“What does check?” Della Street asked.
Mason resumed his pacing the floor. “This chap, Burwell,” he said abruptly, “he seems to be a naive lad in the throes of a first illicit love affair — but notice that he isn’t as naive as he pretends. He says he was coming down here on the Lark, Friday night. Was he? Do you notice that he says Daphne Milfield told him of her husband’s death before Lieutenant Tragg could possibly have told her? Before I visited her. Do you notice how closely the mysterious person who was so interested in the nocturnal habits of sharks resembles this chap, Burwell?
“Let’s suppose Roger Burbank hit Milfield and knocked him over. He left in a rage. Carol returns and finds the man lying with his head resting on that brass-covered threshold. She thinks her father must have killed him. Her father thinks so too. But suppose her father didn’t kill him? Then we must look to the yacht itself and to the evidence of circumstances to tell us what happened and who did kill Milfield. It’s simply a matter of trying to get things to check. The elements of the case are so simple that a child can grasp them, but when you put them together, they simply don’t fit. Let’s look at it from this angle. High tide was at five-forty-one p. m. Take the testimony of the witness, Cameron. Here, I’ll make you a schedule.”
Mason, took a pad of legal foolscap from the desk, picked up a pencil and tabulated certain figures.
Then he passed the schedule across to Paul Drake, and Della Street came to look over his shoulder.
The schedule read —
Friday night...............................................................high tide 5:41 p. m.
Low tide..................................................................three minutes past midnight, making it 12:03 Saturday morning.
Next high tide............................................................6:26 a. m. Saturday morning.
Therefore, boat was aground — so it couldn’t have been moved Friday night 8:00 p. m.
Started tilting.............................................................9:00 p.m.
Had tilted way over.....................................................10:30 p.m.
Would, therefore, start tilting back...................................2:00 a.m.
Nearly erect, but still aground.........................................3:00 a.m.
Floating again............................................................4:00 a.m.
Aground again............................................................8:45 a.m. Saturday morning.
Started tilting............................................................9:45 a.m. Saturday morning.
Tilted way over.........................................................11:15 a.m. — at time police arrive.
Drake studied the schedule and nodded. “That seems simple enough,” he said.
“All right,” Mason announced, taking the pad of legal foolscap once more, “here we have a crude diagram of the interior of the cabin and the position of the body. I’ll make two positions. Position number one which shows where the body lay when the head struck against the threshold. And position number two, where the body was found.
“Now bear this in mind, Pauclass="underline" The tilting of the yacht would roll the body down to position number two. But when the next high tide came along, the body would never roll hack to position number one. All that would happen would be that the yacht, when it floated on the next high tide, would float on an even keel. But because of the position of the anchors and the direction of the tidal currents, when the yacht started to tilt again, it would tilt over to the right side, leaving the starboard side down and the port side up. Therefore, once the body arrived at position number two, it would remain there until it was moved by some human agency. Here, take a look at the sketch and it will show you what I mean.”
Mason handed Drake the sketched diagram.
“Well,” Drake said, “there doesn’t seem to me to be any great conflict in all of this, Perry.”
Mason said, “All right, now let’s start checking the testimony and the physical facts of the case with this schedule. The autopsy surgeon says that there were no wounds on the body from which there would have been any bleeding save that gash in the back of the head which was immediately over the fractured portion of the skull and which we may, therefore, refer to as the fatal wound. Now then, there is blood on the threshold at position number one — rather a considerable amount of blood. Here. I’ll sketch that in the diagram. There is also some blood near the head of the body in position number two, leaving two distinct pools of blood in the carpet with no connection between them save a few isolated drops of blood which would have been deposited when the body rolled. Now that is to be expected because the body would lie in position number one until the tilting of the yacht caused it to start rolling. But once it had started rolling, the tilt would have been sufficiently pronounced to have made it roll over and over without stopping, until it fetched up against the right side of the cabin. Here, let’s check it on the diagram.”
Mason put the diagram down on the arm of the chair so all three of them could see it.
Drake studied the diagram silently for several seconds and said, “Well, what’s wrong with all that, Perry? That’s just the way a body would act. It would lie in one position until the tilt became enough to move it and then when that happened, the body once in motion would roll over and over until it banged up against the low side of the cabin in the position in which it was found.”
“Very good,” Mason said. “Now notice that the boat started to tilt at nine o‘clock Friday night. It hadn’t assumed its position of maximum tilt till about ten-thirty p. m. Friday night. Now the candle is tilted at about seventeen degrees, which indicates that at the time it was burning, the yacht had tilted over about half way. Therefore, we might strike some sort of an average — depending on certain factors which we can’t anticipate at the present time. But I would be inclined to say that we’d find that intermediate period when the yacht had tilted at about seventeen degrees to be rather shortly after nine o’clock — say around nine-twenty and probably not after nine-thirty, and certainly not after nine-forty.
“Now we start putting things together, bearing in mind the statement of the autopsy surgeon that the period of bleeding did not, in his opinion, cover more than half an hour.
“The body was lying with the head against the threshold of the forward cabin, or within an inch or two of that threshold in what we have referred to in the diagram as position number one, and then it rolled over to position number two, and if the bleeding didn’t continue for over half an hour, and if we find blood pools at both position number one and position number two, then we are forced to the conclusion that the murder took place somewhere around nine-fifteen Friday night after the boat bad started to tilt.”
Drake nodded and said, “That’s corroborated by the candle.”
“Exactly,” Mason said. “The condition of the candle indicates that it burned for about twenty minutes, sometime between nine o’clock p.m. and nine-forty p. m. Probably the candle was lit about nine-twenty and extinguished about nine-forty.”
“It was dark before that,” Drake said.
“Now you’re getting to some of the puzzling features of the case,” Mason said. “Either Milfield must have been sitting in the cabin in the dark, or there’s another possibility which seems to be much more feasible. That is, that there was an old stub of a candle in the position where the candle was found. Milfield lit that when it got dark, and that candle burnt itself out, whereupon Milfield pried it loose from the board to which it had been stuck, and tossed it overboard. He thereupon lit a fresh candle and...”