Marryatt, fortunately, knew him well enough to interrupt him. “It’s the sort of afternoon,” he said darkly, “on which one wants to murder somebody, just to relieve one’s feelings.”
“You would be wrong,” said Reeves. “Think of the footmarks you’d be bound to leave behind you in mud like this. You would be caught in no time.”
“Ah, you’ve been reading The Mystery of the Green Thumb. But tell me, how many murderers have really been discovered by their footprints? The bootmakers have conspired to make the human race believe that there are only about half a dozen different sizes of feet, and we all have to cram ourselves into horrible boots of one uniform pattern, imported by the gross from America. What does Holmes do next?”
“Well, you see,” put in Gordon, “the detectives in the book always have the luck. The murderer generally has a wooden leg, and that doesn’t take much tracing. The trouble in real life is the way murderers go about unamputated. And then there’s the left-handed men, how conveniently they come in! I tried detection once on an old pipe, and I could show you from the way the side of it was charred that the owner of it was right-handed. But there are so many right-handed people.”
“In most cases,” said Carmichael, “it’s only nerves that make people think they’re left-handed. A more extraordinary thing is the matter of parting the hair. Everybody is predestined from birth to part his hair on one particular side; but most of the people who ought to part their hair on the right do it on the left instead, because that’s easier when you’re right-handed.”
“I think you’re wrong in principle, Gordon,” said Reeves. “Everybody in the world has his little peculiarities, which would give him away to the eye of a trained detective. You, for example, are the most normal specimen, if I may say so, of the human race. Yet I know which of those whisky glasses on the mantelpiece is yours, though they’re empty.”
“Well, which?” asked Gordon, interested.
“The one in the middle,” said Reeves. “It’s pushed farther away from the edge: you, like the careful soul you are, instinctively took more precaution against its being brushed off. Aren’t I right?”
“To tell the truth, I can’t for the life of me remember. But there, you see, you’re talking of somebody you know. None of us are murderers, at least, I hope not. If you were trying to detect a murderer you’d never been introduced to, you wouldn’t know what to look out for.”
“Try it on,” suggested Marryatt. “You know, the Holmes stunt, deducing things from the bowler hat, and from Watson’s brother’s watch. Try that umbrella over there, whatever it’s doing here; what will you deduce from it?”