The Notched Hairpin (14 page)

“My fears were well-grounded. I ought to have foreseen this fix. Of course it was inevitable. Sankey was determined to show his complete power over me, and this occasion gave him an opportunity.

“I had hardly been five minutes in my study before my Mrs. Sprigg knocked at the door to say that Jane had been sent over to ask whether I would ‘step round' again. Yes, the moment I came here to where he was sitting, it was clear that he was now acting the part of the dictator. He looked up at me and repeated almost exactly the words that he had used before, except this time he omitted any reference to purchase! It was an ultimatum. I was to do precisely as I was told. All the time he was making known his intentions, he made his points with his paper knife, like a schoolmaster with his cane to a stubborn boy. I felt so angry I could have snatched it out of his hand, except that I was sure that a burst of temper now would be fatal. Finally, with an air of triumph, he tossed the paper knife into the air, caught it as it turned and dived down, and, waving me to the door, told me these were his terms.”

Millum paused. His breath was now coming fast as he recalled the scene in which he had been so shamed. I noticed that the story was a little different from Jane's. But this was the fuller and better account. She did not suspect the drama that had been going on between what she took to be two of the gentry, at least one of whom had too much money and too short a temper.

“Then,” Millum resumed, “I had the final proof that he was really mad. He gave me a sidelong look and, as I simply nodded, he suddenly remarked in quite a perky tone, ‘Well, haven't you anything to say, any further counterproposals?'

“It flashed into my mind that this might be—what do you call it—one of the sudden rises in the manic-depressive fluctuation?”

“That will do as well as any other ‘program note' for what a poet has called ‘The ghastly music of the madman's mind.' Go on,” said Mr. M.

“I said to Sankey, with a not-too-ill-simulated chuckle, ‘you may have my garden, of course. But there's no arbor in it.' He actually paused at that. Do you know, I don't think he'd thought whether there was one or not. That made me think I might win time. And, sure enough, when I said, ‘Look here, let
me
prune your arbor roof and then see if that won't serve,' he actually nodded his head. He was evidently playing the part in his mind of a judge granting a reprieve. It was a nice warm day, and he was comfortable enough in his own garden.

“Finally he said, ‘Very well, very well. You may try. Trial by ordeal, eh? And if you fail—and you probably will—then the forfeit is your garden. In the old days it would, of course, have been your head!' and he, in his turn, chuckled.

“I got to work that very afternoon. And while I worked (you know how often the mind will work freely on some problem and the answer come up all of itself while the hands are busy), while I was pruning, I suddenly saw what that roof repairer's gadget was for.”

Mr. Mycroft put out his hand casually and, picking up the withered branch among his collection of debris, switched the table a couple of times.

The other said, “Yes, yes.”

“Then something chimed in your mind?”

Millum again said, “Yes. Just like a chord!”

“But a chord can have four notes?” questioned Mr. M. still further.

Again Millum agreed. But their continual agreement only left me more completely in the dark.

“The fourth was a kind of trigger, though,” Millum went on. “I was trying to rest my mind that evening when suddenly, in the book I was reading and which I thought would be just the thing to get my mind off my troubles—the last place in the world where I would find them popping up—a phrase, a very well-put phrase, struck out at me.”

“As Quakers put it, ‘It spoke to your condition?'” Mr. M. suggested.

“I don't quite know if you would put it that way if you knew what it actually was,” replied Millum.

“I'm not sure I wouldn't,” replied Mr. M., very sure of himself.

But this was such a common state with him that I ventured out of my humble ignorance and its need for enlightenment to take his usual response and say, “Please go on!”

“What I saw seemed to make the thing not only simple but to get rid of my last hesitation. Anyhow, after that I felt under a real compulsion at least to try. I had to, if I may use the term, cast the die. Whether I failed or no, I now had the sensation that I was simply a tool, a surgical instrument, a lance being used for medical purpose …”

He stopped, almost started again, thought better of it, and then said briefly, “There, that's my story,” and was silent.

“A very incomplete one, if I may say so,” I started up.

Mr. M. waved me down. “No,” he remarked, “no, the only omissions I can see are two, and quite small: the incident of which Jane has told us, that in one of your kindly efforts to distract the almost insane Sankey you lent him that charming collection of classic literature that opens—to give the
mise en scène
—with the extraordinary crime stories of a family, six of whom became masters of the world, five of whom went off their heads, and four of whom were murdered. The other small omission, and I think perhaps more important, is the second visit which you made to your own roof.”

Millum nodded, adding, “But do these matter? It was motive you were after; method, by some reason best known to yourself, you knew. After all, I threw in my hand, didn't I, when I saw your exhibit? And I think you may allow, all the more because of what I've told you, that I was ready enough to surrender to anyone who could bring it home, and,” he paused, “more than willingly, to one who brought it home in the way you did.”

It was Mr. M. who now was looking at the ground.

Then, after quite a long silence, during which my patience was not improving (but neither of the others seemed to care or think of me), at last Mr. M. said, “Now for our third problem, that third act, up to which it is so easy to write the two pointing acts, but which is itself so hard.”

But there Mr. Millum broke in and, to my pleasure, was on my side. I was in the dark, and whether Mr. M.'s idea of a denouement was as interesting as he fancied, for me to judge I must have some notion of what had actually taken place; and I still had only the foggiest. To find, then, that Millum, with whom I had grown impatient—he seemed so blindly to back up all Mr. M.'s hints at it all being clear as daylight—to find him on my side and bewildered after all, made me feel a fellow sympathy for him, whether he was or was not a murderer of a man who certainly was a most unpleasant person.

So when Millum said, “May we go back a little?” I joined in with a hearty, “Hear, hear.”

“I've put my cards on the table,” he continued, “and I don't want to make out that it is anything but a pretty grim hand. And I repeat that I am ready to pay the stakes, even if that should include hanging. I have given you the motive. It is for you to judge whether you think I have been truthful and, if so, would human life be safer if Sankey were alive or if I were hanged. I can now say I really and literally don't care a hang. I can't see that he had not become a kind of human cancer, but equally I can now see that so cutting him out was a false stroke. I'm at the end of my tether, you see. But before I go, just to get that surface part of my mind at ease and leave it free for the main problem, which is, of course, motive and whether means do cover ends, I would be grateful if you'd tell me the steps by which you came to—” and he pointed at the table, “to collect that bouquet of such telling arrangement that the moment I saw it I knew the game was up. I have given you the motive, the ‘Why,' now, show me how you found the ‘How.'”

Chapter IV

MR. MYCROFT'S “HOW?”

Mr. Mycrgft rose and stretched himself. He seemed wonderfully at his ease; indeed, had he been that sort, I would have said he was almost in a kind of high spirits. He seemed quite ready to fall in with our wishes—perhaps flattered that we wanted to know. It crossed my mind, too, that maybe he wanted to use the back of his mind in the way in which he and Millum had been speaking of it, while he ran through with us the past moves he had made. He could not, however, avoid the traditional cliche at the start, that “patter” opening of all these old hands at juggling.

“Quite simple, really. ‘Quite obvious,' you'll say, when I've put the cards out. Yes, I'd like to run through the steps of the approach with the two of you. For, in the first two acts is always the secret of the third, or there's no secret at all. All we have to do is to understand what has been put before us. And there you can help me as much as I can help you.

“But once more, refreshment. We took your ‘Why' in two helpings, with lunch sandwiched in between. Now permit me, in vulgar British parlance, to wet my whistle before I give you my
obbligato
on the ‘How.'”

He turned to me, “Mr. Silchester, I, as an amateur detective, am going to make an olfactory deduction. I am certain I scent muffins on the afternoon air. I deduce that they are preparing for our tea. Will you, acting on that clue, see if your eyes can confirm my flair?”

I did not, however, have to move. For on looking toward the dining room I heard a sound, and a moment after, like a richly laden ship, Jane sailed into view complete with what the French call
thé complet
, but, if I may be provincial for once, only the English can really equip. Millum and I rose to relieve her, and there was enough to load the three of us. For accompanying the muffins Mr. M. had scented was a dish of some excellent light pastries and also on a noble platter an equally good, massive plum cake.

“Tea,” pronounced Mr. Mycroft, when I had given each of us a cup, a fine oolong made more fragrant because drunk from fine Spode, “tea is the most social of all meals. It puts us at our ease, as all meals tend, but being the lightest of all meals,” and he took a muffin and eyed the cake appreciatively, “it leaves the mind free. Tea is always so important to English people because they need this, the gentlest of the drug stimulants, before they can relax.”

Certainly China tea always showed the master at his best, and, as I only had to listen, I saw no reason why I should stress the meal's liquid against its solid side.

We were well on the way to a threesome friendship by the time it closed, and Jane was carting back the relics to show in joint triumph with the cook what devastation we had made of her munitions. Millum proved quite delightful, and time and again gave me fresh points for my essay, now almost a thesis, on “1760, the Climax of Our Culture.” So I was really ready to rest my mind and give my whole attention to Mr. M. when he leaned back, fingered the “Gasper” which again had been offered, and launched so swiftly into his narrative that once more he never lit it.

“I'll begin at that part of the story where it began for me, that morning that Mr. Silchester recalls—so little a while back, but so much has taken place in between—when I received a small package by mail. With it had come a letter from a professional friend of mine, to say that he had been sent here on duty to clear an issue on which a little doubt had been raised. He added that he had looked into it, and, after seeing the grounds on which the superstition had grown, he had by a full and thorough investigation come to the conclusion that there were really no grounds, only an ingenious fancy, for disturbing or doubting the coroner's verdict at the inquest. The whole matter had turned, he concluded, on the one piece of material evidence which he was pleased to say he could send by mail. Should I reach his conclusion by an examination of it, then would I return it with my confirmation. Should there occur to me any further details on which I might require more information, would I come down and see him on the spot. He would be there one day more anyhow, seeing the local authorities so as to conclude the matter properly. ‘Anyhow,' he added, ‘the country is now at its best, the place itself has real quality, and an accident of such a sort does not spoil permanent charm for either of us old hands!'

“I like that about Sark: he is a highly placed specialist who has never let his specialized professional interests spoil his sense of the whole, but rather aid his work. He will retire well and then, I hope, employ that fine natural talent for painting which you saw, Mr. Silchester, he could, like all general talents, deploy in the service of his vacation.

“I asked Mr. Silchester to view the little problem with me. He agreed with the expert.” (This was certainly a mellow way of putting my rather hurried reaction, and one which had proved evidently to be wholly mistaken.) “He saw in the object nothing but what it appeared to be, a piece of old-fashioned decorative metal, now being used—as modern poor taste loves to do—for another purpose than that for which it was made. My lens confirmed him and Inspector Sark. For on the handle of this
soi-disant
paper knife were copious fingerprints, all of the same pattern and all vouched by Sark to be Sankey's. They were well-marked, and there was not a trace of any others. The handle had been gripped firmly.

“But as I studied them a doubt arose in my mind. Well-gripped, yes, but gripped what way? The pad of the finger is a wonderful device for gripping, because, like the tread of a motor tire, it is toughly elastic. When a car turns a corner too quickly, you've noticed that the treads make marks on the road not of a rightly formed impress, but distorted. They are pulled away toward the direction in which the car, by its momentum, was lunging, as they grip the road to save the car from leaving it. Now, it was precisely for that effect that I knew I ought to look. I ought to find in miniature that same displacement-effect on the butt of this handle.”

Mr. M. raised up his bundle of relics to the table—whence tea had for a time denied them pride of place—and laid them out again, picking up the paper knife.