The Hampstead Mystery Part 3

"So your theory is that one of the two shot him, and the other was so unnerved that he sent us the letter and put us on the track to save his own neck?"

"Something like that."

"It is not impossible," was the senior officer's comment. "Mind you, I don't say it is my theory. In fact, I am in no hurry to form one. I believe in going carefully over the whole ground first, collecting all the clues and then selecting the right one."

Rolfe admitted that his chief's way of setting to work to solve a mystery was an ideal one, but he made the reservation that it was a difficult one to put into operation. He was convinced that the only way of finding the right clue was to follow up every one until it was proved to be a wrong one.

Inspector Chippenfield continued his study of the mysterious message which had been sent to Scotland Yard. It was written on a sheet of paper which had been taken from a writing pad of the kind sold for a few pence by all stationers. It was flimsy and blue-lined, and the message it contained was smudged and badly printed. But to the inspector's annoyance, there were no finger-prints on the paper. The finger-print expert at Scotland Yard had examined it under the microscope, but his search for finger-prints had been vain.

"Depend upon it, we'll hear from this chap again," said the inspector, tapping the sheet of paper with a finger. "I think I may go so far as to say that this fellow thinks suspicion will be directed to him and he wants to save his neck."

"It's a disguised hand," said Rolfe. "Of course he printed it in order not to give us a specimen of his handwriting. There are telltale things about a man's handwriting which give him away even when he tries to disguise it. But he's tried to disguise even his printing. Look how irregular the letters are--some slanting to the right and some to the left, and some are upright. Look at the two different kinds of 'U's.'"

"He's used two different kinds of pens," said Inspector Chippenfield.

"Look at the difference in the thickness of the letters."

"The sooner he writes again the better," said Rolfe. "I am curious to know what he'll say next."

"My idea is to find out who he is and make him speak," said the inspector, "Speaking is quicker than writing. I could frighten more out of him in ten minutes than he would give away voluntarily in a month of Sundays."

Again Rolfe had to admit that his chief's plan to get at the truth was an ideal one.

"Have you any idea who he is?" he asked.

Inspector Chippenfield had brought his methods too near to perfection to make it possible for him to fall into an open trap.

"I won't be very long putting my hand on him," he said.

"But this thing has been in the papers," said Rolfe. "Don't you think the murderer will bolt out of the country when he knows his mate is prepared to turn King's evidence against him?"

"Ah," said Inspector Chippenfield, "I haven't adopted your theory."

"Then you think that the man who wrote this note knew of the murder but doesn't know who did it?"

"Now you are going too far," said Inspector Chippenfield.

The inspector was so wary about disclosing what was in his mind in regard to the letter that Rolfe, who disliked his chief very cordially, jumped to the conclusion that Inspector Chippenfield had no intelligible ideas concerning it.

"If it was burglars they took nothing as far as we can ascertain up to the present," said Inspector Chippenfield after a pause.

"They were surprised to find anyone in the house. And after the shot was fired they immediately bolted for fear the noise would attract attention."

"What knocks a hole in the burglar theory is the fact that Sir Horace was fully dressed when he was shot," said the inspector. "Burglars don't break into a house when there are lights about, especially after having been led to believe that the house was empty."

"So you think," said Rolfe, "that the window was forced after the murder with the object of misleading us."

"I haven't said so," replied the inspector. "All I am prepared to say is that even that was not impossible."

"It was forced from the outside," continued Rolfe. "I've seen the marks of a jemmy on the window-sill. If it was forced after the murder the murderer was a cool hand."

"You can take it from me," exclaimed Inspector Chippenfield with unexpected candour, "that he was a cool hand. We are going to have a bit of trouble in getting to the bottom of this, Rolfe."

"If anyone can get to the bottom of it, you can," said Rolfe, who believed with Voltaire that speech was given us in order to enable us to conceal our thoughts.

Inspector Chippenfield was so astonished at this handsome compliment that he began to think he had underrated Rolfe's powers of discernment. His tone of cold official superiority immediately thawed.

"There were two shots fired," he said, "but whether both were fired by the murderer I don't know yet. One of them may have been fired by Sir Horace. Just behind you in the wall is the mark of one of the bullets. I dug it out of the plaster yesterday and here it is." He produced from a waistcoat pocket a flattened bullet. "The other is inside him at present." He waved his hand in the direction of the room in which the corpse lay.

"Of course you cannot say yet whether both bullets are out of the same revolver?" said Rolfe.

"Can't tell till after the post-mortem," said the inspector. "And then all we can tell for certain is whether they are of the same pattern. They might be the same size, and yet be fired out of different revolvers of the same calibre."

"Well, it is no use theorising about what happened in this room until after the post-mortem," said Rolfe.

"You'd better give it some thought," suggested the inspector. "In the meantime I want you to interview the people in the neighbourhood and ascertain whether they heard any shots. They'll all say they did whether they heard them or not--you know how people persuade themselves into imagining things so as to get some sort of prominence in these crimes.

But you can sift what they tell you and preserve the grain of truth. Try and get them to be accurate as to the time, as we want to fix the time of the crime as near as possible. Ask Flack to tell you something about the neighbours--he's been in this district fifteen years, and ought to know all about them. While you're away I'll go through these private papers. I want to find out why he came back from Scotland so suddenly. If we knew that the rest might be easy."

"I haven't seen the body yet," said Rolfe. "I'd like to look at it.

Where is it?"

"I had it removed downstairs. You will find it in a big room on the left as you go down the hall. By the by, there is another matter, Rolfe. This glove was found in the room. It may be a clue, but it is more likely that it is one of Sir Horace's gloves and that he lost the other one on his way up from Scotland. It's a left-hand glove--men always lose the right-hand glove because they take it off so often. I've compared it with other gloves in Sir Horace's wardrobe, and I find it is the same size and much the same quality. But find out from Sir Horace's hosier if he sold it. Here's the address of the hosiers,--Bruden and Marshall, in the Strand."

Rolfe went slowly downstairs into the room in which the corpse lay, and closed the door behind him. It was a very large room, overlooking the garden on the right side of the house. Somebody had lowered the Venetian blinds as a conventional intimation to the outside world that the house was one of mourning, and the room was almost dark. For nearly a minute Rolfe stood in silence, his hand resting on the k.n.o.b of the door he had closed behind him. Gradually the outline of the room and the objects within it began to reveal themselves in shadowy shape as his eyes became accustomed to the dim light. He had a growing impression of a big lofty room, with heavy furniture, and a huddled up figure lying on a couch at the end furthest from the window and deepest in shadow.

He stepped across to the window and gently raised one of the blinds. The light of an August sun penetrated through the screen of trees in front of the house and revealed the interior of the room more clearly. Rolfe was amazed at its size. From the window to the couch at the other end of the room, where the body lay, was nearly thirty feet. Glancing down the apartment, he noticed that it was really two rooms, divided in the middle by folding doors. These doors folded neatly into a slightly protruding ridge or arch almost opposite the door by which he had entered, and were screened from observation by heavy damask curtains, which drooped over the archway slightly into the room.

Evidently the deceased judge had been in the habit of using the divided rooms as a single apartment, for the heavier furniture in both halves of it was of the same pattern. The chairs and tables were of heavy, ponderous, mid-Victorian make, and they were matched by a number of old-fas.h.i.+oned mahogany sideboards and presses, arranged methodically at regular intervals on both sides of the room. Rolfe, as his eye took in these articles, wondered why Sir Horace Fewbanks had bought so many. One sideboard, a vast piece of furniture fully eight feet long, had a whisky decanter and siphon of soda water on it, as though Sir Horace had served himself with refreshments on his return to the house. The tops of the other sideboards were bare, and the presses, use in such a room Rolfe was at a loss to conjecture, were locked up. The antique sombre uniformity of the furniture as a whole was broken at odd intervals by several articles of bizarre modernity, including a few daring French prints, which struck an odd note of incongruity in such a room.

The murdered man had been laid on an old-fas.h.i.+oned sofa at the end of this double apartment which was furthest from the window. Rolfe walked slowly over the thick Turkey carpets and rugs with which the floor was covered, glanced at the sofa curiously, and then turned down the sheet from the dead man's face.

At the time of his death Sir Horace Fewbanks was 58 years of age, but since death the grey bristles had grown so rapidly through his clean-shaven face that he looked much older. The face showed none of the wonted placidity of death. The mouth was twisted in an ugly fas.h.i.+on, as though the murdered man had endeavoured to cry for help and had been attacked and killed while doing so. One of Sir Horace's arms--the right one--was thrust forward diagonally across his breast as if in self-defence, and the hand was tightly clenched. Rolfe, who had last seen His Honour presiding on the Bench in the full pomp and majesty of law, felt a chill strike his heart at the fell power of death which did not even respect the person of a High Court judge, and had stripped him of every vestige of human dignity in the pangs of a violent end. The face he had last seen on the Bench full of wisdom and austerity of the law was now distorted into a livid mask in which it was hard to trace any semblance of the features of the dead judge.

Rolfe's official alertness of mind in the face of a mysterious crime soon rea.s.serted itself, however, and he shook off the feeling of sentiment and proceeded to make a closer examination of the dead body. As he turned down the sheet to examine the wound which had ended the judge's life, it slipped from his hand and fell on the floor, revealing that the judge had been laid on the couch just as he had been killed, fully clothed. He had been shot through the body near the heart, and a large patch of blood had welled from the wound and congealed in his s.h.i.+rt. One trouser leg was ruffled up, and had caught in the top of the boot.

The corpse presented a repellent spectacle, but Rolfe, who had seen unpleasant sights of various kinds in his career, bent over the body with keen interest, noting these details, with all his professional instincts aroused. For though Rolfe had not yet risen very high in the police force, he had many of the qualities which make the good detective--observation, sagacity, and some imagination. The extraordinary crime which he had been called upon to help unravel presented a baffling mystery which was likely to test the value of these qualities to the utmost.

Rolfe looked steadily at the corpse for some time, impressing a picture of it in every detail on his mental retina. Struck by an idea, he bent over and touched the patch of blood in the dead man's breast, then looked at his finger. There was no stain. The blood was quite congealed. Then he tried to unclench the judge's right hand, but it was rigid.

As Rolfe stood there gazing intently at the corpse, and trying to form some theory of the reason for the murder, certain old stories he had heard of Sir Horace Fewbanks's private life and character recurred to him. These rumours had not been much--a jocular hint or two among his fellows at Scotland Yard that His Honour had a weakness for a pretty face and in private life led a less decorous existence than a judge ought to do. Rolfe wondered how much or how little truth was contained in these stories. He glanced around the vast room. Certainly it was not the sort of apartment in which a High Court judge might be expected to do his entertaining, but Rolfe recalled that he had heard gossip to the effect that Sir Horace, because of his virtual estrangement from his daughter, did very little entertaining beyond an occasional bridge or supper party to his sporting friends, and rarely went into Society.

Rolfe began to scrutinise the articles of furniture in the room, wondering if there was anything about them which might reveal something of the habits of the dead man. He produced a small electric torch from his pocket, and with its light to guide him in the half-darkened room, he closely inspected each piece of furniture. Then, with the torch in his hand, he returned to the sofa and flashed it over the dead body. He started violently when the light, falling on the dead man's closed hand, revealed a tiny sc.r.a.p of white. Eagerly he endeavoured to release the fragment from the tenacious clutch of the dead without tearing it, and eventually he managed to detach it. His heart bounded when he saw that it was a small torn piece of lace and muslin. He placed it in the palm of his left hand and examined it closely under the light of his torch. To him it looked to be part of a fas.h.i.+onable lady's dainty handkerchief. He was elated at his discovery and he wondered how Inspector Chippenfield had overlooked it. Then the explanation struck him. The small piece of lace and muslin had been effectually hidden in the dead man's clenched hand, and his efforts to open the hand had loosened it.

"Well, Rolfe," said Inspector Chippenfield, when his subordinate reappeared, "you've been long enough to have unearthed the criminal or revived the corpse. Have you discovered anything fresh?"

"Only this," replied Rolfe, displaying the piece of handkerchief.

The find startled Inspector Chippenfield out of his air of bantering superiority.