Dr. Thorndyke Omnibus Vol 7

by R. Austin Freeman

  "Yes," Thorndyke agreed, "there does certainly seem to be something a little queer about the affair. As I understand it, Haire went away with the stated intention of making a short visit to Dublin. He was known to have arrived there on a certain day and to have made two calls at a business house. He is said to have announced his intention to go on to Belfast, but it is not known whether he did, in fact, go there. Nothing at all is known as to his movements after he had left the dealer's premises. From that moment, no one, so far as we know, ever saw him again. Isn't that the position?"

  "That is the position exactly, sir," replied Blandy, "and a very curious position it is if we remember that Haire was a man engaged in business in London and having a set of rooms there containing his household goods and personal effects."

  "Before the fire," I remarked. "There wasn't much left of either after the flare up. He hadn't any home then to come back to."

  "But, sir," Blandy objected, "what reason is there for supposing that he knew anything about the fire? He was somewhere in Ireland when it happened. But a fire in a London by-street isn't likely to be reported in the Irish papers."

  "No," I admitted, "that is true; and it only makes the affair still more queer."

  There was a short silence. Then Thorndyke raised a fresh question. "By the way, Inspector," said he, "there was a legal notice in The Times a few days ago referring to a certain Moxdale deceased. Did you happen to observe it?"

  "Yes, my attention was called to it by one of my colleagues, and, on the chance that there might be some connection with the other Moxdale deceased, I called on the solicitors to make a few enquiries. They are quite a respectable firm—Home, Croner, and Home of Lincoln's Inn—and they were as helpful as they could be, but they didn't know much about the parties. The testator, Harold Moxdale, was an old gentleman, practically a stranger to them, and the other parties were nothing more than names. However, I learned that the principal beneficiary was the testator's nephew, Cecil Moxdale, and that, if he had not had the misfortune to be burned, he would have inherited a sum of about four thousand pounds."

  "It is possible," I suggested, "that it may not be the same Cecil Moxdale. You say that they did not know anything about him. Did you try to fix the identity?"

  "It wasn't necessary," replied Blandy, "for the next beneficiary was another nephew named Gustavus Haire; and as we knew that Haire and Moxdale were cousins, that settled the identity."

  As Blandy gave this explanation, his habitual smile became tinged with a suggestion of foxiness, and I noticed that he was furtively watching Thorndyke to see how he took it. But there was no need, for my colleague made no secret of his interest.

  "Did you learn whether these two bequests were in any way mutually dependent?" he asked.

  Blandy beamed on him almost affectionately. It was evident that Thorndyke's reactions were those that had been desired.

  "A very pertinent question, sir," he replied. "Yes, the two bequests were mutually contingent. The entire sum to be divided between the two nephews was about six thousand pounds. Of this, four thousand went to Cecil and two thousand to Gustavus. But it was provided that if either of them should pre-decease the testator, the whole amount should go the survivor."

  "My word, Blandy!" I exclaimed. "This puts quite a new complexion on the affair. As Harold Moxdale died, if I remember rightly, on the 30th of April, and Cecil died on the 19th of the same month, it follows that the fire in Billington Street was worth four thousand pounds to Mr. Gustavus Haire. A decidedly illuminating fact."

  Blandy turned his benign smile on me. "Do you find it illuminating, sir?" said he. "If you do, I wish you would reflect a few stray beams on me."

  Thorndyke chuckled, softly. "I am afraid, Jervis," said he, "that the inspector is right. This new fact is profoundly interesting—even rather startling. But it throws no light whatever on the problem."

  "It establishes a motive," I retorted.

  "But what is the use of that?" he demanded. "You, as a lawyer, know that proof of a motive to do some act is no evidence, by itself, that the person who had the motive did the act. Haire, as you imply, had a motive for making away with Moxdale. But before you could even suggest that he did actually make away with him, you would have to prove that he had the opportunity and the intention; and even that would carry you no farther than suspicion. To support a charge, there would have to be some positive evidence that the act was committed."

  "Exactly, sir," said Blandy; "and the position is that we have not a particle of evidence that Haire had any intention of murdering his cousin, and there is clear evidence that he had no opportunity. When the fire broke out, he was in Ireland and had been there five days. That is, for practical purposes, an absolutely conclusive alibi."

  "But," I persisted, "aren't there such things as time-fuses or other timing appliances?"

  Blandy shook his head. "Not in a case like this," he replied. "Of course, we have considered that question, but there is nothing in it. In the case of a man who wants to set fire to a lock-up shop or empty premises, it is possible to use some such appliance—a time-fuse, or a candle set on some inflammable material, or an alarm clock—to give him time to show himself a few miles away and establish an alibi; and even then the firemen usually spot it. But here you have a flat, with somebody living in it, and the owner of that flat on the other side of the Irish Channel, where he had arrived five days before the fire broke out.

  "No, sir, I don't think Mr. Haire is under any suspicion of having raised the fire. The thing is a physical impossibility. And I don't know of any other respect in which he is under suspicion. It is odd that we can't discover his whereabouts, but there is really nothing suspicious in it. There is no reason why he should let anyone know where he is."

  I did not contest this, though my feeling was that Haire was purposely keeping out of sight, and I suspected that Blandy secretly took the same view. But the inspector was such an exceedingly downy bird that it was advisable not to say too much. However, I now understood—or thought I did—why he had made this pretext to call on us; he was at a dead end and hoped to interest Thorndyke in the case and thereby get a lead of some kind. And now, having sprung his mine, he reverted to the ostensible object of his visit.

  "As to this salvage stuff," said he. "Would you like me to leave these small things for you to look over?"

  I expected Thorndyke to decline the offer, for there was no mystery about the things, and they were no affair of ours in any case. But, to my surprise, he accepted, and, having checked the list, signed the receipt which Blandy had written out.

  "And as to the stuff in the box; perhaps Mr. Polton might show my man where to put it."

  At this, Polton, who had been calmly examining and sorting the test-slides during the discussion (to which I have no doubt he had given close attention), rose and suggested that the box should be deposited in the laboratory in the first place; and when Thorndyke had agreed, he departed to superintend the removal.

  "I am afraid," said Blandy, "that you will find nothing but rubbish in that box. That, at least, is what it appeared like to me. But, having studied some of your cases, I have been deeply impressed by your power of extracting information from the most unpromising material, and it is possible that these things may mean more to you than they do to me."

  "It is not very likely," Thorndyke replied. "You appear to have extracted from them all the information that one could expect. They have conveyed to you the fact that Cecil Moxdale was apparently the occupant of the rooms at the time of the fire, and that is probably all that they had to tell."

  "It is all they had to tell me," said Blandy, rising and picking up his attaché-case, "and it is not all that I want to know. There is still the problem of how the fire started, and they throw no light on that at all."

  "You have got the clay pipe," I suggested. "Doesn't that tell the story?"

  He smiled at me with amiable reproach as he replied:

  "We don't want the material for plausible g
uesses. We want facts, or at least a leading hint of some kind, and I still have hopes that you may hit on something suggestive."

  "You are more optimistic than I am," replied Thorndyke; "but I shall look over the material that you have brought, and, if it should yield any facts that are not already known to you, I promise to let you have them without delay."

  Blandy brightened up appreciably at this, and, as he turned to depart, he expressed his gratitude in characteristic terms.

  "That, sir, is most generous of you. It sends me on my way rejoicing in the consciousness that my puny intelligence is to be reinforced by your powerful intellect and your encyclopaedic knowledge. I thank you, gentlemen, for your kindly reception of an intruder and a disturber of your erudite activities, and I wish you a very good evening."

  With this, the inspector took his departure, leaving us both a little overpowered by his magniloquence and me a little surprised by Thorndyke's promise which had evoked it.

  XV. POLTON ON THE WAR PATH

  As the inspector's footsteps died away on the stairs, we looked at one another and smiled.

  "That was a fine peroration, even for Blandy," I remarked. "But haven't you rather misled the poor man? He is evidently under the delusion that he has harnessed you firmly to his chariot."

  "I only promised to look over his salvage; which I am quite ready to do for my own satisfaction."

  "I don't quite see why. You are not likely to learn anything from it; and even if you were, this affair is not our concern."

  "I don't know that we can say that," he replied. "But we needn't argue the point. I don't mind admitting that mere professional curiosity is a sufficient motive to induce me to keep an eye on the case."

  "Well, that would be good news for Blandy, for it is obvious that he is completely stumped; and so am I, for that matter, assuming that there is anything abnormal about the case. I don't feel convinced that there is."

  "Exactly," said Thorndyke; "that is Blandy's difficulty. It is a very odd and puzzling case. Taking the group of circumstances as a whole, it seems impossible to accept it as perfectly normal; but yet, when one examines the factors separately, there is not one of them at which one can cavil."

  "I am not sure that I follow that," said I. "Why can we not accept the circumstances as normal? I should like to hear you state the case as it presents itself to you."

  "Well," he replied, "let us first take the facts as a whole. Here is a house which, in some unknown way, catches fire in the small hours of the morning. In the debris of that house is found the body of a man who has apparently been burned to death."

  "Yes," I agreed, with a grin, "the body certainly had that appearance."

  "It transpires later," Thorndyke continued, disregarding my comment, "that the death of that man, A, benefits another man, B, to the extent of four thousand pounds. But the premises in which the fire occurred belong to and are controlled by B; and they had been lent by B to A for his occupation while B should be absent in Ireland. The event by which the benefit accrues to B—the death of Harold Moxdale—has occurred quite a short time after the fire. Finally, the tenant, B, who had ostensibly gone away from his residence to make a short visit to Ireland, has never returned to that residence or made any communication to his landlord—has, in fact, disappeared."

  "Blandy doesn't admit Haire has disappeared," I objected

  "We mustn't take Blandy's statements too literally. In spite of his disclaimers, it is evident that he is hot on the trail of Mr. Gustavus Haire; and the fact is that, in the ordinary sense of the word, Haire has disappeared. He has absented himself from his ordinary places of resort, he has communicated with nobody, and he has left no traces by which the police could discover his whereabouts.

  "But now take the facts separately. The origin of the fire is a mystery, but there is not a particle of evidence of incendiarism. The only person who could have been suspected had been overseas several days before the fire broke out."

  "Do you consider that his absence at the time puts him quite outside the picture? I mean, don't you think that the fire could have been started by some sort of timing apparatus?"

  "Theoretically, I have no doubt that it could. But it would have had to be a rather elaborate apparatus. The common alarm clock would not have served. But really the question seems to be of only academic interest for two reasons. First, the fire experts were on the look-out for some fire-raising appliance and found no trace of any; second, the presence of Moxdale in the rooms seems to exclude the possibility of any such appliance having been used, and, third, even the appliance that you are postulating would not have served its purpose with anything like calculable certainty."

  "You mean that it might not have worked, after all?"

  "No. What I mean is that it could not have been adjusted to the actual purpose, which would have been to cause the death of the man. It would have been useless to fire the house unless it were certain that the man would be in it at the time and that he would not be able to escape. But neither of these things could be foreseen with any degree of certainty. No, Jervis, I think that, on our present knowledge, we must agree with Blandy and the others that no suspicion of arson stands against Gustavus Haire."

  "That is what he says, but it is obvious that he does suspect Haire."

  "I was speaking in terms of evidence," Thorndyke rejoined. "Blandy admits that he has nothing against Haire and therefore cannot treat the disappearance as a flight. If he met Haire, he couldn't detain him or charge him with any unlawful act. But he feels—and I think quite rightly—that Haire's disappearance is a mystery that needs to be explained. Blandy, in fact, is impressed by the case as a whole; by the appearance of a connected series of events with the suggestion of a purpose behind it. He won't accept those events as normal events, brought about merely by chance, but he sees no way of challenging them so as to start an inquiry. That is why he came to us. He hopes that we may be able to give him some kind of leading fact."

  "And so you are proposing to go over the box of rubbish that he has brought on the chance that you may find the leading fact among it?"

  "I think we may as well look over it," he replied. "It is wildly improbable that it will yield any information, but you never know. We have, on more than one occasion, picked up a useful hint from a most unlikely source. Shall we go up and see what sort of rubbish the box contains?"

  We ascended to the laboratory floor, where we found Polton looking with undissembled distaste at a large packing-case filled to the brim with miscellaneous oddments, mostly metallic, and all covered with a coating of white ash.

  "Looks as if Mr. Blandy has turned out a dust-bin," Polton commented, "and passed the contents on to us. A rare job it was getting it up the stairs. Shall I put the whole of the stuff out on the bench?"

  "You may as well," replied Thorndyke, "though I think Blandy might have weeded some of it out. Door-handles and hinges are not likely to yield much information."

  Accordingly, we all set to work transferring the salvage to the large bench, which Polton had tidily covered with newspaper, sorting it out to some extent as we did so, and making a preliminary inspection. But it was a hopeless-looking collection, for the little information that it conveyed we possessed already. We knew about the tools from the little workshop, the projectors and the remains of gramophones and kinematograph cameras, and, as to the buttons, studs, keys, pen-knives, and other small personal objects, they were quite characterless and could tell us nothing.

  Nevertheless, Thorndyke glanced at each item as he picked it out of its dusty bed and laid it in its appointed place on the bench, and even Polton began presently to develop an interest in the proceedings. But it was evidently a merely professional interest, concerning itself exclusively with the detached fragments of the gramophone motors and other mechanical remains and particularly with the battered carcase of the grandfather clock, and I strongly suspected that he was simply on the look-out for usable bits of scrap. Voicing my suspicion, I suggested:
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br />   "This ought to be quite a little windfall for you, Polton. A lot of this clockwork seems to be quite sound—I mean as to the separate parts."

  He laid down the clock (as tenderly as if it had been in going order) and regarded me with a cunning and crinkly smile.

  "It's an ill wind, sir, that blows nobody good. My reserve stock of gear-wheels and barrels and other spare parts will be all the richer for Mr. Blandy's salvage. And you can't have too many spares; you never know when one of them may be the very one that you want. But might I suggest that, as this is a rather dirty job, you let me finish setting the things out and come and look over them at your leisure in the morning, when I have been through them with a dusting-brush."

  As I found the business not only dirty but rather boresome—and in my private opinion perfectly futile—I caught at the suggestion readily, and Thorndyke and I then retired to the sitting-room to resume our operations on the test-slides, after cleansing our hands.

  "We seem to have been ejected," I remarked as we sat down to the table. "Perhaps our presence hindered the collection of scrap."

  Thorndyke smiled. "That is possible," said he. "But I thought that I detected an awakening interest in the inspection. At any rate, it will be as well to let him sort out the oddments before we go through them. He is a good observer, and he might notice things that we should overlook and draw our attention to them."

  "You don't really expect to get any information out of that stuff, do you?" I asked.

  "No," he replied. "The inspection is little more than a formality, principally to satisfy Blandy. Still, Jervis, we have our principles, and one of them—and a very important one—is to examine everything, no matter how insignificant. This won't be the first rubbish-heap that we have inspected; and it may be that we shall learn something from it, after all."