“That,” said the fireman, “was the gasalier of the first-floor room, where Mr. Bland was sitting. Ah! you won’t turn that tap, sir; nobody’ll ever turn that tap again.”
Thorndyke held the twisted mass of brass towards me in silence, and, glancing up the blackened walls, remarked: “I think we shall have to come here again with the Divisional Officer, but meanwhile, we had better see the remains of the body. It is just possible that we may learn something from them.”
He applied to the coroner for the necessary authority to make the inspection, and, having obtained a rather ungracious and grudging permission to examine the remains when the jury had “viewed” them, began to ascend the ladder.
“Our friend would have liked to refuse permission,” he remarked when we had emerged into the street, “but he knew that I could and should have insisted.”
“So I gathered from his manner,” said I. “But what is he doing here? This isn’t his district.”
“No; he is acting for Bettsford, who is laid up just now; and a very poor substitute he is. A non-medical coroner is an absurdity in any case, and a coroner who is hostile to the medical profession is a public scandal. By the way, that gas-tap offers a curious problem. You noticed that it was turned off?”
“Yes.”
“And consequently that the deceased was sitting in the dark when the fire broke out. I don’t see the bearing of the fact, but it is certainly rather odd. Here is the mortuary. We had better wait and let the jury go in first.”
We had not long to wait. In a couple of minutes or so the “twelve good men and true” made their appearance with a small attendant crowd of ragamuffins. We let them enter first, and then we followed. The mortuary was a good-sized room, well lighted by a glass roof, and having at its centre a long table on which lay the shell containing the remains. There was also a sheet of paper on which had been laid out a set of blackened steel waistcoat buttons, a bunch of keys, a steel-handled pocket-knife, a steel-cased watch on a partly-fused rolled-gold chain, and a pocket corkscrew. The coroner drew the attention of the jury to these objects, and then took possession of them, that they might be identified by witnesses. And meanwhile the jurymen gathered round the shell and stared shudderingly at its gruesome contents.
“I am sorry, gentlemen,” said the coroner, “to have to subject you to this painful ordeal. But duty is duty. We must hope, as I think we may, that this poor creature met a painless if in some respects a rather terrible death.”
At this point, Thorndyke, who had drawn near to the table, cast a long and steady glance down into the shell; and immediately his ordinarily rather impassive face seemed to congeal; all expression faded from it, leaving it as immovable and uncommunicative as the granite face of an Egyptian statue. I knew the symptom of old and began to speculate on its present significance.
“Are you taking any medical evidence?” he asked.
“Medical evidence!” the coroner repeated, scornfully. “Certainly not, sir! I do not waste the public money by employing so-called experts to tell the jury what each of them can see quite plainly for himself. I imagine,” he added, turning to the foreman, “that you will not require a learned doctor to explain to you how that poor fellow mortal met his death?”
And the foreman, glancing askance at the skull, replied, with a pallid and sickly smile, that “he thought not.”
“Do you, sir,” the coroner continued, with a dramatic wave of the hand towards the plain coffin, “suppose that we shall find any difficulty in determining how that man came by his death?”
“I imagine,” replied Thorndyke, without moving a muscle, or, indeed, appearing to have any muscles to move, “I imagine you will find no difficulty what ever.”
“So do I,” said the coroner.
“Then,” retorted Thorndyke, with a faint, inscrutable smile, “we are, for once, in complete agreement.”
As the coroner and jury retired, leaving my colleague and me alone in the mortuary, Thorndyke remarked: “I suppose this kind of farce will be repeated periodically so long as these highly technical medical inquiries continue to be conducted by lay persons.”
I made no reply, for I had taken a long look into the shell, and was lost in astonishment.
“But my dear Thorndyke!” I exclaimed; “what on earth does it mean? Are we to suppose that a woman can have palmed herself off as a man on the examining medical officer of a London Life Assurance Society?”
Thorndyke shook his head. “I think not,” said he. “Our friend, Mr. Bland, may conceivably have been a woman in disguise, but he certainly was not a negress.”
“A negress!” I gasped. “By Jove! So it is! I hadn’t looked at the skull. But that only makes the mystery more mysterious. Because, you remember, the body was certainly dressed in Bland’s clothes.”
“Yes, there seems to be no doubt about that. And you may have noticed, as I did,” Thorndyke continued dryly, “the remarkably fire-proof character of the waistcoat buttons, watch-case, knife-handle, and other identifiable objects.”
“But what a horrible affair!” I exclaimed. “The brute must have gone out and enticed some poor devil of a negress into the house, have murdered her in cold blood and then deliberately dressed the corpse in his own clothes! It is perfectly frightful!”
Again Thorndyke shook his head. “It wasn’t as bad as that, Jervis,” said he, “though I must confess that I feel strongly tempted to let your hypothesis stand. It would be quite amusing to put Mr. Bland on trial for the murder of an unknown negress, and let him explain the facts himself. But our reputation is at stake. Look at the bones again and a little more critically. You very probably looked for the sex first; then you looked for racial characters. Now carry your investigations a step farther.”
“There is the stature,” said I. “But that is of no importance, as these are not Bland’s bones. The only other point that I notice is that the fire seems to have acted very unequally on the different parts of the body.”
“Yes,” agreed Thorndyke, “and that is the point. Some parts are more burnt than others; and the parts which are burnt most are the wrong parts. Look at the back-bone, for instance. The vertebrae are as white as chalk. They are mere masses of bone ash. But, of all parts of the skeleton, there is none so completely protected from fire as the back-bone, with the great dorsal muscles behind, and the whole mass of the viscera in front. Then look at the skull. Its appearance is quite inconsistent with the suggested facts. The bones of the face are bare and calcined and the orbits contain not a trace of the eyes or other structures; and yet there is a charred mass of what may or may not be scalp adhering to the crown. But the scalp, as the most exposed and the thinnest covering, would be the first to be destroyed, while the last to be consumed would be the structures about the jaws and the base, of which, you see, not a vestige is left.”
Here he lifted the skull carefully from the shell, and, peering in through the great foramen at the base, handed it to me.
“Look in,” he said, “through the Foramen Magnum—you will see better if you hold the orbits towards the skylight—and notice an even more extreme inconsistency with the supposed conditions. The brain and membranes have vanished without leaving a trace. The inside of the skull is as clean as if it had been macerated. But this is impossible. The brain is not only protected from the fire; it is also protected from contact with the air. But without access of oxygen, although it might become carbonised, it could not be consumed. No, Jervis; it won’t do.”
I replaced the skull in the coffin and looked at him in surprise. “What is it that you are suggesting?” I asked.
“I suggest that this was not a body at all, but merely a dry skeleton.”
“But,” I objected, “what about those masses of what looks like charred muscle adhering to the bones?”
“Yes,”