On an Odd Note

THE CREWEL NEEDLE

Certain others I know, in my position, sir, have had “severe nervous breakdowns”—gone out of their minds—took to parading the streets with banners, and what not, shouting Unfair! Well, thank God, I was always steady minded. I could always see the other side of things. So, although I really was unjustly dismissed from the force, I could still keep my balance. I could see the reason for the injustice behind my dismissal, and could get around to blaming myself for not keeping my silly mouth shut.

Actually, you know, I wasn’t really sacked. I was told that if I wanted to keep what there was of my pension, I had better resign on grounds of ill health. So I did, and serve me right. I should never have made my statement without first having my evidence corroborated. However, no bitterness—that ends badly, mark my words. Justifiable or unjustifiable, bitterness leads to prejudice which, carried far enough, is the same thing as madness. . . . I started life in the Army, d’you see, where you learn to digest a bit of injustice here and there; because if you don’t it gets you down and you go doolally.

If I had been thirty years wiser, thirty years ago, I might have been retired, now, on an inspector’s pension. Only, in the matter of an open verdict, I didn’t have the sense to say nothing. I was young and foolish, d’you see, and therefore over-eager. There was a girl I was very keen on and I was anxious to better myself—d’you see?

I was supposed to be an intelligent officer, as far as that goes in the police force. But that isn’t quite good enough. In those days all the so-called intelligence in the world wouldn’t get a policeman very far—seniority aside—unless he had a kind of spectacular way of showing it.

I’m not embittered, mind you. Nothing against the force. Only I ought to have known when to stop.

At first, like everybody else, I thought nothing of. it. The police were called in after the doctor, merely as a matter of routine, d’you see. I was on a beat, then, in Hammersmith. Toward about eight o’clock one Sunday morning, neighbors on either side of a little house in Spindleberry Road were disturbed by the hysterical crying of a child at Number Nine.

At first there was some talk of the N.S.P.C.C., but there was no question of that, because the people at Number Nine were, simply, a little orphan girl, aged eight, and her aunt, Miss Pantile, who thought the world of her niece and, far from ill-treating the child, had a tendency to spoil her; because the little girl, whose name was Titania, was delicate, having had rheumatic fever.

As is not uncommon, the houses in Spindleberry Road are numbered odd coming up, and even going down. The neighbors in question, therefore, were Numbers Seven and Eleven. Spindleberry Road, like so many of them put up around Brook Green before the turn of the century, is simply a double row of brick barracks, sort of sectionalized and numbered. Under each number, a porch. In front of each porch, iron railings and an iron gate. At the back of each house, a bit of garden: they are accessible from front or back only.

Beg pardon—I’ve never quite lost the habit of making everything I say a kind of report. . . . Well, hearing child crying, neighbors knock at door. No answer. Number Seven shouts through letter-box, “Open the door and let us in, Titania!” Child keeps on crying. Various neighbors try windows, but every window is locked from the inside. At last, Number Eleven, a retired captain of the mercantile marine, in the presence of witnesses, bursts in the back door. Meanwhile, one of the lady neighbors has come to get a policeman, and has found me at the corner of Rowan Road. I appear on the scene.

Not to bother you, sir, with the formalities; being within my rights, as I see them in this case, I go in, having whistled for another policeman who happens to be my sergeant. The house is in no way disturbed, but all the time, upstairs, this child is screaming as if she is being murdered, over and over again: “Auntie Lily’s dead! Auntie Lily’s dead!”

The bedroom is locked on the inside. Sergeant and I force the lock, and there comes out at us a terrified little golden-headed girl, frightened out of her wits. The woman from Number Eleven soothes her as best she can, but the sergeant and I concentrate our attention upon Miss Lily Pantile, who is lying on a bed with her eyes and mouth wide open, stone dead.

The local doctor was called, of course, and he said that, as far as he could tell, this poor old maiden lady had died of something like a cerebral hemorrhage at about three o’clock in the morning. On a superficial examination this was as far as he cared to commit himself. He suggested that this was a matter for the coroner.

And that, as far as everybody was concerned, was that, d’you see. Only it was not. At the inquest it appeared that poor Miss Pantile had met her death through a most unusual injury. A gold-eyed crewel needle had been driven through her skull, and into her brain, about three inches above the left ear!

Now here, if you like, was a mystery with a capital M.

Miss Pantile lived alone with her eight-year-old niece. She had enough money of her own to support them both, but sometimes made a little extra by crewel work—you know, embroidering with silks on a canvas background. She was especially good at creweling roses for cushion covers. The needle she favored—she had packets and packets of them—was the Cumberland Crewel Gold Eye, one of which had found its way, nobody knew how, through her skull and into her brain. But how?—that was the question.

There was no lack of conjecture, you may be sure. Doctors cited dozens of instances of women—tailoresses and dressmakers, particularly—who had suddenly fallen dead through having needles embedded in various vital organs. Involuntary muscular contractions, it was demonstrated, could easily send an accidentally stuck in needle, or portion of a needle, working its way between the muscles for extraordinary distances, until it reached, for example, the heart. . . .

The coroner was inclined to accept this as a solution, and declare a verdict of death by misadventure. Only the doctor wouldn’t have that. Such cases, he said, had come to his attention, especially in the East End of London; and, in every case, the needle extracted had been in a certain way corroded, or calcified, as the case might be. In the case of Miss Lily Pantile, the crewel needle—upon the evidence of a noted pathologist —had been driven into the skull from the outside, with super­human force. Part of the gold eye of the needle had been found protruding from the deceased’s scalp. . . . What did the coroner make of that? the doctor asked.

The coroner was not anxious to make anything of it.

In the opinion of the doctor, could an able-bodied man have driven a needle through a human skull with his fingers?

Definitely, no.

Might this needle, then, have been driven into Miss Pantile’s skull with some instrument, such as a hammer?

Possibly; but only by someone of “preternatural skill” in the use of instruments of exceptional delicacy. . . .

The doctor reminded the coroner that even experienced needlewomen frequently broke far heavier needles than this gold-headed crewel needle, working with cloth of close texture. The human skull, the doctor said—calling the coroner, with his forensic experience, to witness—was a most remarkably difficult thing to penetrate, even with a specially designed instrument like a trephine.

The coroner said that one had, however, to admit the possibility of a crewel needle being driven through a middle-aged woman’s skull with a hammer, in the hands of a highly skilled man.

. . . So it went on, d’you see. The doctor lost his temper and invited anyone to produce an engraver, say, or cabinet-maker, to drive a crewel needle through a human skull with a hammer “with such consummate dexterity”—they were his words, sir —as to leave the needle unbroken, and the surrounding skin unmarked, as was the case with Miss Pantile.

There, d’you see, the coroner had him. He said, in substance: “You have proved that this needle could not have found its way into the late Miss Pantile’s brain from inside. You have also proved that this needle could not have found its way into Miss Pantile’s brain from outside.”

Reprimanding somebody for laughing, then, he declared an open verdict.

So the case was closed. A verdict is a verdict, but coroners are only coroners, even though they may be backed by the Home Office pathologist. And somehow or other, for me, this verdict was not good enough. If I had been that coroner, I thought to myself, I would have made it: Willful murder by a person, or persons, unknown.

All fine and large. But what person, or what persons, known or unknown, with specialized skill enough to get into a sealed house, and into a locked room; hammer a fine needle into a lady’s skull, and get out again, locking all the doors behind him, or them, from the inside—all without waking up an eight-year-old girl by the side of the victim?

Furthermore there was the question of motive. Robbery? Nothing in the house had been touched. The old lady had nothing worth stealing. Revenge? Most unlikely: she had no friends and no enemies—lived secluded with her little niece, doing no harm to anyone. . . . You see, there was a certain amount of sense in the coroner’s verdict . . . Still . . .

“Only let me solve this mystery, and I’m made,” I said to myself.

I solved it, and I broke myself.

Now, as you must know, when you are in doubt you had better first examine yourself.

People get into a sloppy habit of mind. I once read a detective story called “The Invisible Man,” in which everybody swore he had seen nobody; yet there were footprints in the snow. “Nobody,” of course, was the postman, in this story; “invisible” simply because nobody ever bothers to consider a postman as a person.

I was quite sure that in the mystery of Miss Pantile there must have been something somebody overlooked. Not a clue, in the generally accepted sense of the term, but something.

And I was convinced that somehow, out of the corner of my mind’s eye, I had seen in Miss Pantile’s bedroom, a certain something-or-other that was familiar to me, yet very much out of place. Nothing bad in itself—but in the circumstances, definitely queer. Now what was it?

I racked my brains—Lord, but I racked my silly brains!—trying to visualize in detail the scene of that bedroom. I was pretty observant as a youngster—I tell you, I might have got to be detective-inspector if I’d had the sense to keep my mouth shut at the right time—and the scene came back into my mind quite clearly.

There was the room, about sixteen feet by fourteen. Main articles of furniture, a pair of little bedsteads with frames of stained oak; crewel-worked quilts. Everything neat as a pin. A little dressing-table, blue crockery with a pattern of pink roses. Wallpaper, white with a pattern of red roses. A little fire-screen, black, crewel-worked again with yellow roses and green leaves. Over the fireplace, on the mantel-shelf, several ornaments—one kewpie doll with a ribbon round its waist, one china cat with a ribbon round its neck, half a pair of cheap gift-vases with a paper rose stuck in it, and a pink velvet pin-cushion. At the end of the mantel-shelf nearest the little girl’s side of the room, several books—

“. . . Ah-ah! Hold hard, there!” my memory said to me. “You’re getting hot!” . . . You remember the old game of Hot-and-Cold, I dare say, in which you have to find some hidden object? When you’re close to it you’re hot; when you’re not, you’re cold. When my memory said “Hot,” I stopped at the mental image of those books, and all of a sudden the solution to the Spindleberry Road mystery struck me like a blow between the eyes.

And here, in my excitement, I made my big mistake. I wanted, d’you see, to get the credit, and the promotion, that would certainly come with it.

Being due for a weekend’s leave, I put on my civilian suit and went down to Luton, where the orphan girl Titania was staying in the care of some distant cousin, and by making myself pleasant I got to talking with the kid alone, in a tea-shop.

She got through six meringues before we were done talking. . . .

She was a pale-faced little girl, sort of pathetic in the reach-me-down black full mourning they’d dressed her in. One of those surprised-looking little girls with round eyes; mouth always part open. Bewildered, never quite sure whether to come or to go, to laugh or to cry. Devil of a nuisance to an officer on duty: he always thinks they’ve lost their way, or want to be taken across a street.

Her only truly distinguishing mark or characteristic was her hair, which was abundant and very pretty. Picture one of those great big yellow chrysanthemums combed back and tied with a bit of black ribbon.

I asked her was she happy in her new home? She said, “Oh yes. Auntie Edith says as soon as it’s decent I can go to the pictures twice a week.”

“Didn’t your Auntie Lily let you go to the pictures, then?” I asked.

Titania said, “Oh no. Auntie Lily wouldn’t go because picture houses are dangerous. They get burned down.”

“Ah, she was a nervous lady, your Auntie Lily, wasn’t she,” I said, “keeping the house all locked up like that at night?”

“She was afraid of boys,” Titania said, in an old-fashioned way. “These boys! What with throwing stones and letting off fireworks, they can burn you alive in your bed.”

“That’s what your poor Auntie said, isn’t it, Titania? Now, you’re not afraid of boys, are you?”

“Oh no,” she said. “Brian was a boy. He was my brother.”

“What, did Brian die, my little dear?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” she said. “He died of the flu, when Mummy did. I had the flu, too. But I didn’t die; only I was delicate afterwards. I had the rheumatic fever, too.”

“Your brother Brian must have been a fine big boy,” I said. “Now about how old would he have been when he passed away? Twelve?”

“Thirteen and a quarter,” said Titania. “He was teaching me how to spit.”

“And so he passed away, and I’m very sorry to hear it,” I said. “. . . And your Auntie Lily wouldn’t let you go to the pictures, wouldn’t she? Well, you must always obey your elders, as you are told in the catechism. Who did you like best in the pictures?”

Her face sort of lit up, then, d’you see. She told me: “Best of all I liked Pearl White in a serial, Peg O’ The Ring. Oh, it was good! And John Bunny and Flora Finch—” She giggled at the memory. “But we had only got to Part Three of The Clutching Hand when Mummy and Brian died, and I went to live with Auntie Lily. . . . Apart from the danger of fire, picture palaces are unhealthy because they are full of microbes. Microbes carry germs. . . . Auntie Lily used to wear an influenza mask on her face when she went out—you know, you can’t be too careful these days,” said this serious little girl.

“And kept all her windows locked up, too, I daresay,” I said. “But I mean to say, what did you do with yourself? Play with dolls?”

“Sometimes. Or, sometimes, I did sewing, or read books.”

“Ah, you’re a great one for reading, Titania,” I said, “like your poor mother used to be. Why, Titania is a name out of a fairy story, isn’t it? A clever girl like you could read anything she could get her hands on, if she were locked up with nobody to talk to. I bet you read your poor brother’s old books, too. I remember noticing on the mantel-piece a bound volume of the Boy’s Own Paper. And also . . . now let me see . . . a book with a black and yellow cover entitled One Thousand Things a Clever Boy Can Do—is that it?”

She said: “Not Things! Tricks.”

“And right you are! One Thousand Tricks a Clever Boy Can Do. And I’ll bet you mastered them all, didn’t you?”

She said, “Not all of them. I didn’t have the right things to do most of them with—”

“There’s one trick in that book, which I have read myself,” I said, “which you did master, though, and which you did have the right apparatus for, Titania, my dear. Tell you what it is. You get a medium needle and stick it down the center of a soft cork. Then you get a penny and place this penny between two little blocks of wood. Put your cork with the needle in it on top of the penny, and strike the cork a sharp blow with a hammer. The cork will hold the needle straight, so that it goes right through that penny. That’s the way you killed your poor Auntie Lily, isn’t it, Titania?”

Finishing the last of her meringue, she nodded. Having swallowed, she said, “Yes,” and, to my horror, she giggled.

“Why, then,” I said, “you must come back to London with me, d’you see, and tell my inspector all about it.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “Only you mustn’t tell Auntie Edith.”

I told her, “Nobody will do anything dreadful to you; only you must confess and get it off your poor little mind.”

Titania’s second cousin Edith, by courtesy called “Auntie,” came with the child and me to London . . . and there, in the police station, she flatly denied every word of everything, and cried to be sent home.

Put yourself in my position, stigmatized as a madman and a brute! I lost my temper, one word led to another, and I “tendered my resignation. . . .”

I shall never forget the sly expression on the girl Titania’s face when she went back with her Auntie Edith to Luton.

I have no idea what has happened to her since. She will be about thirty-eight or thirty-nine by now, and I should not be at all surprised if she had turned out to be quite a handful.