The magic casket
By way of reply, Thorndyke delicately picked up a flat fragment and
silently held it out towards us. I looked at it and said nothing; for
a very strange suspicion was beginning to creep into my mind.
“A piece of a rib,” said Hemming. “Very odd that it should have broken
across so cleanly. It might have been cut with a saw.”
Thorndyke laid it down and picked up another, larger fragment, which I
had already noticed.
“Here is another example,” said he, handing it to our colleague.
“Yes,” agreed Hemming. “It is really rather extraordinary. It looks
exactly as if it had been sawn across.”
“It does,” agreed Thorndyke. “What bone should you say it is?”
“That is what I was just asking myself,” replied Hemming, looking at
the fragment with a sort of half-vexed smile. “It seems ridiculous
that a competent anatomist should be in any doubt with as large a
portion as this, but really I can’t confidently give it a name. The
shape seems to me to suggest a tibia, but of course it is much too
small. Is it the upper end of the ulna?”
“I should say no,” answered Thorndyke. Then he picked out another of
the larger fragments, and handing it to Hemming, asked him to name it.
Our friend began to look somewhat worried.
“It is an extraordinary thing, you know,” said he, “but I can’t tell
you what bone it is part of. It is clearly the shaft of a long bone,
but I’m hanged if I can say which. It is too big for a metatarsal and
too small for any of the main limb bones. It reminds one of a
diminutive thigh bone.”
“It does,” agreed Thorndyke; “very strongly.” While Hemming had been
speaking he had picked out four more large fragments, and these he now
laid in a row with the one that had seemed to resemble a tibia in
shape. Placed thus together, the five fragments bore an obvious
resemblance.
“Now,” said he, “look at these. There are five of them. They are parts
of limb bones, and the bones of which they are parts were evidently
exactly alike, excepting that three were apparently from the left side
and two from the right. Now, you know, Hemming, a man has only four
limbs, and of those only two contain similar bones. Then two of them
show distinct traces of what looks like a saw-cut.”
Hemming gazed at the row of fragments with a frown of deep cogitation.
“It is very mysterious,” he said. “And looking at them in a row they
strike me as curiously like tibiæ--in shape; not in size.”
“The size,” said Thorndyke, “is about that of a sheep’s tibia.”
“A sheep’s!” exclaimed Hemming, staring in amazement, first at the
calcined bones and then at my colleague.
“Yes; the upper half, sawn across in the middle of the shank.”
Hemming was thunderstruck.
“It is an astounding affair!” he exclaimed. “You mean to suggest----”
“I suggest,” said Thorndyke, “that there is not a sign of a human bone
in the whole collection. But there are very evident traces of at least
five legs of mutton.”
For a few moments there was a profound silence, broken only by a
murmur of astonishment from the cemetery official and a low chuckle
from Superintendent Miller, who had been listening with absorbed
interest. At length Hemming spoke.
“Then, apparently, there was no corpse in the coffin at all?”
“No,” answered Thorndyke. “The weight was made up, and the ashes
furnished, by joints of butcher’s meat. I dare say, if we go over the
ashes carefully, we shall be able to judge what they were. But it is
hardly necessary. The presence of five legs of mutton and the absence
of a single recognizable fragment of a human skeleton, together with
the forged certificates, gives us a pretty conclusive case. The rest,
I think we can leave to Superintendent Miller.”
“I take it, Thorndyke,” said I, as the train moved out of the station,
“that you came here expecting to find what you did find?”
“Yes,” he replied. “It seemed to me the only possibility, having
regard to all the known facts.”
“When did it first occur to you?”
“It occurred to me as a possibility as soon as we discovered that the
cremation certificates had been forged; but it was the undertaker’s
statement that seemed to clench the matter.”
“But he distinctly stated that he measured the body.”
“True. But there was nothing to show that it was a dead body. What was
perfectly clear was that there was something that must on no account
be seen; and when Stalker told us of the embezzlement we had a body of
evidence that could point to only one conclusion. Just consider that
evidence.
“Here we had a death, preceded by an obviously sham illness and
followed by cremation with forged certificates. Now, what was it that
had happened? There were four possible hypotheses. Normal death,
suicide, murder, and fictitious death. Which of these hypotheses
fitted the facts?
“Normal death was apparently excluded by the forged certificates.
“The theory of suicide did not account for the facts. It did not agree
with the careful, elaborate preparation. And why the forged
certificates? If Ingle had really died, Meeking would have certified
the death. And why the cremation? There was no purpose in taking those
enormous risks.
“The theory of murder was unthinkable. These certificates were almost
certainly forged by Ingle himself, who we know was a practised forger.
But the idea of the victim arranging for his own cremation is an
absurdity.
“There remained only the theory of fictitious death; and that theory
fitted all the facts perfectly. First, as to the motive. Ingle had
committed a felony. He had to disappear. But what kind of
disappearance could be so effectual as death and cremation? Both the
prosecutors and the police would forthwith write him off and forget
him. Then there was the bigamy--a criminal offence in itself. But
death would not only wipe that off; after ‘death’ he could marry
Huggard regularly under another name, and he would have shaken off his
deserted wife for ever. And he stood to gain fifteen hundred pounds
from the Insurance Company. Then see how this theory explained the
other facts. A fictitious death made necessary a fictitious illness.
It necessitated the forged certificates, since there was no corpse. It
made cremation highly desirable; for suspicion might easily have
arisen, and then the exhumation of a coffin containing a dummy would
have exploded the fraud. But successful cremation would cover up the
fraud for ever. It explained the concealment of the corpse from the
undertaker, and it even explained the smell of formalin which he
noticed.”
“How did it?” I asked.
“Consider, Jervis,” he replied. “The dummy in this coffin had to be a
dummy of flesh and bone which would yield the correct kind of ash.
Joints of butcher’s meat would fulfil the conditions. But the quantity
required would be from a hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds. Now
Ingle could not go to the butcher and order a whole sheep to be sent
the day before the funeral. The joints would have to be bought
gradually and stored. But the storage of meat in warm weather calls
for some kind of preservative; and formalin is highly effective, as it
leaves no trace after burning.
“So you see that the theory of fictitious death agreed with all the
known circumstances, whereas the alternative theories presented
inexplicable discrepancies and contradictions. Logically, it was the
only possible theory, and as you have seen, experiment proved it to be
the true one.”
As Thorndyke concluded, Dr. Hemming took his pipe from his mouth and
laughed softly.
“When I came down to-day,” said he, “I had all the facts which you had
communicated to the Home Office, and I was absolutely convinced that
we were coming to examine a mare’s nest. And yet, now I have heard
your exposition, the whole thing looks perfectly obvious.”
“That is usually the case with Thorndyke’s conclusions,” said I. “They
are perfectly obvious--when you have heard the explanation.”
Within a week of our expedition, Ingle was in the hands of the police.
The apparent success of the cremation adventure had misled him to a
sense of such complete security that he had neglected to cover his
tracks, and he had accordingly fallen an easy prey to our friend
Superintendent Miller. The police were highly gratified, and so were
the directors of the Griffin Life Assurance Company.
III.
THE STALKING HORSE
As Thorndyke and I descended the stairs of the footbridge at
Densford Junction we became aware that something unusual had happened.
The platform was nearly deserted save at one point, where a small but
dense crowd had collected around the open door of a first-class
compartment of the down train; heads were thrust out of the windows of
the other coaches, and at intervals doors opened and inquisitive
passengers ran along to join the crowd, from which an excited porter
detached himself just as we reached the platform.
“You’d better go for Dr. Pooke first,” the station-master called after
him.
On this, Thorndyke stepped forward.
“My friend and I,” said he, “are medical men. Can we be of any service
until the local doctor arrives?”
“I’m very much afraid not, sir,” was the reply, “but you’ll see.” He
cleared a way for us and we approached the open door.
At the first glance there appeared to be nothing to account for the
awe-stricken expression with which the bystanders peered into the
carriage and gazed at its solitary occupant. For the motionless figure
that sat huddled in the corner seat, chin on breast, might have been a
sleeping man. But it was not. The waxen pallor of the face and the
strange, image-like immobility forbade the hope of any awakening.
“It looks almost as if he had passed away in his sleep,” said the
station-master when we had concluded our brief examination and
ascertained certainly that the man was dead. “Do you think it was a
heart attack, sir?”
Thorndyke shook his head and touched with his finger a depressed spot
on the dead man’s waistcoat. When he withdrew his finger it was
smeared with blood.
“Good God!” the official gasped, in a horrified whisper. “The man has
been murdered!” He stared incredulously at the corpse for a few
moments and then turned and sprang out of the compartment, shutting
the door behind him, and we heard him giving orders for the coach to
be separated and shunted into the siding.
“This is a gruesome affair, Jervis,” my colleague said as he sat down
on the seat opposite the dead man and cast a searching glance round
the compartment. “I wonder who this poor fellow was and what was the
object of the murder? It looks almost too determined for a common
robbery; and, in fact, the body does not appear to have been robbed.”
Here he stooped suddenly to pick up one or two minute fragments of
glass which seemed to have been trodden into the carpet, and which he
examined closely in the palm of his hand. I leaned over and looked at
the fragments, and we agreed that they were portions of the bulb of an
electric torch or flash-lamp.
“The significance of these--if they have any,” said Thorndyke, “we can
consider later. But if they are recent, it would appear that the metal
part of the bulb has been picked up and taken away. That might be an
important fact. But, on the other hand, the fragments may have been
here some time and have no connexion with the tragedy; though you
notice that they were lying opposite the body and opposite the seat
which the murderer must have occupied when the crime was committed.”
As he was speaking, the uncoupled coach began slowly to move towards
the siding, and we both stooped to make a further search for the
remainder of the lamp-bulb. And then, almost at the same moment, we
perceived two objects lying under the opposite seat--the seat occupied
by the dead man. One was a small pocket-handkerchief, the other a
sheet of notepaper.