THE letter which Anthony had written in the early hours of that morning and despatched by District Messenger, the letter which had brought so important a person as Mr Egbert Lucas down to Abbotshall, had run as follows:
MY DEAR LUCAS—AS you know, I have been playing at detectives down at Marling. I have finished my game; the rest is up to you.
What I have found, how I have found it, and my opinion of the meaning of what I have found you will discover set out in the enclosed document, typed by my very own fingers. You may—I cannot tell—think my conclusions wrong, and say that in real life, even as my fairy tales, a set of circumstances, a collection of clues, may equally lead to the innocent as to the guilty. For me, however, I am convinced. To put it in my own diffident way: I know that I am right!
So please read the enclosed. If you agree with me, as I think you will, you will yet find that the evidence is insufficient: and you will be right. I will, therefore, endeavour to arrange for a confession by the guilty person to be given in the (unsuspected) presence of officers of your able department. In order for this to be done, will you give orders for some of your men—three, including a shorthand writer, would be enough—to meet me at the cross-roads on the London side of Marling at about nine tonight? I will then get them covertly into Abbotshall and dispose them in advantageous but secret positions. This may, I know, be irregular, but you can take it that I can manage things without anyone in the house knowing until the business is over. Once your men are where I shall put them, I shall enter the house by a more orthodox way. The rest will follow.
This is asking a lot of you, but, after all, you know me well enough to be reasonably certain that I am less of a fool than most. So, if you agree with my conclusions as set out in the report, please arrange this. Whether you agree or not ring me up, before seven tonight, at my pub in Marling (Greyne 29). If I am not there leave a message: ‘All right’ or ‘Nothing doing,’ as the case may be. Whichever your answer is, I will ring you up when I have received it.
My main reason—or one of my main reasons—for doing all this work was to do Hastings’s little paper, The Owl, a good turn. The report is really for them, though I don’t know when and to what extent you will allow them to publish it. But I rely on you to see that The Owl gets as much journalistic fat as it can digest. No other paper must hear a whisper until you’ve allowed Hastings to make a scoop out of the ‘Dramatic New Developments’.
Yours,
A. R. GETHRYN.
P.S. Don’t forget that if you decide to let me try to arrange this confession, I may fail. I don’t think I will; but I might. I shall rely to a great extent upon the fact that I am something of an actor.
Coming to the end of this letter, Mr Egbert Lucas had whistled beneath his breath, instructed his secretary that on no account was he to be disturbed, and had settled down—he has the most comfortable chair in the Yard—to read the typewritten report.
Unfolding it, he murmured: ‘Unexpected chap, Gethryn. This ought to be interesting.’
He read:
‘THE MURDER OF JOHN HOODE
‘Upon the morning of the 20th of August, 192– I drove to the village of Marling in Surrey. By 9.30 a.m. I had gained admission to the house Abbotshall.
‘Owing to circumstances which need not be set down here, and also, in a great measure, to the courtesy and assistance of Superintendent Boyd of Scotland Yard, I was able from the beginning to pursue unhampered my own investigations. The result of these I give below.
‘(For reasons which must, I think, be obvious, I have divided this report into four parts. Also, I would point out that, for reasons equally evident, the steps in my deduction, reasoning—call it what you will—are not necessarily given here in their chronological order.)
I
‘Immediately upon my arrival at Abbotshall, I spoke at some length with Superintendent Boyd, who gave me the history of the affair as obtained by him through close questioning of the inmates. It appeared then that with the exception of the butler, these one and all had alibis, complete in some cases and in others as nearly so as could be expected of persons who had not known beforehand that they were likely to be accused of murder. (Later, of course, it was revealed—see reports of the inquest—that Mr Archibald Deacon’s alibi did not exist in fact.)
‘Superintendent Boyd and I at once agreed that to suspect the alibiless Poole (the butler) was folly. He had been, obviously and by common report, devoted to his master. Moreover, he is physically incapable—even were he out of his mind—of dealing such blows as caused the death of the murdered man.
‘After our conversation, Superintendent Boyd and I together made an examination of the study, the room in which the murder was done. Together we came to the following conclusions,fn1 all of which were explained by the superintendent in his evidence at the inquest. Since, therefore, these points are by this common knowledge, I will not go into the processes by which they were arrived at, but will merely enumerate them follows:
‘It will be seen that the cumulative implication of these six points tends to strengthen considerably the case against Deacon, which even without them is by no means weak circumstantially. It is now, therefore, that the keynote of my report must come.
‘I met and spoke with Deacon for the first time on the afternoon of the day I arrived at Abbotshall. It needed but three minutes with him to convince me that here was a man who had not been, was not, and never could be a murderer. I cannot defend this statement with logic. It was simply conviction. Like this: In a party of, say, twelve persons there will be eleven about none of whom I could say definitely: “That one is incapable of stealing the baby’s marmalade”; but in the twelfth I may find a man—perhaps unknown to me before—of whom I can swear before God or man: “He could not have stolen the baby’s marmalade—not even, if he had tried to! He is incapable of carrying out such a crime.”
‘Deacon was a twelfth man. Before I had seen him, my views were beginning to differ from those of Scotland Yard: after I had seen and spoken with him they became directly opposed. It became my business to prove, in spite of all difficulties, that this man, whatever the appearances, had had no hand in the death of John Hoode. In what follows, they who read will find, I hope, absolute proof of his innocence; or if not that, at least a battering-ram to shake the tower of their belief in his guilt.
‘Knowing that Deacon was not the murderer, I nevertheless realised that his innocence—so strong was the case against him—could only be established by definite proof that someone else was. That is to say: a negative defence would be useless.
‘It will be seen, then, that the divergence of my opinions from those of the Crown began almost at the outset of my investigation.
‘Let us go back to the study at Abbotshall. On each of the numbered points I gave earlier, I agreed with Superintendent Boyd. Where I began to—had to—disagree was concerning their implication of Deacon. Points (i), (ii), (iii) and (iv) can be left alone; they will fit my murderer as well as, or better than, they fit Deacon. The remaining two, however, must be dealt with more fully.
‘We will take (v) first. The obvious fact that strength far above the normal was behind the blows that killed Hoode was a perfect link in the chain of circumstantial evidence against the gigantic Deacon. But at the inquest, Dr Fowler, the divisional surgeon, said: “The wounds were inflicted so far as I can judge, either by a man three times stronger than the average or by a person of either sex who was insane and had the terrible strength of the insane.”
‘Having to find an alternative to Deacon and having determined to cling to my theory that the murderer was an inhabitant—permanent or temporary—of the house, my choice of Dr Fowler’s alternatives was a man or woman mentally unbalanced. This choice was not, as it might at first seem, a drawback; rather was it the reverse. For one of my first impressions had been that there was something of terrible senselessness about the whole affair, and this impression had increased a thousandfold when I saw the battered head of the dead man. Madness was my first thought then. Those blows—four of them, mark you! when the first had been obviously sufficient—surely spoke of madness; either the lust for blood and destruction of a confirmed homicidal maniac or the consummation of a hatred so deadly, so complete in its possession of the hater, as to constitute of itself insanity.
‘The second was the theory I adopted. For, believing the murderer to be an inmate of the house, it was clear that I must look for one whose insanity was not of a type apparent to the world.
‘Now for point (vi)—the entry by the window. As I have said, I agreed with the police that the murderer did enter by the window; but there our agreement ceased. It is a point in the Crown’s case against Deacon that his are the only legs in the house long enough to enable their owner to clear the flower-bed in stepping from the flagged path to the low sill of the study window. This, I am sure, is, as evidence against Deacon, more than useless. I have not taken measurements, but it is obvious that even for his long legs, a step right into the study would be impossible. This being so, the fact that he could step on to the window sill is of no importance whatever. For one thing, it would have been extremely difficult for him to retain balance; for another, if he had retained his balance, the necessary scrabbling at the window and the twisting and turning he would have had to perform to get legs and then body into the room would have attracted Hoode’s attention before he could see enough of the intruder to recognise him. And then the theory, agreed to by the police, that Hoode did not rise from, or anyhow did not remain long out of, his chair, falls to the ground.
‘Now let us get back to my murderer. Yes, he got in by the window; but he left the flower-bed unmarked. Now, as he is a member of the household we know that his legs cannot be as long as Deacon’s. How, then, did he approach the window?
‘He must have (a) jumped over the flower-bed and into the room; (b) stepped on the flower-bed, but, on leaving, repaired or disguised the damage he had done; or (c) got his feet on to the sill and his whole self into the room without having crossed the flower-bed.
‘It is almost impossible that he should have done (a); (b) is unlikely, since after the murder the murderer had no time to spare. (This is proved later.) One is left, then, with the conviction that the real answer lies in (c). This means either that the murderer erupted through the floor or walls of the study or that he descended the wall of the house and entered the open study window without ever reaching the earth in his journey. (Entrance through the door is barred. Remember, we are taking Poole’s evidence on that point as reliable.)
‘As the murderer was presumably flesh and blood and there was no hole in walls or floor, I fastened on the “descent” theory, which was subsequently confirmed by an examination of the wall outside and above the open study window. Over this wall—over the whole house, in fact—the commonest and creepiest of creepers creep. I refer to Ampelopsis Veitchii. A large drainage-pipe runs to earth beside the study window in question, and for a space of perhaps half a foot on each side of it throughout its length the creeper has been cleared away. But half-way between the top of the window through which the murderer entered the study and the first-floor windows above it, a shoot of creeper has pushed its way out into the cleared space beside the pipe. This shoot drew my attention because it was black and shrivelled.
‘Ampelopis Veitchii, though one of the commonest forms of creeper, is also one of the most tender. A sharp blow upon the main branch of a shoot means death to that shoot within a few hours. The dead piece of creeper I refer to was, I thought at first, at that point on the wall where it might have been struck by the feet of a man of middle height climbing out of either of the first-floor windows over the open one of the study at the moment when he was clutching the sill with one or both hands and hanging with arms bent.
‘It was, I saw, clearly impossible for the murderer to have dropped from the upper window on to the sill of the open study window and so miraculously to have retained his balance that he did not fall on to the flower-bed. Also—in spite of the novelists—there are few drain-pipes which can be used to climb by. This drain-pipe is no exception. Fingers could not be clasped round it; neither would it support more than a five- or six-stone weight. It was clear, therefore, that the murderer, in descending the wall, had used something to climb down—probably a rope. (Descent of the wall was another confirmation of the theory that the murderer was of the house.)
‘It will have been noticed that I have used the masculine personal pronoun to describe the murderer. Dr Fowler’s statement at the inquest, which I quoted earlier, would allow, given insanity, of equal rights to women. But I felt, from the beginning, that John Hoode had been killed by a man, and I worked throughout on that assumption. At every turn little things told me that this was a man’s work; and I was finally satisfied when I accepted the theory of descent by the wall.
‘I will bring to an end here the first part of this report. But before starting upon the next, I will summarise the conclusions already shown, give them life with a touch of imagination, and let you see the picture.
‘The murder was committed by a man who, if not completely mad, was at least insane in his hatred of Hoode and Hoode’s. He was at the time of the murder an inmate of Abbotshall. He effected entrance to the study that night by letting himself down from the more easterly of the first-floor windows over the most easterly of the study windows. He spoke to Hoode, jokingly explaining his unceremonious entry. By some pretext (it would, you know, be easy enough) he got behind Hoode as he sat at his big table. Then he struck.
‘His object achieved, he carried out the plan he has been hatching for weeks. He sets the scene, overturning chairs, spilling papers, dragging the body to the hearth—and all as quietly as you please. He steps back, to regard with pleasure the results of his labours.
‘He overturns the clock, having moved the sofa to rest it upon. He moves back the hands of the clock until they stand at 10.45. A quarter to eleven, mark you! Not ten to, not twenty to, not twenty-three and a half minutes to—but a quarter to!
‘He gives a hasty glance round the room. Everything is in order. He thrusts his head cautiously from the window. All is as he had calculated: there is nobody about; the night is sufficiently dark. He goes up his rope again and through that first-floor window.
II
‘Having established our criminal as at least a monomaniac and an inhabitant—permanent or temporary—of the house, let us go further into detail.
‘First, as regards the fingerprints of which so much has been heard and so few have seen.
‘Everyone is satisfied that the murderer wore gloves, because nowhere else in the study, where he must have handled one thing after another, were any fingerprints found. They are found, these important pieces of evidence, upon the one object where their presence is utterly damning—and there only!
‘The spirals, whorls, and what-nots which compose these marks correspond exactly with those to be found in the skin of the thumb and first two fingers of Archibald Deacon’s right hand. Ergo, say the Police and Public, Archibald Deacon is the murderer. But I say that these fingerprints go a long way to prove (even without the rest of my evidence) that Deacon cannot be the murderer.
‘Here is the one really clever murder (of those discovered) committed within the past fifteen years. Yet, if one takes the popular view, one has to believe that the murderer, who was wise enough to wear gloves during the greater part of the time he was in the study, actually removed one of them and carefully pressed his thumb and fingers upon the highly receptive surface of his weapon’s handle before leaving that weapon in a nice easy place for the first policeman to find!
‘Surely the fallacy of blindly accepting as the murderer the man who made those prints is obvious? Consider the position of the marks. They point down the handle, towards the blade! It is almost incredible that at any time would the murderer have held the weapon as a Regency buck dandled his tasselled cane.
‘My difficulty was to reconcile with Deacon’s innocence of the murder the presence of his fingerprints upon the tool with which it was committed. That the prints were his I had too much respect for the efficacy of the Scotland Yard system to doubt.
‘A possible solution came to me from memory of a detective storyfn2 I once read, in which the murderer, something of a practical scientist, made by means of an ingenious and practicable photographical process, a die of another man’s thumb-print. This he used to incriminate the innocent owner of the thumb.
‘For a while I cherished this theory, so vivid was my recollection of the possibility of the method; but I was never really satisfied. Then, suddenly, I found the explanation which I was afterwards to prove true.
‘Instead of going to the immense trouble of making a stamp or die, why not obtain beforehand upon the desired object the actual fingerprints of the chosen scapegoat?
‘After consideration, I accepted this idea. It fitted well enough with my murderer—a fellow of infinite cunning. I proceeded with the work of reconstruction. Thus:
‘Since Deacon had no knowledge of the crime, the murderer must have induced him, in circumstances so ordinary or usual as to be likely to escape his memory, to take hold of the wood-rasp by its handle at some time before the murder; perhaps eight hours, probably not more. For this clever murderer would realise the difficulty of retaining the fingerprints unspoiled.
‘When, after obtaining the fingerprints, he had got rid of Deacon, he must have removed with gloved hands—taking care not to touch those parts of the handle where the prints must be—the handle he had loosened before Deacon had held it. Then that handle must have been packed (say in a small box with cork wedges) in such a way as to ensure that its carriage in the pocket for the descent of the wall and subsequent activities could be effected without those beautiful marks being spoiled. The reassembling of the tool must have been done after the murder; and the whole Deacon-damning bit of evidence then planted for the police to find.
‘In the study, on a later visit, I found confirmation of the accuracy of my deductions. It will be remembered that when the wood-rasp was produced at the inquest, it was proved to the satisfaction of the court that it was indeed the weapon which had caused Hoode’s death. This proof lay pre-eminently in the condition of the blade, which was far from nice. But it was also pointed out by the police, to make the jury’s assurance doubly sure, that on a little rosewood table in the study there was a scar on the polish, known not to have existed before, which had obviously been made by the blade of just such a wood-rasp as this wood-rasp. Superintendent Boyd gave it as his opinion that the murderer had laid the wood-rasp on this table after he had killed Hoode, and while he was arranging the appearance of a struggle.
‘I agree with the superintendent—but only up to a point. Where he was wrong was in assuming that the scar had been made by the murderer having put down on the table the whole wood-rasp.
‘That scar is of exactly the same length as the blade of the rasp, and is in the centre of the table, having on every side of it some six inches of unscarred table-top.
‘Do you see? That scar could not have been made by the complete tool! The handle is two and a half to three inches in circumference, and if it had been joined to the blade would, by reason of its far greater thickness, have allowed no more than an inch of so of the blade’s tip to touch and scar the table. Had the complete rasp been laid down at the edge of the table with the handle projecting into space, the full-length scar would have been possible. But the scar, as I have described, is in the middle of the table, and could therefore only have been made by the blade without its handle.
‘Here, then, was the justification of my theory. Further proof came later. With full official permission I examined the wood-rasp. It was as it had been found. I held it in my hand. I shook it—and the blade flew off. Two small wooden wedges fell to the floor. I picked a shred of linen from the tang of the blade.
‘Obviously, the use of the little wedges had been to hold the tang of the blade in the enlarged socket of the handle. And the fact that the socket had been enlarged, added to the inadequacy of the wedges, is surely proof enough that the blows which killed Hoode were struck with the blade alone. There is, however, yet more—the shred of linen. It came, I should say, from a handkerchief, the use of which had been, I take it, to get a better grip of the thin tang when striking. The glove the murderer was undoubtedly wearing probably proved insufficient to ensure against a slipping grip. So he wrapped a handkerchief about his gloved hand. An inequality in the surface of the steel caught some loose thread. This he did not notice when hastily ramming handle and blade together after the kill.
‘The wedges and the shred of linen are in the keeping of Superintendent Boyd, to whom I gave them at the time of my discovery. I could not, my case being incomplete, explain then their significance.
‘My next step was to question Deacon. To my surprise and consternation I found that although he was a man for whom tools had neither interest nor meaning and for whom therefore the handling of any such implement might be so much out of the ordinary as to impress itself upon his memory, he had no recollection of ever seeing, before the inquest, any wood-rasp. He even suggested that until now he had not known such a tool to exist.
‘I will not deny that Deacon’s emphatic assertion that he had never even seen the rasp until it was exhibited at the inquest gave me a shaking. It did, and a bad one. I tested all the links in my chain, only to find each sound and the whole most obviously right—until this blind alley.
‘Then it struck me, and I laughed at myself as those who read are probably already laughing at me. I saw that I was committing the grave error of underrating my man. I saw that so far from having received a check I had really been advanced.
‘The fingerprints were on the handle of the rasp, and the handle—had I not been at much pains to prove it?—had been separated from the blade by the murderer. The murderer—being an intelligent murderer—would certainly never have been such a fool as to let the fearsome and so-likely-to-be-remembered blade come within Deacon’s sight. No, it was far more likely that he had disguised the handle as the handle of something else.
‘Having got thus far, I progressed at speed. As what could he have disguised the handle? With efficacy, only as that of another tool. But he probably knew Deacon as a man who had no truck with tools. How, then, did he get the so-ordinary surroundings necessary to prevent awkward memories arising afterwards in the mind of Deacon? The answer is that they were there, ready-made, to his hand. In order to avoid obscurity, I will elucidate this.
‘The indication all through had been that the murderer was a man accustomed to the use of carpenter’s tools. The murderer was an inmate of the house. But one and two together and you will see that he would very possibly be known to the household as one who was “always messing about at that there carpent’ring”. Deacon was also of the household, and would therefore see nothing unusual in, say, being asked to “hold this chisel (or gouge, or anything else you like) for just half a second”. If this seems far-fetched, remember that from the beginning I felt the murderer as one who had been preparing his work for some long time.
‘It was almost at the moment when I reached this stage of thought that a number of hitherto insufficiently substantiated suspicions which had been steadily massing in my mind suddenly re-arranged themselves in such a manner as to become extra links in my chain of reasoning rather than the wild plungings of a mind tired of logic. This merging of reason with intuition (they are twins, those two) left me certain that I should know who I was trying to prove guilty if Deacon gave me the name of the man against whom these suspicions of mine had been directed in answer to the question: “Who, at any time within the twenty-four hours preceding the murder, induced you to hold in your right hand an implement with a short, thick wooden handle of the same appearance as the handle you have seen on the wood-rasp?”
‘You see, I had already learned that of the Abbotshall menagé four men frequently used, and had consequent access to, carpenter’s tools. These were the gardener, the chauffeur, the murdered man, and the guest from whom I had the information.
‘Hoode, the gardener, and the chauffeur I disregarded. The first because he was not his own murderer; the second because at the time of the murder he was in bed at the Cottage Hospital in Marling; and the third because he has respectable and trustworthy friends to swear that he spent the evening of the crime in their company.
‘Remained the guest—that enthusiastic amateur Daedalus—and he the man that from the beginning had excited those nebulous suspicions I have mentioned. He was living in the house at the time when the murder was committed. He was, by his own showing, an amateur carpenter of experience and enthusiasm. (Early he simulated ignorance as to the name of a wood-rasp. Later, by his voluntary statement, he showed that he could not have been ignorant of it. This was the only slip he made when talking with me.)
‘Before I took opportunity to ask Deacon the all-important question, I did much and thought more. With one exception, these thoughts and actions are proper to the next part of this report, and accordingly are dealt with there. The exception is this:
‘I became aware that of the two first-floor windows of Abbotshall which (see Part I) are over the window through which the murderer entered the study, the more easterly must have been the one used by the murderer. For I saw that I had not seen at first, that it would be almost an impossibility for a man descending by a rope from the other window to swing his legs, at the end of the descent, on to the sill of the study-window, since that window is not exactly, as one would find in a house younger and less altered than Abbotshall, between the two first-floor windows above it but has most of its length beneath the more easterly. Moreover, although a man descending from the less easterly window might possibly have struck with his foot that one shoot of creeper in the cleared space beside the drain-pipe (see Part I), he would also be bound to do damage to the main body of the creeper—and that is uninjured.
‘It was, in fact, obvious that the murderer had come out of the room with the more easterly window. (I was annoyed with myself for not having seen this sooner.)
‘That window is to the room occupied as a sitting-room by Sir Arthur Digby-Coates.
‘My suspect amateur carpenter was Sir Arthur Digby-Coates.
‘When at last I put to Deacon my question of who had given him any implement with a wooden handle to hold, the answer was “Sir Arthur Digby-Coates”.
‘(Note—Before going on to Part III, it might be well to explain briefly the circumstances in which Deacon was induced to leave the prints of his fingers on the handle. It is not essential, but may be of interest. Deacon, when I asked him my question, explained that on the morning of the day of the murder he passed by Digby-Coates’s sitting-room. The door was open. Digby-Coates called to him to come in. He entered to find, as on several previous occasions, that Digby-Coates was amusing himself with the completing of an excellent carved cabinet he had been engaged on for many weeks. Digby-Coates was in difficulties, having, he explained, too few hands. Deacon was asked to stand by. He did so, and assisted the enthusiast by handing from the carpenter’s bench near the window one tool after the other. Among them was one, he just remembered, with a handle such as I have described and such as he remembered the wood-rasp handle to be now that he came to think of it.)
‘So there you are. When I heard the story I felt, I confess, no little admiration for Digby-Coates. He is so thorough! You see, this was not the first time Deacon had given such assistance. And he knew Deacon thought little and cared less about the whole business of cabinet-making.
III
‘It is evidence purely of trivialities which has put Deacon in a cell awaiting trial; yet I am convinced that did I attempt to establish his innocence merely by the means I have employed so far, the very people who already accept his guilt as certain would accuse me of having nothing but trivialities upon which to base my version of the affair. Further, it could be said—and would be—that I have read between the lines writing which was not there; that I have so ingeniously twisted the interpretation of what are, in fact, merely ordinarily meaningless signs as to make them appear a grim and coherent indictment against another man; that I have seen an anarchist bomb in a schoolboy’s snowball and a Bolshevik outrage in a ’varsity rag.
‘So I must strengthen my case; for the truth is that this evidence of trivialities is good, but not nearly good enough. It must have a backing to it.
‘Now, there is, if you look at it, a complete absence of any backing to the case against Deacon. “What about the money?” you say. “What about that hundred pounds belonging to Hoode? There’s motive for you!” “Nonsense!” say I. Deacon was paid six hundred pounds a year. He had also an allowance from his only living relative. He had been, it is true, a little shorter of money than usual lately; but to suggest that he would commit murder for a hundred pounds is absurd. A man in his position could have raised the money in a thousand safer and less energetic ways. No, Deacon’s story that the money was a birthday gift from Hoode is, besides being more likely, true. Further, it is easy of proof that Deacon and Hoode were on the best of terms: for corroboration apply to the Minister of Imperial Finance and the household of Abbotshall and 12 Seymour Square. Further still, look at Deacon’s record and see how rash it is to condemn him murderer with nothing more to go upon than those too-beautiful fingerprints and a few ragged pieces of circumstantial evidence, the two best of which were supplied—oh! so ingenuously—by Sir Arthur Digby-Coates. For it was from him that the police first learnt that Hoode had drawn a hundred pounds in notes from his bank. And it was through him that it became known that Deacon had asked him the time at ten forty-five on the night of the murder—the time to which the hands of the clock in the study had been moved by the murderer.
‘There being no backing to the case of the Crown against Deacon, I saw that if I could find a stout one for mine against Digby-Coates I should score heavily.
‘The first thing to be found was motive. What I asked myself, could it be? Money? No. Digby-Coates is a wealthier man by far than ever was Hoode. Revenge for some particular ill turn? Hardly that, since Hoode, though a politician, bore all his life the stamp of honesty and straight dealing. A woman? I was not prepared to accept one as the sole cause. She might, of course, be contributory, but I wanted something more likely. Middle-aged men of the social and intellectual standing of these two do not often, in this age of decrees nisi and cold love, go about killing each other over a woman if she is only the first blot upon the fair sea of friendship.
‘I was forced back, in this search for motive, upon the deductions I had made from those little material signs, and remembered that I had determined, before ever I thought of putting a name to the murderer, that John Hoode was killed by a man insane; not mad in the gibbering, straws-in-the-hair sense, but mentally unbalanced by a kind of ingrowing, self-nourishing hatred.
‘I took this as my starting point and asked myself how I could find corroboration of and reason for this hatred having existed in the heart of a man ostensibly the closest friend of its object. The answer was: look at their past history; as much of it as is available in books of record. I did so, using Hoode’s own books.
‘I found soon enough reason for the hatred. Look as I looked. You will see that always, always, always was Digby-Coates beaten by the man he killed. Were the race one of scholarship, sport, politics, social advancement, honours, the result was the same. Hoode first; Digby-Coates second. Look in Who’s Who, Hansard, the records of Upchester School and Magdalen, the Honours Lists. Look in the minds of the men’s colleagues and contemporaries. Always will you find the same story. Look at this, the slightest extract from the list:
| John Hoode | Arthur Digby-Coates |
| Captain of Upchester (last three years at school). | Senior Monitor (same three years). |
| Won John Halkett scholarship to Magdalen. | Second on list. |
| Rowed 2 IN OXFORD BOAT (THIRD YEAR). | Rowed 6 IN TRIALS (THIRD YEAR). |
| Gaisford (fourth year). | Newdigate (fourth year). |
| Minor office (Admiralty) after three years in Parliament. | Still merely M.P. after six months longer in Parliament. |
| President of Board of Trade. | Still M.P. (He was, I believe, offered at this time a minor Parliamentary Secretaryship; but refused). |
| K.C.M.G., C.V.O., etc. | K.B.E. |
| Minister of Imperial Finance (from the date of the forming of the Ministry in 1919). | Almost at same time accepted Parliamentary Secretaryship to Board of Conciliation. |
‘One could go on for pages, for ever telling this story of races won by a stride—Hoode the winner, Digby-Coates his follower-up—and that stride getting longer and longer as time went on.
‘But at last came the race for the Woman—the race whose loss snapped the last cord of sanity in the mind of the loser.
‘I discovered the existence of the Woman in this way: I searched Hoode’s desk in suspicion of a hidden drawer. I found one and in it a diary (of no use save to corroborate the fact of some of those races), and a bunch of newspaper-cuttings. But I knew—how is no matter—that something was missing from that drawer.
‘What that something was I did not know. I only knew that it was most probably of importance. So I searched the house—and found it. A packet of letters from the Woman. As I was by then up to the neck in the unspeakably nasty work of the Private Inquiry Agent, I read them. Who the woman is will not be set down here. It is my hope that not even in court shall I have to give her name.
‘I sought her and talked with her. Put briefly and brutally her replies were that I was correct in assuming that she had been Hoode’s mistress, and that I was also right (this was a shot in black dark) in assuming that she knew Sir Arthur Digby-Coates. She did not, it seemed, have any affection for the gentleman. She made it plain to me, under some pressure, that Sir Arthur had wished her to stand in relation to him that she subsequently did to John Hoode. But (a shrug of distaste) Sir Arthur had been sent packing—and quickly.
‘Is not that enough, when added to those other and perpetual defeats of the past five-and-thirty years, to show the reason for hatred in the mind of the egoist? Consider the history of the matter. First, boyish jealousy and a determination to win next time; then the gradual process of realisation that strive as he would he would never reach a common goal before his rival; then the slow at first but increasingly fast transition from healthy jealousy to dislike, from dislike to utter hatred. Then, at last, with the crowning loss of the Woman, the monomania—for this is what the hatred is grown—takes a firmer hold and becomes a fire so fierce that only the complete elimination of the hated man will quench it.
‘So much for reasons why Digby-Coates should have hated Hoode. Now for corroboration that such hatred actually existed.
‘I wrote just now of certain newspaper-cuttings which I found in the hidden drawer of Hoode’s desk. These were a bunch of twenty-four, taken from various issues (all bearing dates within the last two years) of The Searchlight, The St Stephen’s Gazette, and Vox Populi. Every one of the cuttings was a leading or almost equally prominent article attacking the Minister of Reconstruction in no half-hearted way.
‘Being one who prefers news without sensationalism, I had never before read a line from any one of these three papers. I came to these extracts, therefore, with a mind not only open but blank, and was immediately struck by the strange unanimity of the three newspapers in regard to John Hoode. For, as all the world must know, whether they read them or not, the trio are of politics widely varying. Their attacks upon the murdered man were made upon different grounds, it is true, but the very fact that the attacks were made, and made so viciously, struck me as unusual. It seemed to me that in the ordinary way the fact of one attacking would be enough to make at least one of the others defend. Further, the grounds upon which the attacks were made appeared to my unbiased mind as flimsy compared with the whole-hearted virulence of the writing.
‘From wondering and re-reading, I came upon a thing yet stranger: the unmistakable and mysterious similarity in the style of the composition. This similarity was to me, who have made something of a study of other men’s methods, even more pronounced when attempts had been made to disguise or vary the manner of writing. After ten minutes’ examination of those cuttings, I was prepared to swear that one man had been conducting the anti-Hoode campaign in three papers whose views on every other matter from vaccination to the Vatican are as wide apart as Stoke Poges, Seattle, and Sinbad the Sailor. I pictured a man of some scholastic attainment who was unable to write in fashion other than preciously correct and so set in his style as to be incapable of varying it, tried he never so hard.
‘I took the cuttings and my conviction to Deacon. He could not help me, so I went to his predecessor as Hoode’s private secretary (the real private secretary, like Deacon, not the departmental one.) From him I obtained confirmation of my theory. He, too, had suspected that not only was one man behind these press attacks, but that this man was also the actual author. He showed me something I had only half-noticed till then; something which went further than mere similarity of style. Throughout the articles, he pointed out, quotations occurred. They were, some of them, unusual quotations. But usual or unusual, one and all were correct! They were correct in some cases to the point of pedantry—if correctness can be so described. And they were thus correct in these three widely differing and highly sensational papers, whose literary standards have always been a byword with those who hate journalese, cliché, and the dreadful mutilation, humiliation and weakening of the English language.
‘It was when this former secretary of Hoode’s pointed this out to me that I recollected having recently been puzzled by a memory which would not be remembered. In one of the cuttings I had come across a quotation from Virgil, in which a dative case had been used rather than the all-prevalent but less correct genitive, and had been haunted at the time of reading with a sense of having seen this same rarity only recently. Suddenly it came back to me. It had been in a book of essays I had dipped into—a book of essays which, on inquiry made later, turned out to be from the pen of Sir Arthur Digby-Coates, writing under a feminine nom de guerre.
‘That, I admit, is not much to go upon. But more was to come. This forerunner of Deacon had—before he quarrelled with Hoode and left him—on his own initiative employed a private detective and set him to unearth this enemy of Hoode’s that seemed to command and write for three incendiary newspapers. You see, this secretary was sure that there was an enemy of some importance at work. At first he said nothing to Hoode, but at last told of his suspicions. He was laughed at. He returned to the charge—and they quarrelled. He left Hoode’s employment without having told him of the private detective. Being, with some excuse, not a little angry, he paid the detective, telling him to stop the work and go to hell.
‘But, luckily, the private detective had smelt a Big Thing, and consequently Big Money. He went on working. He finished his job. I got into touch with him. He has been paid, and the result of his labours has been forwarded to Scotland Yard.
‘His proofs are more than adequate. He has established, mainly through the corruptibility of a disgruntled employee, that Digby-Coates was beyond doubt the hidden owner of those three newspapers and also the composer of all those elaborate paeans of hate which appeared in them from time to time, and were directed against the man who was his friend and whose friendship he so cleverly pretended to return. (One cannot but admire the ingenuity with which Digby-Coates foisted more or less respectable and quite foolish figureheads upon the world—including the rest of the Press—as owners of the papers upon the purchase and upkeep of which he must have spent nearly half his great fortune. He was truly a great Enemy!)
‘But it was in writing himself the attacks with which he tried to bring Hoode to a fall that he overstepped himself and made a loophole through which curious persons could wriggle. Had he left the writing to different men and rested content with being the power behind the machine, he would have increased by a thousand his chances of remaining undiscovered. I suppose that his hate was so strong that to leave to others the forging of the weapons was beyond him.
‘Before ending the third part of this report, I would draw attention to what has thus far been established—established, I hope, to the satisfaction of even the most rigorous anti-Deaconite.
‘It has been shown that there is both reason for and corroboration of Digby-Coates’s hatred of Hoode.
‘It has been shown not only that all the evidence against Deacon can be used equally well against Digby-Coates, but also that there is in fact more of this evidence of material signs against Digby-Coates than there is against Deacon.
‘Above all, we have in the case against Digby-Coates two things (which might be called one thing) that there have never been against Deacon. The first is motive—although it is nothing more (or less) than the crazy hatred of a half-madman. The second is reliable evidence that ill-will existed before the murder.
IV
‘If I were delivering this report as a lecture, I am sure that there would be a little fat man in a corner bounding up and down with ill-suppressed irritation. At this stage he would be unable to restrain himself any longer and would ask passionately why the hell I was wasting my time and his by faking up a case against a man who had a chilled-steel alibi—the perfect, unassailable defence of a man who is seen by various people at such times and in such a place as to make it impossible for him to have committed the crime.
‘I would assure the fat little man—as I assure those who read—that I would in due course deal with and demolish that alibi, pointing out at the same time that it was the very perfection of the thing which had bred some of my first suspicions of its owner. It was too good, too complete, in a household where everyone else had only ordinary ones; it was a Sunday-go-to-meeting alibi; the alibi of a man who at least knew that a crime was going to be committed.
‘But more of that later. For the moment I will take two points which, though they might be considered proper to the first part of this document, I have seen fit to reserve until now.
‘The first concerns a rope. I have explained that I found it necessary to search the house. During that search, which was not only for the missing letters from the drawer in Hoode’s writing-table, I went into Deacon’s bedroom. This is next to, and on the west side of, the room used by Digby-Coates as a sitting room, study and, occasionally, carpenter’s shop. (He has had a bench fitted up there for him, as I mentioned earlier.)
‘In the grate in Deacon’s bedroom was a little pile of soot which at once attracted my attention, as being unusual in so scrupulously tended a house as Abbotshall. I investigated. On the ledge which runs round the interior of the chimney at the point where—on a level with the mantelpiece outside—it suddenly narrows, I found a coil of silk cord of roughly the thickness of a man’s little finger. It was double-knotted at intervals of two inches throughout its length, which was sixteen feet. (By the time this report is read the rope will be in the hands of the authorities. They would have had it sooner, only I was not giving away information until my case was complete.)
‘That pile of soot in the grate was not of long standing. The cord was new. I knew at once that I had found the rope by which my criminal had descended the wall. But how did it get where I found it?
‘I saw that the only answer which would fit the rest of my case was that the rope had been put there by Digby-Coates. Since I knew Deacon to be innocent and I had nowhere found any evidence to show that Digby-Coates had an accomplice, it could have been nobody else. And it was so easy for him, occupying as he did the room next to Deacon’s.
‘I am aware that here I am treading on dangerous ground—from the point of view, that is, of the logical anti-Deaconite—but I say nevertheless that this business of the rope strengthens my case and goes to give yet further indication of Digby-Coates’s deliberate plan to fasten his guilt upon Deacon. Silk rope of so excellent a quality is not common, and I think that Scotland Yard should have little difficulty in tracing its purchase. So convinced am I that they will find Digby-Coates at the other end of the trail that, if I could be of any use, I would willingly help them. Without the rest of my investigations, the finding of that rope would only have hastened Deacon’s journey to another and thicker one. But with them it has an effect most different.
‘Now for the second matter which was to be dealt with before the alibi.
‘It will be remembered that a great point against Deacon was that the hands of the overturned clock in the study stood at 10.45. The coroner, in reviewing the case at the end of the inquest, argued thus: At a quarter to eleven Deacon had entered the room of Sir Arthur Digby-Coates and inquired the time. That he had done so was apparent both from the evidence of Sir Arthur and of Deacon himself. All the other evidence pointed to Deacon. Was it not then only reasonable to assume that Deacon, after committing the murder and arranging the room to look as if a struggle had taken place, had pushed those hands back to 10.45, knowing that at that time he had been with so reputable a witness as is Arthur Digby-Coates? The whole thing was clear, said the coroner, answering his own question and practically directing the already willing jury to pass a verdict against Deacon.
‘The coroner added that he could not say whether, if his assumption were correct, which he was sure it was, Deacon had asked the time of Sir Arthur Digby-Coates in order to be able, by moving the clock, to establish an alibi, or whether that request for the time had been an accident and the moving of the clock hands a subsequent idea brought about by memory of the “time” incident. In any case, added this erudite official, the omission to make a corresponding alteration in the chiming served to show how the cleverest criminal will always make some foolish mistake which will afterwards lead to his capture.
‘How true! How trite! And, in this instance, how utterly wrong! Observe. Both Digby-Coates and Deacon are highly intelligent men. Suppose either of them wishing to show by moving back the hands of a clock that the clock stopped at a time earlier than it did in fact: would either make the ridiculous, childish mistake of forgetting the striking? I think not!
‘Observe again. Two men know that one asked the other the time. Why, then, is the subsequent utilising of that incident to be attributed to only one of them? Clearly it can apply equally to both!
‘Here again the evidence which has been used against Deacon can be used at least equally well against Digby-Coates.
‘This clock business, I say, is only further proof of the great ingenuity of Digby-Coates. It was the cleverest stroke of all. Deacon innocently, naturally, asks him the time. At once Digby-Coates, having already made up his mind that tonight was the night, is seized with an idea whose brilliance is surprising even to himself. Deacon, the man he has already chosen as scapegoat, is playing into his hands.
‘Suppose (I can see his mind working) that he slew Hoode just on the hour, and then made sure, after the clock in the study had struck, that its works, though undamaged, would not go on working, and then moved the hands back till they stood at 10.45. The disorder of the striking when the clock was set going again would reveal to investigators the fact that the hands had been moved and that the clock had stopped not before the hour but after it. Why, these investigators, would ask, had the hands been moved to that particular place—10.45? Soon they would find out—he, clever fellow! helping them without seeming to—that at this moment on the night of the crime Deacon had asked him the time. “Ah-ha!” would say the investigators, “Mr Deacon, to whom so much else points, has been trying to make alibis for himself!”
‘But now, he thinks, he can carry out this great, this wonderful scheme? Ah, yes! Let him put himself in Deacon’s place; let him think what Deacon would do if he was killing Hoode. If he stopped the clock, he wouldn’t draw too much attention to it, so—so—ah, yes!—he would try to make it look as if there had been a struggle and would derange the tidy room accordingly!
‘That, I am convinced, is the way Digby-Coates reasoned. To put it briefly, he had to arrange the study to look, not as if a struggle had really taken place, but as if someone had tried their best to make it look like that. That is to say, while giving the air of a genuine attempt to mislead, he must yet make sure that investigators were not, in fact, misled; the first thing, for instance, that he had to do was to ensure that attention was drawn to the clock, but in such a way as to make it seem that endeavours had been made to draw attention from it.
‘Clever, you must admit. Clever as hell! And successful, as those who had followed the case must know. He got the effect he wanted—that of a man who had really tried to mislead. The police know that “struggle” scene for a fake. But I hope I have shown that it was a double fake. If you think I have imbued my criminal with more ingenuity than any murderer would possess, remember that I, too, am a man, and therefore a potential murderer. Remember also something of which I have given more tangible proof—the fingerprint game he played on Deacon. Remember that it was through him that the police first learnt of the money Hoode had drawn from his bank, and the fact that at 10.45 on the night of the murder Deacon had asked him the time! Remember that this business of the clock and the “struggle” is like that of the silk cord—nothing without what I have described in the earlier parts of this report, but with it a great deal.
‘And now for that alibi.
‘That the murderer was in the study after the clock there—which, by the way, was correct by the other clocks in the house—had struck eleven, is proved by the fact of the striking of that clock being one hour behind.
‘Miss Hoode entered the study and found the body at about ten minutes past eleven.
‘The murderer, then, left the study at some time between two minutes past the hour at the earliest and ten minutes past.
‘So soon as I was certain that the murderer was Digby-Coates, I saw that before my case against him was complete I must disprove his alibi; also I realised that this could best be done by ascertaining much more definitely at what time he left the study to climb back up the wall and into his room. That eight minutes between eleven-two and eleven-ten was too wide a margin to work in.
‘The more I pondered this task the more removed from possibility seemed its completion. Then, by the grace of God, there emerged, in circumstances which need not be set down here, a new witness whose evidence put me in possession of exactly the information I needed.
‘This witness is Robert Belford, a manservant, and therefore a permanent member of the Hoode household. He is a highly-strung little man, and refrained at first from telling what he knew through very natural fear of being himself suspected of the murder of his master.
‘Before Belford’s emergence I had come to the conclusion—though I could not see then how this was going to help—that the acceptance of the old butler—Poole—as a perfectly trustworthy witness had been a mistake. I discovered, you see, that he suffers from that inconvenient disorder hay-fever.
‘When in the throes of a seizure he can neither see, hear nor speak; is conscious, in fact, of nothing save discomfort. That these seizures last sometimes for as long as a minute and a half I can swear to from having watched the old man struggle with one.
‘Immediately after my discovery of the existence in him of this ailment, I questioned Poole; with the result that at last he remembered having suffered a paroxysm on the night of the murder at some time during that part of the evening before the murder when his master was in the study and the rest of the house was quiet. He had not remembered the incident until I asked him. His memory, as he says, is not what it was, and in any case the event was not sufficiently out of the ordinary to have stayed in his head after all the emotions of that crowded night.
‘But it was during, or rather at the beginning, of that minute and a half or two minutes during which the old man could do nothing but cough and sneeze and choke and gasp with his head between his knees, that Belford—the new witness—had entered the study—by the door!
‘When he got into the room he saw immediately the body of his master. In one horrified second (I have said that he is an intensely nervous, highly-strung little man) he took it all in; corpse, disorder, and all the other details of that brilliant and messy crime. And there was, he swears, no one else in the room. The only place in which a man could have hidden would have been the alcove at the far end of the room, but the curtains which, as a rule, cut that off from view, were on that night drawn aside.
‘Belford, after that one great second of horror, fled. As he closed the door behind him, he noticed that Poole, in his little room across the hall, was still wrestling with his paroxysm. Belford retreated. He was terrified that this dreadful crime he had seen might be laid at his door were he seen coming from the room. It was, to say the least, unusual that he should enter the study when his master was working there. Nobody, he felt, would believe him if he told them that he had gone there to ask a favour of the dead man. He crept up the dark hall and crouched on the stairs.
‘His position was directly under the clock which hangs there; and here you have the reason for what has possibly seemed meticulousness on my part in describing this minor incident. He became aware, without thinking, of what that clock said. He stared up at it blankly. But, as often happens, his mechanical action impressed itself on his memory. He swears—nothing will shake his evidence—that the time was five minutes past eleven.
‘There you have it. Digby-Coates, as I have shown, cannot have left the study before eleven-two. At some point between eleven-four and eleven-five Belford finds the study empty of life.
‘I split the difference and took eleven-three as the time at which Digby-Coates left the study—by the window. He must have been, I argued, snugly back in his room by four minutes past at the latest. He is still an active and very powerful man, and the climb could not have taken him long.
‘Having, after hearing what Belford had to tell me, thus been enabled to know at least a part of the time which must prove a weak spot in the alibi, I reviewed that itself. Before I do so, here, however, there is one more point which I must settle. It concerns the hay-fever of the aged Mr Poole. As the attack of this malady which let Belford into the study unobserved failed to stay in his memory, it might be thought that he may have had another attack, enabling another man to enter the study without being seen. That idea, which is sure to be entertained, is, I submit, of no value. One attack is ordinary enough; but the old man tells me that he has been “better lately”. Two of these painful seizures would have stayed in his mind. Besides, there is the silk rope and other evidence to prove descent by the wall. Also, the crime was obviously premeditated, and no murderer of such skill as Hoode’s would rely upon the hay-fever of an aged butler, even if he knew of its existence.
‘Now for the facts of the alibi. It will be remembered that Digby-Coates had, on the night of the murder, retired to his own sitting-room at a few minutes after ten. The night was hot. He opened the window to its fullest extent; also flung the door open. This was (I use his own words, spoken at the inquest) “in order to get the benefit of any breeze there might be”. Further, since he “wished to be alone in order to go through some important papers”, he pinned upon that open door a notice: “Busy—do not disturb”.
‘After he had gone to his room, the first incident with which we need concern ourselves occurred at 10.45, when Deacon made that famous request for the time. At that moment Digby-Coates was pacing the room, and Deacon, disregarding or not seeing the notice on the door, put his question from the passage.
‘About seven minutes later, Belford, walking down the passage, saw Digby-Coates standing in the doorway.
‘The next we hear is from Elsie Syme, one of the housemaids, who “saw Sir Arthur sitting in his big chair by the window” as she passed his door. (The quotation is from her reply to a question of Superintendent Boyd’s.) So far as can be ascertained, this was not more than five minutes after Belford had passed by—making the time about 10.57.
‘Next comes another housemaid, Mabel Smith, who had been working in the linen-closet, which is opposite the door of Deacon’s room. She said that returning from the journey she had made downstairs (and by forgetting which she had furnished Deacon with that false alibi which he rather foolishly tried to make use of) she had noticed Sir Arthur “sitting in his room”. The time then, as guessed by the girl and more definitely confirmed by Elsie Syme, who knew what time she had left the servants’ hall, was between eleven and one minute past.
‘Next comes Belford again. You remember that he entered the study at a point between three and four minutes past eleven. On his way there from the upper part of the house he passed Digby-Coates’s room and “saw Sir Arthur by the window”. Since he went straight to the study, the time at which he passed Digby-Coates’s door cannot have been earlier than 11.03.
‘After this we have Elsie Syme again. This time she is on her way to bed. Passing along the passage she again “saw Sir Arthur sitting by the window”. The time in this instance is a little harder to get at, but cannot have been more than six minutes past the hour.
‘Last we have the evidence of old Poole, who, after entering the study on hearing Miss Hoode scream, immediately fled to fetch his dead master’s friend. He found Sir Arthur sitting with a book, his arm-chair pulled close up to the open window. This, since Miss Hoode entered the study at approximately ten minutes past eleven, was probably at 11.13 or thereabouts.
‘That is the alibi, and a very good one it is, too—too good. It was, of course, never recognised as being an alibi, since Digby-Coates was never suspected by police or public as being the murderer; but the very fact of its being there (it trickled out mixed up with unimportant and verbose evidence, and was very cleverly referred to by Digby-Coates himself on every possible occasion) must have had its subconscious effect. (I should perhaps, explain here that, as Digby-Coates was never suspected and the alibi was therefore the nebulous but effective thing I have described, the times I have given were not mentioned otherwise than generally: such exactitude as appears above is the result of Superintendent Boyd’s and my own questioning, of which more later.)
‘I have shown that according to the witnesses, none of whom I could suspect of anything but honesty, Digby-Coates was seen there in his room at times which made it impossible, that he should have done the murder. Yet I knew he was the murderer. Therefore some at least of these witnesses who had sworn to seeing him were mistaken.
‘I had, then, to find out (a) which witnesses were thus in error, and (b) how they had been induced to make their common mistake.
‘I got at (a) like this: (if the way seems long and roundabout, remember that it is far more difficult to find things out than to understand, when told, how they were so found out):
‘Digby-Coates, I reasoned, must have begun his preparations immediately after Belford saw him standing in the doorway of his room at eight minutes to eleven. To descend the wall; to enter the study; to hold Hoode in chaffing conversation for a moment to allay his curiosity regarding the unusual method of entry; to kill him; to reassemble the wood-rasp; to set the “struggle” scene; arrange the clock; to climb back up the wall again; and all as noiseless as you please, cannot have taken him less than eight minutes at the very least. As I have shown, he was in all probability back in his room by four minutes past the hour (if not earlier) and it will be seen, therefore, that he must have begun descent of the wall by four minutes to at the latest.
‘The witnesses I was after, therefore, were those who thought they had seen him between four minutes to and four minutes past the hour.
‘Of these, as you can see from my statement of the alibi, Elsie Syme is the first, Mabel Smith the second, and Belford the third. (Elsie Syme, it is true, might be considered as barely coming within my rough-and-ready time limit, but you must remember that all the times I fixed were calculations and not stop-watch records.)
‘Separately, I questioned the three servants. It was not an easy task. I had to handle them gently, and I had to impress upon them the vital necessity to forget the conversation as soon as they had left me. I think I managed it.
‘Their answers to my first important question were the same, though each was with me alone when I put it.
‘I said: “You say you saw Sir Arthur at such and such a time in his room on the night of the murder, and that he was sitting in his chair and that that chair was by the window. Are you certain of this?”
‘They said: “Yes, sir,” and said it emphatically.
‘I played my trump card. I played it in some fear; if the answers were not what I expected, my case fell.
‘I said: “Now tell me: exactly how much of Sir Arthur did you see? What parts of him, I mean.”
‘They goggled.
‘I tried again: “Was the chair that big arm-chair? And was it facing the window with its back to the door?”
‘“Yes, sir,” they said.
‘I said: “Then all you saw of Sir Arthur was—”
‘They replied, after some further help but with conviction, that all they had seen was the top of his head, part of his trousers, and the soles of his shoes. Belford, who is an intelligent man, expanded his answer by saying: “You see, sir, we’re all so used-like to seein’ Sir Arthur sittin’ like that and in that chair as we just naturally thinks as how we’d seen all on ’im that night.” Which, I think, is as lucid an explanation of the mistake as could well be given.
‘I must explain here how I came in possession of this trump card of mine. It was through two casual observations, which at first never struck me as bearing in any way upon the matter I was investigating. The first was the annoying, almost impossible tidiness of Digby-Coates’s hair. It did not appear to be greased or pomaded in any way, and yet I never saw it other than as if he had just brushed it, and with care. The second was his curious trick of sitting on the edge of a chair with his feet thrust first backwards through the gateway formed by the front legs and then outwards until each instep is pressed against the back of each of those front legs. It is a trick most boys have, but it is unusual to find it persisting in a man of middle-age. Digby-Coates does not, of course, always sit like that, but frequently.
‘What changed these two chance observations—the sort of thing one idly notices about any man of one’s acquaintance without really thinking about them—into perhaps the most important minor step in my case was a glimpse I had of Digby-Coates from the very point from which the servants who made his alibi had seen him. He was sitting as they had seen him sit (though I did not know this until I questioned them) in the big arm-chair, which was facing the window. All I could see from the passage was the long, solid back of the chair, the top of the well-tended head; six inches of each trouser leg, and the soles of two shoes. On the open door was a notice: “Busy—Please do not disturb”.
‘The scene was, in fact, a replica of what I had gathered it to be on the night of the murder. I fell to thinking, and suddenly the most annoying pieces of my jigsaw puzzle fell into place. I went in and spoke to him. I looked, more carefully than ever before, at his head, and came to the conclusion that he was bald, but wore the most skilfully made toupé I had ever seen. I remembered that he had told me that he never used a valet. I pictured him—he is the type—as one to whom the thought that anyone else knew how unsavoury he appeared minus hair was abhorrent.
‘When I discovered the toupé, I knew that I could smash the alibi if only the unknowing alibi-makers gave me, honestly, the answers I wanted.
‘As you know, they did. I consider the matter clear, but I know it. Perhaps I had better show what Digby-Coates did that night; how he set his stage and played out his one-act show.
‘He retires to his room, knowing that Hoode is in his study, Deacon busy or, as often of late, out, Miss Hoode and Mrs Mainwaring in their beds, and some of the servants, as he wishes them, moving about the house—he has studied their movements and knows that on this night of the week there is work to do which keeps them later than usual. Luckily for him, the night is hot. It gives the necessary excuse for leaving his door as well as his window open. Upon that open door—which is not back against the wall, but only half open—he places a notice: “Busy—Please do not disturb”.
‘(Observe the cunning of this notice. He had, I found from the servants, placed such a notice on the open door on two previous occasions. This, I am sure, he had done for a two-fold reason: (i) to see whether it would really keep out intruders, and (ii) to ensure, when eventually he placed it there on the night he chose for the killing of Hoode, that though the household were not become sufficiently accustomed to it to avoid a glance at it and subsequently into the room, the sight of the notice was yet familiar enough to ensure that it was not remarkable as being without precedent. He had, you see, for the sake of his alibi, to make certain that people passing (i) would look into his room; (ii) would not come in; and (iii) would not think the notice anything out of the ordinary.)
‘Having placed his notice he draws his arm-chair up to its familiar position facing the window. Then he has to wait. Sometimes he sits. Sometimes, the waiting too hard upon even such nerves as his, he paces the room.
‘All goes well. Everyone, everything, plays into his hands. The very man he has chosen to incriminate draws the noose, by that request for time, tighter round his own neck. The leaden-footed minutes, what with this incident, that of Belford, and the increasing certainty of success, begin to pass more swiftly. People go their ways past his door but do not enter.
‘At last it is time. He gets his knotted rope, secures it to the leg of the carpenter’s bench Hoode has had fitted for him. The bench is clamped to the floor; no doubt but that it can stand the strain.
‘Now, with a wary eye upon the door, he takes from its hiding-place the replica of the toupé which is on his head, pads it out with a handkerchief, and sets it on top of a pile of books on the seat of the chair. The pile is just of the height to show the hair over the chair-back to one looking into the room from the passage. He knows, he has tested it many times. (He may, possibly, have used the half-wig from his head. But I think not. He must have had more than one; and he would not wish to have anything unusual in his appearance when he faced Hoode. The difficulty of explaining as a joke his entrance by the window would be sufficient.)
‘A pair of dress trousers pinned to the chair, the lower ends of the legs slightly padded and twisted one round each of the chair’s front legs, and a pair of patent-leather shoes set at the right angle, complete the picture.
‘(So simple as to sound comic, isn’t it? But if one thinks, one can see that in that simplicity lies that same touch of genius which characterises the whole of the other arrangements of the crime. To utilise his own little tricks, such as that way he had of sitting on a chair like a nervous schoolboy, that is genius. He knew that all they could have seen of him from that doorway, if he had really sat in his favourite position in that chair, would have been the top of his head, the ends of his trousers, and his shoes. He knew also that they were so accustomed to seeing only hair, trousers, and shoes when he was really there, that if they saw hair, trousers, and shoes they would be prepared to swear they had seen him.)
‘When the time comes, at last, he drops his rope of silk from the window and descends, his heart beating high with exultation. The moment he has waited for, schemed for, gloated over, will be with him at the end of that short journey…Some minutes later he returns by the same precarious stair.
‘It was the simplicity and sheer daring of the scheme that made this the well-nigh perfect crime it was. It was here that the maniac hatred he had of Hoode helped him so greatly. I cannot conceive any but a man insane running the tremendous risk of discovery which he took with such equanimity. Nor would any but one with the great clarity of mind only attained by the mad have even dreamed of carrying out a crime so adult by means of the schoolboy trick of the dummy. It was an application of the bolster-in-the-dormitory-bed idea which nearly succeeded by virtue of its very unlikelihood.
‘I have little more to say, though it would, of course, be possible to go much further in endeavouring to show the subtler shades of motive for each separate link of Digby-Coates’s plot, and to go into such questions as whether he chose Deacon as scapegoat merely for convenience in drawing suspicion away from himself or whether he had some darker reason; but the time for that sort of thing is not yet.
‘One more word. I wish to make it plain that as a case I know this report to be less complete than is desirable. I know that it might be impossible to hang Digby-Coates simply upon the strength of what I have set down. I know that in all probability the Crown would say that, unless the case were strengthened, it could not be regarded as enough even to try him on. I know the later stages of the report are mainly conjecture—guesswork if you like.
‘I know all this, I say, but I also know that if there is any justice in England today I have shown enough of the true history of John Hoode’s death to bring about the immediate release of Archibald Deacon.
‘I know that Arthur Digby-Coates is guilty of the murder of John Hoode, and, having gone so far towards proving this beyond doubt, I intend to see him brought to trial.
‘The only way to bring this about is to give my work the substantial backing of a confession by the murderer. This I intend to obtain.
‘I cannot but think that, if I succeed, my work is finished and the agreement of even the most sceptical assured.
‘A. R. GETHRYN.’