X. Jones—Of Scotland Yard Read online

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  Case: Marceau Murder Case

  To Newspapers, News Syndicates, and News Bureaus: This clearance report on the world-famous Marceau Murder Case of England, which will reach you at approximately 8 o’clock in the evening of the day on which it reaches our regular subscribers, is compiled primarily for clients of the International Criminological Data Service, Home Office 427-481 Monadnock Building, Chicago. The cabling costs—at code rates!—involved in its transmission from Paris to the U.S.A., plus such additional costs as were incurred in simultaneous wire transmission from New Work to each of the branch offices of the above service, amounted to over $3000. It is copyrighted by our Washington correspondent, under the new copyright regulations covering multigraphed documents, under Copyright No. 1,226, Class D, as of February 24, 10 a.m. REPRODUCTION OF THIS REPORT, IN PRINT OR VIA BROADCAST, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, IS FORBIDDEN PRIOR TO MIDNIGHT OF FEBRUARY 24, 1937, ALTHOUGH PERMITTED IN NEWSPAPERS ISSUED SO LATE ON FEBRUARY 24, 1937, AS TO BEAR THE PRINTED DATE LINE OF FEBRUARY 25, 1937: AND ANY USE OF ANY OF THE MATERIAL IN THE REPORT PRIOR TO ITS HOUR OF RELEASE, OR IN ISSUES OF NEWSPAPERS BEARING A DATE PRIOR TO FEBRUARY 25, 1937, WILL BE VIGOROUSLY PROSECUTED BY ITS COPYRIGHTERS UNDER SECTION B-23, OF THE REVISED AMERICAN COPYRIGHT REGULATIONS, COVERING AFFIDAVITS AND FACTS IN CONFIDENTIAL AGENCY REPORTS. This report is released to you, however, FREE OF CHARGE, for reproduction in toto, or in part, or in re-written form, on and after the hour given herewith as its official release, so long as your story carries our name: International Criminological Data Service. Be governed accordingly, therefore!

  Report written by: X. JONES, FORMER INSPECTOR, SCOTLAND YARD.

  Hotel DuNord, Paris.

  February 24, 1937,

  12:30 p.m. (Paris time).

  I have been asked by Mr. Scutters Jones, director and virtual owner of the American bureau supplying the above service to detective agencies and police chiefs—Mr. Scutters Jones being, incidentally, my brother!—to definitely release to the press of the world on February 25, 1937 (that date being tomorrow) and not before, my full solution of the famous Marceau Murder Case of Great Britain, known also as the “Aeronautic Strangler-Baby Case” and also as “The Mystery of the Flying Strangler Baby.” This, in order that the solution in question may be priorly and exclusively released, via correspondence, by this agency, to its many clients, on Wednesday, February 24, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the service, at Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A., by our grandfather, Traherne Jones, an early pioneer in criminology.3

  To which request, dating back as it does clear to last October4—in fact, to all the plans proposed for utilizing my solution—I have been happy to accede. If for no other reason than that I required Mr. Scutters Jones’ co-operation, were I to secure a number of confirmatory and explicatory affidavits in America; and secondly, since because of inability to stand the vigorous English climate after my long sojourn in Bombay, I realized with regret that I would have to leave England—and Scotland Yard in which, naturally, my professional affections center deeply. I have since then, in fact, resigned from Scotland Yard, and am—technically at least!—an employee of the I.C.D.S. while I am writing this report—at the technical salary of $1 per week! I shall, however, be joining with Mr. Scutters Jones in America sometime next month—for more active connection with the I.C.D.S.—and shall remain (I hope) for at least a year, after which I shall return permanently to Bombay.

  In this report, which I am writing at the Hotel DuNord, Paris, after having secured a certain last and completing affidavit, which is made a part hereof, and which report is being coded, as I write it, by my valued assistant, Mr. Radranath Sepoona, and filed in sections in the main cable office across the street for immediate cable transmission across the ocean, it is neither necessary nor feasible to rehearse the details of the famous Marceau Murder Case, as it is known the world over. For the facts of how André Marceau was found strangled to death, at Little Ivington, Kent, England, on the night of May 10, 1935, within a veritable moat of newly rolled and untrodden lawn, his body the convergence point of a number of footprint trails including prints made by a Lilliputian murderer who descended to him from an autogiro stolen near Lymewich—those, and all the concomitant corroboratory facts, have been set forth in the press of a dozen languages between May 10 and May 17, 1935—and again, copiously, last November in America, in a certain widely syndicated newspaper feature story. And there are none, I take it, unfamiliar with the facts of the famous Marceau Case.

  Nor is it necessary that there be any rehearsal here of my theories as to crime—or rather, of crime solution. Which theories also were set forth at some length, though not by any means in their entirety, or with their full implications, in the syndicated American news story above referred to. It is sufficient to epitomize them here by saying that I regard a crime merely as a disturbance or fixed-stress (i.e., a strain) in the sum-total of human relationship—and the latter as being a medium which lies, essentially, in a 4-dimensional continuum.5 I consider that this stress manifests itself by rimples in the medium lying on all sides of itself, a study of which rimples gives the true picture of the pivotal stress. But I consider, moreover, that being 3-dimensional ourselves—at least in our perceptions!—we cannot see them as “rimples”—but I maintain that we see them as “deviations” in normal human conduct and habitual procedures.6 Consequently, my method of attacking a problem in criminology involves a study not of people per se, or their opportunities—or lack of opportunities—to have committed a crime, or of hypotheses as to why they might have profited from so doing, or of degenerative stigmata, etc., etc., but only of deviations (whether trivial or salient does not in the least matter—likewise, whether voluntary or involuntary also does not matter) in their courses occurring before, simultaneous with, and after a so-called crime.7 And a co-ordination or fusing of such deviations into a so-called “true picture.”

  But to bring oneself in direct touch with the great and ever-expanding sphere of deviations, created by innumerable contacts and relationships between persons who, in some cases, have but contacted8 merely those who themselves have contacted still others who themselves hold relationships of this or that sort with—let us say—a murdered man, it is absolutely necessary to have the foundation of that ever-expanding sphere: which is, of course, the full and complete roster of all the murdered man’s contacts. If one possesses but half or part of such roster, one is hopelessly and inadequately equipped for the study of the problem under this method, since, due to the rapid multiplication of contacts resulting from virtually a geometrical progression—and, as a rule, a decuple progression, too!—one is minus—because of the lack of those missing contacts’ contacts, and their contacts in turn, an enormous segment of space-time required for both analysis and synthesis. Indeed, in no instance have I ever embarked upon the study of a case unless I possessed the foundation contacts—or what I call the 1st Concentric Sphere.

  For this is exactly what, for convenience’s sake in both nomenclature and tabulation, I term the dead man’s first line of contacts: the 1st Concentric Sphere: the Sphere in which some or many of the persons in it have received—both knowingly and, in many cases, unknowingly—deviation because of his murder. Both via the agency of so-called “cause and effect” as defined by the layman—and via the true cause and effect of patterning, which, in any semi-elastic medium, operates on all sides of the disturbing stress.9 The persons in this sphere, if deviated, are themselves, of course, the “causes” of further deviations for individuals in contact with them alone. And all those persons forming contacts of those in the 1st Concentric Sphere, above described, I call, for convenience’ sake, the 2nd Concentric Sphere. And so on out. Though this is but a nomenclatural convenience, it must be remembered at all times, and not an exact and precise delineation of the geometrical
distribution of such persons.

  But now to hard practicality—instead of academic “theory”!

  II.

  I was led to ask for the Marceau Case to study because I was fortunate in securing what appeared to be the complete personnel of the 1st Concentric Sphere.

  Though my solution of the case, curiously, was first indicated by finding a most casual—but marked!—deviation in the 5th Concentric Sphere! To which sphere, fortunately, I was forced almost against my will, because of dissimulation occurring in the 4th Concentric Sphere, and inability on the part of a person to remember—in the 3rd Concentric Sphere!

  But—as to that roster of names—comprising the 1st Concentric Sphere.

  Marceau was a very silent and uncommunicative man. Outside of a certain two fearful mentions in his diary of having seen “The Babe from Hell”—the wording of the mentions covering, in actuality, three separate encounters therewith—his diary was most humdrum; it mentioned nobody, and dealt with such uninteresting details of life as Marceau’s having seen some hothouse cabbages being offered for sale—and of coming to the conclusion that he ought to have his piano tuned! Outside of his servants, who knew each other, naturally, none of Marceau’s contacts seemed to know anything about any of his other contacts. To one he said nothing about anybody else; even Inspector Sheringham, his house guest at the time of his death, a friend from older days as well, knew nothing about Marceau’s world. Fortunately, however, Marceau had few contacts. I was emboldened to ask for his case—specifically, the dossier thereof—to study, because I had had the good fortune to purchase, in Woborn Place, London, an old desk allegedly taken from Marceau’s house at Little Ivington, Kent, England; and because of having an uncle in Bombay who is a cabinet maker, I was able to discern in the desk the site of a possible secret slot. To which slot, moreover, I got access, though by a sharpened poker and not by long feeling for its cunningly hidden spring release which lay, beneath an extremely thinned segment of wood, at a considerable distance from the slot. The contents of this secret recess were two. Two, that is, from the point of view of classification. For one was a series of Marceau Family portrait photographs which ran back for many, many decades, and which vividly dramatized the Marceau Family tree which is on record today in the English Court of Chancery because of its partial use in settling the estate of Théophile Marceau (André’s father). The other was a small leather address book in which Marceau had listed, businesslike, and meticulously, presumably all contacts he had had for the last few years.10

  It seems, moreover, that Marceau had a curious habit—nay, idiosyncrasy!—when first meeting, upon some or another mission, some person to whom he was unknown, of introducing himself not by his own name, to that person, but by a fictitious name and under a fictitious address, or perhaps just postoffice box number in London, in case Marceau desired later communication from the individual in question. But Marceau also invariably set this pseudonym of his down in his book, lest he need it again later!

  I elicited this quaint fact through running down one particular name, that of a Mr. Nettleton Saunders, a retired acoustician living in Swinbrooke Road, London. Mr. Saunders has for many years been forced to live in a wheelchair. Only when we got together, however, did I find—and he also! that the “Mr. Godfrey Laboulaye”—of “Manchester, England” who called upon Mr. Saunders some three years ago, to ascertain what might be new in the world of audition devices and hearing trumpets, was no other than the Mr. Marceau who long, long afterward became the central figure of a cause célèbre centering at Little Ivington, Kent! I thus correctly determined the significance of the curious parenthesized names under some of the entries, much as the first decipherers of the Rosetta Stone in 1831 had the good fortune to catch the name “Ptolemy” written in Greek, demotic, and Egyptian hieroglyphic writing.

  To boil this report short, six contacts of Marceau’s were revealed by my book; contacts, that is, exclusive of those we already had, such as the names of Marceau’s servants, whose home addresses he kept faithfully recorded in the book in case, no doubt, of possible accidents to them; and the name of his friend Inspector Sheringham, whose various changing addresses in London, up to Sheringham’s final street number and flat number in Chelsea, were all recorded. These contacts were, generally speaking, unknown to each other. One had been dead 5 years.11 One, as has been said, was in a wheelchair, and did not even know that he had ever met the famous Marceau. Two others were, at the time of my finding of the book, entirely out of touch with civilization, and investigation on my part revealed that they had been thus even at the time of Marceau’s death—and well before that death too!12 Another contact was that of a person whose name had evidently been transferred to the book from some previous and long-since-destroyed address book; for it had been really transferred—i.e., transferred bodily!—for it had been cut by scissors from the old address-book, and pasted into the new book. The New York address given alongside it was that of a place (as Mr. Scutters Jones subsequently ascertained for me) torn down in 1923; torn down after the meeting which had occasioned the entry—and indicating rather plainly, therefore, that no communication had been held between Marceau and the subject of the entry in the intervening years, since, otherwise, the address portion of the entry would undoubtedly have been revised, as, for instance, was Sheringham’s continually changing address.13 One of the entries was not a person, but a company, for it was an employment agency of London. And after it the words “Furnished Jane.”14

  Thus the book.

  The roster of Concentric Sphere 1.

  And because that secret book appeared to constitute exactly that, I was induced to embark upon what could have been truly a gargantuan task: the collation of all the deviations radiating out from that stress pattern which had come to be known as the Marceau Case. And the fixing, thereby, of the true shape of that pattern, i.e., solving the case!

  But—had I only known! For the determination of the shape of that stress pattern lay not in a vast congeries of deviations, collated in all directions, but in a striking half dozen or so—and one of which—of all things!—lay further out in the Concentric Sphere classification than I had ever gone before.

  The 5th Concentric Sphere!

  And now to show the application of this theory of deviations—“Reverberative Deviations,” if one so wishes to term them, due to “Concussion in Space-Time”—or Geometrical Divergences, due to Stress in Human Relationship, a 4-Dimensional Semi-Elastic Medium. And to elicit the picture held by these deviations—divergences —or call them what we will!

  III.

  The most significant deviations, one of which—taking the central “disturbance” as a sort of concussion—was a reverberation lying far out in the 5th Concentric Sphere, radiated out from an individual in the 1st Concentric Sphere who was posited in that sphere because he was a servant of André Marceau’s. He was Tedro Grimes, Marceau’s butler. Though Grimes himself, it should be stated here, could not have committed any murder; at no time was he out of the house; moreover, he was serving Sheringham, Marceau’s guest, before and during the approximate hour of Marceau’s death; and last but not least, his feet were far from being infant’s feet!

  Nor were these deviations directly “caused” in the sense of commonly accepted “cause and effect” by Grimes, nor did they even apparently “cause” other deviations; yet nevertheless they form dabs of a geometrically minded brush which paints, in toto, a very curious picture!

  So, remembering that Marceau met his death at approximately 8:45 p.m., or nearly so, on May 10, 1935, these two deviations in the part of the 2nd Concentric Sphere made up solely of direct contacts of Grimes, himself in the 1st Concentric Sphere, were as follows:

  Albert Tomkins, the town chemist of Little Ivington, with whom Grimes was accustomed to do all the trading for the Marceau home, Marceau eschewing the chemist contemptuously and completely because of Tomkins’ being openly known to be a Seventh-Day Adventist, died of a coronary embolism on May 9th—
the day before Marceau’s own death. [A new chemist, by name Samuel Hawtrey, came out within a few days from London, and tentatively took over the shop, with a view to purchasing it if the executors made the price right. Which he afterward did, in about 2 weeks.]

  Una Meggs, the beautiful blonde domestic from St. Swithin, 50 miles to the north of Little Ivington, visited Grimes on the afternoon and evening of May 10th, deviating from her customary procedure of working—or of spending her days off in London.

  No deviations in the 3rd Concentric Sphere, radiating out, that is, from Una Meggs, were elicitable, though it should be stated here that in the case of her perhaps closest “contact” no elicitation was possible simply because that “contact” was too young back in May, 1935, to take—or at least to make—notes of events transpiring around it, and too young even yet in late 1936, when the case was investigated by me, to remember! For that particular contact was Una Meggs’ baby Roger, aged, in 1935, two years, who had been taken from her in divorce proceedings—divorce proceedings in which, I regret to say, she had been convicted of being indiscreet—by her former husband, Tom Meggs—now in Australia—and put to board in England. Because of threats she had made against the baby, she had been enjoined many months before from further seeing it. It was, of course, as close a contact therefore of Una Meggs as was her own employer in St. Swithin—though displaced a little on the time axis of space-time—but, though this investigator held a certain brief conversation in late 1936 with a bright young man in his first pair of short linen pants, the conversation was solely about boats and dolls and frogs and whatnot else, the young man in question being unable to recapitulate for this investigator in any degree whatsoever events of early 1935!

  Nor was deviation, furthermore, elicitable in the section of the 4th Concentric Sphere radiating out from this baby boy, for his most intimate—and, in truth, only—contact, Grandma MacLeish, of Cottesmore, England, who boarded him, could throw no light indicating a difference for either her or the boy as between May 10, 1935, and any other days. This investigator, in talking things casually over, as she sat with the boy, now, in late 1936, nearly 3½ years old, at her side, was virtually probing at the same time in the 3rd and 4th Concentric Spheres.