Trent's Last Case by E. C. Bentley (bookreader .txt) 📗
- Author: E. C. Bentley
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Trent went in silence, his thoughts whirling, dancing insanely to a chorus of “Fool! fool!” All that he alone knew, all that he guessed and suspected of this affair, rushed through his brain in a rout; but the touch of her unnerved hand upon his arm never for an instant left his consciousness, filling him with an exaltation that enraged and bewildered him. He was still cursing himself furiously behind the mask of conventional solicitude that he turned to the lady when he had attended her to the house and seen her sink upon a couch in the morning-room. Raising her veil, she thanked him gravely and frankly, with a look of sincere gratitude in her eyes. She was much better now, she said, and a cup of tea would work a miracle upon her. She hoped she had not taken him away from anything important. She was ashamed of herself; she thought she could go through with it, but she had not expected those last questions. “I am glad you did not hear me,” she said when he explained. “But of course you will read it all in the reports. It shook me so to have to speak of that,” she added simply; “and to keep from making an exhibition of myself took it out of me. And all those staring men by the door! Thank you again for helping me when I asked you.... I thought I might,” she ended queerly, with a little tired smile; and Trent took himself away, his hand still quivering from the cool touch of her fingers.
The testimony of the servants and of the finder of the body brought nothing new to the reporters’ net. That of the police was as colourless and cryptic as is usual at the inquest stage of affairs of the kind. Greatly to the satisfaction of Mr. Bunner, his evidence afforded the sensation of the day, and threw far into the background the interesting revelation of domestic difficulty made by the dead man’s wife. He told the court in substance what he had already told Trent. The flying pencils did not miss a word of the young American’s story, and it appeared with scarcely the omission of a sentence in every journal of importance in Great Britain and the United States.
Public opinion next day took no note of the faint suggestion of the possibility of suicide which the coroner, in his final address to the jury, had thought it right to make in connection with the lady’s evidence. The weight of evidence, as the official had indeed pointed out, was against such a theory. He had referred with emphasis to the fact that no weapon had been found near the body.
“This question, of course, is all-important, gentlemen,” he had said to the jury. “It is, in fact, the main issue before you. You have seen the body for yourselves. You have just heard the medical evidence; but I think it would be well for me to read you my notes of it in so far as they bear on this point, in order to refresh your memories. Dr Stock told you—I am going to omit all technical medical language and repeat to you merely the plain English of his testimony—that in his opinion death had taken place six or eight hours previous to the finding of the body. He said that the cause of death was a bullet wound, the bullet having entered the left eye, which was destroyed, and made its way to the base of the brain, which was quite shattered. The external appearance of the wound, he said, did not support the hypothesis of its being self-inflicted, inasmuch as there were no signs of the firearm having been pressed against the eye, or even put very close to it; at the same time it was not physically impossible that the weapon should have been discharged by the deceased with his own hand, at some small distance from the eye. Dr Stock also told us that it was impossible to say with certainty, from the state of the body, whether any struggle had taken place at the time of death; that when seen by him, at which time he understood that it had not been moved since it was found, the body was lying in a collapsed position such as might very well result from the shot alone; but that the scratches and bruises upon the wrists and the lower part of the arms had been very recently inflicted, and were, in his opinion, marks of violence.
“In connection with this same point, the remarkable evidence given by Mr Bunner cannot be regarded, I think, as without significance. It may have come as a surprise to some of you to hear that risks of the character described by this witness are, in his own country, commonly run by persons in the position of the deceased. On the other hand, it may have been within the knowledge of some of you that in the industrial world of America the discontent of labour often proceeds to lengths of which we in England happily know nothing. I have interrogated the witness somewhat fully upon this. At the same time, gentlemen, I am by no means suggesting that Mr. Bunner’s personal conjecture as to the cause of death can fitly be adopted by you. That is emphatically not the case. What his evidence does is to raise two questions for your consideration. First, can it be said that the deceased was to any extent in the position of a threatened man—of a man more exposed to the danger of murderous attack than an ordinary person? Second, does the recent alteration in his demeanour, as described by this witness, justify the belief that his last days were overshadowed by a great anxiety? These points may legitimately be considered by you in arriving at a conclusion upon the rest of the evidence.”
Thereupon the coroner, having indicated thus clearly his opinion that Mr Bunner had hit the right nail on the head, desired the jury to consider their verdict.
A Hot Scent
“Come in!” called Trent.
Mr. Cupples entered his sitting-room at the hotel. It was the early evening of the day on which the coroner’s jury, without leaving the box, had pronounced the expected denunciation of a person or persons unknown. Trent, with a hasty glance upward, continued his intent study of what lay in a photographic dish of enamelled metal, which he moved slowly about in the light of the window. He looked very pale, and his movements were nervous.
“Sit on the sofa,” he advised. “The chairs are a job lot bought at the sale after the suppression of the Holy Inquisition in Spain. This is a pretty good negative,” he went on, holding it up to the light with his head at the angle of discriminating judgement. “Washed enough now, I think. Let us leave it to dry, and get rid of all this mess.”
Mr. Cupples, as the other busily cleared the table of a confusion of basins, dishes, racks, boxes, and bottles, picked up first one and then another of the objects and studied them with innocent curiosity.
“That is called hypo-eliminator,” said Trent, as Mr. Cupples uncorked and smelt at one of the bottles. “Very useful when you’re in a hurry with a negative. I shouldn’t drink it, though, all the same. It eliminates sodium hypophosphite, but I shouldn’t wonder if it would eliminate human beings too.” He found a place for the last of the litter on the crowded mantel-shelf, and came to sit before Mr. Cupples on the table. “The great thing about a hotel sitting-room is that its beauty does not distract the mind from work. It is no place for the mayfly pleasures of a mind at ease. Have you ever been in this room before, Cupples? I have, hundreds of times. It has pursued me all over England for years. I should feel lost without it if, in some fantastic, far-off hotel, they were to give me some other sitting-room. Look at this table-cover; there is the ink I spilt on it when I had this room in Halifax. I burnt that hole in the carpet when I had it in Ipswich. But I see they have mended the glass over the picture of ‘Silent Sympathy’, which I threw a boot at in Banbury. I do all my best work here. This afternoon, for instance, since the inquest, I have finished several excellent negatives. There is a very good dark room downstairs.”
“The inquest—that reminds me,” said Mr. Cupples, who knew that this sort of talk in Trent meant the excitement of action, and was wondering what he could be about. “I came in to thank you, my dear fellow, for looking after Mabel this morning. I had no idea she was going to feel ill after leaving the box; she seemed quite unmoved, and, really, she is a woman of such extraordinary self-command, I thought I could leave her to her own devices and hear out the evidence, which I thought it important I should do. It was a very fortunate thing she found a friend to assist her, and she is most grateful. She is quite herself again now.”
Trent, with his hands in his pockets and a slight frown on his brow, made no reply to this. “I tell you what,” he said after a short pause, “I was just getting to the really interesting part of the job when you came in. Come; would you like to see a little bit of high-class police work? It’s the very same kind of work that old Murch ought to be doing at this moment. Perhaps he is; but I hope to glory he isn’t.” He sprang off the table and disappeared into his bedroom. Presently he came out with a large drawing-board on which a number of heterogeneous objects was ranged.
“First I must introduce you to these little things,” he said, setting them out on the table. “Here is a big ivory paper-knife; here are two leaves cut out of a diary—my own diary; here is a bottle containing dentifrice; here is a little case of polished walnut. Some of these things have to be put back where they belong in somebody’s bedroom at White Gables before night. That’s the sort of man I am—nothing stops me. I borrowed them this very morning when every one was down at the inquest, and I dare say some people would think it rather an odd proceeding if they knew. Now there remains one object on the board. Can you tell me, without touching it, what it is?”
“Certainly I can,” said Mr. Cupples, peering at it with great interest. “It is an ordinary glass bowl. It looks like a finger-bowl. I see nothing odd about it,” he added after some moments of close scrutiny.
“I can’t see much myself,” replied Trent, “and that is exactly where the fun comes in. Now take this little fat bottle, Cupples, and pull out the cork. Do you recognize that powder inside it? You have swallowed pounds of it in your time, I expect. They give it to babies. Grey powder is its ordinary name—mercury and chalk. It is great stuff. Now, while I hold the basin sideways over this sheet of paper, I want you to pour a little powder out of the bottle over this part of the bowl—just here.... Perfect! Sir Edward Henry himself could not have handled the powder better. You have done this before, Cupples, I can see. You are an old hand.”
“I really am not,” said Mr. Cupples seriously, as Trent returned the fallen powder to the bottle. “I assure you it is all a complete mystery to me. What did I do then?”
“I brush the powdered part of the bowl lightly with this camel-hair brush. Now look at it again. You saw nothing odd about it before. Do you see anything now?”
Mr. Cupples peered again. “How curious!” he said. “Yes, there are two large grey finger-marks on the bowl. They were not there before.”
“I am Hawkshaw the detective,” observed Trent. “Would it interest you to hear a short lecture on the subject of glass finger-bowls? When you take one up with your hand you leave traces upon it, usually practically invisible, which may remain for days or months. You leave the marks of your fingers. The human hand, even when quite clean, is never quite dry, and sometimes—in moments of great anxiety, for instance, Cupples—it is very moist. It leaves a mark on any cold smooth surface it may touch. That bowl was moved by somebody with a rather moist hand quite lately.” He sprinkled the powder again. “Here on the other side, you see,
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