R. Austin Freeman

“ Well we had the undoubted fact that cremation had been performed pursuant to the expressed wishes of Septimus Maddock, the man who was alleged to have been cremated. But if it was a case of murder, the crime must have been hurriedly planned a few days before the man's death—that is, after the execution of the will; for we could assume that Maddock would not have connived at his own murder; whereas, if it was a case of substitution, Maddock himself was probably the actual agent. ”

“ If the letter to Jardine had stated that a man was in a fit, instead of suffering from a wound, our friend would have had no need to call at the surgery for appliances but would have gone straight to the works. And there, in all probability, his body would still be lying, for no one would have known whither he had gone; and even if his body had been accidentally discovered, all traces of the means by which he had been killed would probably have been removed. There would have been nothing to show that he had not strayed into the deserted factory and turned on the gas himself ”

“ Instantly, I decided to investigate the recent history of that house and its tenants; but Jardine saved me the trouble. From him I learned that, at the time of the assumed murder, it had been inhabited by the artist whom he had mentioned, but that it had now been empty for a week or two.
"Here were news indeed! This artist, who habitually wore gloves and whose right thumb-print was a twinned loop, had been living in this house at the time of the assumed murder, but had been living elsewhere at the time of the cremation! ”

“ Death was almost certainly produced by a stab in the back; and Maddock was probably just about to carry the body away when destiny, in the form of Jardine, appeared. Then Maddock must have lurked, probably behind the fence which had the large hole in it, until Jardine went away, when he must instantly have picked up the body, carried it down the lane, pushed it over the fence—detaching the reliquary as he did so—carried it away to the house, stripped it and proceeded at once to freeze it, having provided a bottle of the gas in readiness. ”

“ And here, Jardine, I would draw your attention to the interesting way in which, when a long train of hypothetical reasoning has at length elicited an actual, demonstrable truth, that truth instantly reacts on the hypothesis, lifting it as a whole on to an entirely different plane of probability. ”

“ If, however, the body which was cremated was not that of Maddock, then it was the body of some other person; that is to say that the theory of substitution left us with a dead body that was unaccounted for. And since a dead body implies the death of some person, the theory of substitution left us with a death unaccounted for and obviously concealed; that is to say, it raised a strong presumption of the murder of some unknown person. ”

“ Roughly speaking, by the volatilization of a liquified gas—ammonia, in the case of the sheep. But behold! The very man whom we are suspecting of being the agent in this crime is a man who has command of large quantities of a liquefied gas, and who has hired a mineral water factory for no apparent reason and put the premises to no apparent use. ”

“ Here, then, at last I had stepped out of the region of mere hypothesis. Here was an item of positive evidence, and one, moreover, of high probative value. It proved, beyond any reasonable doubt, the existence of some connection between the house on the Heath and the factory in Norton Street; and it established a strong presumption that the artist and the man at the factory were the same person; the weak point in this being the absence of proof that the thumb-print on the painting was made by the artist. ”

“ And here it seemed that our data came to an end; that we had no material whatever for forming any hypothesis as to the identity of the person whose dead body we were assuming to have been substituted for that of Septimus Maddock.
"But while I was thus turning over the possibilities of this cremation case, the other—the Hampstead case—continued to lurk in the background of my mind. It was much less hypothetical. There was positive evidence of some weight that a crime had been committed. And the circumstances offered a fully adequate motive for getting rid of Jardine. ”

“ It occurs to us all now and again. But, do you see, Jardine, how 'the stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner?' Don't you understand how, when I reached this point, there rose before me the picture of that cellar with the commonplace objects that it contained? The case, seven feet by two and a-half—so convenient for preserving a body in a bulky packing; the two waterproof sheets—so well adapted to holding a mass of carbon dioxide snow in contact with the body ”

“ For the purpose of substitution, no more perfectly suitable practitioner could have been selected. The identity of the body was taken for granted—naturally enough, I admit—and no verification was even thought of. Then, as to Jardine's experience. The hand or wrist is not at all a likely region on which to find either a fatal injury or the trace of a hypodermic injection; whereas it is a most important region for purposes of identification. The hand is highly characteristic in itself even when normal ”

“ Maddock will have learned of Reinhardt's intended visit to England and immediately begun his preparations. His scheme—and a most ingenious one it was, I must confess—was clearly to cause Reinhardt to disappear in one locality and produce his body after a considerable interval in another at some distance; and the house on the Heath was apparently taken with this object and to be near Reinhardt's haunts. ”

“ The risk was not great, considering the time of night and the solitary character of the place, and the distance from the house was not too great for a strong man, as Maddock seems to have been, to carry the body. ”

“ The physical possibility was beyond question.
"But if physically possible, was such preservation practicable? Well, how are the bodies of the sheep preserved? By exposing them continuously to intense cold. And how is that intense cold produced? ”