For a sensible time we all stood in breathless silence gazing down at that incredible sack. Suddenly Miller looked up eagerly at Thorndyke, whose sphinx-like countenance showed the faintest shadow of a smile.
“You knew this coffin was empty, Doctor?” said he.
Thorndyke shook his head. “If I had known,” he replied, “I should have told you.”
“Well, you suspected that it was empty.”
“Yes,” Thorndyke admitted, “I don’t deny that.”
“I wonder why you did, and why it never occurred to me.”
“It did not occur to you, perhaps, because you were not in possession of certain suggestive facts which are known to me. Still, if you consider that the circumstances surrounding the alleged deaths of these two men were so incredible as to make us both feel certain that there was some fallacy or deception in regard to the apparent facts, you will see that this was a very obvious possibility. Two men were alleged to have died, and one of them was certainly cremated. It followed that either the other man had died, as alleged, or that his funeral was a mock funeral. There was no other alternative. You must admit that, Miller.”
“I do, I do,” the Superintendent replied ruefully. “It is always like this. Your explanations are so obvious when you have given them, and yet no one thinks of them but yourself. All the same, this isn’t so very obvious, even now. There are some extraordinary discrepancies that have yet to be explained. But we can discuss them on the way back. The question now is, what is to be done with this coffin?”
“The first thing to be done,” replied Thorndyke, “is to screw on the lid. Then we can leave the cemetery authorities to deal with it. But those men must be sworn to absolute secrecy. That is vitally important, for if this exhumation should get reported in the Press, we should probably lose the whole advantage of this discovery.”
“Yes, by Jove!” the Superintendent agreed, emphatically. “It would be a disaster. At present, the late Mr. Crile is at large, perfectly happy and secure and entirely off his guard. We can just follow him up at our leisure and take him unawares. But if he got wind of this, he would be out of reach in a twinkling—that is, if he is alive, which I suppose—” and here the Superintendent suddenly paused, with knitted brows.
“Exactly,” said Thorndyke. “The advantage of surprise is with us, and we must keep it at all costs. You realize the position,” he added, addressing the cemetery official and the Medical Officer.
“Perfectly,” the latter replied, a little glumly, I thought, “and you may rely on us both to do everything that we can to keep the affair secret.”
With this we all emerged from the screen and walked back slowly towards the gate; and as we went, I strove vainly to get my ideas into some kind of order. But the more I considered the astonishing event which had just happened the more incomprehensible did it appear. And yet I saw plainly that it could not really be incomprehensible since Thorndyke had actually arrived at its probability in advance. The glaring discrepancies and inconsistencies which chased one another through my mind could not be real. They must be susceptible of reconciliation with the observed facts. But by no effort was I able to reconcile them.
Nor, evidently, was I alone the subject of these difficulties and bewilderments. The Superintendent walked with corrugated brows and an air of profound cogitation, and even Usher—when he could detach his thoughts from the juvenile choir at the funeral—was obviously puzzled. In fact, it was he who opened the discussion as the carriage moved off.
“This job,” he observed with conviction, “is what the sporting men would call a fair knockout. I can’t make head nor tail of it. You talk of the late Mr. Crile being at large and perfectly happy. But the late Mr. Crile died of cancer of the pancreas. I attended him in his illness. There was no doubt about the cancer, though I wouldn’t swear to the pancreas. But he died of cancer all right. I saw him dead; and, what is more, I helped to put him into that coffin. What do you say to that, Dr. Thorndyke?”
“What is there to say?” was the elusive reply. “You are a competent observer, and your facts are beyond dispute. But inasmuch as Mr. Crile was not in that coffin when we opened it, the unavoidable inference is that after you had put him in, somebody else must have taken him out.”
“Yes, that is clear enough,” rejoined Usher. “But what has become of him? The man was dead; that I am ready to swear to. But where is he?”
“Yes,” said Miller. “That is what is bothering me. There has evidently been some hanky-panky. But I can’t follow it. It isn’t as though we were dealing with a supposititious body. There was a real dead man. That isn’t disputed—at least, I take it that it isn’t.”
“It certainly is not disputed by me,” said Thorndyke.
“Then what the deuce became of him? And why, in the name of blazes, was he taken out of the coffin? That’s what I want to know. Can you tell me, Doctor? But there! What is the good of asking you? Of course you know all about it! You always do. But it is the same old story. You have got the ace of trumps up your sleeve, but you won’t bring it out
