The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

Contrary to the Evidence by Douglas Newton

Douglas Newton (1885-1951) was a prolific writer of books, articles and stories for well over forty years. He achieved a certain fame when his novel War (1914), which pretty much predicted and depicted the First World War, appeared a few months before the real War broke out. He did it all again with The North Afire (1914), which looked at the future conflict in Northern Ireland. A journalist by profession, Newton was selected to accompany the future Edward VIII on his tour of Canada just after the War and wrote about it in Westward with the Prince of Wales (1920). Newton was immensely prolific, so much so that despite having some fifty books published, that represents scarcely a tenth of his total output for magazines during the 1920s and 1930s. One such series that never made it into book-form featured Paul Toft, an investigator who served as an unofficial consultant for the police, but who acted on intuition and instinct rather than hard facts and deduction. The series ran in Pearson’s Magazine during the mid-1930s and includes the following ingenious and near perfect crime.

We sat in the room where old Stanley Park had died so suddenly that morning. As the witnesses unfolded the story, even Paul Toft seemed to grow a mere huddle of sharp knees and elbows in his arm-chair, while Inspector Grimes became a bouncing mass of irritation as he realised that he had been dragged out to Friars’ Vale on the mere reasonless suspicions of a headstrong young woman. The local police sergeant and I sympathised with him.

This was no crime, but a sheer waste of time.

Gerald Park was perfectly frank about the part he had played in the tragedy of his uncle’s death.

He had come out from Stripe to old Stanley Park to borrow money. He hadn’t had much hope of getting it, he admitted, because there was bad blood between him and his uncle – who had kicked him out of this very house for stealing, less than a month ago. He was so desperately hard up, however, he had had to make the try.

He had come out by train to Friars’ Vale Halt and had taken a taxi from there. He had timed himself to arrive about 10.30, because that was the time his uncle always read his papers in this sitting-room. He let himself in with the door-key he had kept when his uncle had turned him out. He did that because he knew that if he rang, Mrs Ferris, his uncle’s housekeeper and only servant, would not let him in. It would have been more than her place was worth, seeing how his uncle had come to hate him.

Anyhow, his idea was to slip in quietly, getting into his uncle’s presence before anything could intervene. But “springing” himself on the old man like that had proved to be a horrible mistake. His uncle saw him even before he could get into the room, and rose from his arm-chair by the fire with such a snarl of rage that Gerald stopped dead in the very doorway.

The old man made furious gestures at him to get out. Gerald spoke, attempting to placate him, but that only made matters worse. At the sound of his nephew’s voice, old Stanley Park took a step forward as though he meant to throw the weedy young man out with his own hands – and then, quite suddenly, he crumpled up and fell to the floor.

Gerald, terrified, sure that the old man had had a stroke at the sight of him, called over his shoulder to Grass, the taxi-man – for the thing had happened so swiftly that he had never even moved inside the sitting-room door. Grass ran in and together they went to the old man. Or, rather, Gerald left that to Grass, who was more competent, while he himself ran back into the hall and called out to Mrs Ferris in the kitchen, before hurrying across the hall into the dining-room to get brandy from the cellarette.

Mrs Ferris was coming up the hall as he came out with the brandy, and they went into the sitting-room together. By then Grass was sure that there was very little hope for old Stanley, though on Gerald’s instructions he drove at once for a doctor, there being no telephone in the house. Mrs Ferris had, meanwhile, taken charge of the old man, Gerald standing by doing anything she ordered. But it was plain there was nothing to be done, and indeed old Stanley was dead before the doctor arrived, about ten minutes later.

Gerald Park, a weedy, rather slick fellow in the early twenties, was clad in smart clothes now gone to seed, rather shamefacedly “supposed” that the sight of him had given his uncle the shock that killed him. He admitted his uncle had good cause for anger against him – he’d behaved like a heartless young fool. Although his uncle had taken him into his home when his father died a few years ago, and had been as kind as his strict nature allowed, he, Gerald, had played fast and loose, got himself into bad company and ways and ended-well, by robbing his uncle on the sly.

He hadn’t any excuse. Of course, he’d hoped to pay the money back sometime, and he probably would have if someone hadn’t sneaked to his uncle and so caused the final explosion. After that he hadn’t a chance. His uncle was terribly down on that sort of thing. He’d been absolutely beside himself with fury and had turned Gerald out of his house then and there. That was his way. Drove his own nephew right out of his life from that moment, warning him never on any account to show his face in Friars’ Vale again.

Perhaps he oughtn’t to have risked coming back, seeing how bitterly the old man felt, but, as he’d said, he was absolutely on the rocks and had to get money somehow – and then, how was he to know that the sight of him would have such a fatal effect?

A straightforward story. Grass, the taxi-driver, not only confirmed it, but strengthened it by several items Gerald Park had left unsaid.

For instance, he had kept his taxi waiting beside the door because Gerald had given him the wink… Well, wink was a manner of speaking. Gerald had asked him to wait in a sheepish sort of way, and Grass, knowing how things were between old Stanley and that young blackg- this nephew of his, as all the village did, anticipated a quick return fare with Gerald being booted out.

While Grass waited he watched Gerald. That was easy. Gerald left the front door wide open – for a quick run out, of course, should his uncle turn nasty. As the sitting-room door was just to the left of the hall, Grass naturally saw Gerald open that. Saw him all the time, in fact, for he never really went over the threshold of the sitting-room-never had the chance from the look of it.

Yes, Gerald stopped dead in the doorway. He seemed scared to go in. Grass heard him call out loud something like, “But, Uncle, give me a chance…” After that there was a crash inside the room, and Gerald turned a frightened face over his shoulder, yelling that his uncle had had a fit or something.

Gerald was so paralysed with surprise that Grass had to push him out of the sitting-room doorway to get at the old man. He found Stanley Park in a heap beside his arm-chair-yes, right across the room, by the fire – and, from the look of him, there wasn’t much chance. Oh, he was still alive, but it was plain his heart had burst or something, at the sight of Gerald, and it was all u.p.

No, Gerald hadn’t gone near him. He stood hovering away off by the door like a frightened puppy, until, suddenly, he thought of the brandy and Mrs Ferris. Grass had heard him yelling for Mrs Ferris. She came in ahead of Gerald, who handed her the brandy and glass; he was still that scared and helpless. In fact, the only thing the feller did try to do was to take off his coat and hand it to him to put under his uncle’s head. Even then Mrs Ferris had stopped him and made him fetch a cushion instead.

Mrs Ferris, a rabbit-mouthed, but plump and motherly sort of woman, bore all this out. She had been at the scullery sink washing the breakfast things when she heard Master Gerald call. She had come at once, after drying her hands. Master Gerald was coming from the dining-room with the brandy and glass in his hands as she reached the sitting-room door. He shouted that his uncle had been taken ill, and she ran into the sitting-room. She didn’t like the look of the old gentleman at all, and sent Grass for the doctor.

No, it was she who gave that order; maybe Master Gerald repeated it to Grass, but the poor boy was so terribly upset he did not know what he was doing. Yes, he stood about helpless the other side of the room, so flummoxed at what had happened that he seemed terrified of coming near his uncle. Yes, he did take off his coat for his uncle’s head, which only showed how struck all-of-a-heap the poor boy was, seeing he could have reached for any of three cushions from the settee.

Mrs Ferris’s manner made it plain that she had a warm corner in her heart for Gerald. She agreed that he’d been wild and reckless, and that his uncle had been terribly set against him because of his theft. But she held he’d been led away by his kind heart. Also, though she didn’t want to cast no aspersions, there was those who had worked against him, too. Yes, Miss Barbara Tabard, if they must have it. All she would say was that if Miss Barbara had only let well alone, poor old Mr Stanley would be alive and happy now.

Miss Barbara Tabard was the reason why we were in the case. She was the daughter of Stanley Park’s sister, and she and Gerald were the only living relatives of the dead man. She lived in Stripe, where she taught in an elementary school, for she was an independent, pretty, and vehement girl in the middle twenties.

For these reasons she had an enmity for Gerald, whom she considered a slimy, unscrupulous little sponger who had wormed his way into their uncle’s good graces solely to feather his own nest. She had already told us quite frankly that it was she who had discovered his thefts and so caused the break between him and his uncle.

Barbara had made the twenty minutes’ journey from Stripe immediately on receiving the wire about her uncle’s death. Finding Gerald on the scene, she had become suspicious at once. Also she found Stanley Park’s doctor puzzled. He could not understand how the old man had come to die from heart failure-as it seemed. Only a few months before, he had given Stanley Park a thorough overhaul, and his heart had then been as sound as a bell. Of course, a shock might have made a difference, but he was perplexed.

Barbara had seized on that (“She would,” Grimes had snarled). She at once became sure there had been foul play. She declared that Gerald would stop at nothing when it was a question of money. And there was a question of money. Stanley Park had been a rich man. He had meant the bulk of his fortune to go to Gerald, as his natural heir, with a smaller sum for her, Barbara. But after Gerald’s exposure and disgrace he had decided to make a fresh will, cutting Gerald out entirely and leaving everything to her.

Gerald, Barbara insisted, must have learnt that he was altering his will and so taken a desperate step to prevent his own disinheritance. The doctor and even the local sergeant thought her suspicions too wild in the face of the evidence, but the impetuous girl promptly tackled the indulgent Mrs Ferris and forced from her an admission that, not only had she been in correspondence with Gerald, but that she had told him that his uncle had actually made an appointment with his lawyer for the next week in order do put the alteration of his will finally in hand.

On learning that, Miss Barbara went off the deep end, as the local sergeant put it, telling him that if he did not move she herself would go to headquarters at Stripe and force the police to take action. As she was plainly the sort to keep her word-with interest – the harassed sergeant decided that the best way out would be to let Stripe hold the baby, so to speak; so he had ‘phoned headquarters. That was why Inspector Grimes and Paul Toft had picked me up at my consulting-room on the way to Friars’ Vale. As Medical Officer I might find something that Stanley Park’s doctor had missed. But they hadn’t much hope. As Grimes said when we’d finished with the witnesses.

“Sheer waste of time an’ tissue. On the face of it, this Gerald Park never had a chance o’ doing anything to his uncle, even if he wanted to. There never was a case in it…”

“I don’t know… I feel…” Paul Toft muttered, and at that ominous “Kill,” we swung on him – and gaped. He had not uncoiled his lank limbs, but his left hand was churning away at a soft piece of india-rubber, that unmistakable sign that his queer mind had sensed crime.

“But – but you can’t feel,” Grimes protested. “Everything’s against foul play. There’s no hint of wound or bruise on the body, for instance, an’ there couldn’t be. Gerald never went within fifteen feet of his uncle. An’ that taxi-driver, who was watching him all the time, saw nothing suspicious.”

“Yes, that taxi-odd,” Paul Toft’s great domed forehead frowned. “Less than ten minutes’ walk from the station – yet this youngster, though he’s financially on the rocks, took a taxi… Queer extravagance, eh?”

“No! Just the sort o’ fool thing his sort does,” Grimes was curtly brushing the suggestion away, when I found myself blurting with that strange impulse that is so often helpful to Toft’s curious gift:

“That driver made a very useful witness, though. Only one who could, with those trees screening the carriage-way. That might be a reason for taking a taxi… And doesn’t he seem to have made the most of it? I mean leaving the front door open and so forth.”

“That’s been explained,” Grimes began, but Toft flashed at me the smile that always tells I have given him a lead, and nodded.

“Ah, Doctor, you always touch the point… You’re right. There’s a certain overemphasis… His strange keeping away from his uncle, for instance… He let the taxi-driver and Mrs Ferris do everything while he stood afar off. Seems a bit over-done-pointed…”

“Yes,” I agreed, “as though he was definitely trying to create the impression that he could not possibly have had anything to do with his uncle’s death.”

“What – you mean you think he had?” Grimes cried.

“I feel – yes, I feel that murder was done here,” Paul Toft said with his most dreamy conviction.

We stared at him. When Paul Toft talked like that we no longer scoffed, he’d proved those extraordinary “feelings” of his too often. But even I could not feel quite convinced. If ever there was a case when the whole mass of the evidence made murder seem quite impossible, this was it. In fact, Grimes all but bellowed:

“How in the name o’ Job did he do it then? Look, the old man was in this chair, by the fireplace. Gerald stood in the door there, fifteen feet away. He was under observation all the time. He simply couldn’t ha’ done a thing, or raised a hand without the taxi-man knowing all about it. How then? Did he mesmerise the old chap to death-or what?”

Even Toft had no answer to that. On the face of it, it was quite impossible for Gerald Park to have struck his uncle down. Unless, as I said: “He shot him from the doorway.”

Directly I spoke I knew I’d said a foolish thing. Though Toft looked at me sharply, Grimes let go a savage bark. “Funny how we’ve all overlooked the loud report of a pistol. A darn loud report, get me, seeing it was fired inside the house. I wonder why the taxi-driver forgot to mention hearing a little thing like that… aye, an’ seeing Gerald using his pistol.”

I wanted to kick myself for blurting without thinking. Not only would it have been impossible for the taxi-man to miss such pistol play, Mrs Ferris must have heard the report too. Crestfallen, then, I was surprised when Toft unlimbered his reedy limbs, and, ignoring Grimes’ “What the devil -?” crossed to the door to call the taxi-man into the room again.

But even the suggestion of hope that brought proved vain. The taxi-man was as contemptuous of the pistol idea as Grimes.

“A pistol? Not a chance,” he said emphatically. “I tell you I had my eyes on Gerald all the time… Expecting fireworks when his uncle saw him, you see. He couldn’t ha’ used a pistol without my seeing-let alone me hearing.”

“That’s sure-you heard nothing?” Grimes insisted.

“Not a thing-an’ I know what pistols sound like, too.”

“He might have been using one with a silencer,” I put in. “You say he called out loudly to his uncle…”

“He did, sir. But that made no manner o’ difference. I mean, I’m ready to swear there wasn’t even the ghost of another noise.”

“Your engine was still running though,” Toft put in.

“Maybe,” the man shrugged. “But that wouldn’t make any difference. We get so used to it we hear other sounds agin it – and I’d have heard even a silencer… An’ then, as I say, I was watching him close. He didn’t make the motions like shooting. Just stood still an’ stiff all the time.”

“How can you be so sure?” I objected. “Can you remember exactly how he stood?”

“Well, I can then,” the man snapped. “He stood practically half out o’ that sitting-room door all the time. His hand was holding it open by the knob all the time… the nearest hand that’d be, the left. His right hand was in his pocket. His arm never lifted or moved or anything-no, not even up to when I shoved him aside to go in to his uncle.”

“But that means his right hand was hidden from you by his body,” I fill muttered. “I’ve heard of people shooting from their pockets…”

Grimes cut in: “You say Gerald took off his coat to put under his uncle’s head – were you able to see if there was a pistol in its pocket, or anywhere on him?”

“There wasn’t, sir,” the taxi-man declared. “I’m certain of that. I’ll tell you why: I noticed how ragged the lining of that coat was, thinking what a come-down it was for a chap like him. It was so ragged that I couldn’t ha’ missed seeing a pistol poking out or bulging. Another thing. It was me he handed the coat to before Mrs Ferris told him to get a cushion-an’ from the weight o’ that coat, there couldn’t have been a pistol in it.”

That seemed conclusive enough, yet Paul Toft muttered: “Odd bit of by-play, that coat business… as though it were part of a thought-up alibi…”

We did not pay much attention to him. The pistol theory was destroyed, especially as the taxi-man went on:

“An’ it’s all stuff, anyhow. As if I didn’t know what bullets do to people… I saw plenty enough in the War. An’ there was no sign o’ wound on poor old Mr Stanley.”

That clinched the matter, as it were, but it also reminded me that it was about time I took a look at the dead man. The body had been taken into the sitting-room behind the one we were in, and as I examined it the thought of foul play receded farther and farther from my mind. There was simply no sign of wound or violence. I pointed this out to Paul Toft, who stood brooding over me as I worked.

“Eh? Nothing there, Doctor?” he muttered, coming out of his medium’s trance… “Nothing that would show, no… I feel that’s it… Something that was sure not to show… How?” He examined the body. “Hair, maybe… Hair still thick and black…”

“It couldn’t hide a bullet wound,” I said.

“No… no, not a bullet wound, but… How would he have stood as Gerald came into the door? Left front to Gerald, eh…? Shave the head on the left side, please, Doctor…”

I did this, not with much hope, but rather because I was always peculiarly under the spell of this strange, lank man’s strange powers. The more of the surface of the skull I uncovered the more pessimistic I became-until Toft’s bony finger prodded forward and he muttered:

“What do you make of that, Doctor?”

It was a tiny puncture in the skin well above the left ear, a little red speck so small that it might have been anything from a flea-bite to the prick of a needle-point. I said as much.

“Needle-point!” he breathed. “Ah, we’re getting warmer.”

“How?” barked Grimes, who had joined us after a routine search of the house. “You suggesting that Gerald jabbed a poisoned needle into the old fellow? Just when did he manage that-never having been near him?”

“A dart might have done it”; I had taken fire at Toft’s suggestion. “A poisoned dart.”

“Fine!” Inspector Grimes jeered. “An’ Gerald being a rackety one was no doubt a first-class darter from practice in pubs. Only you’re forgetting the taxi-man swears he never took his hand from his pocket. Also…”

“An air-pistol fires darts,” I said excitedly. “And, by Jove, an air-pistol makes next to no noise, not enough to be heard above the sound of a taxi-engine, I’ll bet.”

“Fine, Doctor,” Toft smiled at me, but the Inspector went on grimly:

“As I was about to finish-also even air-pistol darts aren’t invisible to the naked eye. They’re quite solid bits of metal, with a point and a lead butt an’ tufts o’ silk to steady ’em. How is it the taxi-man missed such a dart sticking in the old man’s head? Remember Gerald never went near enough to pull it out.”

“I feel… it fell out,” Toft said, but I could not support him there. From the nature of the wound it would have remained sticking into the head.

“The doctor doesn’t think so,” Grimes said, reading my face. “Also, say it did fall out, it would have dropped close to the body. It’s a plain dark brown carpet in that room. Would the taxi-man, Mrs Ferris, and the other doctor have missed seeing it as they worked on the body? It’s a thousand to one against. There was no sign of it in the room then – no sign of it now. I’ve been over that room with a hand-brush. I’ll show you.”

He called out, and the local sergeant brought in a dust-pan with the sweepings of the sitting-room. There was little more than a litter of fluff and scraps, tiny bits of coal, fragments of paper, a couple of wireless screws, a thin, capped pencil, also the little red cylinder of indiarubber that belonged to it though it had been trodden out, one or two buttons, the half of what looked like the elastic button strap of a pair of braces… stuff like that, but no sign of anything like a dart.

“You’re going to say Gerald might have picked his dart up,” Grimes said. “Well, I don’t think he could have, not before it was seen. What’s more, I don’t think he’d risk his neck on anything so conspicuous… And then, there’s the pistol? What became of that? There’s no sign of it anywhere about or on Gerald… No, it won’t wash. You’re only making a case out o’ moonbeams, Toft.”

It seemed so. I stood dejected. Paul Toft said in his dreamy calm:

“There’s no getting over that.” He touched the tiny puncture on the skull. “That’s how he died… I feel that. And he was deliberately wounded under the hair so that we’d miss it.”

“Oh, heck!” wailed Grimes; “an’ I’ve just been telling you that all the facts say no!”

“Of course they would. The whole thing was carefully, brilliantly schemed to make facts say no,” the reedy man mused on. “From the careful employment of that taxi-driver as a witness, to the firing of an all but silent air-pistol from the pocket… a helpfully ragged pocket, remember… And you’ll probably find that Gerald Park is a first-rate marksman.”

“I probably will,” the Inspector said bitterly. “That won’t be so hard as to find how he managed to make a dart and a pistol vanish into thin air under the noses of witnesses. Just crank up a really good feeling to explain that, my lad.”

Toft only blinked and looked at me, and in trying to think of a way out I did remember something.

“Just precisely when did Gerald offer his empty coat to his uncle?” I asked.

“Didn’t you hear Mrs Ferris say it was after she came into the sitting-room,” Grimes said sourly.

“After he’d fetched the brandy,” Toft put in swiftly. “Yes, that’s the loophole, Doctor. He was out of sight of witnesses, at least while he was in the dining-room getting the brandy.”

“An’ a fat lot that’s going to help,” Grimes said as we went into the dining-room. It was, indeed, sparsely furnished; just a gate-table, six stiff chairs, and a side-board with two cupboards, one of which was the cellarette.

“I’ve even searched behind the pictures; there’s nothing here,” Grimes began, and added as Toft walked straight towards a French window in the rear, that opened on to the garden. “An’ that’s no good, either. It’s been locked all winter, an’ the key’s not in it.”

“That’s what makes it queer,” Paul Toft said. “The key’s usually left in this sort of window from year’s end to year’s end. Did someone want to create the impression that nobody could have got out through this window to-day?” He stood still, staring at the lock with his queer other – worldly gaze. Then he muttered:

“Hum! Someone locking this window, snatching out the key, moving on the run to the room across the hall… where would he hide the key?” His eyes twinkled at me. “How’s this for real pukka police deduction, Doctor? There’s a hall stand full of umbrellas on the way… Wouldn’t he toss the key into them in passing?”

I went to the hall stand. The third bulgy umbrella I upended and shook, shot a key to the hall floor. It fitted the French window.

We stepped through it on to a small redtiled veranda overlooking the garden. This was without railing, but it had an inclined glass roof supported by pillars to keep off the rain. We stood and looked at half an acre of neat garden.

“You think he might have nipped out here and chucked his pistol into one of them bushes, or hidden it in one of the flowerbeds?” Grimes asked in a voice not so assured as it had been. “A mug’s trick. He’d ha’ known bushes and flower-beds are the first things we think of.”

“And being a smart fellow he would think of a cleverer place,” Toft said. “Cleverer but handy… easy to use in a hurry, handy to get at when suspicious people like ourselves had gone.”

He stepped out into the garden and looked up at the roof of the veranda. A gutter ran along the edge of it, terminating in large, old-fashioned rain-water heads and down pipes at each end. With his left hand churning away at its indiarubber, Toft walked to the nearest down pipe, stretched his reedy arm up into the rain-water head, and, after a sharp tug, brought his hand away – with an air-pistol.

It was a short, but obviously powerful weapon with a rather full bore, and looked of foreign make. Toft broke it, charging its air chamber, and fired. It made very little sound, and was plainly in perfect working order.

“Job!” Grimes said in grudging admiration. “Your feelings do get you there, I fill… He’s a smart one, that Gerald, just fancy his thinking of locking the window after hiding this and then hiding the key to keep us from looking here… All the same, there’s the dart. He’s got everything so neatly alibi-ed that you’ll have to prove that dart before you can be sure of pinning it on him.”

That was a fact. Paul Toft stood, his great head brooding as he churned away at his indiarubber. Grimes and I examined the pistol, talking quietly not to disturb him. It was an interesting pistol, and I pointed out some oddnesses about it to Grimes – the size of the bore, for instance.

“Too big to carry any air-gun pellet I know,” I said. “Why, you could shoot a pencil from that.”

“Pencil!” Toft’s voice came suddenly, alight with eagerness. “That’s it, Doctor… I wonder why I felt?… But I remember reading about it now.”

“What?” both Grimes and I demanded in one voice, but his lank limbs were carrying him headlong into the house, and he was calling to the sergeant for the pan of sitting-room sweepings.

He was in the sitting-room when they were brought. Toft picked from the mess the little cylinder of rubber that had dropped out of the cap of the pencil.

“Clever,” he muttered. “Devilish clever… Dropping that pencil, too…”

“What’s the pencil got to do with it?” Grimes frowned.

“Nothing,” Toft grinned, “but you’d never suspect that, would you? This bit of rubber looks as if it belonged to that pencil, doesn’t it? Just an ordinary eraser off the top of a pencil. But look-” Toft broke the pistol, exposing the breech hole, and into that he shoved the rubber cylinder. “It fits the pistol as perfectly as any lead slug, you see. Doctor, will you put that big book on top of that arm-chair. Good, now put a sheet of clean notepaper against it… and stand clear. I’m not such a good shot as Gerald Park.”

But he was good enough. He walked to the door, just where Gerald had stood, though instead of shooting from his pocket he took aim in the orthodox way, and fired.

Again the pistol made only a slight sound; a much sharper rap came from the paper where the rubber pellet struck. It struck with such force, in fact, that it bounded right across the room, and only Toft’s sharp eyes followed it to a corner under the book-case some twelve feet away.

“Your eyes show you the first advantage of such a bullet,” Paul Toft said. “Being rubber – having, in fact, a pneumatic tip – it bounces away with great violence from whatever it strikes. Bounces, you might say, right out of range of the victim, so that there is little chance of its being connected with him… and being innocent rubber, anyhow, it is likely to be over-looked. Only it’s not innocent rubber…”

He walked across the room and lifted up the sheet of notepaper the bullet had struck. On that paper we saw a faint ring impression made by the head of the rubber, and in the centre of it a tiny puncture – just such a puncture as had pierced the skin of Stanley Park’s head. It was then that we realised that there must be a needle bedded in that rubber cylinder. Paul Toft proved it to us.

Rescuing the bullet from under the book-case, he held it delicately by one end, and, taking a pair of tweezers from his pocket, pressed the outer edges of the circular top down. As he did that, a tiny needle-point emerged from an almost imperceptible hole in the nose, a needle-point no more than an eighth of an inch long, but, if that point was poisoned – deadly.

“I read about this some time ago… but forgot it until Doctor Jaynes stirred my memory,” the dreamy fellow smiled. “They’ve been using this deadly weapon in several countries of Europe for safe and secret murder. You can see how horribly efficient it is. An assassin can shoot at his man anywhere, in the street, in a crowd, in a theatre. Nobody hears the report of the air-pistol, so nobody can trace the shooter. The victim falls dead, but nobody knows how he dies. There is only that tiny poison hole, hidden by the hair, no doubt, as in Stanley Park’s case. The bullet – that has already bounced off into the litter of the street… it automatically vanishes when it has done its work. Even if fired in a room it can be covered up, as Gerald Park so nearly covered it up, by dropping a pencil from which the rubber eraser is missing… so you would think the bullet merely part of that…”

“Almost fool proof,” Grimes nodded. “When the murdered man tumbled down without wound, without any hint of anybody attacking him, it’d naturally be taken for heart failure or a stroke, as we thought Stanley Park’s death was; and all the murderer has to do is to walk away… Just as Gerald Park nearly did – but won’t.”

But I am afraid Gerald Park did. When Grimes arrested him he was startled, but took it quietly. He simply couldn’t believe we had caught him until he heard the charge read over to him, and saw the pistol. Even then he went quietly to his cell – and committed suicide. He’d been searched, of course, very carefully, but the police had overlooked a further quality of that deadly little indiarubber bullet. It could be too easily hidden. He’d hidden another bullet in the turn-up of his trousers, we thought. But we could never be sure. He was found next morning with the rubber cylinder gripped tight in his fist. The point driven into his palm, so that the hydrocyanic compound on it had done its deadly work. Thus we never knew how he had come to plan his murder – even though Paul Toft had brought it home to him.