<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2><span>VIII</span> <span class="smaller">FINGER-PRINTS</span></h2>
<p>Hilton Toye was the kind of American who knew London as well as most
Londoners, and some other capitals a good deal better than their
respective citizens of corresponding intelligence. His travels were
mysteriously but enviably interwoven with business; he had an air of
enjoying himself, and at the same time making money to pay for his
enjoyment, wherever he went. His hotel days were much the same all over
Europe: many appointments, but abundant leisure. As, however, he never
spoke about his own affairs unless they were also those of the
listener—and not <span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</SPAN></span>always then—half his acquaintances had no idea how
he made his money, and the other half wondered how he spent his time. Of
his mere interests, which were many, Toye made no such secret; but it
was quite impossible to deduce a main industry from the by-products of
his level-headed versatility.</p>
<p>Criminology, for example, was an obvious by-product; it was no morbid
taste in Hilton Toye, but a scientific hobby that appealed to his mental
subtlety. And subtle he was, yet with strange simplicities; grave and
dignified, yet addicted to the expressive phraseology of his less
enlightened countrymen; naturally sincere, and yet always capable of
some ingenuous duplicity.</p>
<p>The appeal of a Blanche Macnair to such a soul needs no analysis. She
had struck through all complexities to the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</SPAN></span> core, such as it was or as
she might make it. As yet she could only admire the character the man
had shown, though it had upset her none the less. At Engelberg he had
proposed to her "inside of two weeks," as he had admitted without
compunction at the time. It had taken him, he said, about two minutes to
make up his mind; but the following summer he had laid more deliberate
siege, in accordance with some old idea that she had let fall to soften
her first refusal. The result had been the same, only more explicit on
both sides. She had denied him the least particle of hope, and he had
warned her that she had not heard the last of him by any means, and
never would till she married another man. This had incensed her at the
time, but a great deal less on subsequent reflection; and such was the
position between that pair when Toye and<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</SPAN></span> Cazalet landed in England from
the same steamer.</p>
<p>On this second day ashore, as Cazalet sat over a late breakfast in
Jermyn Street, Toye sent in his card and was permitted to follow it,
rather to his surprise. He found his man frankly divided between
kidneys-and-bacon and the morning paper, but in a hearty mood,
indicative of amends for his great heat in yesterday's argument. A
plainer indication was the downright yet sunny manner in which Cazalet
at once returned to the contentious topic.</p>
<p>"Well, my dear Toye, what do you think of it now?"</p>
<div class="center"><ANTIMG src="images/ill02.jpg" width-obs='479' height-obs='700' alt="What do you think of it now" /></div>
<p class="bold">"What do you think of it now?"</p>
<p>"I was going to ask you what you thought, but I guess I can see from your face."</p>
<p>"I think the police are rotters for not setting him free last night!"</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>"Scruton?"</p>
<p>"Yes. Of course, the case'll break down when it comes on next week, but
they oughtn't to wait for that. They've no right to detain a man in
custody when the bottom's out of their case already."</p>
<p>"But—but the papers claim they've found the very things they were
searching for." Toye looked nonplused, as well he might, by an
apparently perverse jubilation over such intelligence.</p>
<p>"They haven't found the missing cap!" crowed Cazalet. "What they have
found is Craven's watch and keys, and the silver-mounted truncheon that
killed him. But they found them in a place where they couldn't possibly
have been put by the man identified as Scruton!"</p>
<p>"Say, where was that?" asked Toye with great interest. "My paper only
says the things were found, not where."</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>"No more does mine, but I can tell you, because I helped to find 'em."</p>
<p>"You don't say!"</p>
<p>"You'll never grasp where," continued Cazalet. "In the foundations under the house!"</p>
<p>Details followed in all fulness; the listener might have had a part in
the Uplands act of yesterday's drama, might have played in the library
scene with his adored Miss Blanche, so vividly was every minute of that
crowded hour brought home to him. He also had seen the original
writing-cupboard in Michelangelo's old Florentine house; he remembered
it perfectly, and said that he could see the replica, with its shelf of
a desk stacked with cigars, and the hole in its floor. He was not so
sure that he had any very definite conception of the foundations of an English house.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>"Ours were like ever so many little tiny rooms," said Cazalet, "where I
couldn't stand nearly upright even as a small boy without giving my head
a crack against the ground floors. They led into one another by a lot of
little manholes—tight fits even for a boy, but nearly fatal to the boss
policeman yesterday! I used to get in through one with a door, at the
back of a slab in the cellars where they used to keep empty bottles;
they keep 'em there still, because that's how I led my party out last night."</p>
<p>Cazalet's little gift of description was not ordered by an equal sense
of selection. Hilton Toye, edging in his word in a pause for a gulp of
coffee, said he guessed he visualized—but just where had those missing
things been found?</p>
<p>"Three or four compartments from the first one under the library," said Cazalet.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>"Did you find them?"</p>
<p>"Well, I kicked against the truncheon, but Drinkwater dug it up. The
watch and keys were with it."</p>
<p>"Say, were they buried?"</p>
<p>"Only in the loose rubble and brick-dusty stuff that you get in foundations."</p>
<p>"Say, that's bad! That murderer must have known something, or else it's
a bully fluke in his favor."</p>
<p>"I don't follow you, Toye."</p>
<p>"I'm thinking of finger-prints. If he'd just've laid those things right
down, he'd have left the print of his hand as large as life for Scotland Yard."</p>
<p>"The devil he would!" exclaimed Cazalet. "I wish you'd explain," he
added; "remember I'm a wild man from the woods, and only know of these
things by the vaguest kind of hearsay and stray paragraphs in the
papers. I never knew<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</SPAN></span> you could leave your mark so easily as all that."</p>
<p>Toye took the breakfast menu and placed it face downward on the
tablecloth. "Lay your hand on that, palm down," he said, "and don't move
it for a minute."</p>
<p>Cazalet looked at him a moment before complying; then his fine, shapely,
sunburnt hand lay still as plaster under their eyes until Toye told him
he might take it up. Of course there was no mark whatever, and Cazalet laughed.</p>
<p>"You should have caught me when I came up from those foundations, not
fresh from my tub!" said he.</p>
<p>"You wait," replied Hilton Toye, taking the menu gingerly by the edge,
and putting it out of harm's way in the empty toast-rack. "You can't see
anything now, but if you come round to the Savoy I'll show you something."</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>"What?"</p>
<p>"Your prints, sir! I don't say I'm Scotland Yard at the game, but I can
do it well enough to show you how it's done. You haven't left your mark
upon the paper, but I guess you've left the sweat of your hand; if I
snow a little French chalk over it, the chalk'll stick where your hand
did, and blow off easily everywhere else. The rest's as simple as all
big things. It's hanged a few folks already, but I judge it doesn't have
much chance with things that have lain buried in brick-dust. Say, come
round to lunch and I'll have your prints ready for you. I'd like awfully
to show you how it's done. It would really be a great pleasure."</p>
<p>Cazalet excused himself with decision. He had a full morning in front of
him. He was going to see Miss Macnair's brother, son of the late head of
his father's old firm of solicitors, and now one<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</SPAN></span> of the partners, to
get them either to take up Scruton's case themselves, or else to
recommend a firm perhaps more accustomed to criminal practise. Cazalet
was always apt to be elaborate in the first person singular, either in
the past or in the future tense; but he was more so than usual in
explaining his considered intentions in this matter that lay so very near his heart.</p>
<p>"Going to see Scruton, too?" said Toye.</p>
<p>"Not necessarily," was the short reply. But it also was elaborated by
Cazalet on a moment's consideration. The fact was that he wanted first
to know if it were not possible, by the intervention of a really
influential lawyer, to obtain the prisoner's immediate release, at any
rate on bail. If impossible, he might hesitate to force himself on
Scruton in the prison, but he would see.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>"It's a perfect scandal that he should be there at all," said Cazalet,
as he rose first and ushered Toye out into the lounge. "Only think: our
old gardener saw him run out of the drive at half past seven, when the
gong went, when the real murderer must have been shivering in the
Michelangelo cupboard, wondering how the devil he was ever going to get out again."</p>
<p>"Then you think old man Craven—begging his poor pardon—was getting out
some cigars when the man, whoever he was, came in and knocked him on the head?"</p>
<p>Cazalet nodded vigorously. "That's the likeliest thing of all!" he
cried. "Then the gong went—there may even have come a knock at the
door—and there was that cupboard standing open at his elbow."</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>"With a hole in the floor that might have been made for him?"</p>
<p>"As it happens, yes; he'd search every inch like a rat in a trap, you
see; and there it was as I'd left it twenty years before."</p>
<p>"Well, it's a wonderful yarn!" exclaimed Hilton Toye, and he lighted the
cigar that Cazalet had given him.</p>
<p>"I think it may be thought one if the police ever own how they made
their find," agreed Cazalet, laughing and looking at his watch. Toye had
never heard him laugh so often. "By the way, Drinkwater doesn't want any
of all this to come out until he's dragged his man before the beak again."</p>
<p>"Which you mean to prevent?"</p>
<p>"If only I can! I more or less promised not to talk, however, and I'm
sure you won't. You knew so much already,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</SPAN></span> you may just as well know the
rest this week as well as next, if you don't mind keeping it to yourself."</p>
<p>Nobody could have minded this particular embargo less than Hilton Toye;
and in nothing was he less like Cazalet, who even now had the
half-regretful and self-excusing air of the impulsive person who has
talked too freely and discovered it too late. But he had been perfectly
delightful to Hilton Toye, almost too appreciative, if anything, and now
very anxious to give him a lift in his taxi. Toye, however, had shopping
to do in the very street that they were in, and he saw Cazalet off with
a smile that was as yet merely puzzled, and not unfriendly until he had
time to recall Miss Blanche's part in the strange affair of the previous afternoon.</p>
<p>Say, weren't they rather intimate,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</SPAN></span> those two, even if they had known
each other all their lives? He had it from Blanche (with her second
refusal) that she was not, and never had been, engaged. And a fellow who
only wrote to her once in a year—still, they must have been darned
intimate, and this funny affair would bring them together again quicker than anything.</p>
<p>Say, what a funny affair it was when you came to think of it! Funny all
through, it now struck Toye; beginning on board ship with that dream of
Cazalet's about the murdered man, leading to all that talk of the old
grievance against him, and culminating in his actually finding the
implements of the crime in his inspired efforts to save the man of whose
innocence he was so positive. Say, if that Cazalet had not been on his
way home from Australia at the time!</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>Like many deliberate speakers, Toye thought like lightning, and had
reached this point before he was a hundred yards from the hotel; then he
thought of something else, and retraced his steps. He retraced them even
to the table at which he had sat with Cazalet not very many minutes ago;
the waiter was only now beginning to clear away.</p>
<p>"Say, waiter, what have you done with the menu that was in that
toast-rack? There was something on it that we rather wanted to keep."</p>
<p>"I thought there was, sir," said the English waiter at that admirable
hotel. Toye, however, prepared to talk to him like an American uncle of Dutch extraction.</p>
<p>"You thought that, and you took it away?"</p>
<p>"Not at all, sir. I 'appened to observe<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</SPAN></span> the other gentleman put the
menu in his pocket, behind your back as you were getting up, because I
passed a remark about it to the head waiter at the time!"</p>
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