As a thief in the night

by R. Austin Freeman

When we had inspected the servants’ bedrooms and the attics—leaving the indispensable cards—we went down to the basement and visited the kitchen, the scullery, the servants’ parlour and the cellars; and this brought our tour to an end.

“Now,” said Thorndyke, “we proceed from the general to the particular. While you are drawing up your schedule of dilapidations I will just browse about and see if I can pick up any stray crumbs in which inference can find nourishment. It isn’t a very hopeful quest, but you observe that we have already lighted on two objects which may have a meaning for us.”

“Yes, we have ascertained that some one in this house used a particular kind of wool and that some one possessed a glass mortar. Those do not seem to me very weighty facts.”

“They are not,” he agreed; “indeed, they are hardly facts at all. The actual fact is that we have found the things here. But trifles light as air sometimes serve to fill up the spaces in a train of circumstantial evidence. I think I will go and have another look at that rubbish-heap.”

I was strongly tempted to follow him, but could hardly do so in face of his plainly expressed wish to make his inspection alone. Moreover, I had already seen that there was more to be done than I had supposed. The house was certainly not in bad repair, but neither did it look very fresh nor attractive. Furniture and especially pictures have a way of marking indelibly the walls of a room, and the paintwork in several places showed disfiguring traces of wear. But I was anxious to let this house, even at a nominal rent, so that, by a few years’ normal occupation its sinister reputation might be forgotten and its value restored.

As a result, I was committed to a detailed inspection of the whole house and the making of voluminous notes on the repairs and re-decorations which would be necessary to tempt even an impecunious tenant to forget that this was a house in which a murder had been committed. For that was the current view, erroneous as I believed it to be. Note-book in hand, I proceeded systematically from room to room and from floor to floor, and became so engrossed with my own business that I almost forgot Thorndyke; though I could hear him moving about the house, and once I met him—on the first floor, with a couple of empty medicine bottles and a small glass jar in his hands, apparently making his way to Harold’s room, where, as I have said, he had left his attaché case.

That room I left to the last, as it was already entered in my list and I did not wish to appear to spy upon Thorndyke’s proceedings. When, at length, I entered the room I found that he, like myself, had come to the end of his task. On the floor his attaché case lay open, crammed with various objects, several of which appeared to be bottles, wrapped in oddments of waste paper (including some pieces of wall paper which he had apparently stripped off ad hoc when the other supplies failed) and among which I observed a crumpled fly-paper. Respecting this I remarked: “I don’t see why you are burdening yourself with this. A fly-paper is in no sense an incriminating object, even though such things have, at times, been put to unlawful use.”

“Very true,” he replied as he peeled off the rubber gloves which he had been wearing during the search. “A fly-paper is a perfectly normal domestic object. But, as you say, it can on occasion be used as a source of arsenic for criminal purposes; and a paper that has been so used will be found to have had practically the whole of the arsenic soaked out of it. As I happened to find this in the servants’ parlour, it seemed worth while to take it to see whether its charge of arsenic had or had not been extracted.”

“But,” I objected, “why on earth should the poisoner—if there really is such a person—have been at the trouble of soaking out fly-papers when, apparently he was able to command an unlimited supply of Fowler’s Solution?”

“Quite a pertinent question, Mayfield,” he rejoined. “But may I ask my learned friend whether he found the evidence relating to the Fowler’s Solution perfectly satisfactory?”