“I know. Not good enough if we’d played the waiting game. But good enough to try shock tactics. We caught her off her guard and she cracked up.”
“Not,” Mr. Fox said, “a nice type of woman.”
Alleyn strolled to the gate and looked up the lane to the church. The spire shone golden in the evening sun.
“The rector,” Alleyn said, “tells me he’s going to do something about the balcony.”
“Mrs. Simpson, née Wagstaff,” Fox remarked, “suggested wire netting.”
“And she ought to know,” Alleyn said and turned back to the cottage.
Other Stories
Truth may or may not be stranger than fiction. It is certainly less logical. Consider the affair of the severed hand at Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1885. Late in the afternoon of December 16th of that year, the sergeant on duty at the central police station was visited by two brothers and their respective small sons. They crowded into his office and, with an air of self-conscious achievement, slapped down a parcel, wrapped in newspaper, on his desk. Their name, they said, was Godfrey.
The sergeant unwrapped the parcel. He disclosed, nestling unattractively in folds of damp newsprint, a human hand. It was wrinkled and pallid like the hand of a laundress on washing day. On the third finger, left hand, was a gold ring.
The Godfreys, brothers and sons, made a joint announcement. “That’s Howard’s hand,” they said virtually in unison and then added, in explanation, “bit off by a shark.”
They looked significantly at a poster pasted on the wall of the police office. The poster gave a description of one Arthur Howard and offered a reward for information as to his whereabouts. The Godfreys also produced an advertisement in a daily paper of two months earlier:
Fifty Pounds Reward. Arthur Howard, drowned at Sumner on Saturday last Will be given for the recovery of the body or the first portion received thereof recognizable. Apply Times Office.
The Godfreys were ready to make a statement. They had spent the day, it seemed, at Taylor’s Mistake, a lonely bay not far from the seaside resort of Sumner, where Arthur Rannage Howard had been reported drowned on October 10th. At about two o’clock in the afternoon, the Godfreys had seen the hand lying in the sand below high-water mark.
Elisha, the elder brother, begged the sergeant to examine the ring. The sergeant drew it off the cold, wrinkled finger. On the inside were the initials A. H.
The Godfreys were sent away without a reward. From that moment they were kept under constant observation by the police.
A few days later, the sergeant called upon Mrs. Sarah Howard. At sight of the severed hand, she cried out—in tears—that it was her husband’s.
Later, a coroner’s inquest was held on the hand. Three insurance companies were represented. If the hand was Howard’s hand, they were due to pay out, on three life policies, sums amounting to 2,400 pounds. The policies had all been transferred into the name of Sarah Howard.
The circumstances of what the coroner called “the alleged accident” were gone over at the inquest. On October 10, 1885, Arthur Howard, a railway workshop fitter, had walked from Christchurch to Sumner. On his way he fell in with other foot-sloggers who remembered his clothes and his silver watch on a gold chain and that he had said he meant to go for a swim at Sumner where, in those days, the waters were shark infested.
The next morning a small boy had found Howard’s clothes and watch on the end of the pier at Sumner. A few days later insurance had been applied for and refused, the advertisement had been inserted in the paper and, as if in answer to the widow’s prayer, the Godfreys, on December 16th, had discovered the hand.
But there also appeared the report of no less than ten doctors who had examined the hand. The doctors, after the manner of experts, disagreed in detail but, in substance, agreed upon three points.
1) The hand had not lain long in the sea.
2) Contrary to the suggestions of the brothers Godfrey, it had not been bitten off by a shark but had been severed by the teeth of a hacksaw.
3) The hand was that of a woman.
This damaging report was followed by a statement from an engraver. The initials A. H., on the inside of the ring, had not been made by a professional’s tool, said this report, but had been scratched by some amateur.
The brothers Godfrey were called in and asked whether, in view of the evidence, they would care to make a further statement.
Elisha Godfrey then made what must have struck the police as one of the most impertinently unlikely depositions in the annals of investigation.
Elisha said that in his former statement he had withheld certain information which he would now divulge. Elisha said that he and his brother had been sitting on the sands when from behind a boulder, there appeared a man wearing blue goggles and a red wig and saying, “Come here! There’s a man’s hand on the beach!”
This multi-colored apparition led Elisha and his brother to the hand, and Elisha had instantly declared, “That’s Howard’s hand.”
The goggles and wig had then said, “Poor fellow… poor fellow.”
“Why didn’t you tell us before about this chap in the goggles and wig?” the police asked.
“Because,” said Elisha, “he begged me to promise I wouldn’t let anyone know he was there.”
Wearily, a sergeant shoved a copy of this amazing deposition across to Elisha. “If you’ve still got the nerve, sign it.”
The Godfreys read it through and angrily signed.
The police, in the execution of their duty, made routine inquiries for information about a gentleman in blue goggles and red wig in the vicinity of Sumner and Taylor’s Mistake on the day in question.
To their intense astonishment they found what they were after.
Several persons came forward saying that they had been accosted by this bizarre figure, who excitedly showed them a paper with the Godfreys’ name and address on it and told them that the Godfreys had found Howard’s hand.
The police stepped up their inquiries and extended them the length and breadth of New Zealand. The result was a spate of information.
The wig and goggles had been seen on the night of the alleged drowning, going north in the ferry steamer. The man who wore them had been run in for insulting a woman, who had afterwards refused to press charges. He had taken jobs on various farms. Most strangely, he had appeared at dawn by the bedside of a fellow worker and had tried to persuade this man to open a grave with him. His name, he had said, was Watt. Finally, and most interesting of all, it appeared that on the 18th of December the goggles and wig had gone for a long walk with Mrs. Sarah Howard.
Upon this information, the police arrested the Godfrey brothers and Mrs. Howard on a charge of attempting to defraud the insurance companies.
But a more dramatic arrest was made in a drab suburb of the capital city. Here the police ran to earth a strange figure in clothes too big for him, wearing blue goggles and a red wig. It was the missing Arthur Howard.
At the trial, a very rattled jury found the Godfreys and Mrs. Howard “not guilty” on both counts and Howard guilty on the second count of attempting to obtain money by fraud.
So far, everything ties up quite neatly. What won’t make sense is that Howard did his best to look like a disguised man, but came up with the most eye-catching “disguise” imaginable.
No clue has ever been produced as to the owner of the hand. Of eight graves that were subsequently opened in search for the body to match the hand, none contained a dismembered body. But the hand had been hacked off by an amateur. Could Howard have bribed a dissecting-room janitor or enlisted the help of some undertaker’s assistant? And if, as seemed certain, it was a woman’s hand, where was the rest of the woman?