“Just now,” said Dr. Curtis, “you quoted Taylor. Do you remember the American Crowbar Case?”

“Phineas P. Gage?”

“The same. Do you remember that an iron rod forty-three inches long and one and a quarter inches in diameter, with a tapering point and weighing thirteen and a quarter pounds, passed completely through Phineas’ head?”

“ ‘There was much haemorrhage,’ ”— Alleyn chanted drearily. “ ‘and escape of brain matter.’ ”

“He eventually recovered all his faculties of body and mind…”

“ ‘…with the loss of the injured eye.’ I knew you’d flatten me with Phineas P. And what of Mr. J. Collyer Adam (Public Prosecutor, Madras) and his case of the man with the knife in his forehead?”

“Well,” said Dr. Curtis with a grin, “with those examples before you, what d’you mean by asking why he didn’t die sooner? For all we know, until I’ve had a peep inside, he might have survived to tell you ’oo done it and saved us all a night’s work.”

“He got a swinging great crack on the temple,” Alleyn observed.

“Yes. I was going to ask you how you account for it.”

“The smudge, inefficiently removed off the chromium steel boss in the lift wall, accounts for it. So, I fancy, do the bruises on the right temple and round the eyes, and the cut on the left temple, as well as a dent in the side of Lord W.’s bowler and the bloodstains on a pair of driving gloves we found in the lift. Henry Lamprey’s gloves, they are, as he very airily admitted. Michael saw them in the hall, so no doubt they were taken at the same time as the knife. I get a picture of a great buffet on the side of the head. Then I see a picture of a left hand laid thumb downwards across the eyes, with the heel of the hand against the wall. While the left hand is still in position and the subject unconscious, the point of the skewer, held in the right hand and guided through the fingers of the left, completes a singularly nasty piece of work.”

“A bit conjectural, isn’t it?”

“Before they took the body away, Fox and I made an experiment. We stopped the lift at the uninhabited flat below this one and reconstructed the scene. Luckily rigor was not far advanced. The body fitted the marks exactly. The dent in the bowler tallies with a bit of chromium steel fancy work above the stain. Thompson’s taken some shots of it. The results should be illuminating and calculated to give a tender juryman convulsions. And here, I fancy, comes Miss Tinkerton.”

Tinkerton was a thin, ambling sort of woman of about fifty. The only expression observable in her face was one of faint disapproval. She was colourless, not only in complexion, or merely because she gave no impression of character, but all over and in detail. Her eyes, her lashes, her lips, her voice, and her movements, were all without colour. It was as if she existed in a state of having recently uttered the phrase “not quite nice,” and forgotten its inspiration, while her mouth idiotically maintained the form given by the sentiment. She was dressed with great neatness in clothes that, a long time ago, might have belonged to some one else but had since absorbed nonentity. She wore pince nez and a hair net. When Alleyn asked her to sit down, she edged round a chair and, with an air of suspicion, cautiously lowered her rump. She fixed her eyes on the edge of the table.