Trent's Last Case (14 page)

I paused there to contemplate the coolness and ingenuity of the man. The thing, I now began to see, was so safe and easy, provided that his mimicry was good enough, and that his nerve held. Those two points assured, only some wholly unlikely accident could unmask him.

To come back to my puzzling out of the matter as I sat in the dead man's bedroom with the tell-tale shoes before me. The reason for the entrance by the window instead of by the front door will already have occurred to any one reading this. Entering by the door, the man would almost certainly have been heard by the sharp-eared Martin in his pantry just across the hall; he might have met him face to face.

Then there was the problem of the whisky. I had not attached much importance to it; whisky will sometimes vanish in very queer ways in a household of eight or nine persons; but it had seemed strange that it should go in that way on that evening. Martin had been plainly quite dumbfounded by the fact. It seemed to me now that many a man—fresh, as this man in all likelihood was, from a bloody business, from the unclothing of a corpse, and with a desperate part still to play—would turn to that decanter as to a friend. No doubt he had a drink before sending for Martin; after making that trick with ease and success, he probably drank more.

But he had known when to stop. The worst part of the enterprise was before him: the business—clearly of such vital importance to him, for whatever reason—of shutting himself in Manderson's room and preparing a body of convincing evidence of its having been occupied by Manderson; and this with the risk—very slight, as no doubt he understood, but how unnerving!—of the woman on the other side of the half-open door awaking and somehow discovering him. True, if he kept out of her limited field of vision from the bed, she could only see him by getting up and going to the door. I found that to a person lying in her bed, which stood with its head to the wall a little beyond the door, nothing was visible through the doorway but one of the cupboards by Manderson's bed-head. Moreover, since this man knew the ways of the household, he would think it most likely that Mrs. Manderson was asleep. Another point with him, I guessed, might have been the estrangement between the husband and wife, which they had tried to cloak by keeping up, among other things, their usual practice of sleeping in connected rooms, but which was well known to all who had anything to do with them. He would hope from this that if Mrs. Manderson heard him, she would take no notice of the supposed presence of her husband.

So, pursuing my hypothesis, I followed the unknown up to the bedroom, and saw him setting about his work. And it was with a catch in my own breath that I thought of the hideous shock with which he must have heard the sound of all others he was dreading most: the drowsy voice from the adjoining room.

What Mrs. Manderson actually said, she was unable to recollect at the inquest.

She thinks she asked her supposed husband whether he had had a good run in the car. And now what does the unknown do? Here, I think, we come to a supremely significant point. Not only does he—standing rigid there, as I picture him, before the dressing-table, listening to the sound of his own leaping heart—not only does he answer the lady in the voice of Manderson; he volunteers an explanatory statement. He tells her that he has, on a sudden inspiration, sent Marlowe in the car to Southampton; that he has sent him to bring back some important information from a man leaving for Paris by the steamboat that morning. Why these details from a man who had long been uncommunicative to his wife, and that upon a point scarcely likely to interest her? Why these details about Marlowe?

Having taken my story so far, I now put forward the following definite propositions: that between a time somewhere about ten, when the car started, and a time somewhere about eleven, Manderson was shot—probably at a considerable distance from the house, as no shot was heard; that the body was brought back, left by the shed, and stripped of its outer clothing; that at some time round about eleven o'clock a man who was not Manderson, wearing Manderson's shoes, hat, and jacket, entered the library by the garden window; that he had with him Manderson's black trousers, waistcoat, and motor-coat, the denture taken from Manderson's mouth, and the weapon with which he had been murdered; that he concealed these, rang the bell for the butler, and sat down at the telephone with his hat on and his back to the door; that he was occupied with the telephone all the time Martin was in the room; that on going up to the bedroom floor he quietly entered Marlowe's room and placed the revolver with which the crime had been committed—Marlowe's revolver—in the case on the mantelpiece from which it had been taken; and that he then went to Manderson's room, placed Manderson's shoes outside the door, threw Manderson's garments on a chair, placed the denture in the bowl by the bedside, and selected a suit of clothes, a pair of shoes, and a tie from those in the bedroom.

Here I will pause in my statement of this man's proceedings to go into a question for which the way is now sufficiently prepared: Who was the false Manderson?

Reviewing what was known to me, or might almost with certainty be surmised, about that person, I set down the following five conclusions:

(1.) He had been in close relations with the dead man. In his acting before Martin and his speaking to Mrs. Manderson he had made no mistake.

(2.) He was of a build not unlike Manderson's, especially as to height and breadth of shoulder, which mainly determine the character of the back of a seated figure when the head is concealed and the body loosely clothed. But his feet were larger, though not greatly larger, than Manderson's.

(3.) He had considerable aptitude for mimicry and acting—probably some experience too.

(4.) He had a minute acquaintance with the ways of the Manderson household.

(5.) He was under a vital necessity of creating the belief that Manderson was alive and in that house until some time after midnight on the Sunday night.

So much I took as either certain or next door to it. It was as far as I could see. And it was far enough.

I proceed to give, in an order corresponding with the numbered paragraphs above, such relevant facts as I was able to obtain about Mr. John Marlowe, from himself and other sources:

(1.) He had been Mr. Manderson's private secretary, upon a footing of great intimacy, for nearly four years.

(2.) The two men were nearly of the same height, about five feet eleven inches; both were powerfully built and heavy in the shoulder. Marlowe, who was the younger by some twenty years, was rather slighter about the body, though Manderson was a man in good physical condition. Marlowe's shoes (of which I examined several pairs) were roughly about one shoemaker's size longer and broader than Manderson's.

(3.) In the afternoon of the first day of my investigation, after arriving at the results already detailed, I sent a telegram to a personal friend, a Fellow of a college at Oxford, whom I knew to be interested in theatrical matters, in these terms:

PLEASE WIRE JOHN MARLOWE'S RECORD IN CONNECTION WITH ACTING AT OXFORD SOME TIME PAST DECADE VERY URGENT AND CONFIDENTIAL.

My friend replied in the following telegram, which reached me next morning (the morning of the inquest):

MARLOWE WAS MEMBER O.U.D.S FOR THREE YEARS AND PRESIDENT 19- PLAYED BARDOLPH CLEON AND MERCUTIO EXCELLED IN CHARACTER ACTING AND IMITATIONS IN GREAT DEMAND AT SMOKERS WAS HERO OF SOME HISTORIC HOAXES.

I had been led to send the telegram which brought this very helpful answer by seeing on the mantel-shelf in Marlowe's bedroom a photograph of himself and two others in the costume of Falstaff's three followers, with an inscription from
The Merry Wives
, and by noting that it bore the imprint of an Oxford firm of photographers.

(4.) During his connection with Manderson, Marlowe had lived as one of the family. No other person, apart from the servants, had his opportunities for knowing the domestic life of the Mandersons in detail.

(5.) I ascertained beyond doubt that Marlowe arrived at a hotel in Southampton on the Monday morning at 6.30, and there proceeded to carry out the commission which, according to his story, and according to the statement made to Mrs. Manderson in the bedroom by the false Manderson, had been entrusted to him by his employer. He had then returned in the car to Marlstone, where he had shown great amazement and horror at the news of the murder.

These, I say, are the relevant facts about Marlowe. We must now examine fact number 5 (as set out above) in connection with conclusion number 5 about the false Manderson.

I would first draw attention to one important fact. The only person who professed to have heard Manderson mention Southampton at all before he started in the car was Marlowe. His story—confirmed to some extent by what the butler overheard—was that the journey was all arranged in a private talk before they set out, and he could not say, when I put the question to him, why Manderson should have concealed his intentions by giving out that he was going with Marlowe for a moonlight drive. This point, however, attracted no attention. Marlowe had an absolutely air-tight alibi in his presence at Southampton by 6.30; nobody thought of him in connection with a murder which must have been committed after 12.30—the hour at which Martin the butler had gone to bed.

But it was the Manderson who came back from the drive who went out of his way to mention Southampton openly to two persons. He even went so far as to ring up a hotel at Southampton and ask questions which bore out Marlowe's story of his errand. This was the call he was busy with when Martin was in the library.

Now let us consider the alibi. If Manderson was in the house that night, and if he did not leave it until some time after 12.30, Marlowe could not by any possibility have had a direct hand in the murder. It is a question of the distance between Marlstone and Southampton. If he had left Marlstone in the car at the hour when he is supposed to have done so—between 10 and 10.30—with a message from Manderson, the run would be quite an easy one to do in the time. But it would be physically impossible for the car—a 15 h.p. four-cylinder Northumberland, an average medium-power car—to get to Southampton by half-past six unless it left Marlstone by midnight at latest.

Motorists who will examine the road-map and make the calculations required, as I did in Manderson's library that day, will agree that on the facts as they appeared there was absolutely no case against Marlowe.

But even if they were not as they appeared; if Manderson was dead by eleven o'clock, and if at about that time Marlowe impersonated him at White Gables; if Marlowe retired to Manderson's bedroom—how can all this be reconciled with his appearance next morning at Southampton? He had to get out of the house, unseen and unheard, and away in the car by midnight. And Martin, the sharp-eared Martin, was sitting up until 12.30 in his pantry, with the door open, listening for the telephone bell. Practically he was standing sentry over the foot of the staircase, the only staircase leading down from the bedroom floor.

With this difficulty we arrive at the last and crucial phase of my investigation. Having the foregoing points clearly in mind, I spent the rest of the day before the inquest in talking to various persons and in going over my story, testing it link by link. I could only find the one weakness which seemed to be involved in Martin's sitting up until 12.30; and since his having been instructed to do so was certainly a part of the plan, meant to clinch the alibi for Marlowe, I knew there must be an explanation somewhere. If I could not find that explanation, my theory was valueless. I must be able to show that at the time Martin went up to bed the man who had shut himself in Manderson's bedroom might have been many miles away on the road to Southampton.

I had, however, a pretty good idea already—as perhaps the reader of these lines has by this time, if I have made myself clear—of how the escape of the false Manderson before midnight had been contrived. But I did not want what I was now about to do to be known. If I had chanced to be discovered at work, there would have been no concealing the direction of my suspicions. I resolved not to test them on this point until the next day, during the opening proceedings at the inquest. This was to be held, I knew, at the hotel, and I reckoned upon having White Gables to myself so far as the principal inmates were concerned.

So in fact it happened. By the time the proceedings at the hotel had begun I was hard at work at White Gables. I had a camera with me. I made search, on principles well known to and commonly practiced by the police, and often enough by myself, for certain indications. Without describing my search, I may say at once that I found and was able to photograph two fresh fingerprints, very large and distinct, on the polished front of the right-hand top drawer of the chest of drawers in Manderson's bedroom; five more (among a number of smaller and less recent impressions made by other hands) on the glasses of the French window in Mrs. Manderson's room, a window which always stood open at night with a curtain before it; and three more upon the glass bowl in which Manderson's dental plate had been found lying.

I took the bowl with me from White Gables. I took also a few articles which I selected from Marlowe's bedroom, as bearing the most distinct of the innumerable fingerprints which are always to be found upon toilet articles in daily use. I already had in my possession, made upon leaves cut from my pocket diary, some excellent fingerprints of Marlowe's which he had made in my presence without knowing it. I had shown him the leaves, asking if he recognized them; and the few seconds during which he had held them in his fingers had sufficed to leave impressions which I was afterwards able to bring out.

By six o'clock in the evening, two hours after the jury had brought in their verdict against a person or persons unknown, I had completed my work, and was in a position to state that two of the five large prints made on the window-glasses, and the three on the bowl, were made by the left hand of Marlowe; that the remaining three on the window and the two on the drawer were made by his right hand.

By eight o'clock I had made at the establishment of Mr. H. T. Copper, photographer, of Bishopsbridge, and with his assistance, a dozen enlarged prints of the finger-marks of Marlowe, clearly showing the identity of those which he unknowingly made in my presence and those left upon articles in his bedroom, with those found by me as I have described, and thus establishing the facts that Marlowe was recently in Manderson's bedroom, where he had in the ordinary way no business, and in Mrs. Manderson's room, where he had still less. I hope it may be possible to reproduce these prints for publication with this dispatch.

At nine o'clock I was back in my room at the hotel and sitting down to begin this manuscript. I had my story complete. I bring it to a close by advancing these further propositions: that on the night of the murder the impersonator of Manderson, being in Manderson's bedroom, told Mrs. Manderson, as he had already told Martin, that Marlowe was at that moment on his way to Southampton; that having made his dispositions in the room, he switched off the light, and lay in the bed in his clothes; that he waited until he was assured that Mrs. Manderson was asleep; that he then arose and stealthily crossed Mrs. Manderson's bedroom in his stocking feet, having under his arm the bundle of clothing and shoes for the body; that he stepped behind the curtain, pushing the doors of the window a little further open with his hands, strode over the iron railing of the balcony, and let himself down until only a drop of a few feet separated him from the soft turf of the lawn.

All this might very well have been accomplished within half an hour of his entering Manderson's bedroom, which, according to Martin, he did at about half-past eleven.

What followed your readers and the authorities may conjecture for themselves.

The corpse was found next morning clothed—rather untidily. Marlowe in the car appeared at Southampton by half-past six.

I bring this manuscript to an end in my sitting-room at the hotel at Marlstone. It is four o'clock in the morning. I leave for London by the noon train from Bishopsbridge, and immediately after arriving I shall place these pages in your hands. I ask you to communicate the substance of them to the Criminal Investigation Department.

PHILIP TRENT.