Personally, I should say between them on Wednesday morning, 18th November.”
“The day they went for that motor-car ride?” I gasped.
“And carried away the old man’s remains beneath a multiplicity of rugs,” he added.
“But he was alive long after that!” I urged. “The woman Nicholson –”
“The woman Nicholson saw and spoke to a man in bed, whom she supposed was old Mr Dyke. Among the many questions put to her by those clever detectives, no one thought, of course, of asking her to describe the old man. But even if she had done so, Wyatt was far too great an artist in crime not to have contrived a make-up which, described by a witness who had never before seen Dyke, would easily pass as a description of the old man himself.”
“Impossible!” I said, struck in spite of myself by the simplicity of his logic.
“Impossible, you say?” he shrieked excitedly.
“Why, I call that crime a masterpiece from beginning to end; a display of ingenuity which, fortunately, the criminal classes seldom possess, or where would society be? Here was a crime committed, where everything was most beautifully stage-managed, nothing left unforeseen. Shall I reconstruct it for you?”
“Do!” I said, handing across the table to him a brandnew, beautiful bit of string, on which his talon-like fingers fastened as upon a prey.
“Very well,” he said, marking each point with a scientific knot. “Here, it is, scene by scene. There was Alfred Wyatt and Amelia Dyke – a pair of blackguards, eager to obtain that £4,000 which only the old man’s death could secure for them. They decide upon killing him, and: Scene 1 – Miss Amelia makes her arrangements. She advertises for a charwoman, and engages one, who is to be a very useful witness presently.
“Scene 2 – The murder, brutal, horrible, on the person of an old cripple, whilst his own daughter stands by, and the dismembering of the body.
“Scene 3 – The ride in the motor car – after dark, remember, and with plenty of rugs, beneath which the gruesome burden is concealed. The scene is accompanied by the comedy of Miss Dyke speaking to her father, and waving her hand affectionately at him from below. I tell you, that woman must have had some nerve!
“Then, Scene 4 – The arrival at Wembley, and the hiding of the remains.
“Scene 5 – Amelia goes to Edinburgh by the 5.15 a.m. train, and thus secures her own alibi. After that, the comedy begins in earnest. The impersonation of the dead man by Wyatt during the whole of that memorable Thursday. Mind you, that was not very difficult; it only needed the brain to invent, and the nerve to carry it through. The charwoman had never seen old Dyke before; she only knew that he was an invalid. What more natural than that she should accept as her new master the man who lay in bed all day, and only spoke a few words to her? A very slight make-up of hair and beard would complete the illusion.
“Then, at six o’clock, the woman gone, Wyatt steals out of the house, bespeaks the motor car, leaves it in the street in a convenient spot, and is back in time to be seen by Mrs Marsh at seven.
“The rest is simplicity itself. The silhouette at the window was easy enough to arrange; the sound of a man walking on crutches is easily imitated with a couple of umbrellas – the actual crutches were, no doubt, burned directly after the murder. Lastly, the putting out of the light at half past ten was the crowning stroke of genius.
“One little thing might have upset the whole wonderful plan, but that one thing only; and that was if the body had been found before the great comedy scene of Thursday had been fully played. But that spinney near Wembley was well chosen. People don’t go wandering under trees and in woods on cold November days, and the remains were not found until the Saturday.
“Ah, it was cleverly stage-managed, and no mistake. I couldn’t have done it better myself. Won’t you have another cup of tea? No? Don’t look so upset. The world does not contain many such clever criminals as Alfred Wyatt and Amelia Dyke.”
VII
1
“Well, it certainly is most amazing!” I said that day, when I had finished reading about it all in The Daily Telegraph.
“Yet the most natural thing in the world,” retorted the man in the corner, as soon as he had ordered his lunch. “Crime invariably begets crime. No sooner is a murder, theft, or fraud committed in a novel or striking way, than this method is aged – probably within the next few days – by some other less imaginative scoundrel.
“Take this case, for instance,” he continued, as he slowly began sipping his glass of milk, “which seems to amaze you so much. It was less than a year ago, was it not? that in Paris a man was found dead in a cab, stabbed in a most peculiar way – right through the neck, from ear to ear – with, presumably, a long, sharp instrument of the type of an Italian stiletto.
“No one in England took much count of the crime, beyond a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders at the want of safety of the Paris streets, and the incapacity of the French detectives, who not only never discovered the murderer, who had managed to slip out of the cab unperceived, but who did not even succeed in establishing the identity of the victim.
“But this case,” he added, pointing once more to my daily paper, “strikes nearer home.
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