Chapter XVI.Written EvidenceInspector Flamborough had to wait a couple of days before his unknown ally, Justice, made any further move. It so happened that Sir Clinton was not at headquarters when the post brought the expected communication; and the Inspector had plenty of time to consider the fresh evidence, unbiased by his superior's comments. As soon as the Chief Constable reappeared, Flamborough went to him to display the latest document in the case.“This came by the midday post, sir,” he explained, laying some papers on the table. “It's Mr. Justice again. The results of his raid on the Deepcar house, it seems.”Sir Clinton picked up the packet and opened out the papers. Some photographic prints attracted his attention, but he laid them aside and turned first to a plain sheet of paper on which the now familiar letters from telegraph forms had been gummed. With some deliberation he read the message.“I enclose photographs of part of the correspondence which has recently taken place between Dr. Silverdale and Miss Deepcar.“Justice.”Sir Clinton gazed at the sheet for a moment or two, as though considering some matter unconnected with the message. At last he turned to the Inspector.“I suppose you've tried this thing for finger-prints? No good, eh? I can still smell a faint whiff of rubber from it—off his gloves, I suppose.”Flamborough shook his head in agreement with Sir Clinton's surmise.“Nothing on it whatever, sir,” he confirmed.The Chief Constable laid down the sheet of paper and took up one of the photographs. It was of ordinary half-plate size and showed a slightly reduced copy of one page of a letter.that things cannot go on anylonger in this way.The plan we talked over lastseems the best. When I have givenHassendean hints about the use ofhyoscine, he will probably see forhimself how to get what he wants.After that, it merely means watchingthem, and I am sure that we shall soonhave her out of our way. It will bevery easy to make it seem intentionalon their part; and no one is likelyto look further than that.Flamborough watched the Chief Constable's face as he read the message, and as soon as he saw that Sir Clinton had completed his perusal of it, the Inspector put in his word.“I've checked the writing, sir. It's Silverdale's beyond any doubt.”The Chief Constable nodded rather absent-mindedly and took up another of the prints. This showed a largely-magnified reproduction of the first two lines of the document; and for a minute or so Sir Clinton subjected the print to a minute scrutiny with a magnifying glass.“It's an original, right enough,” Flamborough ventured to comment at last. “Mr. Justice has been very thorough, and he's given us quite enough to prove that it isn't a forgery. You can see there's no sign of erasing or scraping of any sort on the paper of the original; and the magnification's big enough to show up anything of that sort.”“That's true,” Sir Clinton admitted. “And so far as one can see, the lines of the writing are normal. There are none of those halts-in-the-wrong-place that a forger makes if he traces a manuscript. The magnification's quite big enough to show up anything of that sort. I guess you're right, Inspector, it's a photograph of part of a real document in Silverdale's own handwriting.”“The rest of the things make that clear enough,” Flamborough said, indicating several other prints which showed microphotographic reproductions of a number of other details of the document. “There's no doubt whatever that these are all genuine bits of Silverdale's handwriting. There's been no faking of the paper or anything like that.”Sir Clinton continued his study of the photographs, evidently with keen interest; but at last he put all the prints on his desk and turned to the Inspector.“Well, what do you make of it?” he demanded.“It seems clear enough to me,” Flamborough answered. “Look at the contents of that page as a whole. It's as plain as one could wish. Silverdale and the Deepcar girl have had enough of waiting. Things can't go on any longer in this way. They've been discussing various ways of getting rid of Mrs. Silverdale. ‘The plan we talked over last seems the best.’ That's the final decision, evidently. Then you get a notion of what the plan was. Silverdale was going to prime Hassendean with information about hyoscine, and practically egg him on to drug Mrs. Silverdale so as to get her into his power. Then when the trap was ready, Silverdale and the Deepcar girl were to be on the alert to take advantage of the situation. And the last sentence makes it clear enough that they meant to go the length of murder and cover it up by making it look like a suicide-pact between young Hassendean and Mrs. Silverdale. That's how I read it, sir.”Sir Clinton did not immediately endorse this opinion. Instead, he picked up the full copy of the manuscript page and studied it afresh as though searching for something in particular. At last he appeared to be satisfied; and he slid the photograph across the desk to the Inspector.“I don't wish to bias you, Inspector, so I won't describe what I see myself. But will you examine the word ‘probably’ in that text and tell me if anything whatever about it strikes you as peculiar—anything whatever, remember.”Flamborough studied the place indicated, first with his naked eye and then with the magnifying glass.“There's no sign of any tampering with the paper that I can see, sir. The surface is intact and the ink lines run absolutely freely, without the halts and shakes one would expect in a forgery. The only thing I do notice is that the word looks just a trifle cramped.”“That's what I wanted. Note that it's in the middle of a line, Inspector. Now look at the word ‘shall’ in the fifth line from the bottom of the page.”“One might say it was a trifle cramped too,” Flamborough admitted.“And the ‘it’ in the third line from the foot?”“It looks like the same thing.”Flamborough relapsed into silence and studied the photograph word by word while Sir Clinton waited patiently.“The word ‘the’ in the phrase ‘about the use of hyoscine’ seems cramped too; and the ‘to’ at the start of the last line suffers in the same way. It's so slight in all these cases that one wouldn't notice it normally. I didn't see it till you pointed it out. But if you're going to suggest that there's been any erasing and writing in fresh words to fit the blank space, I'll have to disagree with you, sir. I simply don't believe there's been any thing of the sort.”“I shan't differ from you over that,” Sir Clinton assured him blandly. “Now let's think of something else for a change. Did it never occur to you, Inspector, how much the English language depends on the relative positions of words? If I say: ‘It struck you,’ that means something quite different from: ‘You struck it.’ And yet each sentence contains exactly the same words.”“That's plain enough,” Flamborough admitted, “though I never thought of it in that way. And,” he added in a dubious tone, “I don't see what it's got to do with the case, either.”“That's a pity,” Sir Clinton observed with a sympathy which hardly sounded genuine. “Suppose we think it over together. Where does one usually cramp words a trifle when one is writing?”“At the end of a line,” Flamborough suggested. “But these crampings seem to be all in the middle of the lines of that letter.”“That's what seems to me interesting about them,” Sir Clinton explained drily. “And somehow it seems to associate itself in my mind with the fact that Mr. Justice hasn't supplied us with the original document, but has gone to all the trouble of taking photographs of it.”“I wondered at that, myself,” the Inspector confessed. “It seems a bit futile, true enough.”“Try a fresh line, Inspector. We learned on fairly good authority that Mr. Justice took away a number of letters from Miss Deepcar's house. And yet he only sends us a single page out of the lot. If the rest were important, why doesn't he send them. If they aren't important, why did he take them away?”“He may be holding them up for use later on, sir.”Sir Clinton shook his head.“My reading of the business is different. I think this is Mr. Justice's last reserve. He's throwing his last forces into the battle now.”“There seems to be something behind all this,” Flamborough admitted, passing his hand over his hair as though to stimulate his brain by the action, “but I can't just fit it all together as you seem to have done, sir. You can say what you like, but that handwriting's genuine; the paper's not been tampered with; and I can't see anything wrong with it.”Sir Clinton took pity on the inspector's obvious anxiety.“Look at the phrasing of the whole document, Inspector. If you cared to do so, you could split it up into a set of phrases something after this style: ‘that things cannot go on any longer in this way. . . . The plan we talked over last seems the best. . . . When I have given . . . Hassendean . . . hints . . . about the . . . use of . . . hyoscine . . . he will probably see for himself how . . . to get what he wants. . . . After that, it merely means . . . watching them . . . and I am sure that . . . we shall soon have . . . her . . . out of our way. . . . It will be very easy . . . to make it seem . . . intentional . . . on their part . . . and no one is likely . . . to look further than that.’ Now, Inspector, if you met any one of these phrases by itself, would you infer from it inevitably that a murder was being planned? ‘Things cannot go on any longer in this way.’ If you consider how Mrs. Silverdale was behaving with young Hassendean, it's not astonishing to find a phrase like that in a letter from Silverdale to the girl he was in love with. ‘The plan we talked over last seems the best.’ It might have been a day's outing together that he was talking about for all one can tell. ‘He will probably see for himself how my wife is playing with him.’ And so forth.”“Yes, that's all very well,” Flamborough put in, “but what about the word ‘hyoscine?’ That's unusual in love-letters.”“Miss Deepcar was working on hyoscine under Silverdale's directions, remember. It's quite possible that he might have mentioned it incidentally.”“Now I think I see what you mean, sir. You think that this document that Mr. Justice has sent us is a patchwork—bits cut out of a lot of different letters and stuck together and then photographed?”“I'm suggesting it as a possibility, Inspector. See how it fits the facts. Here are a set of phrases, each one innocuous in itself, but with a cumulative effect of suggestion when you string them together as in this document. If the thing is a patchwork, then a number of real letters must have been used in order to get fragments which would suit. So Mr. Justice took a fair selection of epistles with him when he raided Miss Deepcar's house. Further, in snipping out a sentence here and there from these letters, he sometimes had to include a phrase running on from one line to another in the original letter; but when he came to paste his fragments together, the original hiatus at the end of a line got transferred to the middle of a line in the final arrangement made to fit the page of the faked letter. That's what struck me to begin with. For example, suppose that in the original letter you had the phrase: ‘he will probably see for himself how’; and the original line ended with ‘probably.’ That word might be a bit cramped at the end of the line. But in reconstructing the thing, ‘probably’ got into the middle of the line, and so you get this apparently meaningless cramping of the word when there was space enough for it to be written uncramped under normal conditions. Just the same with the other cases you spotted for yourself. They represent the ends of lines in the original letters, although they all occur in the middle of lines in the fake production.”“That sounds just as plausible as you like, sir. But you've got the knack of making things sound plausible. You're not pulling my leg, are you?” the Inspector demanded suspiciously. “Besides, what about there being no sign of the paper having been tampered with?”“Look at what he's given us,” Sir Clinton suggested. “The only case where he's given a large-scale reproduction of a whole phrase is at the top of the letter: ‘Things cannot go on any longer in this way.’ That's been complete in the original, and he gives you a large-scale copy of it showing that the texture of the paper is intact. Of course it is, since he cut the whole bit out of the letteren bloc. When it comes to the microphotographs, of course he only shows you small bits of the words and so there's no sign of the cutting that was needed at the end of each fragment. And in the photograph of the full text, there's no attempt to show you fine details. He simply pasted the fragments in their proper order on to a real sheet of note-paper, filled up the joins with Chinese White to hide the solutions of continuity, and used a process plate which wouldn't show the slight differences in the shades of the whites where the Chinese White overlay the white of the note-paper. If you have a drawing to make for black-and-white reproduction in a book, you can mess about with Chinese White as much as you like, and it won't show up in the final result at all.”Flamborough, with a gesture, admitted the plausibility of Sir Clinton's hypothesis.“And you think that explains why he didn't send us the original document, sir?”“Since I'm sure he hadn't an original to send, it's hard to see how he could have sent it, Inspector.”Flamborough did not contest this reading of the case. Instead, he passed to a fresh aspect of the subject.“Mr. Justice is evidently ready to go any length to avenge somebody—and that somebody can hardly have been young Hassendean, judging from what we've heard about his character.”Sir Clinton refused the gambit offered by the Inspector.“Mr. Justice is a very able person,” he observed, “even though he does make a mistake now and again, as in this last move.”“You said you'd some idea who he was, sir?” Flamborough said with an interrogative note in his voice.The Chief Constable showed no desire to be drawn. He glanced rather quizzically at his subordinate for a moment before speaking.“I'll give you the points which strike me in that connection, Inspector; and then you'll be just as well placed as I am myself in the matter of Mr. Justice. First of all, if you compare the time of publication of the morning newspapers with the time, at which Mr. Justice's telegram was collected from the pillar-box, I think it's fairly evident that he didn't depend on the journalists for his first information about the affair. Even the Ivy Lodge news wasn't printed until after he had despatched his message.”“That's true, sir,” Flamborough admitted.His manner showed that he expected a good deal more than this tittle of information.“Therefore he must have had some direct information about the bungalow business. Either he was on the spot when the affair occurred, or else he was told about it almost immediately by someone who was on the spot.”“Admitted,” the inspector confirmed.“Then he obviously—or is it ‘she obviously,’ Inspector?—saw the importance of hyoscine as a clue as soon as any word about it got into the newspapers. Immediately, in comes the code advertisement, giving us—rather unnecessarily I think—the tip to inquire at the Croft-Thornton Institute.”Flamborough's face showed that he felt Sir Clinton was merely recapitulating very obvious pieces of evidence.“Then there was the writing on the advertisements which he sent to the papers—Mrs. Silverdale's writing rather neatly forged, if you remember.”“Yes,” said the Inspector, showing by his tone that at this point he was rather at sea.“Then there was the fact that he managed to choose his time most conveniently for his raid on Miss Deepcar's house.”“You mean he made his visit when only the maid was at home, sir?”“Precisely. I rather admire his forethought all through the business. But there's more in it than that, if you think it over, Inspector?”“Well, sir, if your reading's correct, he wanted some of Silverdale's letters to serve as a basis for these photographs.”“Something even more obvious than that, Inspector. Now, with all that evidence in front of you, can't you build up some sort of picture of Mr. Justice? You ought to be able to come fairly near it, I think.”“Somebody fairly in the swim with the Silverdale crowd, at any rate. I can see that. And someone who knew the Croft-Thornton by hearsay, at any rate. Is that what you mean, sir?”Sir Clinton betrayed nothing in his expression, though the Inspector scrutinised his face carefully; but he added something which Flamborough had not expected.“Final points. The date on the fragment of an envelope that I found in the drawer in Mrs. Silverdale's room was 1925. The date inside that signet-ring on her finger was 5–11–25. And there was the initial ‘B’ engraved alongside the date.”Inspector Flamborough quite obviously failed to see the relevancy of these details. His face showed it in the most apparent way.“I don't see what you're getting at there, sir,” he said rather shamefacedly. “These things never struck me; and even now I don't see what they've got to do with Mr. Justice.”If he expected to gain anything by this frank confession, he was disappointed. Sir Clinton had evidently no desire to save his subordinate the trouble of thinking, and his next remark left Flamborough even deeper in bewilderment.“Ever read anything by Dean Swift, Inspector?”“I readGulliver's Travelswhen I was a kid, sir,” Flamborough admitted, with the air of deprecating any investigation into his literary tastes.“You might read hisJournal to Stellasome time. But I guess you'd find it dull. It's a reprint of his letters to Esther Johnson. He called her ‘Stella,’ and it's full of queer abbreviations and phrases like ‘Night, dear MD. Love Pdfr.’ It teems with that sort of stuff. Curious to see the human side of a man like Swift, isn't it?”“In love with her, you mean, sir?”“Well, it sounds like it,” Sir Clinton replied cautiously. “However, we needn't worry over Swift. Let's see if we can't do something with this case, for a change.”He glanced at his watch.“Half-past five. We may be able to get hold of her.”He picked up the telephone from his desk and asked for a number while Flamborough waited with interest to hear the result.“Is that the Croft-Thornton Institute?” Sir Clinton demanded at length. “Sir Clinton Driffield speaking. Can you ask Miss Hailsham to come to the telephone?”There was a pause before he spoke once more.“Miss Hailsham? I'm sorry to trouble you, but can you tell me if there's a microphotographic camera in the Institute? I'd like to know.”Flamborough, all ears, waited for the next bit of the one-sided conversation which was reaching him.“You have two of them? Then I suppose I might be able to get permission to use one of them, perhaps, if we need it. . . . Thanks, indeed. By the way, I suppose you're just leaving the Institute now. . . . I thought so. Very lucky I didn't miss you by a minute or two. I mustn't detain you. Thanks again. Good-bye.”He put down the telephone and turned to Flamborough.“You might ask Miss Morcott to come here, Inspector.”Flamborough, completely puzzled by this move, opened the door of the adjoining room and summoned Sir Clinton's typist.“I want you to telephone for me, Miss Morcott,” the Chief Constable explained. “Ring up Dr. Trevor Markfield at his house. When you get through, say to his housekeeper: ‘Miss Hailsham speaking. Please tell Dr. Markfield that I wish to see him to-night and that I shall come round to his house at nine o’clock.’ Don't say any more than that, and get disconnected before there's any chance of explanations.”Miss Morcott carried out Sir Clinton's orders carefully and then went back to her typing. As soon as the door closed behind her, the Inspector's suppressed curiosity got the better of him.“I don't quite understand all that, sir. I suppose you asked about the photomicrographic affair just to see if these prints could have been made at the Croft-Thornton?”“I hadn't much doubt on that point. Photomicrographic apparatus isn't common among amateur photographers, but it's common enough in scientific institutes. No, I was really killing two birds with one stone: finding out about the micro-camera and making sure that Miss Hailsham was leaving the place for the night and wouldn't have a chance to speak to Markfield before she went.”“And what about her calling on Markfield to-night, sir?”“She'll have to do it by proxy, I'm afraid. We'll represent her, however inefficiently, Inspector. The point is that I wanted to be sure that Markfield would be at home when we called; and I wished to avoid making an appointment in my own name lest it should put him too much on his guard. The time's come when we'll have to persuade Dr. Markfield to be a bit franker than he's been, hitherto. I think I see my way to getting out of him most of what he knows; and if I can succeed in that, then we ought to have all the evidence we need.”He paused, as though not very sure about something.“He's been bluffing us all along the line up to the present, Inspector. It's a game two can play at; and you'll be good enough to turn a deaf ear occasionally if I'm tempted out of the straight path. And whatever happens, don't look over-surprised at anything I may say. If you can contrive to look thoroughly stupid, it won't do any harm.”
Inspector Flamborough had to wait a couple of days before his unknown ally, Justice, made any further move. It so happened that Sir Clinton was not at headquarters when the post brought the expected communication; and the Inspector had plenty of time to consider the fresh evidence, unbiased by his superior's comments. As soon as the Chief Constable reappeared, Flamborough went to him to display the latest document in the case.
“This came by the midday post, sir,” he explained, laying some papers on the table. “It's Mr. Justice again. The results of his raid on the Deepcar house, it seems.”
Sir Clinton picked up the packet and opened out the papers. Some photographic prints attracted his attention, but he laid them aside and turned first to a plain sheet of paper on which the now familiar letters from telegraph forms had been gummed. With some deliberation he read the message.
“I enclose photographs of part of the correspondence which has recently taken place between Dr. Silverdale and Miss Deepcar.“Justice.”
“I enclose photographs of part of the correspondence which has recently taken place between Dr. Silverdale and Miss Deepcar.
“Justice.”
Sir Clinton gazed at the sheet for a moment or two, as though considering some matter unconnected with the message. At last he turned to the Inspector.
“I suppose you've tried this thing for finger-prints? No good, eh? I can still smell a faint whiff of rubber from it—off his gloves, I suppose.”
Flamborough shook his head in agreement with Sir Clinton's surmise.
“Nothing on it whatever, sir,” he confirmed.
The Chief Constable laid down the sheet of paper and took up one of the photographs. It was of ordinary half-plate size and showed a slightly reduced copy of one page of a letter.
that things cannot go on anylonger in this way.The plan we talked over lastseems the best. When I have givenHassendean hints about the use ofhyoscine, he will probably see forhimself how to get what he wants.After that, it merely means watchingthem, and I am sure that we shall soonhave her out of our way. It will bevery easy to make it seem intentionalon their part; and no one is likelyto look further than that.
The plan we talked over lastseems the best. When I have givenHassendean hints about the use ofhyoscine, he will probably see forhimself how to get what he wants.After that, it merely means watchingthem, and I am sure that we shall soonhave her out of our way. It will bevery easy to make it seem intentionalon their part; and no one is likelyto look further than that.
Flamborough watched the Chief Constable's face as he read the message, and as soon as he saw that Sir Clinton had completed his perusal of it, the Inspector put in his word.
“I've checked the writing, sir. It's Silverdale's beyond any doubt.”
The Chief Constable nodded rather absent-mindedly and took up another of the prints. This showed a largely-magnified reproduction of the first two lines of the document; and for a minute or so Sir Clinton subjected the print to a minute scrutiny with a magnifying glass.
“It's an original, right enough,” Flamborough ventured to comment at last. “Mr. Justice has been very thorough, and he's given us quite enough to prove that it isn't a forgery. You can see there's no sign of erasing or scraping of any sort on the paper of the original; and the magnification's big enough to show up anything of that sort.”
“That's true,” Sir Clinton admitted. “And so far as one can see, the lines of the writing are normal. There are none of those halts-in-the-wrong-place that a forger makes if he traces a manuscript. The magnification's quite big enough to show up anything of that sort. I guess you're right, Inspector, it's a photograph of part of a real document in Silverdale's own handwriting.”
“The rest of the things make that clear enough,” Flamborough said, indicating several other prints which showed microphotographic reproductions of a number of other details of the document. “There's no doubt whatever that these are all genuine bits of Silverdale's handwriting. There's been no faking of the paper or anything like that.”
Sir Clinton continued his study of the photographs, evidently with keen interest; but at last he put all the prints on his desk and turned to the Inspector.
“Well, what do you make of it?” he demanded.
“It seems clear enough to me,” Flamborough answered. “Look at the contents of that page as a whole. It's as plain as one could wish. Silverdale and the Deepcar girl have had enough of waiting. Things can't go on any longer in this way. They've been discussing various ways of getting rid of Mrs. Silverdale. ‘The plan we talked over last seems the best.’ That's the final decision, evidently. Then you get a notion of what the plan was. Silverdale was going to prime Hassendean with information about hyoscine, and practically egg him on to drug Mrs. Silverdale so as to get her into his power. Then when the trap was ready, Silverdale and the Deepcar girl were to be on the alert to take advantage of the situation. And the last sentence makes it clear enough that they meant to go the length of murder and cover it up by making it look like a suicide-pact between young Hassendean and Mrs. Silverdale. That's how I read it, sir.”
Sir Clinton did not immediately endorse this opinion. Instead, he picked up the full copy of the manuscript page and studied it afresh as though searching for something in particular. At last he appeared to be satisfied; and he slid the photograph across the desk to the Inspector.
“I don't wish to bias you, Inspector, so I won't describe what I see myself. But will you examine the word ‘probably’ in that text and tell me if anything whatever about it strikes you as peculiar—anything whatever, remember.”
Flamborough studied the place indicated, first with his naked eye and then with the magnifying glass.
“There's no sign of any tampering with the paper that I can see, sir. The surface is intact and the ink lines run absolutely freely, without the halts and shakes one would expect in a forgery. The only thing I do notice is that the word looks just a trifle cramped.”
“That's what I wanted. Note that it's in the middle of a line, Inspector. Now look at the word ‘shall’ in the fifth line from the bottom of the page.”
“One might say it was a trifle cramped too,” Flamborough admitted.
“And the ‘it’ in the third line from the foot?”
“It looks like the same thing.”
Flamborough relapsed into silence and studied the photograph word by word while Sir Clinton waited patiently.
“The word ‘the’ in the phrase ‘about the use of hyoscine’ seems cramped too; and the ‘to’ at the start of the last line suffers in the same way. It's so slight in all these cases that one wouldn't notice it normally. I didn't see it till you pointed it out. But if you're going to suggest that there's been any erasing and writing in fresh words to fit the blank space, I'll have to disagree with you, sir. I simply don't believe there's been any thing of the sort.”
“I shan't differ from you over that,” Sir Clinton assured him blandly. “Now let's think of something else for a change. Did it never occur to you, Inspector, how much the English language depends on the relative positions of words? If I say: ‘It struck you,’ that means something quite different from: ‘You struck it.’ And yet each sentence contains exactly the same words.”
“That's plain enough,” Flamborough admitted, “though I never thought of it in that way. And,” he added in a dubious tone, “I don't see what it's got to do with the case, either.”
“That's a pity,” Sir Clinton observed with a sympathy which hardly sounded genuine. “Suppose we think it over together. Where does one usually cramp words a trifle when one is writing?”
“At the end of a line,” Flamborough suggested. “But these crampings seem to be all in the middle of the lines of that letter.”
“That's what seems to me interesting about them,” Sir Clinton explained drily. “And somehow it seems to associate itself in my mind with the fact that Mr. Justice hasn't supplied us with the original document, but has gone to all the trouble of taking photographs of it.”
“I wondered at that, myself,” the Inspector confessed. “It seems a bit futile, true enough.”
“Try a fresh line, Inspector. We learned on fairly good authority that Mr. Justice took away a number of letters from Miss Deepcar's house. And yet he only sends us a single page out of the lot. If the rest were important, why doesn't he send them. If they aren't important, why did he take them away?”
“He may be holding them up for use later on, sir.”
Sir Clinton shook his head.
“My reading of the business is different. I think this is Mr. Justice's last reserve. He's throwing his last forces into the battle now.”
“There seems to be something behind all this,” Flamborough admitted, passing his hand over his hair as though to stimulate his brain by the action, “but I can't just fit it all together as you seem to have done, sir. You can say what you like, but that handwriting's genuine; the paper's not been tampered with; and I can't see anything wrong with it.”
Sir Clinton took pity on the inspector's obvious anxiety.
“Look at the phrasing of the whole document, Inspector. If you cared to do so, you could split it up into a set of phrases something after this style: ‘that things cannot go on any longer in this way. . . . The plan we talked over last seems the best. . . . When I have given . . . Hassendean . . . hints . . . about the . . . use of . . . hyoscine . . . he will probably see for himself how . . . to get what he wants. . . . After that, it merely means . . . watching them . . . and I am sure that . . . we shall soon have . . . her . . . out of our way. . . . It will be very easy . . . to make it seem . . . intentional . . . on their part . . . and no one is likely . . . to look further than that.’ Now, Inspector, if you met any one of these phrases by itself, would you infer from it inevitably that a murder was being planned? ‘Things cannot go on any longer in this way.’ If you consider how Mrs. Silverdale was behaving with young Hassendean, it's not astonishing to find a phrase like that in a letter from Silverdale to the girl he was in love with. ‘The plan we talked over last seems the best.’ It might have been a day's outing together that he was talking about for all one can tell. ‘He will probably see for himself how my wife is playing with him.’ And so forth.”
“Yes, that's all very well,” Flamborough put in, “but what about the word ‘hyoscine?’ That's unusual in love-letters.”
“Miss Deepcar was working on hyoscine under Silverdale's directions, remember. It's quite possible that he might have mentioned it incidentally.”
“Now I think I see what you mean, sir. You think that this document that Mr. Justice has sent us is a patchwork—bits cut out of a lot of different letters and stuck together and then photographed?”
“I'm suggesting it as a possibility, Inspector. See how it fits the facts. Here are a set of phrases, each one innocuous in itself, but with a cumulative effect of suggestion when you string them together as in this document. If the thing is a patchwork, then a number of real letters must have been used in order to get fragments which would suit. So Mr. Justice took a fair selection of epistles with him when he raided Miss Deepcar's house. Further, in snipping out a sentence here and there from these letters, he sometimes had to include a phrase running on from one line to another in the original letter; but when he came to paste his fragments together, the original hiatus at the end of a line got transferred to the middle of a line in the final arrangement made to fit the page of the faked letter. That's what struck me to begin with. For example, suppose that in the original letter you had the phrase: ‘he will probably see for himself how’; and the original line ended with ‘probably.’ That word might be a bit cramped at the end of the line. But in reconstructing the thing, ‘probably’ got into the middle of the line, and so you get this apparently meaningless cramping of the word when there was space enough for it to be written uncramped under normal conditions. Just the same with the other cases you spotted for yourself. They represent the ends of lines in the original letters, although they all occur in the middle of lines in the fake production.”
“That sounds just as plausible as you like, sir. But you've got the knack of making things sound plausible. You're not pulling my leg, are you?” the Inspector demanded suspiciously. “Besides, what about there being no sign of the paper having been tampered with?”
“Look at what he's given us,” Sir Clinton suggested. “The only case where he's given a large-scale reproduction of a whole phrase is at the top of the letter: ‘Things cannot go on any longer in this way.’ That's been complete in the original, and he gives you a large-scale copy of it showing that the texture of the paper is intact. Of course it is, since he cut the whole bit out of the letteren bloc. When it comes to the microphotographs, of course he only shows you small bits of the words and so there's no sign of the cutting that was needed at the end of each fragment. And in the photograph of the full text, there's no attempt to show you fine details. He simply pasted the fragments in their proper order on to a real sheet of note-paper, filled up the joins with Chinese White to hide the solutions of continuity, and used a process plate which wouldn't show the slight differences in the shades of the whites where the Chinese White overlay the white of the note-paper. If you have a drawing to make for black-and-white reproduction in a book, you can mess about with Chinese White as much as you like, and it won't show up in the final result at all.”
Flamborough, with a gesture, admitted the plausibility of Sir Clinton's hypothesis.
“And you think that explains why he didn't send us the original document, sir?”
“Since I'm sure he hadn't an original to send, it's hard to see how he could have sent it, Inspector.”
Flamborough did not contest this reading of the case. Instead, he passed to a fresh aspect of the subject.
“Mr. Justice is evidently ready to go any length to avenge somebody—and that somebody can hardly have been young Hassendean, judging from what we've heard about his character.”
Sir Clinton refused the gambit offered by the Inspector.
“Mr. Justice is a very able person,” he observed, “even though he does make a mistake now and again, as in this last move.”
“You said you'd some idea who he was, sir?” Flamborough said with an interrogative note in his voice.
The Chief Constable showed no desire to be drawn. He glanced rather quizzically at his subordinate for a moment before speaking.
“I'll give you the points which strike me in that connection, Inspector; and then you'll be just as well placed as I am myself in the matter of Mr. Justice. First of all, if you compare the time of publication of the morning newspapers with the time, at which Mr. Justice's telegram was collected from the pillar-box, I think it's fairly evident that he didn't depend on the journalists for his first information about the affair. Even the Ivy Lodge news wasn't printed until after he had despatched his message.”
“That's true, sir,” Flamborough admitted.
His manner showed that he expected a good deal more than this tittle of information.
“Therefore he must have had some direct information about the bungalow business. Either he was on the spot when the affair occurred, or else he was told about it almost immediately by someone who was on the spot.”
“Admitted,” the inspector confirmed.
“Then he obviously—or is it ‘she obviously,’ Inspector?—saw the importance of hyoscine as a clue as soon as any word about it got into the newspapers. Immediately, in comes the code advertisement, giving us—rather unnecessarily I think—the tip to inquire at the Croft-Thornton Institute.”
Flamborough's face showed that he felt Sir Clinton was merely recapitulating very obvious pieces of evidence.
“Then there was the writing on the advertisements which he sent to the papers—Mrs. Silverdale's writing rather neatly forged, if you remember.”
“Yes,” said the Inspector, showing by his tone that at this point he was rather at sea.
“Then there was the fact that he managed to choose his time most conveniently for his raid on Miss Deepcar's house.”
“You mean he made his visit when only the maid was at home, sir?”
“Precisely. I rather admire his forethought all through the business. But there's more in it than that, if you think it over, Inspector?”
“Well, sir, if your reading's correct, he wanted some of Silverdale's letters to serve as a basis for these photographs.”
“Something even more obvious than that, Inspector. Now, with all that evidence in front of you, can't you build up some sort of picture of Mr. Justice? You ought to be able to come fairly near it, I think.”
“Somebody fairly in the swim with the Silverdale crowd, at any rate. I can see that. And someone who knew the Croft-Thornton by hearsay, at any rate. Is that what you mean, sir?”
Sir Clinton betrayed nothing in his expression, though the Inspector scrutinised his face carefully; but he added something which Flamborough had not expected.
“Final points. The date on the fragment of an envelope that I found in the drawer in Mrs. Silverdale's room was 1925. The date inside that signet-ring on her finger was 5–11–25. And there was the initial ‘B’ engraved alongside the date.”
Inspector Flamborough quite obviously failed to see the relevancy of these details. His face showed it in the most apparent way.
“I don't see what you're getting at there, sir,” he said rather shamefacedly. “These things never struck me; and even now I don't see what they've got to do with Mr. Justice.”
If he expected to gain anything by this frank confession, he was disappointed. Sir Clinton had evidently no desire to save his subordinate the trouble of thinking, and his next remark left Flamborough even deeper in bewilderment.
“Ever read anything by Dean Swift, Inspector?”
“I readGulliver's Travelswhen I was a kid, sir,” Flamborough admitted, with the air of deprecating any investigation into his literary tastes.
“You might read hisJournal to Stellasome time. But I guess you'd find it dull. It's a reprint of his letters to Esther Johnson. He called her ‘Stella,’ and it's full of queer abbreviations and phrases like ‘Night, dear MD. Love Pdfr.’ It teems with that sort of stuff. Curious to see the human side of a man like Swift, isn't it?”
“In love with her, you mean, sir?”
“Well, it sounds like it,” Sir Clinton replied cautiously. “However, we needn't worry over Swift. Let's see if we can't do something with this case, for a change.”
He glanced at his watch.
“Half-past five. We may be able to get hold of her.”
He picked up the telephone from his desk and asked for a number while Flamborough waited with interest to hear the result.
“Is that the Croft-Thornton Institute?” Sir Clinton demanded at length. “Sir Clinton Driffield speaking. Can you ask Miss Hailsham to come to the telephone?”
There was a pause before he spoke once more.
“Miss Hailsham? I'm sorry to trouble you, but can you tell me if there's a microphotographic camera in the Institute? I'd like to know.”
Flamborough, all ears, waited for the next bit of the one-sided conversation which was reaching him.
“You have two of them? Then I suppose I might be able to get permission to use one of them, perhaps, if we need it. . . . Thanks, indeed. By the way, I suppose you're just leaving the Institute now. . . . I thought so. Very lucky I didn't miss you by a minute or two. I mustn't detain you. Thanks again. Good-bye.”
He put down the telephone and turned to Flamborough.
“You might ask Miss Morcott to come here, Inspector.”
Flamborough, completely puzzled by this move, opened the door of the adjoining room and summoned Sir Clinton's typist.
“I want you to telephone for me, Miss Morcott,” the Chief Constable explained. “Ring up Dr. Trevor Markfield at his house. When you get through, say to his housekeeper: ‘Miss Hailsham speaking. Please tell Dr. Markfield that I wish to see him to-night and that I shall come round to his house at nine o’clock.’ Don't say any more than that, and get disconnected before there's any chance of explanations.”
Miss Morcott carried out Sir Clinton's orders carefully and then went back to her typing. As soon as the door closed behind her, the Inspector's suppressed curiosity got the better of him.
“I don't quite understand all that, sir. I suppose you asked about the photomicrographic affair just to see if these prints could have been made at the Croft-Thornton?”
“I hadn't much doubt on that point. Photomicrographic apparatus isn't common among amateur photographers, but it's common enough in scientific institutes. No, I was really killing two birds with one stone: finding out about the micro-camera and making sure that Miss Hailsham was leaving the place for the night and wouldn't have a chance to speak to Markfield before she went.”
“And what about her calling on Markfield to-night, sir?”
“She'll have to do it by proxy, I'm afraid. We'll represent her, however inefficiently, Inspector. The point is that I wanted to be sure that Markfield would be at home when we called; and I wished to avoid making an appointment in my own name lest it should put him too much on his guard. The time's come when we'll have to persuade Dr. Markfield to be a bit franker than he's been, hitherto. I think I see my way to getting out of him most of what he knows; and if I can succeed in that, then we ought to have all the evidence we need.”
He paused, as though not very sure about something.
“He's been bluffing us all along the line up to the present, Inspector. It's a game two can play at; and you'll be good enough to turn a deaf ear occasionally if I'm tempted out of the straight path. And whatever happens, don't look over-surprised at anything I may say. If you can contrive to look thoroughly stupid, it won't do any harm.”