The Notched Hairpin (16 page)

“Well, I maintain that Jane heard
something
. Our inspector friend could explain away her misinterpretation of sight. But having done that, he was content. He did not try to explain
why
she thought she heard the door open as well as saw it. Having shown that it couldn't have been opened that day, he left that other little problem, which was really the big clue, lying neglected. He could see, being an artist, that there was a sight; she did see something, which she misinterpreted. Perhaps had he been instead a musician he would have asked: ‘Even if she misinterpreted it, what could she have actually heard?' If he had asked that, I believe he would have known as much as I learned.”

He paused and added, “Considering how things have turned out, I think it was providential that his hobby was painting and not music. Of course, I had one advantage to start with. Being an amateur, I have been able to pursue detection just because of its interest and not as part of a social system for catching criminals. The police can never become real artists at their task,” he sighed, “because it is at best a weary effort to stop things when they have already gone too far, to kill because you can't cure, to overthrow but not to understand. They can't prevent because they are not really interested in the great problems of all detection—human motive, human desire, and the greatest of all tragedies, our vast desires and our mean, inadequate, hopeless means. I know this sounds like rambling moralizing but, believe me, it is because these were my premises when I began to take an interest in the problems of detection that I have on a number of occasions been able to see deeper into a problem than my official colleagues. And, moreover, that point of view was precisely what gave me the viewpoint from which I was able to oversee the whole of this problem.

“In my interest in the pure problem of detection I had noticed this matter—over which we have had to take all this time because all the rest turns on it—the problem of the senses, how easily we let ourselves be confused when we are trying to decode their messages. And sound is the first that I started with, because of its notorious difficulty. Bats have a perfect system of biaural hearing—that is to say, they use their ears as we should, but as a matter of fact as we only use our eyes. They judge where an object is by echo sounding, by sending out their incessant squeak and judging with such precision that they can fly blindfolded through a maze of wires and touch none. We judge the place and distance of an object by the same triangulation done through our eyes—binocular vision. We could do the same with our ears no doubt, if we chose. But we are lazy. Hence we hear but don't really attend, and, not giving right attention, we are self-deceived.

“So years ago, seeing this gap in our power of detection, I made a small dictionary for myself, like those dictionaries of synonyms—but mine was what I rightly called a dictionary of symphonies.”

At that, even the obedient Millum looked up, his face showing as much polite protest as mine.

Mr. M. smiled.

“Don't be puzzled thinking that I made a catalogue of all the big works by the great musicians! I'm using the word with more accuracy than they. My catalogue shows the unsuspected similarities of sound that can be given by different, utterly different, objects and so lead to completely mistaken identification. You'd hardly believe how like, indistinguishably alike to the untrained ear which most people are content with, sounds are—sounds which are taken to be quite different because, when we look, we
see
they are caused by objects that
look
quite different. Do you know that some crockery, when it is being washed in soapy water, will emit a note so like a growling dog that people will look out of the window thinking that the watchdog has been roused?

“Once I had a case which turned on whether someone had gone down a passage to kill a man at the other end. Someone swore that someone had so gone. Under examination he recollected he did not see him, but heard him. On further examination he allowed that he did not hear the actual footsteps but heard the boards of the passage creak. On the carpet being raised in the passage, it was found there were no boards underneath, but flagstones. The case fell through—I'm glad to say. For I came in at the end and was able to find the man, to save him from hanging, and to get him to make a lifelong reparation. For the witness I've quoted, and on whose evidence everything turned, was discredited not on his sense of hearing but on his wrong and rash interpretation of what he heard. What he was ready to keep on swearing to, even when discredited, was that he had heard the creaking of boards as when they are stepped on and he added, ‘I heard that creaking regularly go along that passage. I am sure that someone did walk down it.' And he was right, flagstones or no flagstones. But they don't creak. Then what could give the same sort of sound? I went to my catalogue, thinking I would find boots—which wouldn't be helpful. Boots I found correlated with the sound made when a cork begins to be drawn from the neck of a glass bottle, and much else of other examples but none to my point. But as I went through the creaks I found correlated with boards—what would you think? That hard cloth called corduroy—generally only worn by gamekeepers, and that, at one stroke, gave me my man.

“Now we are ready to strike. Jane heard—she says—the door open. What Jane actually heard, but misinterpreted in the terms of her unexamined wish, was a twang. As she wished the sound to come from the door, she was certain that it did so. She gave evidence that this was not only possible but probable. And we ourselves sounded that catch or hasp above the door,” he pointed over his shoulder toward the garden wall behind him, “that reacted aurally like a giant jew's-harp. Further, she did see the shadow made by the spray of branch above swayed by a gust of wind. So, putting a further false deduction to her first wishful mistake, she added up her findings and was convinced that the door had opened. She heard, I repeat, a twang. She was in the position least suited to use our only method of detecting place by sound, biaural hearing. For she was glancing out into the garden, and the sound, as it happens, originated from a source not on her right, but on her left.”

“Excuse me,” Millum interrupted, his tone quiet and his comment to the point, “excuse me, I don't follow just here. Surely, if her left ear was toward the … the source of the sound, she was very well placed to judge the direction?”

“A good objection,” allowed Mr. M, “but you have overlooked the echo. In acoustics, as in painting, each source of sound or light throws back part of its radiation until we often, as here, think the echoing surface—in this case the brick wall behind us now—is the actual source of the sound wave. The sound wave that we are tracking was sent out above and behind Jane's stance. Naturally, then, she first heard and perhaps heard only the echo that glanced back from the wall and so came first to her right ear!”

Millum bowed, and I nodded with growing appreciation.

Mr. M. went on: “It was the fact that Jane
had
rightly heard a twang and yet had wholly mistaken whence that sudden buzz of sound came from—it was that thought that suddenly, like a note resolving a chord, made the whole thing begin to take shape in my mind. And then, as happens when once you are in line, everything began to fall into place.

“When we were in the arbor I had noticed that it was an odd time to prune trees, with the sap rising. I suppose we can now say that as Sankey was mad enough to have killed a goose,” he smiled gently at Millum, “that laid him golden eggs, why should he not prune trees just when they are about to yield! But I didn't know that then. And the more I looked about, the more I was puzzled, and therefore the more hopeful of coming upon a very remarkable story. For I next noticed, as I looked at this arbor, that though the pruning had certainly not been done incompetently, there was one place where an ugly cut, a complete break through the canopy, had been made. When we were down by the door I therefore looked over the cuttings which had been taken over there, and saw at once this one considerable branch that had been amputated. Before that I had observed the skylight which the amputation made, while I was sitting in this chair. I saw then, as I see now, that it permits one to have, as through a porthole, just a glimpse of the upper part of the corner of the house over the road—but not quite up to the parapet. To be able to see the parapet itself,” and Mr. M. crouched in his seat, “you see I have to double down until my head is now where, a moment before, when I was sitting up, my heart was!”

I watched the demonstration, but again Mr. Millum turned away.

“And then came a further point, really a very nice one—one that gave me hope.” Mr. M. looked across to Millum and repeated, “Real hope! But first for proof. After this I had only to look where I was now pretty sure I'd find. Our source again was our highly educated inspector, once more showing that a man's keen power of observation must always be distinguished from the use to which he puts that power, the meaning he attaches to the finds he makes. And, further, just because he was so well-read, when he made his mistaken misinterpretation he was further out and off than Jane herself. About the volume of Suetonius et al., both he and Jane were agreed. The inspector was sure it clinched his case for suicide, and I was sure it reopened it and gave me a new conviction and a new hope—for, as I shall show in a moment, it gave me not only the direction in which I was to look but also a first light into the motive and into the character I was to discover. That is why,” and Mr. M.'s voice became gentle, “that is why I used the word ‘hope' advisedly and why I was not merely amused but glad that the very intelligence of the highly educated inspector had thrown him off the scent. And here, in another and actual sense, came in that sense, the sense of smell.

“My further little volume, which will be a companion to the first I have mentioned on Similar Sounds, will be on Similar Scents. But this collection of synolfactorics, if I have to coin a rather ugly neologism, is still in a very rudimentary condition. I have, though, been able to find some associations which the ordinary person would say at first sight, but not at first whiff, have nothing in common—for example, that cooking red peppers (a delicious dish with veal Milanaise) give exactly the same smell as that disgusting fume, burning rubber!

“Naturally, what every student on this subject would start upon would be the tobaccos. The first thing is to train the nose until it can tell at the first whiff what tobacco a man smokes or has smoked. As soon as I entered that room up there,” and Mr. M. pointed up the steps to the house, “I knew that here we had a Latakia smoker, and a Latakia smoker is, as one might say, out on the end of the branch. By that I mean, as it is the strongest of all tobaccos, he is very unlikely ever to go back to the weaker, as a man who has taken to inhaling will never willingly enjoy the finer taste given by a good tobacco when flavored simply on the palate. And Latakia is an end of the passage in another sense, for, as you probably know, many of the types are highly impregnated with opium. The man who takes to the strongest of all the Asia Minor tobaccos is already more than halfway to the smoke that has suffocated half of all Asia—the poppy latex.

“So I know by my nose that the late owner of this house smokes and, more, that he smokes only one brand. Then, once smell has given me that information—for that pungent tobacco hangs about, as maids say, very long—then I can set my eyes to look out for traces, should they be needed to lead me further. That's when, Mr. Silchester, you will recall with what rightful triumph the inspector produced this book which, unlike Jane, he knew well enough and could use as evidence for his theory of suicide. For he found the passage about painless
felo-de-se
, and found it because it was marked by the silt of tobacco ash—which happens when a careless smoker or an engrossed reader studies a passage and, unaware, lets the burned-out ash fall and settle in the crease and groin of the leaves. Of course the ash itself, especially when crushed between the leaves, would not have been enough for me to work on, however much it may have been depended on as a guide by the master of masters of our craft. All honor to the ashes of our great eponym, but between you and me I have always had my doubts as to whether even he could read, translate, and detect through tobacco ash as infallibly as he is said to have asserted. Perhaps he was a medium and acted clair-voyantly, the ash acting by its chance patterns merely as a provocatant to his mystic insight—as with the ladies who divine from stranded tea leaves! Or perhaps some subtle fume from the ash acted on his superfine olfactory sense and raised him to vision, as the laurel leaves' smoke at Delphi soothed and uplifted the Pythian Sibyl!

“But these are speculations into an almost sacred past. Let us return to the profane present. I did find with the ash something I could go on. In the crevice of the page I found with my lens—while Jane's narrative generously gave me time—not only ash, but fragments of the actual tobacco. It was Virginian—a thing a smoker of Latakia would never use. In the crevices of the first couple of pages I found further ash—not so much as in the deposit in the later pages, but with it a crumb or two of unburned tobacco, and that tobacco was Latakia. In other words, when I had reached that point I could say definitely the following things: that Sankey had read the earlier few pages but had not reached the Petus passage, for before he could get as far as that he fell struck through the heart while he held the book; secondly, I could be sure that someone who smoked Virginian tobacco had been reading, yes, and brooding, over that Petus passage before Sankey was given the book; and thirdly, that no one had had that book since, for the inspector had locked it up as soon as it was handed to him by the chief here, who himself had taken it from under the undisturbed body.

“Nor, while I studied the book with my lens, with some profit, as you see, did I fail to keep on listening to Jane's bright flow. And I was again rewarded because of her vivid visual sense—simple minds are often photographic in their memories. In describing that last day, she had really let nothing escape her. You recall her account of her bringing in what she called Mr. Sankey's ‘elevens'—his chocolate, and how the visitor from over the way, coming at that moment with this book (which she claimed, with an understandable mis-reading, for cookery) still, though carrying this large volume, was able to open the doors for her even though he had to do it with his left hand. And she noticed that this left hand had both thumb and first finger heavily bandaged. Naturally, as soon as I could—in point of fact, today—I examined that thumb and finger, persuading their owner, in lighting my cigarette for me, to show them. I could see on them no sign of lesion. But if, that fateful morning, they were to pick up quickly and unnoticed a paper knife on which their prints must on no account appear, it would be a wise and an obvious precaution to bandage them, would it not?”