You may or may not have read my various books—there are eight of them now—on criminology. Their preparation has led me into all sorts of queer by-ways and has given me a curiously clear and analytical insight into the mind of the criminal. I have solved many mysteries—you will forgive the apparent boastfulness, but I have no useful Watson to detail my exploits—but I stop there, with solving them, I mean. When I know the answer, I hand the whole matter over to the police. “There is your man (or woman)—take him,” I say. And sometimes they do take him—and hang him. But occasionally they reply, “But we can’t take him—we couldn’t prove it against him.” That, however, is no business of mine. I am a scientist, not a police official, and have nothing to do with the foolery of their law courts or the flummery of what they call their rules of evidence.
I have supplied the answer to the conundrum and that suffices me. The mystery and its solution go into my notebooks, to be used eventually for my own purpose, it may be to illustrate a theory, or perhaps to demonstrate a scientific fact. I have no desire to pose and no intention of posing as a worker of miracles.
There is nothing marvellous about my methods nor wonderful in the results. I do but proceed from fact to fact, as you will see in this narrative, wherein I have set forth exactly what happened, however foolish it may make me look. The reader will accompany me step by step in my investigation of the Clevedon mystery and will learn precisely how the solution, which so bewildered and astonished the little group in Cartordale, came to me. You will see me groping in the dark, then you will discover, as I did, a pin-point of light which grows wider and wider until the whole story stands revealed. And if you guess the solution before I did, that will show that you are a cleverer detective than I am, which may very easily be.
I did not, by the way, go to Cartordale for the purpose of investigating this particular mystery. I became involved in it almost involuntarily. It was a queerly tangled skein enough, and that of itself would have been sufficient fascination to drag me into it, though I was deep in it long before any intention or even desire to solve the puzzle manifested itself. As a rule I carefully select my cases. Some appeal to me, others do not. But in this instance I was not entirely a free agent. I was in it before I quite knew where I was going. That being so, it may be interesting to explain how I came to be at Cartordale at all.
My Aunt Emily, to put it briefly, left me the house and the money that took me into the wilds of Peakshire. I had never met her in the flesh, and she, as far as I know, had never set eyes on me. In point of fact, she never forgave my father for taking to himself a second wife after my mother died. But that is family history and dry stuff. Aunt Emily made amends for past neglect by her will. She left me about eight hundred a year from investments, and the house at Cartordale, both very useful, though I was not exactly a poor man. My books have provided me with a fairly steady income for some years.
Stone Hollow, the house I had inherited, was a square, rather gloomy-looking building—outwardly sombre, at all events—situated at the head of Cartordale, a wild and romantic valley in the heart of Peakshire, some sixteen miles from the large industrial city of Midlington. The name, Stone Hollow, had a comparatively recent derivation, arising from the fact that the house was built on the site of, and largely on the profits from, a now disused stone quarry.
The house itself stood on a sort of broad shelf, and behind it a tall hill sprang almost perpendicularly upwards, still showing on its face the marks and scars of former quarrying operations, though Nature was already busy trying to hide the evidences of man’s vandalism behind a cover of green and brown. Before the house, the ground sloped gently downwards towards the Dale, while to the left was a stretch of heather clad moorland lying between Stone Hollow and White Towers, the residence of Sir Philip Clevedon.
It sounds rather well in description, but I will frankly confess that after a very few days at Cartordale I was bored. Though I had travelled widely, I had never actually lived out of London and was always very quickly eager to be back there. At first, I had done my best to persuade myself that a country life was really the ideal and that it would provide me with quiet and isolation that would be useful for literary work. But I soon arrived at the limit of my resources in self-deception. Which brings me to the night of February 23rd.
I was lolling on the couch in the room I had made my study, pretending to work and succeeding very badly.
“Nothing ever happens in a place like this,” I said aloud, with a yawn. “I should become a hopeless vegetable if I lived here. I couldn’t even write another book. There isn’t a chapter in the whole blessed place. Neither robbery nor murder ever happens. The folk wouldn’t know the meaning of the words without looking them up in a dictionary. Honesty is the badge of all their tribe, and honesty, if commendable, is dull.”