“My hypothesis, then, had been changed into highly probable theory. The next stage was the necessary verification. I began with a rather curious experiment. The man who tried to murder Marion could have been no other than her father’s murderer. Then he must have been Morris. But it seemed that he was totally unlike Morris, and the mask evidently suggested to her no resemblance. But yet it was probable that the man was Morris, for the striking features—the hook nose and the heavy brows—would be easily ‘made up,’ especially at night. The question was whether the face was Morris’s with these additions. I determined to put that question to the test. And here Polton’s new accomplishment came to our aid.
“First, with a pinch of clay, we built up on Morris’s mask a nose of the shape described and slightly thickened the brows. Then Polton made a gelatine mould, and from this produced a wax mask. He fitted it with glass eyes and attached it to a rough plaster head, with ears which were casts of my own painted. We then fixed on a moustache, beard, and wig, and put on a shirt, collar, and jacket. It was an extraordinarily crude affair, suggestive of the fifth of November. But it answered the purpose, which was to produce a photograph; for we made the photograph so bad—so confused and ill-focused—that the crudities disappeared, while the essential likeness remained. As you know, that photograph was instantly recognized, without any sort of suggestion. So the first test gave a positive result. Marion’s assailant was pretty certainly Morris.”
“I should like to have seen Mr. Polton’s ’prentice effort,” said Marion, who had been listening, enthralled by this description.
“You shall see it now,” Thorndyke replied with a smile. “It is in the next room, concealed in a cupboard.”
He went out, and presently returned, carrying what looked like an excessively crude hairdresser’s dummy, but a most extraordinarily horrible and repulsive one. As he turned the face towards us, Marion gave a little cry of horror and then tried to laugh—without very striking success.
“It is a dreadful-looking thing!” she exclaimed; “and so hideously like that fiend.” She gazed at it with the most extreme repugnance for a while, and then said, apologetically: “I hope you won’t think me very silly, but—”
“Of course I don’t,” Thorndyke interrupted. “It is going back to its cupboard at once;” and with this he bore it away, returning in a few moments with a smaller object, wrapped in a cloth, which he laid on the table. “Another ‘exhibit,’ as they say in the courts,” he explained, “which we shall want presently. Meanwhile we resume the thread of our argument.
“The photograph of this waxwork, then, furnished corroboration of the theory that Morris was the man whom we were seeking. My next move was to inquire at Scotland Yard if there were any fresh developments of the Van Zellen case. The answer was that there were; and Superintendent Miller arranged to come and tell me all about them. You were present at the interview and will remember what passed. His information was highly important, not only by confirming my inference that Bendelow was the murderer, but especially by disposing of the difficulty connected with the disappearance of your patient. For now there came into view a second man—Crile—who had died at Hoxton of an abdominal cancer and had been duly buried; and when you were able to give me this man’s address, a glance at the map and at the Post Office Directory showed that the two men had died in the same house. This fact, with the further facts that they had died of virtually the same disease and within a day or two of the same date, left no reasonable doubt that we were really dealing with one man, who had died and for whom two death certificates, in different names, and two corresponding burial orders, had been obtained. There was only one body, and that was cremated in the name of Bendelow. It followed that the coffin which was buried at Mr. Crile’s funeral must have been an empty coffin. I was so confident that this must be so that I induced Miller to apply for an exhumation, with the results that you know.
“There now remained only a single point requiring verification: the question as to what face it was that those two ladies saw when they looked into the coffin of Simon Bendelow. Here again Polton’s new accomplishments came to our aid. From the plaster mask your apprentice made a most realistic wax mask, which I offer for your critical inspection.”
He unfolded the cloth and produced a mask of thin, yellowish wax and of a most cadaverous aspect, which he handed to Marion.
“Yes,” she said approvingly, “it is an excellent piece of work; and what beautiful eyelashes. They look exactly like real ones.”
“They are real ones,” Thorndyke explained with a chuckle.
She looked up at him inquiringly, and then, breaking into a ripple of laughter, exclaimed: “Of course! They are his own! Oh! How like Mr. Polton. But he was quite right, you know. He couldn’t have got the effect any other way.”
“So he declared,” said Thorndyke. “Well, we hired a coffin and had an inspection window put in the lid, and we got a black skull cap. We put a dummy head in the coffin with a wig on it; we laid the mask where the
