The Blind Barber (31 page)

“By all means,” said Morgan feelingly.

“Hand me back my list of clues, then. H’mfl I’ll see if I can have a modest shot at proving to you that—always supposing your data to be correct and complete—Lord Sturton was the only person aboard the
Queen Victoria
who could fill all the requirements for the Blind Barber.

“We commence, then, on one assumption: one assumption on which the whole case must rest. This assumption is that there is an impostor aboard, masquerading as somebody else. Fix that fact firmly in mind before beginning; go even to the length of believing a police commissioner’s radiogram, and you will have at least a direction in which to start.”

“Wait a bit!” protested Morgan. “We know that now, of course; and, since you were the only one who saw who it was, you ought to have the concession. But that radiogram accused Dr. Kyle, and therefore—”

“No, it didn’t,” said Dr. Fell, gently. “That is precisely where your whole vision strained away into the mist. It went wrong on so small but understandable a matter as the fact that people don’t waste money by sending punctuation in radiograms, and you were misled by the absence of a couple of commas. With that error I shall deal in its proper place, under the head of The Clue of Terse Style … For the moment, we have only the conception of an impostor aboard. There is another point in connection with this, stated to you so flatly and frankly that I have not even bothered to include it as a clue. As in other cases of mine, I seem to remember, it was so big that nobody ever gave it a thought. At one sweep it narrowed the search for the Blind Barber from a hundred passengers to a very, very few people. The Police Commissioner of the City of New York—not unusually timorous or faint-hearted about making arrests, even if they happen to be wrong arrests—wires thus: ‘Well-known figure and must be no mistake made or trouble,’ and adds, ‘Will not be definite in case of trouble.’ Now, that is suggestive. It is even startling. The man, in other words, is so important that the Commissioner finds it advisable not to mention his name, even in a confidential communication to the commander of the ship. Not only does it exclude John Smith or James Jones or Charles Woodcock, but it leads us towards men of such wealth or influence that the public is (presumably) interested in newspaper photographs of them (or anybody else) playing golf. This coy reticence on the part of the New York authorities may also be due partly to the possibility that the eminent man is an Englishman, and that severe complications may ensue in case of an error. But I do not press the point, because it is reasoning before my clues.”

He had clearly been listening absently for the doorbell; and now, as the doorbell rang, he nodded and lifted his head to bellow:

“Let ’em in, Vida!”

There was a tramping of footfalls up the steps. The door of Dr. Fell’s study opened to admit two large men with a prisoner between them. Morgan heard Dr. Fell say, “Ah, good afternoon, Jennings; and you, too, Hamper. Inspector Jennings, this is Mr. Morgan, one of our witnesses. Mr. Morgan, Sergeant Hamper. The prisoner, I think you know …”

But Morgan was looking at the latter, who said, almost affably:

“How do you do, Doctor? I—er—I see you’re looking at my appearance. No, there’s no deception and damned little disguise. Too tricky and difficult … Good afternoon, Mr. Morgan. I see you’re surprised at the change in my voice. It’s a relief to let down from the jerky manner; but I’d got so used to it it almost came natural. Rubbish rubbish rubbish!” squeaked the bogus Lord Sturton, with a sudden shift back to the manner he had previously used, and crowed with mirth.

Morgan jumped a little when he heard that echo of the old manner. The bogus Lord Sturton was in sunlight now, where Morgan remembered him only in the gloom of a darkened cabin like a picture-book wizard: his head hunched into a shawl, his face shaded by a flopping hat. Now he was revealed as a pale, long-faced, sharp-featured man with a rather unpleasant grin. A checked comforter was wound round his scrawny throat, and his clothes were weird. But he wore a bowler hat pushed back on his head, and he was smoking a cigar. Yet, although the grotesquerie had been removed, Morgan liked his look even less. He had an eye literally like a rattlesnake’s. It measured Dr. Fell, swivelled round to the window, calculated, and became affable again.

“Come in!” said Dr. Fell. “Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. I’ve been wanting very much to make your acquaintance, if you’re willing to talk … ”

“Prisoner’s pretty talkative, sir,” said Inspector Jennings, with a slow grin. “He’s been entertaining Sergeant Hamper and me all the way up on the train. I’ve got a note-book full and he admits—”

“Why not?” inquired their captive, lifting his left hand to take the cigar out of his mouth. “Rubbish rubbish rubbish! Ha-ha!”

“… But all the same, sir,” said Jennings, “I don’t think I’ll unlock the handcuff just yet. He says his name’s Nemo. Sit down, Nemo, if the doctor says so. I’ll be beside you.”

Dr. Fell lumbered to the sideboard and got Nemo a drink of brandy. Nemo sat down.

“Point’s this,” Nemo explained, in a natural voice which was not quite so shrill or jerky as the Lord Sturton impersonation, but nevertheless had enough echo of it to make Morgan remember the whole scene in the darkened ill-smelling cabin. “Point’s this. You think you’re going to hang me? You’re not. Rubbish!” His snaky neck swivelled round, and his eye smiled on Morgan. “Haha, no, no! I’ve got to be extradited first. They’ll want me in the States. And between that time and this—I’ve got out of worse fixes.”

Dr. Fell put the glass at his elbow, sat down opposite, and contemplated him. Mr. Nemo worked his head round and winked.

“Point is, I’m giving this up because I’m a fatalist. Fatalist! Wouldn’t
you
be? Best set-up I ever had—meat—pie—easy; ho-ho, how easy? Wasn’t as though I had to be a disguise expert. I told you there was no deception. I’m a dead ringer for Sturton. Look so much like him I could stand him in front of me and shave by him. Joke. But I can’t beat marked cards. Sweat? I never had such a bad time in my life as when those God-damned kids—” again he twisted round and looked at Morgan, who was glad he had not a razor in his hands at that moment—“when those God-damned kids tangled it all up …”

“I was about to tell my young friend,” said Dr. Fell, “at his own request, some of the points that indicated you were—yourself, Mr. Nemo …”

The doctor was getting great if sleepy enjoyment as he sat back against the dying light from the window and studied the man. Mr. Nemo’s lidless eyes were returning the stare.

“Be interested to hear it myself,” he said. “Anything to—delay things. Good cigar, good brandy. You listen, m’boy,” he said, leering at Jennings. “Give you some pointers. If there’s anything you don’t know—well, when you’ve finished I’ll tell you. Not before.”

Jennings gestured to Sergeant Hamper, who got out his notebook.

Dr. Fell settled himself to begin with relish:

“Sixteen clues, then. Casting my eye over the evidence presented—you needn’t take all this down, Hamper; you won’t understand all of it—I came, after the obvious giveaway of the impostor being an important man … ”

Mr. Nemo bowed very gravely, and the doctor’s eye twinkled.

“ … to what I called the Clue of Suggestion. It conveyed the idea. It opened the door on what first seemed a mad notion. During a heated argument between you, Morgan, and your friend Warren, while Warren was enthusiastically pleading the guilt of Dr. Kyle on the basis of detective fiction, you yourself said: ‘Oh, and get rid of the idea that somebody may be impersonating him … That may be all right for somebody who seldom comes in contact with anyone, but a public figure like an eminent physician won’t do.’
¹

“It wasn’t evidence. It only struck me as a curious coincidence that there really was aboard the ship somebody who seldom came in contact with anyone; who was known, I think, you said, as ‘The Hermit of Jermyn Street.’ ‘He’ll see nobody,’ you remarked; ‘he has no friends; all he does is collect rare bits of jewellry.’
²
These were only supporting facts to my real clue of suggestion; but undeniably Lord Sturton filled the qualifications of the radiogram. Merely a coincidence …

“Then I remembered another coincidence: Lord Sturton was in Washington. A Sturton, real or bogus, had called on Uncle Warpus and told him of the purchase of the emerald elephant, which is the Clue of Opportunity.
³
Whether he was at the reception on the night of Uncle Warpus’s indiscretion some time later, and learned about the moving-picture film … ”

“He was,” said Mr. Nemo, and chortled suddenly.

“ … this I didn’t know. But what we do know is that the Stelly affair occurred next in Washington, as Warren explained. This account of the Stelly business is what I call the Clue of Fraternal Trust.
⁴
It was described as a crime that looked like magic and was connected with the British Embassy. Stelly was a shrewd, careful, well-known jewel-collector who didn’t omit any precautions against thieves, ordinary or extraordinary, as he thought. He left the Embassy one night, and was robbed without fuss. What looked like magic was his being decoyed or robbed by any ordinary criminal, and also how the criminal should have known of the necklace to begin with … But it is not at all magical if two well-known jewel-collectors exhibit their treasures to each other and have a tendency to talk shop. It is not at all magical for an eminent peer, even if he is so hermit-like that nobody knows him, to be welcomed at the Embassy in a foreign country, provided he has the documents to prove his identity. These coincidences, you see, are piling up.

“But this peer doesn’t travel entirely alone. He is known to have a secretary. The first glimpse we have of him in the narrative is his rushing up the gangplank of a ship (so notoriously eccentric that he can wrap himself round in concealing comforters) and accompanied by this secretary.
⁵
In the passenger-list I find a Miss Hilda Keller occupying the same suite as Lord Sturton, as I think you yourselves found later.
⁶
But for the moment I put that aside … ”

There was a gurgling noise as Dr. Fell chuckled into his pipe.

“Definitely, things began to happen after some days out (during all of which time Lord Sturton has kept entirely to his cabin, and the secretary with him).
⁷
The first part of the film was stolen. The mysterious girl appeared, obviously trying to warn young Warren of something. There was the dastardly attack on Captain Whistler—the absence of the attackers on deck for some half an hour—and the subsequent disappearance of the girl. You believed (and so did I) that she had been murdered and thrown overboard. But, putting aside the questions of who the girl was and why she was killed, we have that curious feature of the bed being remade thoroughly, a soiled towel even being replaced. That is what I call, from deductions you will see in a moment, the Clue of Invisibility … ”
⁸

Mr. Nemo wriggled back in the chair. He put down his glass, his face had gone more pale and his mouth twitched—but not from fear at all. He had nothing to conceal. He was white and poisonous from some emotion Morgan did not understand. You felt the atmosphere about him, as palpably as though you could smell a drug.

“I was crazy about that little whore,” he said, suddenly, with such a change in voice and expression that they involuntarily started. “I hope she’s in hell.”

“That’s enough,” said Dr. Fell, quietly. He went on: “If somebody wished (for whatever reason) to kill her, why was she not merely killed and left there? The inference first off was that she would be more dangerous to the murderer if her body were discovered than if she were thrown overboard. But why should this be. Disappearance or outright murder, there would still be an investigation … Yet observe! What does the murderer do? He carefully makes up the berth and replaces the towel. This could not be to make you think the stunned girl had recovered and gone to her own cabin. It would have exactly the opposite effect. It means that the murderer was trying to make those in authority think—meaning Captain Whistler—that the girl was nothing but a mythical person; a lie invented for some reason by yourselves.

“Behind the apparent madness of this course, since four people had seen her, consider what the murderer’s reasons must have been. To begin with, he knew what had happened on C deck; he hoped Whistler would spot young Warren as the man who had attacked him, and yourselves as the people who had stolen the emerald; he knew that Whistler would not be likely to credit
any
story you told, and give short shrift to your excuses. But to adopt such a dangerous course as pretending she was a myth meant (
a
) that the girl would be traced straight to him if she were found dead, and that he could not stand the light of
any investigation whatever by police authorities afterwards
. It also meant (
b
) it was far less dangerous to conceal her absence, and that he had good reason to think he could conceal it.

“Now, this, gentlemen, is a very remarkable choice indeed, when you try to conceal an absence from a community of only a hundred passengers. Why couldn’t he stand
any
investigation? How could he hope to convince investigators that nobody was missing?

“First ask yourself who this girl could have been. She could not have been travelling alone: a solitary passenger is not connected closely enough with anybody else to lead absolutely damning evidence straight to him among a hundred people, and to make it necessary to pretend the girl had never existed; besides, a solitary passenger would be the first to be missed. She was not travelling in a family party, or, as Captain Whistler shrewdly pointed out, there might possibly have been complaint at her disappearance. She was travelling then, with just one other person—the murderer. She was travelling as wife, companion, or what you like. The murderer could hope to conceal her disappearance, first, because she must have made no acquaintances and have been with him every moment of the time. That means the murderer seldom or never had left his cabin. He might conceal it, second, because he was so highly placed as to be above suspicion—
not otherwise
—and because he himself was the victim of a theft that directed attention away from him. But, if he were all this, why couldn’t he stand any investigation whatever? The not-very-complicated answer is that he was an impostor who had enough to do in concealing his imposture. If you then musingly consider what man was travelling with a single female companion, what man had kept to his cabin every moment of the time, what man was so highly-placed as to be above suspicion; what man had been the victim of a theft; and, finally, what man there is whom we have some slight reason to think as an impostor; then it is remarkable how we swing round again to Lord Sturton. All this is built up on the clue of a clean towel, the clue of invisibility. But it is still coincidence without definite reason, though we find rapid support for it.