Mr. Holcombe was on the bed, fully dressed. He
had a wet towel tied around his head, and his face
looked swollen and puffy. He opened one eye and
looked at me.
“What a night!” he groaned.
“What happened! What did you find?”
He groaned again. “Find!” he said.
“Nothing, except that there was something wrong
with that whisky. It poisoned me. I haven’t
been out of the house!”
So for that day, at least, Mr. Ladley became Mr. Holcombe
again, and as such accepted ice in quantities, a mustard
plaster over his stomach, and considerable nursing.
By evening he was better, but although he clearly
intended to stay on, he said nothing about changing
his identity again, and I was glad enough. The
very name of Ladley was horrible to me.
The river went down almost entirely that day, although
there was still considerable water in the cellars.
It takes time to get rid of that. The lower floors
showed nothing suspicious. The papers were ruined,
of course, the doors warped and sprung, and the floors
coated with mud and debris. Terry came in the
afternoon, and together we hung the dining-room rug
out to dry in the sun.
As I was coming in, I looked over at the Maguire yard.
Molly Maguire was there, and all her children around
her, gaping. Molly was hanging out to dry a sodden
fur coat, that had once been striped, brown and gray.
I went over after breakfast and claimed the coat as
belonging to Mrs. Ladley. But she refused to
give it up. There is a sort of unwritten law
concerning the salvage of flood articles, and I had
to leave the coat, as I had my kitchen chair.
But it was Mrs. Ladley’s, beyond a doubt.
I shuddered when I thought how it had probably got
into the water. And yet it was curious, too,
for if she had had it on, how did it get loose to
go floating around Molly Maguire’s yard?
And if she had not worn it, how did it get in the
water?
The newspapers were full of the Ladley case, with
its curious solution and many surprises. It was
considered unique in many ways. Mr. Pitman had
always read all the murder trials, and used to talk
about the corpus delicti and writs of habeas
corpus—corpus being the legal
way, I believe, of spelling corpse. But I came
out of the Ladley trial—for it came to
trial ultimately—with only one point of
law that I was sure of: that was, that it is
mighty hard to prove a man a murderer unless you can
show what he killed.
And that was the weakness in the Ladley case.
There was a body, but it could not be identified.
The police held Mr. Ladley for a day or two, and then,
nothing appearing, they let him go. Mr. Holcombe,
who was still occupying the second floor front, almost
wept with rage and despair when he read the news in
the papers. He was still working on the case,
in his curious way, wandering along the wharves at
night, and writing letters all over the country to
learn about Philip Ladley’s previous life, and
his wife’s. But he did not seem to get
anywhere.
