The Incident of the Letter

It was late in the afternoon when Kessler made his way to the door on Aldercote Square, where Doyle admitted him at once and led him down through the kitchen offices and across a yard that had once been a garden, to the building known indifferently as the lab or the old annex. Voss had bought the property from the heirs of a textile concern thirty years before; his own tastes running chemical rather than commercial, he had converted the mill block at the bottom of the yard into his private laboratory and study, and it was through that block that the battered door on Mercer Row gave access. It was the first time the lawyer had been received in that part of his friend's domain. He eyed the dingy, high-windowed structure with curiosity and crossed the great main floor, once crowded with looms and later with benches and fume hoods, now lying gaunt and half-empty, tables laden with apparatus, crates stacked against the walls, the light falling dimly through the clouded clerestory. At the far end a steel stair mounted to a door faced in red felt; and through this Kessler was at last received into Voss's cabinet. It was a large room lined with glass-fronted cases, furnished among other things with a cheval glass and a business table, and looking out upon the little court through three dusty windows barred with iron. A fire burned in the grate. A lamp stood lit on the mantel, for even in the city the fog lay thick that evening. And close up to the warmth sat Adrian Voss, looking deathly sick. He did not rise to meet his visitor. He held out a cold hand and bade him welcome in a changed voice.

"And now," said Kessler, as soon as Doyle had left them, "you have heard the news."

The doctor shuddered. "They were crying it in the square," he said. "I heard them in my dining room. Every screen in this city has his picture, or would have, if anyone could describe him."

"One word," said the lawyer. "Whitfield was my client. But so are you, and I want to know what I am doing. You have not been mad enough to hide this fellow?"

"Kessler, I swear to God," cried Voss, "I swear to God I will never set eyes on him again. I bind my honor to you that I am done with him in this world. It is all at an end. And indeed he does not want my help. You do not know him as I do. He is safe. He is quite safe. Mark my words, he will never more be heard of."

The lawyer listened gloomily. He did not like his friend's feverish manner. "You seem pretty sure of him," he said, "and for your sake I hope you may be right. If it came to a trial, your name might appear."

"I am quite sure of him," replied Voss. "I have grounds for certainty that I cannot share with anyone. But there is one thing on which you may advise me. I have received a letter, and I am at a loss whether I should show it to the police. I should like to leave it in your hands. You would judge wisely. I have so great a trust in you."

"You fear, I suppose, that it might lead to his detection?" asked Kessler.

"No," said the other. "I cannot say I care what becomes of Marsh. I am quite done with him. I was thinking of my own character, which this hateful business has rather exposed."

Kessler ruminated awhile. He was surprised at his friend's selfishness, and yet relieved by it. "Well," he said at last, "let me see the letter."

The letter was written in an odd, upright hand and signed "Mr. Marsh." It signified, briefly enough, that the writer's benefactor, Adrian Voss, whom he had long so unworthily repaid for a thousand generosities, need labor under no alarm for his safety, as he had means of escape on which he placed a sure dependence. The lawyer liked the letter well enough. It put a better color on the intimacy than he had looked for, and he blamed himself for some of his past suspicions.

"Have you the envelope?"

"I burned it before I thought what I was about," replied Voss. "But it bore no postmark. The note was handed in."

"Shall I keep this and sleep upon it?"

"I wish you to judge for me entirely," was the reply. "I have lost confidence in myself."

"Well, I shall consider," returned the lawyer. "And now, one word more. It was Marsh who dictated the terms in your will about the disappearance."

Voss seemed seized with a qualm of faintness. He shut his mouth tight and nodded.

"I knew it," said Kessler. "He meant to ruin you if he could not inherit. You had a fine escape."

"I have had what is far more to the purpose," returned Voss solemnly. "I have had a lesson. O God, Walter, what a lesson I have had!" And he covered his face for a moment with his hands.

On his way out the lawyer stopped and had a word with Doyle. "By the bye, there was a letter handed in today. What was the messenger like?" But Doyle was positive that nothing had come except by post, "and only circulars by that," he added.

This news sent the visitor off with his fears renewed. Plainly the letter had come by the Mercer Row door. Possibly, indeed, it had been written in the cabinet itself, and if that were so it must be differently judged and handled with the more caution. As he went, the newsboys were crying it through the fog at every corner: special edition, the Whitfield murder, the hunt for a man whom no one could describe. That was the funeral oration of one friend and client, and Kessler could not help a certain dread lest the good name of another be sucked down in the eddy of the scandal. It was a ticklish decision he had to make, and self-reliant as he was by habit, he began to long for advice. None was to be had directly. But perhaps, he thought, it might be fished for.

Presently he sat on one side of his own hearth with Tess Gorman, the head of his firm's forensic practice, upon the other, and midway between them, at a nicely calculated distance from the fire, a bottle of a particular old Burgundy that had long dwelt unsunned in the foundations of his house. The fog still slept over the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like carbuncles, and through the muffle of those fallen clouds the procession of the town's life rolled on with a sound like a mighty wind. But the room was gay with firelight. The bottle had stood in the foundations of his house longer than he could remember buying wine, and the cork was still in it. On the table beside it he laid Marsh's letter face down, and beside that, face up, the note from Aldercote Square inviting him to dinner. Insensibly the lawyer melted. There was no person from whom he kept fewer secrets than Tess Gorman, and he was never quite sure that he kept as many as he meant to. She knew Doyle, she had been often enough about the property on business, and being a great student and critic of handwriting she would take such a letter as a natural thing to show her and drop some remark over it by which he might shape his course.

Gorman had built the firm's document practice out of a borrowed microscope and an unreasonable patience. She was forty, exact, and cheerful in the way of people who like problems with edges. She had testified in two hundred cases and had never once been made to look uncertain on the stand, and Kessler, who distrusted almost every expert he had ever hired, trusted her completely, which was precisely why he could not bring himself to tell her everything, and why he had arranged the evening so that she might discover the half of it herself.

"This is a sad business about Whitfield," he said.

"Yes, sir, indeed. It has raised a great deal of public feeling," returned Gorman. "The man who did it, of course, was mad."

"I should like to hear your views on that," replied Kessler. "I have a document here in his handwriting. It is between ourselves, for I scarcely know what to do about it. It is an ugly business at the best. But there it is, quite in your way. A murderer's autograph."

Gorman's eyes brightened, and she sat down at once and studied the letter with passion. "No, sir," she said. "Not mad. But it is an odd hand."

"And by all accounts a very odd writer," added the lawyer.

Just then the housekeeper entered with a note.

"Is that from Dr. Voss, sir?" inquired the examiner. "I thought I knew the writing. Anything private, Mr. Kessler?"

"Only an invitation to dinner. Why? Do you want to see it?"

"One moment. I thank you, sir." And Gorman laid the two sheets side by side and compared them sedulously. "Thank you, sir," she said at last, returning both. "It is a very interesting autograph."

There was a pause, during which Kessler struggled with himself. "Why did you compare them, Tess?" he inquired suddenly.

"Well, sir," returned the examiner, "there is a rather singular resemblance. The two hands are in many points identical. Only differently sloped."

Kessler set down his glass with the wine untasted in it.

"Identical," he said.

"In the making of the letters, sir. In the join where the s takes up the t, and in the depth of the y before it turns. The slope is a thing a man can put on by canting his wrist, and it takes practice to hold, but the hand underneath does not alter."

"May I keep the specimen?"

"No."

"Has Dr. Voss said why the slope differs?"

"Tess."

"Sir."

"You are to say nothing of either of these papers, in the office or out of it."

She sat back and looked at the two sheets on the table. "It came from the square, then, and you knew it before I did."

"You will say nothing," said Kessler.

"No, sir," said the examiner. "You need not tell me twice." She put the letter down beside the invitation and rose, and at the door she turned once more. "It is his hand, sir. You know that as well as I do."

And the blood ran cold in Kessler's veins. "What!" he thought. "Adrian Voss forging the hand of a murderer!" He did not carry the letter to Cole. To put it into her hands was to put the service door on Mercer Row into them as well, and the door belonged to his client; so that night he locked the note into his safe beside the old will, and there it stayed.