“Well, well, well!” Mr. Bradley kindly expressed the feelings of the Circle.
“And who was it, then?” queried Miss Dammers, who had an unfortunate lack of dramatic feeling. For that matter Miss Dammers was inclined to plume herself on the fact that she had no sense of construction, and that none of her books ever had a plot. Novelists who use words like “values” and “reflexes” and “Oedipus-complex” simply won’t have anything to do with plots. “Who appeared to you in this interesting revelation, Mr. Sheringham?”
“Oh, let me work my story up a little first,” Roger pleaded.
Miss Dammers sighed. Stories, as Roger as a fellow-craftsman ought to have known, simply weren’t done nowadays. But then Roger was a bestseller, and anything is possible with a creature like that.
Unconscious of these reflections, Roger was leaning back in his chair in an easy attitude, meditating gently. When he began to speak again it was in a more conversational tone than he had used before.
“You know, this really was a very remarkable case. You and Bradley, Mrs. Fielder-Flemming, didn’t do the criminal justice when you described it as a hotch-potch of other cases. Any ideas of real merit in previous cases may have been borrowed, perhaps; but as Fielding says, in Tom Jones, to borrow from the classics, even without acknowledgment, is quite legitimate for the purposes of an original work. And this is an original work. It has one feature which not only absolves it from all charge to the contrary, but which puts it head and shoulders above all its prototypes.
“It’s bound to become one of the classical cases itself. And but for the merest accident, which the criminal for all his ingenuity couldn’t possibly have foreseen, I think it would have become one of the classical mysteries. On the whole I’m inclined to consider it the most perfectly-planned murder I’ve ever heard of (because of course one doesn’t hear of the even more perfectly-planned ones that are never known to be murders at all). It’s so exactly right—ingenious, utterly simple, and as near as possible infallible.”
“Humph! Not so very infallible, as it turned out, Sheringham, eh?” grunted Sir Charles.
Roger smiled at him.
“The motive’s so obvious, when you know where to look for it; but you didn’t know. The method’s so significant, once you’ve grasped its real essentials; but you didn’t grasp them. The traces are so thinly covered, when you’ve realised just what is covering them; but you didn’t realise. Everything was anticipated. The soap was left lying about in chunks, and we all hurried to stuff our eyes with it. No wonder we couldn’t see clearly. It really was beautifully planned. The police, the public, the press—everybody completely taken in. It seems almost a pity to have to give the murderer away.”
“Really, Mr. Sheringham,” remarked Mrs. Fielder-Flemming. “You’re getting quite lyrical.”
“A perfect murder makes me feel lyrical. If I was this particular criminal I should have been writing odes to myself for the last fortnight.”
“And as it is,” suggested Miss Dammers, “you feel like writing odes to yourself for having solved the thing.”
“I do rather,” Roger agreed.
“Well, I’ll begin with the evidence. As to that, I won’t say that I’ve got such a collection of detail as Bradley was able to amass to prove his first theory, but I think you’ll all agree that I’ve got quite enough. Perhaps I can’t do better than run through his list of twelve conditions which the murderer must fulfil, though as you’ll see I don’t by any means agree with all of them.
“I grant and can prove the first two, that the murderer must have at least an elementary knowledge of chemistry and criminology, but I disagree with both parts of the third; I don’t think a good education is really essential, and I should certainly not rule out anyone with a public-school or university education, for reasons which I’ll explain later. Nor do I agree with the fourth, that he or she must have had possession of or access to Mason’s notepaper. It was an ingenious idea of Bradley’s that the possession of the notepaper suggested the method of the crime, but I think it mistaken; a previous case suggested the method, chocolates were decided on (for a very good reason indeed, as I’ll show later) as the vehicle, and Mason’s as being the most important firm of chocolate manufacturers. It then became necessary to procure a piece of their notepaper, and I’m in a position to show how this was done.
“The fifth condition I would qualify. I don’t agree that the criminal must have possession of or access to a Hamilton No. 4 typewriter, but I do agree that such possession must have existed. In other words, I would put that condition in the past tense. Remember that we have to deal with a very astute criminal, and a very carefully planned crime. I thought it most unlikely that such an incriminating piece of evidence as the actual typewriter would be allowed to lie about for anyone to discover. Much more probable that a machine had been bought specially for the occasion. It was clear from the letter that it wasn’t a new machine which had been used. With the courage of my deduction, therefore, I spent a whole afternoon making inquiries at secondhand typewriter-shops till I ran down the place where it had been bought, and proved the buying. The shopman was able to identify my murderer from a photograph I had with me.”
“And where’s the machine now?” asked Mrs. Fielder-Flemming eagerly.
“I expect, at the bottom of the Thames. That’s my point. This criminal of mine leaves nothing to chance at all.
“With the sixth condition, about being near the post-office during the critical hour, of course I agree. My murderer has a mild alibi, but it doesn’t hold water. As to the next two, the fountain-pen and the ink, I haven’t been able to check them at all, and while I agree that their possession would be
