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(Related by Christopher Jervis, M.D.)

It was one of the axioms of medico-legal practice laid down by my colleague, John Thorndyke, that the investigator should be constantly on his guard against the effect of suggestion. Not only must all prejudices and preconceptions be avoided, but when information is received from outside, the actual, undeniable facts must be carefully sifted from the inferences which usually accompany them. Of the necessity for this precaution our insurance practice furnished an excellent instance in the case of the fire at Mr. Brattle’s oil-shop.

The case was brought to our notice by Mr. Stalker of the “Griffin” Fire and Life Insurance Society a few days after Christmas. He dropped in, ostensibly to wish us a Happy New Year, but a discreet pause in the conversation on Thorndyke’s part elicited a further purpose.

“Did you see the account of that fire in Bloomsbury?” Mr. Stalker asked.

“The oil-shop? Yes. But I didn’t note any details, excepting that a man was apparently burnt to death and that the affair happened on the twenty-fifth of December.”

“Yes, I know,” said Mr. Stalker. “It seems uncharitable, but one can’t help looking a little askance at these quarter-day fires. And the date isn’t the only doubtful feature in this one; the Divisional Officer of the Fire Brigade, who has looked over the ruins, tells me that there are some appearances suggesting that the fire broke out in two different places—the shop and the first-floor room over it. Mind you, he doesn’t say that it actually did. The place is so thoroughly gutted that very little is to be learned from it; but that is his impression; and it occurred to me that if you were to take a look at the ruins, your radiographic eye might detect something that he had overlooked.”

“It isn’t very likely,” said Thorndyke. “Every man to his trade. The Divisional Officer looks at a burnt house with an expert eye, which I do not. My evidence would not carry much weight if you were contesting the claim.”

“Perhaps not,” replied Mr. Stalker, “and we are not anxious to contest the claim unless there is manifest fraud. Arson is a serious matter.”

“It is wilful murder in this case,” remarked Thorndyke.

“I know,” said Stalker. “And that reminds me that the man who was burnt happens to have been insured in our office, too. So we stand a double loss.”

“How much?” asked Thorndyke.

“The dead man, Percival Bland, had insured his life for three thousand pounds.”

Thorndyke became thoughtful. The last statement had apparently made more impression on him than the former ones.

“If you want me to look into the case for you,” said he, “you had better let me have all the papers connected with it, including the proposal forms.”

Mr. Stalker smiled. “I thought you would say that—know you of old, you see—so I slipped the papers in my pocket before coming here.”

He laid the documents on the table and asked: “Is there anything that you want to know about the case?”

“Yes,” replied Thorndyke. “I want to know all that you can tell me.”

“Which is mighty little,” said Stalker; “but such as it is, you shall have it.”

“The oil-shop man’s name is Brattle and the dead man, Bland, was his lodger. Bland appears to have been a perfectly steady, sober man in general; but it seems that he had announced his intention of spending a jovial Christmas Night and giving himself a little extra indulgence. He was last seen by Mrs. Brattle at about half-past six, sitting by a blazing fire, with a couple of unopened bottles of port on the table and a box of cigars. He had a book in his hand and two or three newspapers lay on the floor by his chair. Shortly after this, Mr. and Mrs. Brattle went out on a visit to Hornsey, leaving him alone in the house.”

“Was there no servant?” asked Thorndyke.

“The servant had the day and night off duty to go to her mother’s. That, by the way, looks a trifle fishy. However, to return to the Brattles; they spent the evening at Hornsey and did not get home until past three in the morning, by which time their house was a heap of smoking ruins. Mrs. Brattle’s idea is that Bland must have drunk himself sleepy, and dropped one of the newspapers into the fender, where a chance cinder may have started the blaze. Which may or may not be the true explanation. Of course, an habitually sober man can get pretty mimsey on two bottles of port.”

“What time did the fire break out?” asked Thorndyke.

“It was noticed about half-past eleven that flames were issuing from one of the chimneys, and the alarm was given at once. The first engine arrived ten minutes later, but, by that time, the place was roaring like a furnace. Then the water-plugs were found to be frozen hard, which caused some delay; in fact, before the engines were able to get to work the roof had fallen in, and the place was a mere shell. You know what an oil-shop is, when once it gets a fair start.”

“And Mr. Bland’s body was found in the ruins, I suppose?”

“Body!” exclaimed Mr. Stalker; “there wasn’t much body! Just a few charred bones, which they dug out of the ashes next day.”

“And the question of identity?”

“We shall leave that to the coroner. But there really isn’t any question. To begin with, there was no one else in the house; and then the remains were found mixed up with the springs and castors of the chair that Bland was sitting in when he was last seen. Moreover, there were found, with the bones, a pocket-knife, a bunch of keys and a set of steel waistcoat buttons, all identified by Mrs. Brattle as belonging to Bland. She noticed the cut steel buttons on his waistcoat when she wished him ‘good-night.’ ”

“By the way,” said Thorndyke, “was Bland reading by the light of an oil lamp?”

“No,” replied Stalker. “There was a two-branch gasalier with a porcelain shade to one burner, and he had that burner alight when Mrs. Brattle left.”

Thorndyke reflectively picked up the proposal form, and, having glanced through it, remarked: “I see that Bland is described as unmarried. Do you know why he insured his life for this large amount?”

“No; we assumed that it was probably in connection with some loan that he had raised. I learn from the solicitor who notified us of the death, that the whole of Bland’s property is left to a cousin—a Mr. Lindsay, I think. So the probability is that this cousin had lent him money. But it is not the life claim that is interesting us. We must pay that in any case. It is the fire claim that we want you to look into.”

“Very well,” said Thorndyke; “I will go round presently and look over the ruins, and see if I can detect any substantial evidence of fraud.”

“If you would,” said Mr. Stalker, rising to take his departure, “we should be very much obliged. Not that we shall probably contest the claim in any case.”

When he had gone, my colleague and I glanced through the papers, and I ventured to remark: “It seems to me that Stalker doesn’t quite appreciate the possibilities of this case.”

“No,” Thorndyke agreed. “But, of course, it is an insurance company’s business to pay, and not to boggle at anything short of glaring fraud. And we specialists, too,” he added with a smile, “must beware of seeing too much. I suppose that, to a rhinologist, there is hardly such a thing as a healthy nose—unless it is his own—and the uric acid specialist is very apt to find the firmament studded with dumb-bell crystals. We mustn’t forget that normal cases do exist, after all.”

“That is true,” said I; “but, on the other hand, the rhinologist’s business is with the unhealthy nose, and our concern is with abnormal cases.”

Thorndyke laughed. “ ‘A Daniel come to judgment,’ ” said he. “But my learned friend is quite right. Our function is to pick holes. So let us pocket the documents and wend Bloomsbury way. We can talk the case over as we go.”

We walked at an easy pace, for there was no hurry, and a little preliminary thought was useful. After a while, as Thorndyke made no remark, I reopened the subject.

“How does the case present itself to you?” I asked.

“Much as it does to you, I expect,” he replied. “The circumstances invite inquiry, and I do not find myself connecting them with the shopkeeper. It is true that the fire occurred on quarter-day; but there is nothing to show that the insurance will do more than cover the loss of stock, chattels and the profits of trade. The other circumstances are much more suggestive. Here is a house burned down and a man killed. That man was insured for three thousand pounds, and, consequently, some person stands to gain by his death to that amount. The whole set of circumstances is highly favourable to the idea of homicide. The man was alone in the house when he died; and the total destruction of both the body and its surroundings seems to render investigation impossible. The cause of death can only be inferred; it cannot be proved; and the most glaring evidence of a crime will have vanished utterly. I think that there is a quite strong prima facie suggestion of murder. Under the known conditions, the perpetration of a murder would have been easy, it would have been safe from detection, and there is an adequate motive.

“On the other hand, suicide is not impossible. The man might have set fire to the house and then killed himself by poison or otherwise. But it is intrinsically less probable that a man should kill himself for another person’s benefit than that he should kill another man for his own benefit.

“Finally, there is the possibility that the fire and the man’s death were the result of accident; against which is the official opinion that the fire started in two places. If this opinion is correct, it establishes, in my opinion, a strong presumption of murder against some person who may have obtained access to the house.”

This point in the discussion brought us to the ruined house, which stood at the corner of two small streets. One of the firemen in charge admitted us, when we had shown our credentials, through a temporary door and down a ladder into the basement, where we found a number of men treading gingerly, ankle deep in white ash, among a litter of charred wood-work, fused glass, warped and broken china, and more or less recognisable metal objects.

“The coroner and the jury,” the fireman explained; “come to view the scene of the disaster.” He introduced us to the former, who bowed stiffly and continued his investigations.

“These,” said the other fireman, “are the springs of the chair that the deceased was sitting in. We found the body—or rather the bones—lying among them under a heap of hot ashes; and we found the buttons of his clothes and the things from his pockets among the ashes, too. You’ll see them in the mortuary with the remains.”

“It must have been a terrific blaze,” one of the jurymen remarked. “Just look at this, sir,” and he handed to Thorndyke what looked like part of a gas-fitting, of which the greater part was melted into shapeless lumps and the remainder encrusted into fused porcelain.

“That,” said the fireman, “was the gasalier of the first-floor room, where Mr. Bland was sitting. Ah! you won’t turn that tap, sir; nobody’ll ever turn that tap again.”

Thorndyke held the twisted mass of brass towards me in silence, and, glancing up the blackened walls, remarked: “I think we shall have to come here again with the Divisional Officer, but meanwhile, we had better see the remains of the body. It is just possible that we may learn something from them.”

He applied to the coroner for the necessary authority to make the inspection, and, having obtained a rather ungracious and grudging permission to examine the remains when the jury had “viewed” them, began to ascend the ladder.

“Our friend would have liked to refuse permission,” he remarked when we had emerged into the street, “but he knew that I could and should have insisted.”

“So I gathered from his manner,” said I. “But what is he doing here? This isn’t his district.”

“No; he is acting for Bettsford, who is laid up just now; and a very poor substitute he is. A non-medical coroner is an absurdity in any case, and a coroner who is hostile to the medical profession is a public scandal. By the way, that gas-tap offers a curious problem. You noticed that it was turned off?”

“Yes.”

“And consequently that the deceased was sitting in the dark when the fire broke out. I don’t see the bearing of the fact, but it is certainly rather odd. Here is the mortuary. We had better wait and let the jury go in first.”

We had not long to wait. In a couple of minutes or so the “twelve good men and true” made their appearance with a small attendant crowd of ragamuffins. We let them enter first, and then we followed. The mortuary was a good-sized room, well lighted by a glass roof, and having at its centre a long table on which lay the shell containing the remains. There was also a sheet of paper on which had been laid out a set of blackened steel waistcoat buttons, a bunch of keys, a steel-handled pocket-knife, a steel-cased watch on a partly-fused rolled-gold chain, and a pocket corkscrew. The coroner drew the attention of the jury to these objects, and then took possession of them, that they might be identified by witnesses. And meanwhile the jurymen gathered round the shell and stared shudderingly at its gruesome contents.

“I am sorry, gentlemen,” said the coroner, “to have to subject you to this painful ordeal. But duty is duty. We must hope, as I think we may, that this poor creature met a painless if in some respects a rather terrible death.”

At this point, Thorndyke, who had drawn near to the table, cast a long and steady glance down into the shell; and immediately his ordinarily rather impassive face seemed to congeal; all expression faded from it, leaving it as immovable and uncommunicative as the granite face of an Egyptian statue. I knew the symptom of old and began to speculate on its present significance.

“Are you taking any medical evidence?” he asked.

“Medical evidence!” the coroner repeated, scornfully. “Certainly not, sir! I do not waste the public money by employing so-called experts to tell the jury what each of them can see quite plainly for himself. I imagine,” he added, turning to the foreman, “that you will not require a learned doctor to explain to you how that poor fellow mortal met his death?” And the foreman, glancing askance at the skull, replied, with a pallid and sickly smile, that “he thought not.”

“Do you, sir,” the coroner continued, with a dramatic wave of the hand towards the plain coffin, “suppose that we shall find any difficulty in determining how that man came by his death?”

“I imagine,” replied Thorndyke, without moving a muscle, or, indeed, appearing to have any muscles to move, “I imagine you will find no difficulty whatever.”

“So do I,” said the coroner.

“Then,” retorted Thorndyke, with a faint, inscrutable smile, “we are, for once, in complete agreement.”

As the coroner and jury retired, leaving my colleague and me alone in the mortuary, Thorndyke remarked:

“I suppose this kind of farce will be repeated periodically so long as these highly technical medical inquiries continue to be conducted by lay persons.”

I made no reply, for I had taken a long look into the shell, and was lost in astonishment.

“But my dear Thorndyke!” I exclaimed; “what on earth does it mean? Are we to suppose that a woman can have palmed herself off as a man on the examining medical officer of a London Life Assurance Society?”

Thorndyke shook his head. “I think not,” said he. “Our friend, Mr. Bland, may conceivably have been a woman in disguise, but he certainly was not a negress.”

“A negress!” I gasped. “By Jove! So it is. I hadn’t looked at the skull. But that only makes the mystery more mysterious. Because, you remember, the body was certainly dressed in Bland’s clothes.”

“Yes, there seems to be no doubt about that. And you may have noticed, as I did,” Thorndyke continued dryly, “the remarkably fire-proof character of the waistcoat buttons, watch-case, knife-handle, and other identifiable objects.”

“But what a horrible affair!” I exclaimed. “The brute must have gone out and enticed some poor devil of a negress into the house, have murdered her in cold blood and then deliberately dressed the corpse in his own clothes! It is perfectly frightful!”

Again Thorndyke shook his head. “It wasn’t as bad as that, Jervis,” said he, “though I must confess that I feel strongly tempted to let your hypothesis stand. It would be quite amusing to put Mr. Bland on trial for the murder of an unknown negress, and let him explain the facts himself. But our reputation is at stake. Look at the bones again and a little more critically. You very probably looked for the sex first; then you looked for racial characters. Now carry your investigations a step farther.”

“There is the stature,” said I. “But that is of no importance, as these are not Bland’s bones. The only other point that I notice is that the fire seems to have acted very unequally on the different parts of the body.”

“Yes,” agreed Thorndyke, “and that is the point. Some parts are more burnt than others; and the parts which are burnt most are the wrong parts. Look at the back-bone, for instance. The vertebræ are as white as chalk. They are mere masses of bone ash. But, of all parts of the skeleton, there is none so completely protected from fire as the back-bone, with the great dorsal muscles behind, and the whole mass of the viscera in front. Then look at the skull. Its appearance is quite inconsistent with the suggested facts. The bones of the face are bare and calcined and the orbits contain not a trace of the eyes or other structures; and yet there is a charred mass of what may or may not be scalp adhering to the crown. But the scalp, as the most exposed and the thinnest covering, would be the first to be destroyed, while the last to be consumed would be the structures about the jaws and the base, of which, you see, not a vestige is left.”

Here he lifted the skull carefully from the shell, and, peering in through the great foramen at the base, handed it to me.

“Look in,” he said, “through the Foramen Magnum—you will see better if you hold the orbits towards the skylight—and notice an even more extreme inconsistency with the supposed conditions. The brain and membranes have vanished without leaving a trace. The inside of the skull is as clean as if it had been macerated. But this is impossible. The brain is not only protected from the fire; it is also protected from contact with the air. But without access of oxygen, although it might become carbonised, it could not be consumed. No, Jervis; it won’t do.”

I replaced the skull in the coffin and looked at him in surprise.

“What is it that you are suggesting?” I asked.

“I suggest that this was not a body at all, but merely a dry skeleton.”

“But,” I objected, “what about those masses of what looks like charred muscle adhering to the bones?”

“Yes,” he replied, “I have been noticing them. They do, as you say, look like masses of charred muscle. But they are quite shapeless and structureless; I cannot identify a single muscle or muscular group; and there is not a vestige of any of the tendons. Moreover, the distribution is false. For instance, will you tell me what muscle you think that is?”

He pointed to a thick, charred mass on the inner surface of the left tibia or shin-bone. “Now this portion of the bone—as many a hockey-player has had reason to realise—has no muscular covering at all. It lies immediately under the skin.”

“I think you are right, Thorndyke,” said I. “That lump of muscle in the wrong place gives the whole fraud away. But it was really a rather smart dodge. This fellow Bland must be an ingenious rascal.”

“Yes,” agreed Thorndyke; “but an unscrupulous villain too. He might have burned down half the street and killed a score of people. He’ll have to pay the piper for this little frolic.”

“What shall you do now? Are you going to notify the coroner?”

“No; that is not my business. I think we will verify our conclusions and then inform our clients and the police. We must measure the skull as well as we can without callipers, but it is, fortunately, quite typical. The short, broad, flat nasal bones, with the ‘Simian groove,’ and those large, strong teeth, worn flat by hard and gritty food, are highly characteristic.” He once more lifted out the skull, and, with a spring tape, made a few measurements, while I noted the lengths of the principal long bones and the width across the hips.

“I make the cranial-nasal index 55.1,” said he, as he replaced the skull, “and the cranial index about 72, which are quite representative numbers; and, as I see that your notes show the usual disproportionate length of arm and the characteristic curve of the tibia, we may be satisfied. But it is fortunate that the specimen is so typical. To the experienced eye, racial types have a physiognomy which is unmistakable on mere inspection. But you cannot transfer the experienced eye. You can only express personal conviction and back it up with measurements.

“And now we will go and look in on Stalker, and inform him that his office has saved three thousand pounds by employing us. After which it will be Westward Ho! for Scotland Yard, to prepare an unpleasant little surprise for Mr. Percival Bland.”

There was joy among the journalists on the following day. Each of the morning papers devoted an entire column to an unusually detailed account of the inquest on the late Percival Bland—who, it appeared, met his death by misadventure—and a verbatim report of the coroner’s eloquent remarks on the danger of solitary, fireside tippling, and the stupefying effects of port wine. An adjacent column contained an equally detailed account of the appearance of the deceased at Bow Street Police Court to answer complicated charges of arson, fraud and forgery; while a third collated the two accounts with gleeful commentaries.

Mr. Percival Bland, alias Robert Lindsay, now resides on the breezy uplands of Dartmoor, where, in his abundant leisure, he, no doubt, regrets his misdirected ingenuity. But he has not laboured in vain. To the Lord Chancellor he has furnished an admirable illustration of the danger of appointing lay coroners; and to me an unforgettable warning against the effects of suggestion.