The Great Fog (3 page)

Then, confirming the witness, the Doctor added, “And the wax can cause considerable irritation if it thickens, and if an unskillful nail works at it you have a good source of infection there.”

“Well, she didn't like going to a strange doctor. So every few months Dr. Smirke would syringe it out for her. Often they'd start all right. But she
was
so sensitive and he was so irritable. She'd say he hurt her, and he'd say she was a crybaby. I'd hear it often, for he'd call me in to bring the hot water and hold the towels and things. But the last time I was with them on it he was quite sympathetic. When she winced, I remember him saying in a really nice tone of voice—it surprised me a bit, so I remember it—‘You're right, Marion, this time I think it really has caused a little real pruitis'—Is that the word?” Mary asked.

“Near enough, please go on.”

“He looked in with a sort of instrument. Then he said, ‘But I think I know what can settle the trouble for good.' Maybe a few days after, at table, he said, ‘I've been making inquiries from colleagues. Their reports are very favorable. Come up to the office one day and have a few treatments with X rays on that spot in the ear, and I'll wager you'll never feel it again.' She was away a day and came back with a small dressing in the ear. I don't remember her complaining for another week. Then, one day at dinner, I saw her putting her hand up to her ear.”

“Which?” asked Dr. Wendover.

“How'd a girl remember that?” grunted Sergeant Skillin.

“Oh, but I do. It was her right ear, the one which had been treated. For I remember she had on her fine ruby ring that she always wore on her right hand. I recall thinking how finely it flashed in the light of the candles.”

“Did she say anything?” asked Dr. Wendover again.

“I remember, Dr. Smirke said, ‘You're not feeling that ear again? The X ray is said to be a certain cure.' She only said something about it being a little numb. Then, later, she said something, too, about being so nervous that she was glad to have the anesthetic when he was giving her the X rays.”

“Oh, she was thankful for having had an anesthetic?” interrupted Dr. Wendover.

“Yes, and she added, ‘It's worth it to be rid of that horrid tickle.' I remember, because she wasn't the kind of person ever to notice things getting better but very quick to notice them if they were worse. I thought that tickle must have been pretty tough for someone to think it was worth a certain amount of trouble to be rid of it. Of course, she'd have to complain about the little numbness she felt in its place.”

“Of course,” said Dr. Wendover reflectively.

“Well, Doctor, that was all. A week after there was the accident.”

Mary left, thanked and commiserated on loss of part of an afternoon. As her footsteps died away, Sergeant Skillin rose. “That closes the case. Those are the only ‘on the spot' witnesses. The three couples of diners can't tell us anything more than they told at the inquest.”

“I agree, I agree,” said Dr. Wendover in a sort of perfunctory aside.

“Well, then, there's nothing more to do, is there?”

To that, there was not given even an inattentive assent. The Doctor continued gazing at the prone ladder, its long legs sprawled almost touching the wall on their right, its head now reaching a considerable way up the floor of the long room.

“After all, you can't reopen a case,” the Sergeant called at him, “if all you can say for fact is that a violent-tempered unstable woman, after exasperating her husband, fell off the top of a tall ladder. To want a person dead isn't murder.”

Dr. Wendover shifted around. “It is, morally.”

“We're not Morality, we're Law.”

“Um; it's a natural law that where there's a will there's a way.”

“Well, the way was the ladder. How did he will her to fall off, and neatly, plumb on her head! He couldn't have pulled her off. Six people were on the line in between.”

Dr. Wendover did not answer but turned back to looking at the ladder itself. Sergeant Skillin tried to rouse him:

“Why did you pull it down?”

“Why, it's our last witness.”

“It'll tell us nothing we don't know. We know everyone who handled it. Doubt if you'd even find the poor woman's fingerprints on it.”

Evidently no longer listening, the Doctor had strolled up to the ladder's head, where the hinged back-supports joined onto the top of the flight of steps. Sergeant Skillin was reaching the end of his tether.

“Here,” he called out, excusing himself for his tone of voice—because old Wendover was really daydreaming—“if you want to interrogate that dumb scantling, you won't get anything from its head, from that old clotheshorse's mouth,” he chuckled, his natural good temper restored by his own small joke. “Its feet, at my end, are the only thing that might help us. But, of course, I've questioned them.”

He bent down and looked at the undersurfaces of the ladder's ends, now visible. “Y'see, as true and firm as you could wish or, rather, as we could not wish.” He shook the ladder's struts and tried the steps. “No play there. These ladders are new and of good workmanship.”

Dr. Wendover turned. “Then they were purchased lately.”

“Yes, Dr. Smirke had bought them a couple of months ago. He told the man who provided them, and whom he'd dealt with for some years, that he was tired of those dangerous lean-to ladders and had nearly had an accident or two by their slipping on this smooth floor. This year, he said, he'd have safe ladders before he started decorations for the Christmas party. And they are safe.”

The Doctor assented, “He was certainly a careful man.” That did not, however, take his attention from the ladder head at his feet. Finally, as Sergeant Skillin was strolling to the door, he roused himself to call him back. “You said we shouldn't get anything from this old clotheshorse's mouth. I like your simile, but I venture to differ from you in your dismissal of this witness.”

“Well, you'll have to do the translating and, remember, not to me, your indulgent friend, but to a court and an expensive defending lawyer.”

“You'll at least let me rehearse the part in front of you.”

“Oh, go ahead.”

“First, be so kind as to bend yours a little, so that you may see the witness's mouth.”

Sergeant Skillin did consent to bend his head sideways. “Why, that's only a handhold.” Sure enough, just under the broad platform top-step, in the side piece of wood which supported it, a space was cut, big enough to put a hand through.

“And, look, there's the companion one on the other side.” The Sergeant drew himself up, glad to counterquiz the Doctor. “They must be handholds for carrying the ladder.”

“No; if the ladder was a four-foot one, instead of four times that height, you might carry it so. But, see, this big thing, if it is carried, must be carried longways; its weight would require two hands, and, then, if this is a handhold, it should be at right angles to the way it is actually cut. Besides, these cuts weren't made by the maker. That sawing isn't professional carpentry. That he troubled to paint over the cuts shows that he wished to hide his work as much as possible. Finally, the incision is right up under the top piece.”

“Yes, but that doesn't hide it when you look up from the floor.”

“It is in the shadow cast by the overlap of the board above. But he had a second reason for putting the opening as high as he could, his real reason. He needed it to be flush with the underside of the top board.”

“But what about the other opening on the other side?”

“It's a blind.”

“Oh, you can't get rid of additional facts that don't support your theory by dismissing them as lead-away false clues.”

“Well, now we'll get to the center, and that will show. We've simply been looking at the not very communicative mouth.”

Dr. Wendover knelt down and the Sergeant followed suit. The pocket flashlight threw its bright circle on the underside of the top board of the ladder.

“Not much there.” A grumbling tone was coming back into the Sergeant's voice. The bright circle traveled along the grain of the wood.

“Those little indentations,” the Doctor's voice said beside him. “A couple here; another couple here; a third pair here; and now …” the light dipped down some four inches and retraced its course. “You see the same little indents and, now, as we reach the end, by what I have called the blind mouth on the ladder's right side, a final couple of these same small punctures.”

“Well, there may have been some bit of upholstery or mat tacked onto the top step so you could kneel on it safely without danger of its slipping.”

“Queer, then, that there is no pair of punctures on this left-hand side.”

“Oh, this is altogether too fine-drawn, Doctor!”

“We are dealing with something very fine,” he allowed, “but, really, no finer than a fingerprint. This is a very clear and telling impression.”

As they rose from their knees and he slipped the torch back into his pocket, he took out a pad and pencil. “Let's chart those punctures like a graph.” He plotted them on the paper. “See, they weren't quite parallel: while on the right side, where the two lines most diverged, they were closed by that last couple of indents and, on the left side, where they are closest, there is no closing brace of punctures.” He rapidly drew connecting lines through the points he had plotted.

Sergeant Skillin, looking over his shoulder, remarked, “Well, they might be the marks of the tacks that held on a cloth cover, as I've said. You see, since the person was so unskillful as not to keep his lines straight, they'd diverged at the right side, so that he had to put in an extra pair of tacks.”

“But if he wasn't unskillful?” asked Dr. Wendover. “If that design follows very carefully a pattern? Then, Skillin, does that pattern suggest anything to you?”

“It looks like an elongated horseshoe pointing to the left.”

“Yes. And by your insight, by your reading the writing punctured on this panel, you have got your man.”

Sergeant Skillin was quite pleased at the praise, even more doubtful of the statement, and completely puzzled at the demonstration. So he naturally said nothing.

“Yes,” went on Dr. Wendover, stretching himself. “Take a chair, Sergeant. Thought contracts the muscles, do what we will. Well, it's over. We can relax. We've time. Smirke was so clever that he's quite at his ease. He won't move till you come for him, and then he'll go quiet, certain you can't know, or if you suspect, can't prove. All we have to do now, as I suspect you've seen through to the end, is to make certain that the jury has as clear a view as we. You're undoubtedly right-that almost-closed curve, plotted by those pairs of punctures on the underside of that top board of the ladder, are the print or outline of a horseshoe, or, if you like to put it in criminal-court language, of the weapon with which Mrs. Smirke was killed. And the small ‘mouth' in that ladder's head, on its left side, is the gun port through which Mrs. Smirke was shot.”

“Now, Doctor dear, do be sensible,” broke in Sergeant Skillin. “With all yer blarney, ye know that I haven't the slightest idea of what ye are talking about. Glory be! The poor woman was
not
shot. Though she fell as though she had been.”

“Sergeant, as always, you are right in what you observe, or have told you in evidence, but, being more used to courts than I, you sometimes fear to go as far as you really see. Mrs. Smirke was shot, shot in the ear.”

“Sounds like
Hamlet
to me, and
Hamlet's
a good play but a bad crime story.”

“You're right, then, we must have a little more proof.”

“Can you get it?”

“I only want one piece more, literally a grain, to tip old justice's scales, even though they're rusty. And you can get it for me. We're too old hands to be upset by gruesome detail, you and I. Get me the right ear of the dead woman. I must have the real ear. The outer part doesn't matter.”

“It'll need going through a few forms, you know?”

“Well, again I wager we have time. What we're looking for will keep.”

Sergeant Skillin was impressed. That ladder had been tampered with, carefully, queerly and, further, he knew Mrs. Smirke's ear had been doctored by a doctor who did not wish her well. Had the ladder top on the night of the murder held the key? He did not like to think he might have overlooked that. Could the dead woman's ear be the lock that key fitted in? “I'll get it for you,” he said.

He had only to get the papers through. Dr. Wendover and the police surgeon managed the anatomical side between them. Within twenty-four hours he received a call from the Doctor's house, asking him to come over. He was taken at once to the Doctor's private laboratory at the top of the house. As soon as he entered he saw a microscope standing under a high light and he noticed, pointing at the specimen platform, an electrical rig-up of some sort.

“Sergeant, will you please look down that microscope?” were the Doctor's first words.

Silently, Sergeant Skillin took his place on the stool and peered down into the lit field. The Doctor's voice at his shoulder said, “What you are now observing is some fluid from the semicircular canal of the dead woman's ear. It is, of course, not very clear. The only definite things are some tiny black spots.”

“I see them,” reported the Sergeant.

“Keep your eye on them.”

He heard a switch click, and exclaimed, “Oh, the small black spots have rushed ahead!”

The Doctor's voice at his shoulder said, “There, that's all; that's my final demonstration.”

“But what is it at all?”

“Well, first, what did I do? I switched on a magnet. What followed? The black grains rushed toward it. What, therefore, are they? Minute steel dust, rustless steel. Where do they come from? The right inner ear of Mrs. Smirke, deceased. What would they do there when she was alive?” He paused.