“Who put that smoke in the hall?” Miller demanded fiercely. “And why didn’t you come down when you heard us ringing the bell?”
“I don’t know what you a talking about,” the man replied sulkily, “or what business this is of yours. Who are you? And what are you doing in my house?”
“In your house?” repeated Thorndyke. “Then you will be Mr. Elliott?”
The man turned a startled glance on him and replied angrily: “Never you mind who I am. Get out of this house.”
“But I do mind who you are,” Thorndyke rejoined mildly. “I came here to see Mr. Elliott. Are you Mr. Elliott?
“No, I am not. Mr. Elliott is abroad. If you like to send a letter here for him, I will forward it when I get his address.”
While this conversation had been going on, I had been examining the stranger, not without curiosity. For his appearance was somewhat unusual. In the first place, he wore an unmistakable wig, and his shaven face bore an abundance of cuts and scratches, suggesting a recently and unskilfully mown beard. His spectacles did not disguise a pronounced divergent squint of the left eye; but what specially caught my attention was the ear—large ear, lobeless and pointed at the tip like the ear of a satyr. As I looked at this, and at the scraped face, the squint and the wig, a strange suspicion flashed into my mind; and then, as I noted that the nose was markedly deflected to the left, I turned to glance at Thorndyke.
“Would you mind telling us your name?” the latter asked blandly.
“My name is—is—Johnson; Frederick Johnson.”
“Ah,” said Thorndyke. “I thought it was Manford—James Manford—and I think so still. I suggest that you have a scar on the right side of your forehead, just under the wig. May we see?”
As Thorndyke spoke the name, the man turned a horrible livid grey and started back as if to retreat up the stairs. But the constable blocked the way; and as the man was struggling to push past, Miller adroitly snatched off the wig; and there, on the forehead, was the tell-tale scar.
For an appreciable time we all stood stock-still like the figures of a tableau. Then Thorndyke turned to the superintendent.
“I charge this man, James Manford, with the murder of Stephan Bilsky.”
Again there was a brief interval of intolerable silence. In the midst of it, we heard the street door open and shut, and a woman’s voice called up the stairs: “Whatever is all this smoke? Are you up there, Jim?
I pass over the harrowing details of the double arrest. I am not a policeman, and to me such scenes are intensely repugnant. But we must needs stay until two taxis and four constables had conveyed the prisoners away from the still reeking house to the caravanserai of the law. Then, at last, we went forth with relief into the fresh air and bent our steps towards the station.
“I take it,” Miller said reflectively, “that you never suspected Bilsky?”
“I did at first. But when Mrs. Manford and the solicitor told their tale I realised that he was the victim and that Manford must be the murderer.”
“Let us have the argument,” said I. “It is obvious that I have been a blockhead, but I don’t mind our old friend here knowing it.”
“Not a blockhead, Jervis,” he corrected. “You were half asleep that night and wholly uninterested. If you had been attending to the matter, you would have observed several curious and anomalous appearances. For instance, you would have noticed that the body was, in parts, completely charred, and brittle. Now we saw the outbreak of the fire and we found it extinguished when we reached the building. Its duration was a matter of minutes; quite insufficient to reduce a body to that state. For, as you know, a human body is an extremely incombustible thing. The appearance suggested the destruction of a body which had been already burnt; and this suggestion was emphasised by the curiously unequal distribution of the charring. The right hand was burnt to a cinder and blown to pieces. The left hand was only scorched. The right foot was utterly destroyed, but the left foot was nearly intact. The face was burned away completely, and yet there were parts of the head where the hair was only singed.
“Naturally, with these facts in mind, I scrutinised those remains narrowly. And presently something much more definite and sinister came to light. On the left hand, there was a faint impression of another hand—very indistinct and blurred, but still unmistakably a hand.”
“I remember,” said I, “the inspector pointed it out as evidence that the deceased had been standing with his hands clasped before or behind him; and I must admit that it seemed a reasonable inference.”
“So it did, because you were both assuming that the man had been alone and that it must therefore have been the impression of his own hand. For that reason, neither of you looked at it critically. If you had, you would have seen at once that it was the impression of a left hand.”
“You are quite right,” I confessed ruefully. “As the man was stated to have been alone, the hand impression did not interest inc. And it was a mere group of smudges, after all. You are sure that it was a left hand?”
“Quite,” be replied. “Blurred as the smudges were, one could make out the relative lengths of the fingers. And there was the thumb mark at the distal end of the palm, but pointing to the outer side of the hand. Try how you may, you can’t get a right hand into that position.
“Well, then, here was a crucial fact. The mark of a left hand on a left hand proved the presence of a second person, and at once raised a strong presumption of homicide, especially when considered in conjunction with the unaccountable state of the body. During the evening, a visitor had come and gone, and on him—Bilsky—the suspicion naturally fell. But Mrs. Manford unwittingly threw an entirely new light on the case. You remember she told us that her husband had opened a new bottle of hair dye on the very morning before the explosion and had applied it with unusual care. Then his hair was dyed. But the hair of the corpse was not dyed. Therefore the corpse was not the corpse of Manford. Further, the presumption of murder applied now to Manford, and the body almost certainly was that of Bilsky.”
“How did you deduce that the hair of the corpse was not dyed?” I asked.
“I didn’t deduce it at all. I observed it. You remember a little patch of hair above the right ear, very much singed but still recognisable as hair? Well, in that patch I made out distinctly two or three white hairs. Naturally, when Mrs. Manford spoke of the dye, I recalled those white hairs, for though you may find silver hairs among the gold, you don’t find them among the dyed. So the corpse could not be Manford’s and was presumably that of Bilsky.
“But the instant that this presumption was made, a quantity of fresh evidence arose to support it. The destruction of the body was now understandable. Its purpose was to prevent identification. The parts destroyed were the parts that had to be destroyed for that purpose: the face was totally unrecognisable, and the right hand and right foot were burnt and shattered to fragments. But these were Bilsky’s personal marks. His right hand was mutilated and his right foot deformed. And the fact that the false teeth found were undoubtedly Manford’s was conclusive evidence of the intended deception.
“Then there were those very queer financial transactions, of which my interpretation was this: Manford borrowed two thousand pounds from Clines. With this he opened an account in the name of Elliott. As Elliott, he lent himself two thousand pounds which he repaid Clines—subject to an insurance of his life for that amount, taken out in Elliott’s name.”
“Then he would have gained nothing,” I objected.
“On the contrary, he would have stood to gain two thousand pounds on proof of his own death. That, I assumed, was his scheme: to murder Bilsky,