  Mr. M. smiled.

  “Don’t be puzzled thinking that I made a catalogue of all the big works by the great musicians! I’m using the word with more accuracy than they. My catalogue shows the unsuspected similarities of sound that can be given by different, utterly different, objects and so lead to completely mistaken identification. You’d hardly believe how like, indistinguishably alike to the untrained ear which most people are content with, sounds are—sounds which are taken to be quite different because, when we look, we see they are caused by
objects that look quite different. Do you know that some crockery, when it is being washed in soapy water, will emit a note so like a growling dog that people will look out of the window thinking that the watchdog has been roused?

  “Once I had a case which turned on whether someone had gone down a passage to kill a man at the other end. Someone swore that someone had so gone. Under examination he recollected he did not see him, but heard him. On further examination he allowed that he did not hear the actual footsteps but heard the boards of the passage creak. On the carpet being raised in the passage, it was found there were no boards underneath, but flagstones. The case fell through—I’m glad to say. For I came in at the end and was able to find the man, to save him from hanging, and to get him to make a lifelong reparation. For the witness I’ve quoted, and on whose evidence everything turned, was discredited not on his sense of hearing but on his wrong and rash interpretation of what he heard. What he was ready to keep on swearing to, even when discredited, was that he had heard the creaking of boards as when they are stepped on and he added, ‘I heard that creaking regularly go along that passage. I am sure that someone did walk down it.’ And he was right, flagstones or no flagstones. But they don’t creak. Then what could give the same sort of sound? I went to my catalogue, thinking I would find boots—which wouldn’t be helpful. Boots I found correlated with the sound made when a cork begins to be drawn from the neck of a glass bottle, and much else of other examples but none to my point. But as I went through the creaks I found correlated with boards—what would you think? That hard cloth called corduroy—generally only worn by gamekeepers, and that, at one stroke, gave me my man.

  “Now we are ready to strike. Jane heard—she says—the door open. What Jane actually heard, but misinterpreted in the terms of her unexamined wish, was a twang. As she wished the sound to come from the door, she was certain that it did so. She gave evidence that this was not only possible but probable. And we ourselves sounded that catch or hasp above the door,” he pointed over his shoulder toward the garden wall behind him, “that reacted aurally like a giant jew’s-harp. Further, she did see the shadow made by the spray of branch above swayed by a gust of wind. So, putting a further false deduction to her first wishful mistake, she added up her findings and was convinced that the door had opened. She heard, I repeat, a twang. She was in the position least suited to use our only method of detecting place by sound, biaural hearing. For she was glancing out into the garden, and the sound, as it happens, originated from a source not on her right, but on her left.”

  “Excuse me,” Millum interrupted, his tone quiet and his comment to the point, “excuse me, I don’t follow just here. Surely, if her left ear was toward the … the source of the sound, she was very well placed to judge the direction?”

  “A good objection,” allowed Mr. M, “but you have overlooked the echo. In acoustics, as in painting, each source of sound or light throws back part of its radiation until we often, as here, think the echoing surface—in this case the brick wall behind us now—is the actual source of the sound wave. The sound wave that we are tracking was sent out above and behind Jane’s stance. Naturally, then, she first heard and perhaps heard only the echo that glanced back from the wall and so came first to her right ear!”

  Millum bowed, and I nodded with growing appreciation.

  Mr. M. went on: “It was the fact that Jane had rightly heard a twang and yet had wholly mistaken whence that sudden buzz of sound came from—it was that thought that suddenly, like a note resolving a chord, made the whole thing begin to take shape in my mind. And then, as happens when once you are in line, everything began to fall into place.

  “When we were in the arbor I had noticed that it was an odd time to prune trees, with the sap rising. I suppose we can now say that as Sankey was mad enough to have killed a goose,” he smiled gently at Millum, “that laid him golden eggs, why should he not prune trees just when they are about to yield! But I didn’t know that then. And the more I looked about, the more I was puzzled, and therefore the more hopeful of coming upon a very remarkable story. For I next noticed, as I looked at this arbor, that though the pruning had certainly not been done incompetently, there was one place where an ugly cut, a complete break through the canopy, had been made. When we were down by the door I therefore looked over the cuttings which had been taken over there, and saw at once this one considerable branch that had been amputated. Before that I had observed the skylight which the amputation made, while I was sitting in this chair. I saw then, as I see now, that it permits one to have, as through a porthole, just a glimpse of the upper part of the corner of the house over the road—but not quite up to the parapet. To be able to see the parapet itself,” and Mr. M. crouched in his seat, “you see I have to double down until my head is now where, a moment before, when I was sitting up, my heart was!”

  I watched the demonstration, but again Mr. Millum turned away.

  “And then came a further point, really a very nice one—one that gave me hope.” Mr. M. looked across to Millum and repeated, “Real hope! But first for proof. After this I had only to look where I was now pretty sure I’d find. Our source again was our highly educated inspector, once more showing that a man’s keen power of observation must always be distinguished from the use to which he puts that power, the meaning he attaches to the finds he makes. And, further, just because he was so well-read, when he made his mistaken misinterpretation he was further out and off than Jane herself. About the volume of Suetonius et al., both he and Jane were agreed. The inspector was sure it clinched his case for suicide, and I was sure it reopened it and gave me a new conviction and a new hope—for, as I shall show in a moment, it gave me not only the direction in which I was to look but also a first light into the motive and into the character I was to discover. That is why,” and Mr. M.’s voice became gentle, “that is why I used the word ‘hope’ advisedly and why I was not merely amused but glad that the very intelligence of the highly educated inspector had thrown him off the scent. And here, in another and actual sense, came in that sense, the sense of smell.

  “My further little volume, which will be a companion to the first I have mentioned on Similar Sounds, will be on Similar Scents. But this collection of synolfactorics, if I have to coin a rather ugly neologism, is still in a very rudimentary condition. I have, though, been able to find some associations which the ordinary person would say at first sight, but not at first whiff, have nothing in common—for example, that cooking red peppers (a delicious dish with veal Milanaise) give exactly the same smell as that disgusting fume, burning rubber!

  “Naturally, what every student on this subject would start upon would be the tobaccos. The first thing is to train the nose until it can tell at the first whiff what tobacco a man smokes or has smoked. As soon as I entered that room up there,” and Mr. M. pointed up the steps to the house, “I knew that here we had a Latakia smoker, and a Latakia smoker is, as one might say, out on the end of the branch. By that I mean, as it is the strongest of all tobaccos, he is very unlikely ever to go back to the weaker, as a man who has taken to inhaling will never willingly enjoy the finer taste given by a good tobacco when flavored simply on the palate. And Latakia is an end of the passage in another sense, for, as you probably know, many of the types are highly impregnated with opium. The man who takes to the strongest of all the Asia Minor tobaccos is already more than halfway to the smoke that has suffocated half of all Asia—the poppy latex.

  “So I know by my nose that the late owner of this house smokes and, more, that he smokes only one brand. Then, once smell has given me that information—for that pungent tobacco hangs about, as maids say, very long—then I can set my eyes to look out for traces, should they be needed to lead me further. That’s when, Mr. Silchester, you will recall with what rightful triumph the inspector produced this book which, unlike Jane, he knew well enough and could use as evidence for his theory of suicide. For he found the passage about painless felo-de-se, and found it because it was marked by
the silt of tobacco ash—which happens when a careless smoker or an engrossed reader studies a passage and, unaware, lets the burned-out ash fall and settle in the crease and groin of the leaves. Of course the ash itself, especially when crushed between the leaves, would not have been enough for me to work on, however much it may have been depended on as a guide by the master of masters of our craft. All honor to the ashes of our great eponym, but between you and me I have always had my doubts as to whether even he could read, translate, and detect through tobacco ash as infallibly as he is said to have asserted. Perhaps he was a medium and acted clair-voyantly, the ash acting by its chance patterns merely as a provocatant to his mystic insight—as with the ladies who divine from stranded tea leaves! Or perhaps some subtle fume from the ash acted on his superfine olfactory sense and raised him to vision, as the laurel leaves’ smoke at Delphi soothed and uplifted the Pythian Sibyl!