X. Jones—Of Scotland Yard Read online

  Deviation, however, in the 5th Concentric Sphere, was elicitable: as follows:

  Paddy O’Garner, the milkman of Cottesmore, and incidentally milkman to Grandma MacLeish—for she kept no cow—stopped (as shown by his carefully kept books) on May 11, 1935, delivering her regular daily l-quart of certified milk, though he resumed it a week later.

  And right here, thanks solely to probing as far as the 5th Concentric Sphere, the Marceau Murder Case began to resolve itself into the first stage of its solution!

  And right here—or, rather, a paragraph or two beyond this point!—we shall commence sending this report—plus any necessary footnotes thereto!—by cable; for I am going to confess, here and now, that these—and all my foregoing words as well, whether of “report” or of “footnotes”—have not, as seems from the opening lines of this record, been whisked across the Atlantic telegraphically, but will have been—upon February 24, 1937, 12:30 p.m. Paris Time!—across the ocean for a full 3 days, in the form of a carefully typewritten but coded document and 3 carbon copies thereof. And which four transcripts will have all been marked to travel via registered mail on the Aquitonic, leaving England February 15th for Boston—and via registered airmails from Boston to the four offices of the International Criminological Data Service. And safe receipt of all four of which typewritten documents will have been acknowledged before a single word, continuing the analysis which they begin, is cabled.

  The reasons for our beginning our cabling right here will, of course, be quite evident as we proceed. And so now we begin—in earnest!

  At 3 francs the word! Special rates—direct code—Paris to U.S.A. and, by simultaneous multiple wire transmission, to New York, Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco.

  IV.

  Why was certified milk canceled by Grandma MacLeish?

  The answer can be no other than that she had no infant to feed it to!

  If not—why not?

  Because—let us say—the infant was taken away by the courts.

  Or else because—let us say—it died.

  Neither of which, however, is the case, for she still had, in late 1936, an infant, now nearly 3½ years old, and still officially in her charge by the court.

  The only supposition left, therefore, is that for a period of 1 week, in 1935, that infant left her place.

  Left it, to be exact, on May 10th!

  But it must be remembered that Grandma MacLeish was receiving the generous allowance of 3 pounds a month for boarding the infant, from Meggs himself in Australia. The 3 pounds actually supported her.

  At once we see the only possible answer: that the infant was “kidnapped” on May 10th. Scotchlike, she stopped the expensive milk at once—next morning, in fact! Hurried about and got hold of a—but let the following paragraph from her affidavit, taken by me last night late in Cottesmore, Lancashire, England, on the outskirts of Liverpool, speak for itself—and also describe the rather simple steps I took last October to find whether, if the infant went away, it came back again! As follows:

  Grandma MacLeish (affidavit of February 23rd): “Well, I suppose you got me! Since you say you got a copy of the Meggs baby’s fingerprints from the birth records at Central-Lying-in Hospital, London—and this brat’s fingertips don’t tally. Yes, I got this brat up in Liverpool a week after the Meggs baby was kidnapped from me. It’s my oldest daughter’s. She’s—well—she’s on the turf—if you got to know it! The court was allowing me 3 pounds a month for the Meggs baby. Tom Meggs is in Australy; he’ll stay there for years, prob’ly; and since Una was enj’ined by the courts from coming near her kid—from even steppin’ foot into Lancashire, ’thout the court’s permission—there wouldn’t have been nobody who would ever have knowed I didn’t have the kid no longer. And—what’s that? Suppose she’d a-come sneakin’ around—to get a sight of it? Well, she just wouldn’t—cause I’d warned her by letter that I’d have to notify the Judge if I ever seen her here around Cottesmore. But anyway, Una got a unexpected chanct to go to America. To work for some invalid lady. Oh, about a couple of weeks after the kid was snatched. Yes. So I was a hundred per cent safe. But still I don’t see how you knew? Oh, because I stopped the cert’fied milk the day after Baby Meggs was kidnapped? Well—I ’spose I should have kept on taking the milk and poured it down the drain. But I’m Scotch, don’t forget! Still, I ain’t committed no crime, I say, outside maybe o’ taking all that board money these past near 2 years, an’ they ain’t nobody going to send an old woman like me to prison—specially when I agree to pay it all back. What’s that you say? 66—pounds? Hrmph! We-ell—I can repay it all—for I got a 200-pound legacy a month ago.”

  And now for the first time, this deviation in the 3rd Concentric Sphere (I refer to the Meggs baby’s somewhat unusual experience!) elicited through a very casual deviation in the 5th Concentric Sphere, pours its light upon an apparently coincidental “deviation” in the 2nd Concentric Sphere: Una Meggs’ visiting Grimes the afternoon and evening of May 10, 1935. In view of the fact that Una Meggs and baby Roger were mother and son—and gradually accruing mother-hunger is a force larger than all court injunctions!—we simply have to reject the bald suggestion of coincidence, and allot to that deviation an ineluctable geometrical position in the stress-pattern known as the André Marceau Extinction; or, speaking in ordinary terms, give it a “causal” connection: In short, Una Meggs must have been in some way back of the kidnapping of her baby: the transportation of the infant across and out of England was to be done by aircraft; and Una Meggs came to visit Grimes that particular night simply because the roof of the Marceau home bore that great 15-foot red-neon-light arrow, turned on at dusk every night—and therefore perfectly marked for an aviator; all of which would make it possible for her to receive a signal that the kidnapping near Liverpool had been successful, and that she could, perhaps, go on to America. Or to France. Or to somewhere other than England.

  It was not difficult to ascertain that she had had, in England, a sweetheart, by name Luke Moreland. An expert mechanic, of some sort, and incidentally an American. Other domestics provided the name of this man who forms part of the 3rd Concentric Sphere. Tracing out the United States passport records at Washington, D.C., America, reveals that Moreland came to France, in January of 1935, with his wife Agnes, and his 2-year-old baby Flora. On a combination passport, covering all three. The passport records show his occupation as “expert plane mechanic.” The records also show his return to America in the latter part of May, 1935, with his baby—and the death certificate of his wife’s demise in the little French town of Avalon appended to his passport, modifying it accordingly. The passport had also been viséd, at Paris, for England. The application for it gave his nearest relative as the Reverend Moreland, residing in a small town in—well, let us just call it, for example Sparks, Michigan—for I will leave the town and state unnamed in order to save this estimable gentleman as much undesirable notoriety as possible.

  It would be more than reasonable to hypothesize, at this juncture of our analysis, that Luke Moreland’s wife and baby both died in Avalon, France—but we do not need to hypothesize, for the death records of that little town establish that they did both die—of typhoid fever acquired from the same source. We do not have to hypothesize that he went over to England on a stay, for we know that. Nor that he met Una. Nor that he loved her. (She was, it must be remembered, a local beauty-prize winner) Nor that he wanted to marry her. We might, however, hypothesize logically that she told him that if he would kidnap her baby in some way (which baby, as we have said, had been taken from her completely by the English courts, in the Meggs divorce proceedings, on account of some past indiscretions upon her part) and take it to America, she would marry him. Tracing him down through his father—who believes this investigation is purely a technical matter involving Luke’s old passport—we find that Luke Moreland and a beautiful blonde girl and baby boy—not girl!—are living today in a small town in Nebraska, under another name. For the sake of this little new famil
y, we withhold their new name—and their present location.

  But let Luke Moreland’s affidavit speak for itself—and also reveal that as early as 4 months ago—through the aid of my brother, Scutters Jones—a single fingerprint, of those valuable fingerprint records that I myself used on Grandma MacLeish’s present charge, was being utilized to change a hypothesis into a fact. The affidavit, secured yesterday noon in Nebraska, and cabled to me in London last night, runs as follows:

  Luke Moreland (affidavit secured February 23rd by Hobart Brister, assistant director International Criminological Data Service): “You say that that census taker who looked the kid over last October 31st for the Federal kid census was a dick, eh, and was just catching one of the kid’s fingerprints to match up to a fingerprint he had—so’s it could be ascertained whether our kid was Una Meggs’ kid, and—Oh, not a dick, eh?—but an employee of a criminologic data service—whatever the hell that is? Well, looks as though you got us all dead to rights, all right! And that—oh, you say you got a cablegram from Tom Meggs in Australia that he’s marrying again in Sydney, and is willing for Una to take her baby in England if she wants to. Let’s see the cable, first. Hm, you have all right! Well, that’s hot—seeing we took the kid nearly two years ago—and got it now! And—yeah—come in, Roger—let the gentleman have a look at you—fine kid, isn’t he? Well, I’ll have to give you the low-down, I guess. And I suppose I’ll have to take the rap on that stolen autogir— what’s that?—oh you say it was only on 3-months consignment with Gonders­by, and its title was still in the name of the Knepp-Chandley people—and that they’ve got so much publicity out of the Marceau Case for their giro that they’ve agreed to withdraw any prosecution of Marceau’s murderers as far as stealing the autogiro goes? Let’s see that letter of waiver. Whoops! Jesus—but has that had me worried! Well, I guess there isn’t much I can tell you, at that. Una said she’d marry me if I did the job—yes—got her kid out of England. She was eating her heart out about it. Well, I wasn’t in the snatch racket—but it looked easy. I studied it all out. That giro was there every day at dusk, in Runnymede Field, near Lymewich, while Gondersby’s servant was on the way to box her up in the hangar. And seemed to get always filled with oil and gas, as regular as clockwork, on Thursdays. As for me, I can fly any old kind of a crate ever built—the Knepp-Chandley giro included! So I snatched the kid at Cottesmore that Friday while Grandma MacLeish was spading up her garden. Yes, I’d decided long in advance that it would have to be done on a Friday, because of that oiling and complete gassing the giro got on Thursdays. And so Friday it was! I took the kid cross country—sure—right across the fields. To Runnymede Field. Yes, that dinky private landing field that looks like what we’d call, here in America, a baseball lot! Placed him up in the cockpit as soon’s Gondersby clambered out and beat it up the line. Slipped into the woods close by to get my suitcase of stuff I’d stashed. Those boys coming out of those woods at a different point saw the kid there—and reported it. But by the time they and the old fieldmaster come up, I was back in—had taxied off. Was far above their heads, in fact. It was no trouble to make the Marceau home. I knew the British guide beams. And that red neon arrow on Marceau’s room was visible 5 miles up! Una, of course, was just playing a stall to Grimes that afternoon and evening that she’d come to Little Ivington solely to visit him. Had him all puffed up, I guess—the old jackanapes! No, she didn’t come to see him at all, believe you me! She just came there—yeah, that’s right!—because of that handy red arrow marking the place so’s I could give her the highball that all was oke. Which I did. First time I hit the region I merely circled once around the arrow—then hovered a full quarter minute above the roof—then went on towards the Channel. But thought to myself, after I was seven or eight miles off, that I’d ought to have give the machine the gun a bit—in case Una was inside a room with windows all down and all that. So I turned about—came back—and this time I buzzed around and around the house—damn near lifted the top of the chimney off once—gave the machine the gun, once—and even flashed my underfuselage light into all the windows I could. Then off I wheeled—this time for good—and made for the Channel. Crossed the Channel in about an hour—sure—I took it at a pretty wide spot—between Havre and Boulogne, as it afterward appeared. I landed on a lonely beach on the French side. Near the town, I think ’twas, of Vaugirard. Yes, that was it. I drained the tank of the giro down to 2 gallons. Then set her controls for her to move up—by herself, that is—and northwest again. Yes, via both propellers, the horizontal one and the vertical one. And threw her wide open. She went off like a thoroughbred, and she undoubtedly sank in the English Channel. I took the kid back to America as my own—for my passport, at least with my wife’s death certificate—yes, I tore up the death certificate of my own poor little gal—covered the two of us all right. Una joined me here in (name of town deleted) a few weeks later.”

  And thus, through the simple cancellation of a simple quart of certified milk—merged, as we may put it, with an apparently capricious visit on the part of a beautiful girl to an unprepossessing elderly man who could be of no interest whatsoever to her, the identity of the “midget” presumed to have come down a short rope-ladder from a hovering autogiro, then garroting Marceau, is at last established, as well as the identity of the autogiro itself—and the identity of the pilot “accomplice.” Indeed, upon ascertaining months ago that Moreland was an expert plane mechanic—and that he and Una Meggs already had her child—the whole business of the kidnapping was clarified for this investigator, without the fuller details just now presented in this affidavit.

  But upon this autogiro transporting this stolen child, sad to relate—and upon this autogiro only!—rests the hypothesis as to the method of the deposit upon the lawn, and subsequent withdrawal therefrom, of Marceau’s Lilliputian murderer. For countless witnesses testified that no other planes or ’giros were heard or seen above Little Ivington or the territory outlying it that evening, as well as to the fact that the two times an aircraft did visit the region to the south of the town, it was the same machine. And soundless planes and autogiros, it must be remembered, are not yet perfected! As for Moreland himself, it must be remembered he had no motive to kill Marceau in any way, and did not even know him.

  The one source, therefore, for a vertical descent of a murderer, of any size at all, onto the central footprinted area of that lawn, is destroyed.

  But, unfortunately, all horizontal approaches, across the lawn, to the central footprinted area were, as it will be remembered, also negated. Reason: no footprints whatsoever in the moat of rolled dirt entirely encircling Marceau and the inner footprinted area—a moat whose width, relative to that footprinted area, was nowhere less than 31 feet, and, at its maximum, was 60 feet.

  In short, all approaches to Marceau, from all spatial directions, are now negated.

  And so, facing the facts as I faced them last October, we are confronted with the rather bewildering (and untenable) theory that Marceau—for some unaccountable reason—garroted himself!—after first, through some highly curious maneuver in purely 2-dimensional or planar geometry, placing that trail of footprints leading up to—and, alas, away from!—his own body, with—for instance, let us say—a clay model of a Lilliputian foot he had fashioned. Purely tentative, both these suppositions, however—and set forth momentarily to prove their own hopeless untenability. For Marceau could not garrote himself: the existence of the instinct of self-preservation alone tells us that he would remove the garrote at the first sense of strangling; and, did he not succeed in doing so, it would be found upon his neck. It was not found there. Nor anywhere else. Nor—in spite of all possible contraventions of Euclid!—were any clay models of Lilliputian feet found, either, within an area of radius three or four times the distance that any human hand—Marceau’s included—could have hurled them, for the dossier states that the land about the croquet lawn was searched for hundreds and hundreds of feet and to the last degree—the roof of the house, also�
��anywhere, in fact, where any incriminating object might have been dropped or flung by the murderers.

  And so, in view of the fact that Marceau’s garroting smacks of Black Magic—and Black Magic there is none!—we shall actually have to go into 4th dimensional considerations to trace it down; in short, we shall have to dissociate that very compound incident, the garroting, into two or more component aspects—and analyze but one aspect alone in the light of possible space-time displacement!

  V.

  This incident of Marceau’s garroting consists essentially of three facts. One, the undeniable fact that he died of forcible asphyxiation. The second, that the mark of strangulation was left on his neck. The third, that he left behind him two messages in code, one containing (as he wrote above it, in red ink and in uncoded words) the name of his murderer in case he were ever found dead under strange circumstances; the other setting forth (as he also wrote above it, in pencil, and likewise in uncoded words) the explanation of exactly how his death was brought about.15

  But, though Marceau could not have garroted himself to death, he could have put that livid circle on his neck to simulate having been garroted by someone else. By an acid-soaked wire! A madman, let us tentatively say, creating the basis for a story of a wild weird attack upon himself Which hypothesis would conform most beautifully with his known words, allegedly terror-stricken, screamed forth about 20 or 25 minutes before his body was found.

  “Oh—my God! It’s the Babe—from Hell.” Etc. Etc. And which hypothesis would conform with his diary entries, too. (And right here, let me say, lies the first danger of false reasoning.) But nevertheless, pursuing this reasoning but temporarily, if Marceau did put that ring there, it did not necessarily have to have been put there just the moment before his death. In short, that particular aspect of his death may be slid quite a distance back along the time axis; the ring could have been put there on Marceau’s neck that afternoon, in his bedroom. During the half hour, in fact, when it has always been presumed he was taking a nap after seeding that lawn. Nor did the ring particularly have to have been put on his neck by a wire, either, for it could have been put there by a thick cord, soaked—all but its ends—in acid, and held taut around his neck for four or five minutes. The cord being then tossed into the grate fire burning in his bedroom, and consumed. And the acid—bought up in London, let us say—poured down the wash-bowl which yet today graces his bedroom. For when he went out to roll the lawn, his high Ascot tie would have concealed the livid ring. And when found—after he’d removed his tie, and even opened up his shirt a bit and rolled it down—the ring would have been exposed. Being then wrongfully assigned as part of his death picture.