The Notched Hairpin (5 page)

And to prove this intriguing theory, our guide began to lead us back to the dining room. But I could have told him that Mr. M. was as easy to lead as Jane was to keep to a point. I smiled as I saw the older detective snatch at a straw of distraction, for Mr. M. is one of those who believes that at least in information it is better to give than to receive. We had hardly turned from the door when he stopped, and then, making off along the side of the garden wall, called out, “Just a moment. One more confirmation of our fully documented narrative.” We waited while he rummaged over the sprays of wilted beech and finally produced quite a big one, almost a small branch, and held it up, apparently to admire it. But do what he would, he could make no further play with this distraction and after a moment consented to be led back to the dining room, still, however, absent-mindedly switching at his boots with the branchlet that he had acquired and evidently hardly knew he still retained. However, as he went up the steps he did drop it beside them. He would certainly have lost some of his gains with Jane if he had brought beech mast and leafage onto her glossy floors and velvety rugs.

“Now,” said the inspector like an impatient lecturer when he had us ranged at the window, “please stay here and watch carefully that small piece of the top of the door which you can see from here.” With that he left us. A moment after, we heard him, though hidden, calling to us from the door's direction, “Watch!” And as we watched, the top of the door moved some six inches or more out from shadow into light. But I heard no whine of the catch.

When he rejoined us, Mr. M. said, “That was very neat.”

The other took it with a certain half-ashamed modesty. “You've had time to enjoy some of the modern painting?”

Again that almost resentful assent. “Yes, it does help us to discount the senses, doesn't it? As Constable said, ‘What do we see but light falling on light.'” And Mr. M. sighed a trifle histrionically, I thought, as he added, “And shadows passing through shadows.”

I am glad this kind of high-flown enigmatism seemed to fail to buoy up our inspector about the same time that my patience was thinning, and when I said almost a little sharply, “What is this all about?” Mr. M. condescended quite quickly with, “Of course, the door didn't open at all. All that was done just now was to move a branch, which let a highlight of sunbeam fall upon the upper part of the door, which made the effect as though the top of the door itself had actually moved out from shadow into sunlight—in other words, had opened.”

The inspector nodded and went on, “As the door never opened, no one entered by it. The garden therefore was completely closed, no one was in it, and so the only person who could have killed Sankey was himself. We have the motive, too, which the other alternative—murder—would have left really no more than a piece of fanciful construction. I've had the routine inquiries made
as
to undesirable tramps. There's nothing to give us any clue there. You know that most tramps are known more or less to the police and most of them are fairly harmless—as far from the killer type as is a slug. For the other case—suicide I have on the contrary been able to get clear confirmation. Sankey was melancholic. I have seen his doctor: growing irritability—you've gathered that from the maid; influenza this spring and its after-depression lasting on acutely. That's the general condition or state of likelihood. Have we any evidence, though, of any momentary provocation that might have sprung the mine of loaded self-disgust?”

The inspector certainly liked a phrase and I was tickled by his attempt at eloquence. But I was even more pleased when, adding, “Now, for further specific proof,” he moved across to a desk and from one of its drawers took out a finely bound book. It was a delight to the eye. He held it up for us to study. I saw at once it was the beautiful Nonpareil edition of classical texts bound in pigskin and printed on esparto grass paper in that press's fine font—a treasure indeed, and a lovely addition to the decor of any room even if you never opened it. Across its broad handsome back, in finely stamped gold letters that were miniatures of the Trajan Column inscription capitals, one could read with ease the title:
Suetonius: The Lives of the Caesars. Martial: Epigrams. Pliny: Letters
.

Mr. M. took the noble volume from the inspector. “A charming selection! First, that almost unbelievable story of how absolute power came successively to twelve mostly commonplace men, with results utterly fantastic and generally fatal not only to those around them but to themselves. Then, the incomparably terse satire-comment on such a society by Epigram's father. And finally, the quiet reflections of a perfect gentleman who lived just after that too-exciting time—the ideal position for a moralist. I have always admired this way of showing Latin's Golden Age turning, as autumn does in late October, from the gold to the silver. Here's an example: this placing of the famous Martial Epigram 1.14 on one page and on the opposite the Pliny Epistle 111.16. What could be happier—each throwing light on the other! And after the horrors of the actual tyranny, as Suetonius has given it earlier, the poet and the essayist select for comment an act of heroism that shines all the more brightly against the sullen background of arbitrary violence.”

I think the inspector was a little impatient at Mr. M. for having caught and bettered his taste in rhetoric. Certainly I wasn't sorry when we were brought back from comments on classical cutthroats to our actual problem.

“You will see,” our informant went on, “why I have shown you this book. You are looking at the actual page which the victim was reading when the fatal impulse took him. It indicates what I feel sure any jury, without a doctor to help them, would conclude served as the ‘trigger action.'”

“But,” Mr. M. challenged, “how do you know this was the actual page he was reading and not merely the way the book fell when he toppled over it?”

“Look closely into the cleft of these pages. There's cigarette ash, see, that silted down into the binding. That proves this was the point Sankey had reached when suddenly the impulse took him.”

“But why …?” Mr. M. began; and then fell silent, reading.

His question was apparently sensed by our very informed informant.

“Reading live clues to trace dead men's motives keeps one from having time to read dead languages,” he said. “But as soon as I saw that the ash had marked the last page the dead man had read, I had it translated. The vicar here, who had to come up to see about the funeral and whom I interrogated about Millum, is a fine Latinist and kindly made this rendering for me,” and he took a slip of paper from his pocket. “These lines do provide us with the sudden provocation, the final proof that here we have suicide.”

But before he could read his scrap or I could shift round and glance at the original that had provided such an unexpected provocation to
felo-de-se
, Mr. M.'s voice, in the best lectern manner, boomed out: “‘Taking the dagger she drove it into her own side, withdrew it, handed it to her hesitating husband, remarking quietly as she sank, “It does not hurt, Petus!'” A fairly free translation, but it will serve.”

And after paying himself this first compliment, he turned handsomely on his colleague, “Yes, that's a fine piece of deduction and a core piece in your argument. Sankey, brooding on suicide, reads how noble it is to die, and, further, in this classic case, how easy death by self-stabbing really is! ‘So every bondsman in his own hand bears the power to cancel his captivity.' And to borrow another line from the same poet so much greater than Martial, the bondsman may do it ‘with a bare bodkin.'”

If our guide had been a little impatient at Mr. M.'s competing with him in phrase-making, that was now all forgotten at this open appreciation and apparent conviction. He almost flushed with pleasure, and showed his friendliness with an added desire to pile proof on proof; though by now I was quite satisfied and content in every sense of the word that here we did not have a murder but simply a person who didn't seem to have been very nice, who had removed himself from the scene.

But Mr. M. seemed to want more and co-operated at once when the inspector went on,” Well, Sir, that rightly does bring us to the bare bodkin itself, as I promised. Will you now let me go over it with you?”

And, sure enough, Mr. M. brought out the little box from his pocket. They opened it, and this time I strained to get over their shoulders a glimpse of the relic. There it lay, a dismal piece of metal.

“The fingerprints?” questioned Mr. M.

“Agree with Sankey's,” the other replied, “and not a trace of anyone else's! So how could he have been stabbed by anyone else? They couldn't have grasped his hand and made him stab himself!”

“You know what this object is?” Mr. Mycroft was clearly determined to go on showing knowledge even if the case was closed, like an automatic lighthouse goes on giving out flashes of light though all the ships have gone into port.

“Oh, some sort of
objet d'art
—
a
fake piece, I suppose,” the other answered casually.

“No, it's a real piece, on the whole. It's one of those extravagant giant hairpins, made in the form of weapons usually. This one is a miniature of a long-bladed halberd. These large skewers were used by Renaissance ladies to adorn and fasten their high-built hair. It's weighted at the blade end to keep it from toppling out of the hair coils. This one, as most of them were, is of silver. That accounts for its color. Tarnished or patinated silver, you know, is nearly black.”

I did feel a little taken aback that I had dismissed as a worthless piece of pastiche not only a weapon that had just committed murder—if only self-murder—but also an archaeological object of some interest in its own right. But Mr. M., having made this his contribution to coiffeur curiosities, had gone back to mope over the Suetonius—always a danger of his mind, as much as Jane the maid's, that attraction of irrelevant interests. How strangely, I thought, extremes meet—one mind too full, the other too empty; both, therefore, caught and held by anything!

The inspector roused him with, “We should, I think, see Jane once more and ask her about this knifelike pin. Then I think we needn't keep her on call any longer nor I further detain either of you. The case will be closed.”

He called Jane, who was not far off, and at once asked her about the pin-paper knife. It was a theme she fancied.

“That knife, I never did like it! You see that little pot over there, still a bit on the bright and cheery side? Well, believe me or not, that nearly lost me my situation! One day I gave it a bit of
Polisho:
it was as dirty as that horrid knife. And up the copper came as bright as the sun's self. And then Mr. Sankey came in as black as thunder and said I'd ruined all the patty something and I'd be dismissed if ever I did such a thing again!”

“Patina?” suggested Mr. M.

“Patty or putty, dirt is dirt; but of course masters can be dirty, if maids must (and like to be) clean. But I left that horrid little knife alone and, indeed, he always liked it laid beside him as he read. Often he'd play with it, spinning it about or cutting the pages of books the publishers had forgot to. And now it's turned on him.”

The flow was stopped by the inspector again thanking our star witness, and once more she began to withdraw, obviously almost as pleased with her second act and exit as with her first. It was, however, her friend Mr. M. who gave her an encore.

“I wonder whether you could tell us when it was that Mr. Sankey obtained this book?” And he held out the Suetonius for her to see. “I don't see his bookplate in it, and I have noticed that it is in his own books as a rule.”

I was surprised at this but shouldn't have been, Mr. M. was like a juggler and conjuror rolled into one, and for every occasion on which you observed him picking up clues you may be sure there were half a dozen when you never observed him observing—indeed, the analogy was even closer; for often I found, at the cost of being crestfallen later, that when he appeared obviously to be attending to something, in point of fact this was a blind—he was really keeping his eye on another thing that was quite unaware it was being watched.

But Jane rewarded his perspicacity with a hearty, “Well, now, Sir, you really are as sharp as the proverbial pin! True enough! It isn't—or perhaps I ought to say” (and she lengthened her round face slightly as a salute to the unmourned dead) “it wasn't his book. And I can tell you about it, too!”

“Ah, you can!” said Mr. M., somehow making with his voice a tone that ridiculously reminded me of those few encouraging chords with which a brilliant and helpful accompanist, turning round to the shy singer, will rouse his protégé to go into action.

“Yes,” said Jane, throwing herself into her mood of recollection. “Now I have it. I sees it as though I were going through it all again. As I've said, I let Mr. Millum in. And he holds the doors open for me. And there I see it again. It was just like him, but today it is just a bit more thoughtful-like. For I notice—you see, being that sort myself, naturally I notice kind things that aren't merely careless kind, but cost—I notice that as he'd a big book in his right hand he'd have to open the door for me with his left, awkward-like; and I notice that he's cut his left thumb and finger while so kindly doing that pruning the day before. I remarked on it and asked if I might bandage it properly. For it was done that clumsy he must have done it himself, and men—nor, for that matter, Mrs. Sprigg—are no use for such things, are they?” We submitted in silence to the charge. “But he, so anxious never to give trouble, said of course not! It was nothing. He was being overcareful to bandage it at all and please would I not nohow draw Mr. Sankey's attention to it. As if I would! I'm a very poor storyteller if I've given the impression that
he
was that sort!”