Smallbone Deceased

“After that,” said the housekeeper, “at ten o’clock he retired to bed. The nurse had the bedroom across the passage and I had the room next to her. Between us we were certain to hear if he cried out. His attacks, you know—very sudden.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Sergeant Plumptree.

It seemed to him to be pretty conclusive. There would be just time, he thought, to call on the nurse, before reporting back to Inspector Hazlerigg.

V

Dr. Bland, the pathologist, was a dry man but an enthusiast.

The photograph which he exhibited for Hazlerigg’s attention looked, at first blink, like an aerial view of the Grand Canyon of Arizona. There were the innumerable fissile crevices running in from either side towards the centre, the gulfs and gullies, the potholes and pockmarks of the surrounding terrain; and there down the middle, as if ruled off by a draughtsman, was the deep, steep-sided indenture of the canyon itself, and far down at the bottom the dark line of the stream.

“Effect of picture-wire on the human neck,” said Dr. Bland. “Two hundred magnifications.”

“Extraordinary,” said Hazlerigg with distaste. “I suppose that dark line at the bottom is the—just so. You needn’t explain. What does it all prove?”

“Quite a lot,” said the doctor. “Would you like a picture of the weapon. Subject to very slight possible errors, here it is. Take a short piece of ordinary seven-strand brass picture-wire. Drive a small hole between the strands, about two-thirds of the way along—you could do that with a nail, or a sharp gimlet. Then thread one end of your wire through the hole. That gives you a nice smoothly-running noose, or slip-knot. I suggest that you then fasten toggles of wood—anything to afford you a good grip—one at either end of your wire. There’s an inexpensive, neat, household model of the garrotter’s loop—”

“Inexpensive,” said Hazlerigg. “Neat, and untraceable.”

“Oh, quite,” said the pathologist. “It’s a household weapon. Anybody could make one.”

“Thank you.”

“I haven’t done yet,” said Dr. Bland. “That’s a picture of the weapon. Would you like a picture of your murderer?”

“If it’s not asking too much of you,” said Hazlerigg politely.

“Well, to a certain extent the weapon implies the user. He must be methodical, neat with his hands, with enough imagination to devise such a weapon, and enough ruthlessness to use it.”

“You surprise me,” said Hazlerigg.

“He is also, most probably, left-handed.”

“What!”

“Ah—I thought that might stir you out of your confounded dismal professional indifference,” said the pathologist. “That’s a clue, isn’t it? That’s something to go on. Not just one of Jimmy Bland’s pawky generalisations. I repeat, he was left-handed. I mean it in this sense—not that he was a man who only used his left hand, but he was a man whose left hand—or, at all events, his left wrist was better developed and stronger than his right.”

“Where did you get all this from?”

“From the wire. From the enlarged photograph of the neck, which you so rudely threw back at me a moment ago.” Dr. Bland laid the photograph on the table again and ran the tip of his finger along some of the north-bank tributaries of the Colorado. “Observe,” he said, “how all the creases on the right are drawn backwards—that is, towards the spine. That means that when the murderer started to pull, he held the right handle of his machine steady, and excited the actual pressure with his left hand. No other explanation will fit. Now for an ordinary, right-handed man, the tendency would have been just the opposite. He would have held steady with the left hand and done the pulling with the right. Cast your mind back to the last time you pulled a tight cork out of a bottle of old port—”

“Yes, I think I see what you mean.”

Hazlerigg went through the motions of garrotting an imaginary victim, whilst the pathologist watched and nodded his approval.

“One other thing, doctor. You say ‘he’ and ‘him’ and ‘the man’. Is that certain? Could it have been a woman?”