The Notched Hairpin (15 page)

“That distortion of the fingerpad whorls would be quite clear, if Sankey … the last time he used this, used it with such effect. To change my simile to make my meaning quite clear, if the knife had been used only as a paper cutter and for no other purpose, never as a dagger, then the finger whorls would appear like a series of ripples on a still pool. But if the paper knife was ever thrust home not between the pages of a book, but between human ribs and by a human hand, then all these ripples would be as though a wind had blown them and they were swaying away from the point and direction toward which the point of the dagger was being plunged. I hope I have made that plain!”

Millum turned away and drew hard on his cigarette.

“That was enough to make me wonder whether I could know more. And then, as I looked up and down this small shaft or haft, I did catch sight of something else. This little handle has on it two metals, a common device of silversmiths to vary the appearance of their work. And this was an authentic piece, undoubtedly, a small Renaissance toy, one of those fantastic hairpins from that fantastic age, made of silver when the silversmiths counted among themselves artists as competent as Cellini. The shaft of now almost black silver—we know the late master of this house respected patina, if nothing else—has had added lengthwise, you see, to its upper part, three small flukes or flutings which no doubt add to the design. But the odd thing was that, when I touched this other dulled metal, which you see is a deep gray, not black, the small file mark showed that it was aluminum—a metal which Cellini and his peers might well have loved but no one had seen till he and his had been in their graves some four centuries.

“But all that proved nothing. It did, however, make one's mind all the less inclined to sit down and say ditto to Mr. Sark. I felt no more at this point than that I could ask our inspector some questions which would amuse him and no doubt rouse him to a fairly matched argument such as we unravelers love. So I went on studying this piece till Mr. Silchester—who is an intuitional type—became almost vexed. For I had to bring out my heavyweight piece, my large microscope, which always appears to him, as I dare say it must look to any novelist's eye, a piece of drama rather than a necessary process of detection. It repaid me. For on working my way along the stem I found, on reaching the end, if not one more clue, at least another challenge to the authoritative verdict.

“You see, the top of this hairpin now turned paper knife is a flat capital—the conventional Renaissance conclusion to any such little columnar composition. I was looking at that to see whether I could find any faint, half-obliterated traces of the thumb, which might and ought to be there if this knife was driven home by a man striking at his own breast. There weren't. But then, such traces on such an exposed area might possibly have been wiped off or never have made a clear impression. And, moreover, I had to allow that the blow could have been given without the thumb being in that position. But while I looked and failed to find what I was looking for, I was rewarded by another doubt. Across the top, you see, is a shallow groove.”

I certified that was so; Mr. Millum did not. It did not seem important to me, I must say. Mr. M. read my thoughts.

“And why not? you rightly ask. Yes,” he allowed, “it wouldn't have held me, if I had not seen in the magnification of the microscope that this groove was holding something. Again, nothing of note. But in case of suspicion, everything must be made to answer who and what it is, even if what it says is quite aboveboard. The groove was clogged; natural enough in an old object and one which, as we happen now to know, was never permitted to be cleaned, but which might be touched unintentionally by duster and cleaning rag. I picked out the contents of the groove and had little difficulty in recognizing them as common gum—resin. I cleared the whole groove and stored my minute specimen on the chance that it might prove helpful. But when I had done that I found I had raised another little question—again no answer, but a fresh query from the groove itself. When it was emptied, I noticed that though the silver was darkened, it was much less dark there than the silver of the rest of the piece. In other words, that cleft looked unmistakably as though it had been made much later than the rest of the workmanship and its chasing. So I was certain of two things: the groove and the aluminum fluke fittings were additions to the piece and lately made. Now, why someone should so trouble to toy with such a toy—that, certainly, was a small mystery.

“But my work in the groove had given me another indication. It began to point to the sort of man I might be needing to find and, further, it told me he would be one possessed of no little antiquarian knowledge.

“So, putting my witness again under the microscope's penetrating eye, using the finest point I could handle, I made a series of small scores on the groove's sides. Then, under the power of magnification I was using, the verdict stood out, plainly written.

“One of the most active and lucrative fields of detection—for the sums of money involved are high—is in the judgment of ancient bronzes. The market is large, because so many cultures wrought their most enduring works in this metal. ‘Perennial bronze'—the phrase itself is now a venerable antique. More lasting than iron, less likely to be melted down than gold. The prices are often very big because such work is not seldom of supreme mastery. And where there's money value there'll be sharks to prey on gulls. The forgers, it must be owned, have done wonders and, on the other hand, the detectors of forgeries have been as resourceful. It has been a worldwide underground battle, both sides using all the science they can summon. The great triumph of the forgers was their discovering how to make that patina so prized by collectors and so puzzling to Jane. Between the two, I, a mere scientist, have no wish to judge.
De gustibus
always closes such controversies for me.

“But what did catch my attention and was laid aside in my memory for future possible use was the reply of the museums to this attack on their treasures, this subtle flooding of their market. They found that though to the keenest naked eye a patina of yesterday chemically produced looked indistinguishable from one which two or three thousand years of quiet burial were needed to produce naturally, yet, under the microscope, a touch of the file (unnoticeable to unaided sight) showed up the lie. As the oxidation of the copper (which is, of course, the patina) proceeds, fine fissures of decomposition eat into the metal, making patterns like a tree and hence called dendrition. But the important point is that if time and nature produce such tree patterns they are wild, like forest trees; while when man produces them artificially and hurriedly, the patterns look actually artificial—they are stiff and mechanical, like trees from round a doll's house! And the same is true of silver. What I saw under the microscope were these small formal tree patterns.

“It was while I was trying to put these two or three small anomalies together with the doubt that I had about the fingerprints that I was helped by Mr. Silchester, who thought I ought to close the act I was playing and put on another. As you may have gathered, he is developing a theme of which I hope we shall hear more—‘1760, the Climax of Culture'—and in running out his first bright ideas he fell upon the word ‘balance.' Then, as so often happens with him and me, his repetition of the word gave me an idea almost before I could see what it would mean, an idea for an experiment. While I gave him another form of provocation, which no doubt will prove as stimulating to his creative faculty in the field of history, I took the paper knife from the field of the microscope and began to judge its balance. As it showed where its center of gravity lay and toppled over toward its pointed end,” and Mr. M. illustrated it for us, “something went into place in my mind. Of course such pins are, as we have said, weighted in that way so as to keep them from toppling out of the coiled hair of their wearer. I knew also that I must not jump to conclusions. And the best way not to do that is just not to look at what is forming in your mind, and the best way to do
that
is to jump up and do something else. So I suggested to Mr. Silchester that we should catch the train and come here.

“On our arrival, Sark made fine play with his conviction based on evidence. Several times I felt that I would look pretty foolish if I ventured to go against him. But I still felt it would be safe for me to check up on every one of the doubts which I had. First, that admirable Jane, admirable in her loquacity as in her other services—believe me, it is not that people talk too much that bores us, it is that we listen too little—Jane told me that she never used any of the resins as a polish. Whence, then, had the resin in this groove come? Next, when we were in the garden, we were shown how impossible it was for anyone to have entered by the garden door—and indeed it was—and how the notion that one could was all an illusion of sight, a thing which only an artist combined with a detective would have noticed. That's exactly the kind of proof that knocks a jury flat with admiration—showing, as they always wish to believe, the uselessness of all evidence. For remember, juries are always against the court. That's the strength of the system and the safety of democracy—the common man let in to watch the experts at their game and to have the ruling voice if the experts overplay their clever hand so that it becomes pure sleight of hand.

“But I mustn't run on. We were shown, as I've just said, how the illusion of sight built up the proof which really wasn't there. Just because Jane wanted a murder—for murder is always more appealing to active people than suicide—she found the proof. She didn't want it to be suicide because you can't catch a suicide—he's slipped through your fingers. But you can have a hue and cry after a murderer, especially if he's a tramp—someone who won't work when the rest of us do. Yes, Jane's motive is clear enough, though …” and Mr. M. paused and the younger Mr. M. shifted uneasily, “had she seen clearly enough then, I feel sure even she would have preferred suicide as the explanation.

“Still, to return to the facts, to my mind Jane stood her ground. I'd seen that she was a really good reporter, and though she was caught by the trick or play of the light on that door (not being a careful student of the Impressionists, those great questioners of what we really see) yet she did not only see: she heard.

“Now I know that hearing can be more of a nuisance than seeing. If seeing is a shaky sort of thing on which to build belief, the ear is even more flimsy. We know that even courts of law don't allow hearsay! But here we come to the real problem of all the senses which Mr. Silchester raised some while back and to which we can now fruitfully return. Our great Ionian father of detection and analysis, Heraclitus, said, ‘The senses are bad witnesses.' He put them all in a bunch. I think he was mainly right. But, if I may patronize one of the source thinkers of mankind, I would venture to go a little further. I'd certainly agree that the senses may be pretty poor guides on the immense trail of detection on which Heraclitus and the first Greek scientists were setting out. They were seeking the prints of a hand as ubiquitous as it is invisible. But in the humdrum matters of lying, murder, and theft—in short, in what goes on on the surface of life—it is not so much our sensory witnesses, our expert reporters who are at fault, but ourselves, as cross-examiners. Beside the mistakes they make, ours are monstrous.”

Mr. M. paused and laughed. “I am sorry to seem to be getting my second wind in the far past. You will think that I am like the classic French lawyer who could never begin placing his case before the court without going back to the Fall, and finally made as a concession a datum line with the Deluge. But, Mr. Silchester, you raised the point, and in point of fact—it is a tribute to your unanalytic intuition—the case largely turns on it. At least, if that seems too much for me to claim yet, I can tell you that at that point my vague questing turned into what I believe is called, in hunting circles, a breast-high scent.

“Let me, then, say one more thing about the senses, and then we'll get straight back to the story. When we sense something, experience anything, I believe that nine times out of ten the sense which calls our attention gives us a perfectly sound report. The mischief is that we are in such a hurry and so careless that we don't distinguish between what it actually tells us and the ‘sense' we want to make of it. The worst judge on the bench, dozing and bored, hardly handles evidence so carelessly as we do matters of life and death being given to us by our only messengers, the senses. For they alone can tell us of what we call the world round us through which we are running blind.

“Now, the basis of good cross-examining is to take one question at a time and one witness at a time. So as soon as I'd talked to Jane I saw, as I've said, that she was a good reporter—vivid, alive, interested, observant. You say she was caught out by the door seeming to move, and I have granted that. But I ask myself what made her first think that the door had opened, what called her attention so that she looked down in that direction? Quite another sense: hearing. Now, hearing is a most troublesome sense, but it's mainly because we really won't give our attention to it when it is speaking to us. We immediately turn aside and ask our eyes to go and see what hearing is talking about. That's no way to treat a witness, and we get what we deserve—a muddle. That's what Jane did. Unfortunately it's become the standard human reaction; our eyes have run away with us. That's why we say seeing is believing—and sight has treated the rest of the senses with a contempt they do not deserve. It is quite amazing how much, how intensively and diagnostically, people can hear, if they try and notice that they are hearing and are not just getting ready to see. And then there's scent too, even more neglected and one which I have found, as I hope to show in a moment, a useful tracker also. After all, the French say of a man of great artistic acumen, one who seems to go beyond sight, that he has a flair—he has some kind of power to smell out a masterpiece under a disguise that would throw sight completely off the track.