The blue scarab
full view all the time--a wax match. Now a wax match is a perfectly
innocent and very commonplace object, but yet the presence of this one
gave me pause. In the first place, women do not, as a rule, use wax
matches, though there was not much in that. What was more to the point
was that the candlestick by the bedside contained a box of safety
matches, and that, as the burned remains of one lay in the tray, it
appeared to have been used to light the candle. Then why the wax
match?
While I was turning over this problem Foxton had corked the bottle,
wrapped it carefully in a piece of paper which he took from the
dressing table and bestowed it in his pocket.
“Well, Jervis,” said he, “I think we’ve seen everything. The analysis
and the post-mortem will complete the case. Shall we go down and hear
what Mrs. Beddingfield has to say?”
But that wax match, slight as was its significance, taken alone, had
presented itself to me as the last of a succession of phenomena each
of which was susceptible of a sinister interpretation, and the
cumulative effect of these slight suggestions began to impress me
somewhat strongly.
“One moment, Foxton,” said I. “Don’t let us take anything for granted.
We are here to collect evidence, and we must go warily. There is such
a thing as homicidal poisoning, you know.”
“Yes, of course,” he replied, “but there is nothing to suggest it in
this case; at least, I see nothing. Do you?”
“Nothing very positive,” said I; “but there are some facts that seem
to call for consideration. Let us go over what we have seen. In the
first place, there is a distinct discrepancy in the appearance of the
body. The general easy, symmetrical posture, like that of a figure on
a tomb, suggests the effect of a slow, painless poison. But look at
the face. There is nothing reposeful about that. It is very strongly
suggestive of pain or terror or both.”
“Yes,” said Foxton, “that is so. But you can’t draw any satisfactory
conclusions from the facial expression of dead bodies. Why, men who
have been hanged, or even stabbed, often look as peaceful as babes.”
“Still,” I urged, “it is a fact to be noted. Then there is that cut on
the lip. It may have been produced in the way you suggest; but it may
equally well be the result of pressure on the mouth.”
Foxton made no comment on this beyond a slight shrug of the shoulders,
and I continued:
“Then there is the state of the hand. It was closed, but it did not
really grasp the object it contained. You drew the bottle out without
any resistance. It simply lay in the closed hand. But that is not a
normal state of affairs. As you know, when a person dies grasping any
object, either the hand relaxes and lets it drop, or the muscular
action passes into cadaveric spasm and grasps the object firmly. And
lastly, there is this wax match. Where did it come from? The dead
woman apparently lit her candle with a safety match from the box. It
is a small matter, but it wants explaining.”
Foxton raised his eyebrows protestingly. “You’re like all specialists,
Jervis,” said he. “You see your specialty in everything. And while you
are straining these flimsy suggestions to turn a simple suicide into
murder, you ignore the really conclusive fact that the door was bolted
and had to be broken open before any one could get in.”
“You are not forgetting, I suppose,” said I, “that the window was wide
open and that there were house painters about and possibly a ladder
left standing against the house.”
“As to the ladder,” said Foxton, “that is a pure assumption; but we
can easily settle the question by asking that fellow out there if it
was or was not left standing last night.”
Simultaneously we moved towards the window; but half-way we both
stopped short. For the question of the ladder had in a moment become
negligible. Staring up at us from the dull red linoleum which covered
the floor were the impressions of a pair of bare feet, imprinted in
white paint with the distinctness of a woodcut. There was no need to
ask if they had been made by the dead woman: they were unmistakably
the feet of a man, and large feet at that. Nor could there be any
doubt as to whence those feet had come. Beginning with startling
distinctness under the window, the tracks diminished rapidly in
intensity until they reached the carpeted portion of the room, where
they vanished abruptly; and only by the closest scrutiny was it
possible to detect the faint traces of the retiring tracks.
Foxton and I stood for some moments gazing in silence at the sinister
white shapes; then we looked at one another.
“You’ve saved me from a most horrible blunder, Jervis,” said Foxton.
“Ladder or no ladder, that fellow came in at the window; and he came
in last night, for I saw them painting these window-sills yesterday
afternoon. Which side did he come from, I wonder?”
We moved to the window and looked out on the sill. A set of distinct,
though smeared impressions on the new paint gave unneeded confirmation
and showed that the intruder had approached from the left side, close
to which was a cast-iron stack-pipe, now covered with fresh green
paint.
“So,” said Foxton, “the presence or absence of the ladder is of no
significance. The man got into the window somehow, and that’s all that
matters.”
“On the contrary,” said I, “the point may be of considerable
importance in identification. It isn’t every one who could climb up a
stack-pipe, whereas most people could make shift to climb a ladder,
even if it were guarded by a plank. But the fact that the man took off
his boots and socks suggests that he came up by the pipe. If he had
merely aimed at silencing his foot-falls, he would probably have
removed his boots only.”
From the window we turned to examine more closely the footprints on
the floor, and, while I took a series of measurements with my spring
tape, Foxton entered them in my notebook.
“Doesn’t it strike you as rather odd, Jervis,” said he, “that neither
of the little toes has made any mark?”
“It does indeed,” I replied. “The appearances suggest that the little
toes were absent, but I have never met with such a condition. Have
you?”
“Never. Of course one is acquainted with the supernumerary toe
deformity, but I have never heard of congenitally deficient little
toes.”
Once more we scrutinized the footprints, and even examined those on
the window-sill, obscurely marked on the fresh paint; but, exquisitely
distinct as were those on the linoleum, showing every wrinkle and
minute skin-marking, not the faintest hint of a little toe was to be
seen on either foot.
“It’s very extraordinary,” said Foxton. “He has certainly lost his
little toes, if he ever had any. They couldn’t have failed to make
some mark. But it’s a queer affair. Quite a windfall for the police,
by the way; I mean for purposes of identification.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “and having regard to the importance of the
footprints, I think it would be wise to get a photograph of them.”
“Oh, the police will see to that,” said Foxton. “Besides, we haven’t
got a camera, unless you thought of using that little toy snapshotter
of yours.”
As Foxton was no photographer I did not trouble to explain that my
camera, though small, had been specially made for scientific purposes.
“Any photograph is better than none,” I said, and with this I opened
the tripod and set it over one of the most distinct of the footprints,
screwed the camera to the goose-neck, carefully framed the footprint
in the finder and adjusted the focus, finally making the exposure by
means of an Antinous release. This process I repeated four times,
twice on a right footprint and twice on a left.
“Well,” Foxton remarked, “with all those photographs the police ought
to be able to pick up the scent.”
“Yes, they’ve got something to go on; but they’ll have to catch their
hare before they can cook him. He won’t be walking about barefooted,
you know.”
“No. It’s a poor clue in that respect. And now we may as well be off
as we’ve seen all there is to see. I think we won’t have much to say
to Mrs. Beddingfield. This is a police case, and the less I’m mixed up
in it the better it will be for my practice.”
I was faintly amused at Foxton’s caution when considered by the light
of his utterances at the breakfast table. Apparently his appetite for
mystery and romance was easily satisfied. But that was no affair of
mine. I waited on the doorstep while he said a few--probably
evasive--words to the landlady and then, as we started off together in
the direction of the police station, I began to turn over in my mind
the salient features of the case. For some time we walked on in
silence, and must have been pursuing a parallel train of thought for,
when he at length spoke, he almost put my reflections into words.
“You know, Jervis,” said he, “there ought to be a clue in those
footprints. I realize that you can’t tell how many toes a man has by
looking at his booted feet. But those unusual footprints ought to give
an expert a hint as to what sort of man to look for. Don’t they convey
any hint to you?”
I felt that Foxton was right; that if my brilliant colleague,
Thorndyke, had been in my place, he would have extracted from those
footprints some leading fact that would have given the police a start
along some definite line of inquiry; and that belief, coupled with
Foxton’s challenge, put me on my mettle.
“They offer no particular suggestions to me at this moment,” said I,
“but I think that, if we consider them systematically, we may be able
to draw some useful deductions.”
“Very well,” said Foxton, “then let us consider them systematically.
Fire away. I should like to hear how you work these things out.”
Foxton’s frankly spectatorial attitude was a little disconcerting,
especially as it seemed to commit me to a result that I was by no
means confident of attaining. I therefore began a little diffidently.
“We are assuming that both the feet that made those prints were from
some cause devoid of little toes. That assumption--which is almost
certainly correct--we treat as a fact, and, taking it as our starting
point, the first step in the inquiry is to find some explanation of
it. Now there are three possibilities, and only three: deformity,
injury and disease. The toes may have been absent from birth, they may
have been lost as a result of mechanical injury, or they may have been
lost by disease. Let us take those possibilities in order.
“Deformity we exclude since such a malformation is unknown to us.
“Mechanical injury seems to be excluded by the fact that the two
little toes are on opposite sides of the body and could not
conceivably be affected by any violence which left the intervening
feet uninjured. This seems to narrow the possibilities down to
disease; and the question that arises is, What diseases are there
which might result in the loss of both little toes?”
I looked inquiringly at Foxton, but he merely nodded encouragingly.
His rôle was that of listener.
“Well,” I pursued, “the loss of both toes seems to exclude local
disease, just as it excluded local injury; and as to general diseases,
I can think only of three which might produce this
condition--Raynaud’s disease, ergotism, and frost-bite.”
“You don’t call frost-bite a general disease, do you?” objected
Foxton.
“For our present purpose, I do. The effects are local, but the
cause--low external temperature--affects the whole body and is a
general cause. Well, now, taking the diseases in order, I think we can
exclude Raynaud’s disease. It does, it is true, occasionally cause the
fingers or toes to die and drop off, and the little toes would be
especially liable to be affected as being most remote from the heart.
But in such a severe case the other toes would be affected. They would