Part 18

“No,” roared Macauley. “I’ll see you damned first.”

“Then,” said Miller, “I arrest you on a charge of having murdered----”

The rest of the sentence was drowned in a sudden uproar. The tall, powerful negro, bellowing like an angry bull, had whipped out a large, strangely shaped knife and charged furiously at the Superintendent. But the two plain-clothes men had been watching him from behind and now sprang upon him, each seizing an arm. Two sharp, metallic clicks in quick succession, a thunderous crash and an ear-splitting yell, and the formidable barbarian lay prostrate on the floor with one massive constable sitting astride his chest and the other seated on his knees.

“Now’s your chance, Doctor,” said Miller. “I’ll get his shoes and socks off.”

As Thorndyke re-inked his plates, Miller and the local superintendent expertly removed the smart patent shoes and the green silk socks from the feet of the writhing, bellowing negro. Then Thorndyke rapidly and skilfully applied the inked plates to the soles of the feet--which I steadied for the purpose--and followed up with a dexterous pressure of the paper pad, first to one foot and then--having torn off the printed sheet--to the other. In spite of the difficulties occasioned by Macauley’s struggles, each sheet presented a perfectly clear and sharp print of the sole of the foot, even the ridge-patterns of the toes and ball of the foot being quite distinct. Thorndyke laid each of the new prints on the table beside the corresponding large photograph, and invited the two superintendents to compare them.

“Yes,” said Miller--and Superintendent Platt nodded his acquiescence--“there can’t be a shadow of a doubt. The ink-prints and the photographs are identical, to every line and skin-marking. You’ve made out your case, Doctor, as you always do.”

“So you see,” said Thorndyke, as we smoked our evening pipes on the old stone pier, “your method was a perfectly sound one, only you didn’t apply it properly. Like too many mathematicians, you started on your calculations before you had secured your data. If you had applied the simple laws of probability to the real data, they would have pointed straight to Macauley.”

“How do you suppose he lost his little toes?” I asked.

“I don’t suppose at all. Obviously it was a case of double ainhum.”

“Ainhum!” I exclaimed with a sudden flash of recollection.

“Yes; that was what you overlooked. You compared the probabilities of three diseases either of which only very rarely causes the loss of even one little toe and infinitely rarely causes the loss of both, and none of which conditions is confined to any definite class of persons; and you ignored ainhum, a disease which attacks almost exclusively the little toe, causing it to drop off, and quite commonly destroys both little toes--a disease, moreover, which is confined to the black-skinned races. In European practice ainhum is unknown, but in Africa, and to a less extent, in India, it is quite common. If you were to assemble all the men in the world who have lost both little toes, more than nine-tenths of them would be suffering from ainhum; so that, by the laws of probability, your footprints were, by nine chances to one, those of a man who had suffered from ainhum, and therefore a black-skinned man. But as soon as you had established a black man as the probable criminal, you opened up a new field of corroborative evidence. There was a black man on the spot. That man was a native of Sierra Leone and almost certainly a man of importance there. But the victim’s husband had deadly enemies in the native secret societies of Sierra Leone. The letters of the husband to the wife probably contained matter incriminating certain natives of Sierra Leone. The evidence became cumulative, you see. Taken as a whole, it pointed plainly to Macauley, apart from the new fact of the murder of Toussaint in Liverpool, a city with a considerable floating population of West Africans.”

“And I gather from your reference to the African poison, strophanthus, that you fixed on Macauley at once when I gave you my sketch of the case?”

“Yes; especially when I saw your photographs of the footprints with the absent little toes and those characteristic chigger-scars on the toes that remained. But it was sheer luck that enabled me to fit the key-stone into its place and turn mere probability into virtual certainty. I could have embraced the magician Wardale when he brought us the magic slippers. Still, it isn’t an absolute certainty, even now, though I expect it will be by to-morrow.”

And Thorndyke was right. That very evening the police entered Macauley’s chambers in Tanfield Court, where they discovered the dead woman’s attaché case. It still contained Toussaint’s letters to his wife, and one of those letters mentioned by name, as members of a dangerous secret society, several prominent Sierra Leone men, including the accused David Macauley.

III. THE NEW JERSEY SPHINX

“A rather curious neighbourhood this, Jervis,” my friend Thorndyke remarked as we turned into Upper Bedford Place; “a sort of temporary aviary for cosmopolitan birds of passage, especially those of the Oriental variety. The Asiatic and African faces that one sees at the windows of these Bloomsbury boarding-houses almost suggest an overflow from the ethnographical galleries of the adjacent British Museum.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “there must be quite a considerable population of Africans, Japanese and Hindus in Bloomsbury; particularly Hindus.”

As I spoke, and as if in illustration of my statement, a dark-skinned man rushed out of one of the houses farther down the street and began to advance towards us in a rapid, bewildered fashion, stopping to look at each street door as he came to it. His hatless condition--though he was exceedingly well dressed--and his agitated manner immediately attracted my attention, and Thorndyke’s too, for the latter remarked, “Our friend seems to be in trouble. An accident, perhaps, or a case of sudden illness.”

Here the stranger, observing our approach, ran forward to meet us and asked in an agitated tone, “Can you tell me, please, where I can find a doctor?”

“I am a medical man,” replied Thorndyke, “and so is my friend.”

Our acquaintance grasped Thorndyke’s sleeve and exclaimed eagerly:

“Come with me, then, quickly if you please. A most dreadful thing has happened.”

He hurried us along at something between a trot and a quick walk, and as we proceeded he continued excitedly, “I am quite confused and terrified; it is all so strange and sudden and terrible.”

“Try,” said Thorndyke, “to calm yourself a little and tell us what has happened.”

“I will,” was the agitated reply. “It is my cousin, Dinanath Byramji--his surname is the same as mine. Just now I went to his room and was horrified to find him lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling and blowing--like this,” and he puffed out his cheeks with a soft blowing noise. “I spoke to him and shook his hand, but he was like a dead man. This is the house.”

He darted up the steps to an open door at which a rather scared page-boy was on guard, and running along the hall, rapidly ascended the stairs. Following him closely, we reached a rather dark first-floor landing where, at a half-open door, a servant-maid stood listening with an expression of awe to a rhythmical snoring sound that issued from the room.

The unconscious man lay as Mr. Byramji had said, staring fixedly at the ceiling with wide-open, glazy eyes, puffing out his cheeks slightly at each breath. But the breathing was shallow and slow, and it grew perceptibly slower, with lengthening pauses. And even as I was timing it with my watch while Thorndyke examined the pupils with the aid of a wax match, it stopped. I laid my finger on the wrist and caught one or two slow, flickering beats. Then the pulse stopped too.

“He is gone,” said I. “He must have burst one of the large arteries.”