“If a common thief did it,” contended Vance, “then there’s no science of psychology, there are no philosophic truths, and there are no laws of art. If it was a genuine crime of robbery, then, by the same token, there is no difference whatever between an old master and a clever technician’s copy.”
“You’d entirely eliminate robbery as the motive, I take it.”
“The robbery,” Vance affirmed, “was only a manufactured detail. The fact that the crime was committed by a highly astute person indicates unquestionably that there was a far more potent motive behind it. Any man capable of so ingenious and clever a piece of deception is obviously a person of education and imagination; and he most certainly would not have run the stupendous risk of killing a woman unless he had feared some overwhelming disaster—unless, indeed, her continuing to live would have caused him greater mental anguish, and would have put him in greater jeopardy, even than the crime itself. Between two colossal dangers, he chose the murder as the lesser.”
Markham did not speak at once: he seemed lost in reflection. But presently he turned and, fixing Vance with a dubious stare, said:
“What about that chiselled jewel-box? A professional burglar’s jimmy wielded by an experienced hand doesn’t fit into your æsthetic hypothesis—it is, in fact, diametrically opposed to such a theory.”
“I know it only too well.” Vance nodded slowly. “And I’ve been harried and hectored by that steel chisel ever since I beheld the evidence of its work that first morning. . . . Markham, that chisel is the one genuine note in an otherwise spurious performance. It’s as if the real artist had come along at the moment the copyist had finished his faked picture, and painted in a single small object with the hand of a master.”
“But doesn’t that bring us back inevitably to Skeel?”
“Skeel—ah, yes. That’s the explanation, no doubt; but not the way you conceive it. Skeel ripped the box open—I don’t question that; but—deuce take it!—it’s the only thing he did do: it’s the only thing that was left for him to do. That’s why he got only a ring which La Belle Marguerite was not wearing that night. All her other baubles—to wit, those that adorned her—had been stripped from her and were gone.”
“Why are you so positive on this point?”
“The poker, man—the poker! . . . Don’t you see? That amateurish assault upon the jewel-case with a cast-iron coal-prodder couldn’t have been made after the case had been prized open—it would have had to be made before. And that seemingly insane attempt to break steel with cast iron was part of the stage-setting. The real culprit didn’t care if he got the case open or not. He merely wanted it to look as if he had tried to get it open; so he used the poker and then left it lying beside the dinted box.”