“Behind the fair?”
“That scoundrel had a hundred louis from me. I have absolutely nothing left.”
“I see. He played your own game, did he? And you do me the honour to suppose me equally base?”
He laughed, not pleasantly. He raised his cane, and for months thereafter they told the tale in Rheims of the caning administered by the great Danet to Florimond Souverain de la Galette, a caning which made an end of his career as a master-at-arms, at least in that part of France.
A simple matter of deduction
by Lord Dunsany
Do you remember Mr. Linley, the detective in Lord Dunsany’s “The Two Bottles of Relish”? Well, here is a brand-new Mr. Lin Icy story, never before published anywhere in the world... As you read this tale of pure deduction, you will be reminded of those marvelous opening scenes in most of the Sherlock Holmes stories — those magnificent curtain-raisers in which the Master takes up a simple object (like a watch or a walking-slick), examines it almost casually, and then, to the utter amazement of Dr. Watson (and the reader), reels off a staggering series of deductions; except that in this case Mr. Linley examines an ordinary crossword puzzle and then, with all the sharpness and shrewdness of Holmes himself narrows a field of seventy-five suspects to the one and only possible murderer... Shades of Sherlock, here is classic criminological coup in the grandest of ail ’tec traditions!
As Smithers, that admirable specimen of a modern Watson, says: “It was all pure magic to me.” That’s what Lord Dunsany’s detective stories are — pure magic, written with charm and a delicate aura of fable; you can almost see Lord Dunsany sitting in his study, working wonders with words, in a patch of Irish sunlight...
“Yes,” said Smithers, “Mr. Linley is a wonderful man.”
Smithers was being interviewed by a man from The Daily Rumour, who would far sooner have interviewed Linley. But Linley would not talk about himself, and so they had gone to Smithers.
“I understand that you lived in the same flat with him,” said the journalist.
“That’s right,” said Smithers. “I did for a couple of years.”
“And what was the most remarkable case in which he took part?” asked the interviewer, a young man of the name of Ribbert.
“I couldn’t say that,” said Smithers. “I’ve seen so many of them.”
“You’ve told us of some.”
“Well, I have,” said Smithers.
“Are there any that you haven’t told us about?” asked Ribbert.
“Well, yes,” said Smithers. “There was the case of Mr. Ebright, who was lured to an empty house by a telephone call, and there murdered. You could find an empty house before the war, if you looked for it; and this man had found his way in — through a window at the back, the police said — and had hired Mr. Ebright there somehow, and was waiting for him when he came. You may remember the case.”
“I think I do,” said the journalist.
“There were no clues in it,” Smithers went on, “no clues at all; not what you would really call clues. And that was what brought the detective in charge of the case to Mr. Linley, and that is why you might call it one of his cleverest bits of work. The detective thought Mr. Linley might help him, because he was Inspector Ulton who had been helped by Mr. Linley before. I was there at the time, when Inspector Ulton came in, and after they’d said Howdydo, he says to Mr. Linley, ‘There’s a case with a certain amount of mystery about it, and we thought that you might perhaps have an idea that would help us...’ ”
“What are the facts?” asks Mr. Linley.
“There are very few of them,” says the Inspector. “It’s a case of murder.”
I was surprised to hear him say that, because it’s a word that Inspector Ulton never seemed to like to use. But he used it this time. “He was killed with a hammer or some such object,” Inspector Ulton says. “His skull was battered in, and the hammer, or whatever it was, had been cleaned on a bit of newspaper. The body wasn’t found until two days later, so that the murderer got a good start. We know it was premeditated murder, not only because the dead man, Mr. Ebright, was lured there by a telephone call, but because there are no fingerprints except his in the whole house. And that means the murderer must have been wearing gloves all the time, even when he was doing a crossword puzzle, which is the only thing besides the sheet of bloody newspaper that had been left in the room in which the dead man was lying — a bare room in an unoccupied house in a little street near Sydenham.”
“How do you know that it was the murderer who worked on the crossword puzzle?” asks Mr. Linley.
“Because he would have been doing it while he was waiting for the other man to come,” says Inspector Ulton. “He must have got there first so as to let Mr. Ebright in.”
“Yes, that is so,” Mr. Linley says. “Could you let me see the puzzle?”
“It’s only an ordinary one,” says Inspector Ulton, “and all the letters are done in capitals, which give us no clue to his handwriting.”
“Still, I would like to take a look.”
And Inspector Ulton takes an envelope out of his pocket and pulls out a torn sheet of newspaper. “There it is,” he says. “No fingerprints.”
And there was the crossword puzzle, nearly all filled in.
“He must have waited for a long time for his victim,” says Mr. Linley.
“We thought of that,” says the Inspector. “But it didn’t get us any further.”
“I think the crossword puzzle will.”
“The puzzle?” says the Inspector.
“I don’t know,” says Mr. Linley. “Let me look at it.”
And he looks at it for quite a long while. And then he says to Inspector Ulton, “Who did it?” Which seemed odd to me at the time. But he explained to me afterwards that they usually know at Scotland Yard who has committed a murder, but that what they want to know is how to prove it. But Inspector Ulton only says, “We don’t know.”
And then Mr. Linley asks, “What was the motive?”
“Ah,” says Inspector Ulton, “if I could tell you that, we wouldn’t need to trouble you. The motive would lead us to the man like a foot-track. But there’s no motive and no clue, or none that has come our way.”
And Mr. Linley goes on looking at the crossword puzzle, and Inspector Ulton says, “What do you make of it?”
“A friend of his,” says Mr. Linley. Which was hardly the right word to use of somebody who had murdered him. But that was Mr. Linley’s way of putting things.
“A friend?”
“Someone of his acquaintance,” says Mr. Linley. ‘Or he couldn’t have lured him into that deserted house.”
But that was getting nobody any forrarder. For Inspector Ulton says, “We had thought of that, and had gone carefully over the list of all the people he knew. But the trouble is there are seventy-five of them. It would be one of those, as you say. But we can’t very well put seventy-five men on trial.”
“No,” says Mr. Linley. “The dock couldn’t hold them all.”
But one could see that Inspector Ulton didn’t think that very funny. And then Mr. Linley goes on. “But I think I can whittle them down a bit for you. To begin with, he has one of those new fountain pens that will write for weeks on end without refilling them. Not quite everybody has one. So that reduces your list by two or three. And then he would have sent it to be refilled about the time of the murder, which reduces it a good deal further.”
I saw that he must, have got that from the crossword puzzle. But after that it was all pure magic to me. For he goes on, “And I fancy he is a man who has a garden. I should say a fairly good one. And then he lives among chess players, though he doesn’t play himself. And he is not without education, but was never at Eton or any similar school. And he has a gun and probably lives near a river or marshes.”