Anyhow, it wasn’t outside the bounds of possibility that Noakes had removed the cactus for some purpose of his own. You couldn’t prove he hadn’t. Say he did. All right. Then, at 9 o’clock, up comes Sellon, and sees Noakes coming into the parlour… Here Kirk paused to consider again. If Noakes was coming for the 9.30 news as usual, be was before his time. He came in (said Sellon) and looked at the clock. The dead man had worn no watch, and Kirk had taken it for granted that he had come in merely to see how near it was to the news-bulletin time. But he might also have been meaning to put the cactus back and come in a bit early on that account. That was all right. He comes in. He thinks, Now, have I got time to fetch that there plant in from the scullery, or wherever it is, before the news comes on? He looks at the clock. Then Joe Sellon taps at the window-and he comes over. They have their talk and Joe goes away. The old boy fetches in his plant and gets up on a chair or something to put it back. Or maybe be gets the steps. Then, while he’s doing that, he sees it’s getting on for half-past nine, and that flurries him a bit. He leans over too far, or the steps slip, or he ain’t careful getting down, and over he goes backwards and gives his bead a crack on the floor-or, better still, on the corner of the settle. He’s knocked out. Then presently he comes to, puts away the chair or the steps or whatever it was and after that-well, after that, we know what happened to him. So there you are. Simple as pie. No cutting or stealing keys or hiding blunt instruments or telling lies-nothing at all but a plain accident and everybody telling the truth.
Kirk was as much overcome by the beauty, simplicity and economy of this solution as Copernicus must have been when he first thought of putting the sun in the centre of the Solar System and saw all the planets, instead of describing complicated and ugly geometrical capers, move onward in orderly and dignified circles. He sat and contemplated it with affection for nearly ten minutes before venturing to examine it. He was afraid of knocking the bloom off it.
Still, a theory was only a theory; one had got to find evidence to support it. One must at any rate be sure there was no evidence against it. First of all, could a man kill himself like that, simply by falling off a pair of steps?
Side by side with half-crown editions of English poets and philosophers, flanked on the right by Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and on the left by that handy police publication which dissects and catalogues crimes according to the method of their commission, stood, tall and menacing, the two blue volumes of Taylor’s Medical Jurisprudence, that canon of uncanonical practice and Baedeker of the back doors to death. Kirk had often studied it in a dutiful readiness for the unexpected. Now he took it down and turned the pages of Volume I, till he came to the running head: ‘Intercranial Haemorrhage-Violence or Disease’. He was looking for the story of the gentleman who fell out of a chaise. Yes, here he was: he emerged with a kind of personality from the Report of Guy’s Hospital for 1859:
‘A gentleman was thrown out of a chaise, and fell upon his head with such violence as to stun him. After a short time he recovered his senses, and felt so much better that he entered the chaise again, and was driven to his father’s house by a companion. He attempted to pass off the accident as of a trivial nature, but he soon began to feel heavy and drowsy, so that he was obliged to go to bed. His symptoms became more alarming, and he died in about an hour from effusion of blood in the brain.’
Excellent and unfortunate gentleman, his name unknown, his features a blank, his life a mystery; embalmed for ever in a fame outlasting the gilded monuments of princes! He lived in his father’s house, so was presumably unmarried and young-a bit of a swell, perhaps, wearing the fashionable new Inverness cape and the luxuriant silky side-whiskers which were just coming into favour. How did he come to be thrown out of the chaise? Did the horse bolt with him? Had he looked on the wine when it was red? The vehicle, we observe, was undamaged, and his companion at any rate sober enough to drive him home. A courageous gentleman (since he was resolute to enter the chaise again), a considerate gentleman (since he made light of the accident in order to spare his parents anxiety); his premature death must have occasioned much lamentation among the crinolines. No one could have guessed that, nearly eighty years later, a police superintendent in a rural district would be reading his brief epitaph: ‘A gentleman was thrown out of a chaise…’
Not that Superintendent Kirk troubled his head with these I biographical conjectures. What exasperated him was that the book did not mention the height of the chaise from the ground or the rate at which the vehicle was proceeding.
How would the fall compare in violence with that of an elderly man from a step-ladder on to an oak floor? The next case quoted was even less to the point: this was a youth of eighteen, who was hit on the head in a fight, went about his business for ten days, had a headache on the eleventh day and died in the night. Then came a drunken carter, aged fifty, who fell from the shafts of his cart and was killed. This seemed more hopeful; except that the wretched creature had fallen three or four times, the last time being thrown under the wheels of the cart by the bolting horse. Still, it did seem to show that a short fall would do quite a lot of damage. Kirk pondered a little, and then went to the telephone.
Dr Craven listened with patience to Kirk’s theory, and agreed that it was an attractive one. ‘Only,’ said he, ‘if you want me to tell the coroner that the man fell on his back, I can’t do it. There is no bruising whatever on the back, or on the left-hand side of the body. If you looked at my report to the coroner you must have seen that all the marks were on the right-Land side and in front, except the actual blow that caused death. I’ll tell you again what they are. The right forearm and elbow show heavy bruises, with considerable extravasation from the surface vessels, showing that they were inflicted some time before death. I should say that when he was hit behind the left ear, he was flung over forwards on to his right side with the force of the blow. The only other marks are bruises and slight abrasions on the shins, hands and forehead. The hands and forehead are marked with dust, and this suggests, I think, that he got the injuries in falling forward down the cellar steps. He died shortly after that, for there is little extravasation from these injuries. I am, of course, excluding the hypostasis produced by his having lam a whole week face downwards In the cellar. That, naturally, is all in the front part of the body.’
Kirk had forgotten the meaning of ‘hypostasis’, which the doctor pronounced in a very unlikely way; but he gathered that it wasn’t a thing that could be made to support the theory. He asked whether Noakes could have been killed by hitting his head in a fall.
‘Oh, certainly,’ said Dr Craven; ‘but you’ll have to explain how he hit the back of his head in falling and yet came down on his face.’
With this Kirk had to be content. It looked rather as though a flaw might be developing in his beautiful rounded theory. It is the little rift within the lute, he thought, mournfully, that by and by will make the music mute. But he shook his head angrily. Tennyson or no Tennyson, he wasn’t going to abandon the position without a struggle. He called to his assistance a more robust and comforting poet-one who hold we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better’-called to his wife that he was going out, and reached for his hat and overcoat. If only he could have another look at the sitting- room, he might be able to see how that fall could have come about.