“It is evidence purely of trivialities which has put Deacon in a cell awaiting trial; yet I am convinced that did I attempt to establish his innocence merely by the means I have employed so far, the very people who already accept his guilt as certain would accuse me of having nothing but trivialities upon which to base my version of the affair. Further, it could be said—and would be—that I have read between the lines writing which was not there; that I have so ingeniously twisted the interpretation of what are, in fact, merely ordinarily meaningless signs as to make them appear a grim and coherent indictment against another man; that I have seen an anarchist bomb in a schoolboy’s snowball and a Bolshevik outrage in a varsity rag.
“So I must strengthen my case; for the truth is that this evidence of trivialities is good, but not nearly good enough. It must have a backing to it.
“Now, there is, if you look at it, a complete absence of any backing to the case against Deacon. ‘What about the money?’ you say. ‘What about that hundred pounds belonging to Hoode? There’s motive for you!’ ‘Nonsense!’ say I. Deacon was paid six hundred pounds a year. He had also an allowance from his only living relative. He had been, it is true, a little shorter of money than usual lately; but to suggest that he would commit a murder for a hundred pounds is absurd. A man in his position could have raised the money in a thousand safer and less energetic ways. No, Deacon’s story that the money was a birthday gift from Hoode is, besides being more likely, true. Further, it is easy of proof that Deacon and Hoode were on the best of terms: for corroboration apply to the Ministry of Imperial Finance and the households of Abbotshall and 12 Seymour Square. Further still, look at Deacon’s record and see how rash it is to condemn him murderer with nothing more to go upon than those too-beautiful fingerprints and a few ragged pieces of circumstantial evidence, the two best of which were supplied—oh! so ingeniously—by Sir Arthur Digby-Coates. For it was from him that the police first learnt that Hoode had drawn a hundred pounds in notes from his bank. And it was through him that it became known that Deacon had asked him the time at ten forty-five on the night of the murder—the time to which the hands of the clock in the study had been moved by the murderer.
“There being no backing to the case of the Crown against Deacon, I saw that if I could find a stout one for mine against Digby-Coates I should score heavily.
“The first thing to be found was motive. What, I asked myself, could it be? Money? No. Digby-Coates is a wealthier man by far than ever was Hoode. Revenge for some particular ill turn? Hardly that, since Hoode, though a politician, bore all his life the stamp of honesty and straight dealing. A woman? I was not prepared to accept one as the sole cause. She might, of course, be contributory, but I wanted something more likely. Middle-aged men of the social and intellectual standing of these two do not often, in this age of decrees nisi and cold love, go about killing each other over a woman if she is only the first blot upon the fair sea of their friendship.
“I was forced back, in this search for motive, upon the deductions I had made from those little material signs, and remembered that I had determined, before ever I thought of putting a name to the murderer, that John Hoode was killed by a man insane; not mad in the gibbering, straws-in-the-hair sense, but mentally unbalanced by a kind of ingrowing, self-nourishing hatred.
“I took this as my starting point and asked myself how I could find corroboration of and reason for this hatred having existed in the heart of a man ostensibly the closest friend of its object. The answer was: look at their past history; as much of it as is available in books of record. I did so, using Hoode’s own books.
“I found soon enough reason for the hatred. Look as I looked. You will see that always, always, always was Digby-Coates beaten by the man he killed. Were the race one of scholarship, sport, politics, social advancement, honours, the result was the same. Hoode first; Digby-Coates second. Look in the Who’s Who, Hansard, the records of Upchester School and Magdalen, the Honours Lists. Look in the minds of the men’s colleagues and contemporaries. Always will you find the same story. Look at this, the slightest extract from the list:—
John Hoode.
Arthur Digby-Coates.
Captain of Upchester (last three years at school).
Senior Monitor (same three years).
Won John Halket scholarship to Magdalen.
Second on list.
Rowed 2 in Oxford boat (third year).
Rowed 6 in trials (third year).
Gaisford (fourth year).
Newdigate (fourth year).
Minor office (Admiralty) after three years in Parliament.
Still merely M.P. after six months longer in Parliament.
President of Board of Trade.
Still M.P. (He was, I believe, offered at this time a minor Parliamentary Secretaryship; but refused.)
K.C.M.G., C.V.O., etc.
K.B.E.
Minister of Imperial Finance (from the date of the forming of the Ministry in 1919.)
Almost at same time accepted Parliamentary Secretaryship to Board of Conciliation.
“One could go on for pages, forever telling this story of races won by a stride—Hoode the winner, Digby-Coates his follower-up—and that stride getting longer and longer as time went on.
“But at last came the race for the Woman—the race whose loss snapped the last cord of sanity in the mind of the loser.
“I discovered the existence of the Woman in this way: I searched Hoode’s desk in suspicion of a hidden drawer. I found one and in it a diary (of no use save to corroborate the fact of some of those races), and a bunch of newspaper-cuttings. But I knew—how is no matter—that something was missing from that drawer.
“What that something was I did not know. I only knew that it was most probably of importance. So I searched the house—and found it. A packet of letters from the Woman. As I was by then up to the neck in the unspeakable nasty work of the Private Inquiry Agent, I read them. Who the woman is will not be set down here. It is my hope that not even in court shall I have to give her name.
“I sought her and talked with her. Put briefly and brutally her replies were that I was correct in assuming that she had been Hoode’s mistress, and that I was also right (this was a shot in black dark) in assuming that she knew Sir Arthur Digby-Coates. She did not, it seemed, have any affection for the gentleman. She made it plain to me, under some pressure, that Sir Arthur had wished her to stand in the relation to him that she subsequently did to John Hoode. But a (shrug of distaste) Sir Arthur had been sent packing—and quickly.
“Is not that enough, when added to those other and perpetual defeats of the past five-and-thirty years, to show the reason for hatred in the mind of the egoist? Consider the history of the matter. First, boyish jealousy and a determination to win next time; then the gradual process of realisation that strive as he would he would never reach a common goal before his rival; then the slow at first but increasingly fast transition from healthy jealousy to dislike, from dislike to utter hatred. Then, at last, with the crowning loss of the Woman, the monomania—for this is what the hatred is grown—takes a firmer hold and becomes a fire so fierce that only the complete elimination of the hated man will quench it.
“So much for reasons why Digby-Coates should have hated Hoode. Now for corroboration that such hatred actually existed.
“I wrote just now of certain newspaper-cuttings which I found in the hidden drawer of Hoode’s desk. These were a bunch of twenty-four, taken from various issues (all bearing dates within the last two years) of The Searchlight, The St. Stephen’s Gazette, and Vox Populi. Every one of the cuttings was a leading or almost equally prominent article attacking the Minister of Reconstruction in no halfhearted way.
“Being one who prefers news without sensationalism, I had never before read a line from any one of these three papers. I came to these extracts, therefore, with a mind not only open but blank, and was immediately struck by the strange unanimity of the three newspapers in regard to John Hoode. For, as all the world must know, whether they read them or not, the trio are of politics widely varying. Their attacks upon the murdered man were made upon different grounds, it is true, but the very fact that the attacks were made, and made so viciously, struck me as unusual. It seemed to me that in the ordinary way the fact of one attacking would be enough to make at least one of the others defend. Further, the grounds upon which the attacks were made appeared to my unbiased mind as flimsy compared with the wholehearted virulence of the writing.
“From wondering and rereading, I came upon a thing yet stranger: the unmistakable and mysterious similarity in the style of the composition. This similarity was to me, who have made something of a study of other men’s methods, even more pronounced when attempts had been made to disguise or vary the manner of writing. After ten minutes’ examination of those cuttings, I was prepared to swear that one man had been conducting the anti-Hoode campaign in three papers whose views on every other matter from vaccination to the Vatican are as wide apart as Stoke Poges, Seattle, and Sinbad the Sailor. I pictured a man of some scholastic attainment who was unable to write in fashion other than preciously correct and so set in his style as to be incapable of varying it, tried he never so hard.
“I took the cuttings and my conviction to Deacon. He could not help me, so I went to his predecessor as Hoode’s private secretary (the real private secretary, like Deacon, not the departmental one.) From him I obtained confirmation of my theory. He, too, had suspected that not only was one man behind these press attacks, but that this man was also the actual author. He showed me something I had only half-noticed till then; something which went further than mere similarity of style. Throughout the articles, he pointed out, quotations occurred. They were, some of them, unusual quotations. But usual or unusual, one and all were correct! They were correct in some cases to the point of pedantry—if correctness can be so described. And they were thus correct in these three widely differing and highly sensational papers, whose literary standards have always been a byword with those who hate journalese, cliché, and the dreadful mutilation, humiliation and weakening of the English language.
“It was when this former secretary of Hoode’s pointed this out to me that I recollected having recently been puzzled by a memory which would not be remembered. In one of the cuttings I had come across a quotation from Virgil, in which a dative case had been used rather than the all-prevalent but less correct genitive, and had been haunted at the time of reading with a sense of having seen this same rarity only recently. Suddenly it came back to me. It had been in a book of essays I had dipped into—a book of essays which, on inquiry made later, turned out to be from the pen of Sir Arthur Digby-Coates, writing under a feminine nom de guerre.
“That, I admit, is not much to go upon. But more was to come. This forerunner of Deacon had—before he quarrelled with Hoode and left him—on his own initiative employed a private detective and set him to unearth this enemy of Hoode’s that seemed to command and write for three incendiary newspapers. You see, this secretary was sure that there was an enemy of some importance at work. At first he said nothing to Hoode, but at last told of his suspicions. He was laughed at. He returned to the charge—and they quarrelled. He left Hoode’s employment without having told him of the private detective. Being, with some excuse, not a little angry, he paid the detective, telling him to stop the work and go to hell.
“But, luckily, the private detective had smelt a Big Thing, and consequently Big Money. He went on working. He finished his job. I got into touch with him. He has been paid, and the result of his labours has been forwarded to Scotland Yard.
“His proofs are more than adequate. He has established, mainly through the corruptibility of a disgruntled employee, that Digby-Coates was beyond doubt the hidden owner of those three newspapers and also the composer of all these elaborate paeans of hate which appeared in them from time to time, and were directed against the man who was his friend and whose friendship he so cleverly pretended to return. (One cannot but admire the ingenuity with which Digby-Coates foisted more or less respectable and quite foolish figureheads upon the world—including the rest of the Press—as owners of the papers upon the purchase and upkeep of which he must have spent nearly half his great fortune. He was truly a great Enemy!)
“But it was in himself writing the attacks with which he tried to bring Hoode to a fall that he overstepped himself and made a loophole through which curious persons could wriggle. Had he left the writing to different men and rested content with being the power behind the machine, he would have increased by a thousand his chances of remaining undiscovered. I suppose that his hate was so strong that to leave to others the forging of the weapons was beyond him.
“Before ending the third part of this report, I would draw attention to what has thus far been established—established, I hope, to the satisfaction of even the most rigorous anti-Deaconite.
“It has been shown that there is both reason for and corroboration of Digby-Coates’s hatred of Hoode.
“It has been shown not only that all the evidence against Deacon can be used equally well against Digby-Coates, but also that there is in fact more of this evidence of material signs against Digby-Coates than there is against Deacon.
“Above all, we have in the case against Digby-Coates two things (which might be called one thing) that there have never been against Deacon. The first is motive—although it is nothing more (nor less) than the crazy hatred of a half-madman. The second is reliable evidence that ill-will existed before the murder.