Christopher Quarles: College Professor and Master DetectiveBrebner, Percy James
General
Christopher Quarles: College Professor and Master Detective
Brebner, Percy James
College teachers -- Fiction; Detective and mystery stories
"Let us examine the third proposition before we apply for a warrant,"
said Quarles. "The will may have been hidden. If so, it must be in an
unexpected place, all the likely places having been looked into. We
must try and look into the mind of an eccentric. For a moment let us
take any ordinary man, and you will find that he exhibits certain
peculiarities. He is a creature of sequences, and he goes on repeating
himself. He will continue to wear the same kind of clothes, even
though the fashion changes. He will always put certain things into a
certain pocket. He will arrange his papers, not in the best way, but
in the way he has always arranged them. He can only write on a certain
kind of paper with a particular make of pen. Such habits as these are
acquired by quite an ordinary man, and no one thinks much about them.
Now take a man not quite so ordinary. He gets a mania for storing up
useless odds and ends, dislikes destroying anything, touches every
second post he passes in his walks, lives on one meal a day, perhaps,
or becomes a vegetarian. We say of this man that he is rather
eccentric. In short, we notice him because he exaggerates our own
peculiarities. Man repeats himself, that is the point. He does a thing
his way, not yours. Now take a really eccentric man--Mr. Frisby. We
may speak of specific peculiarities in his case, Wigan. He accumulated
useless papers and locked them up. He left valuable papers in an open
drawer. Broken fragments he carefully concealed in a chest; letters
which he treasured he left where anyone might find them. Even if he
did destroy a paper he did not tear it up, he twisted it up. Some men
invariably tear paper across and across, others crumple it into a
ball. Mr. Frisby twisted it. You remember my looking into the paper
basket. There were no torn pieces in it, nor crumpled; they were all
twisted. A small thing, but significant. I looked into several
drawers, you remember. In one was a duster, not just thrown in as you
would do, but twisted up. In his bedroom an old alpaca coat had been
thrown into a drawer, twisted up. Twisting was a habit of his. How it
was acquired I cannot say, but I should guess that in Australia the
act of twisting or turning something was a necessary part of his day's
work. I have known many sailors acquire the habit. This habit, I
argued, might help us in our search. The will was not under lock and
key, Mr. Frisby did not keep his valuables like that; unless the
search was incomplete it was not lying in an unlocked drawer. Was it
twisted up somewhere?"
"His hands," I said excitedly, moving my own as I had seen Oglethorpe
move his.
"Exactly, Wigan, twisting, and more. You are making the motion
correctly, I was careful to ascertain that. It is the action of
unscrewing. The will was screwed into something, and the dying man was
trying to make them understand that something had to be unscrewed."
"What is that something, dear?" asked Zena.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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