Inspector Kelly And The Deduction Machine

Reginald, Inspector Kelly’s brother whipped the dust sheet off of his new invention.

“Behold”, he said, proudly, “My deductive engine. The future of detective work. It will do for deduction what Babbage’s difference engine did for mathematics. One only has to enter the clues as one would enter the premises within a deductive argument and the machine will piece them together and come to a conclusion”.

“Babbage smabbage”, said Kelly, “You make detective work sound like baking a cake, simply mix the clues together, pop them in your deduction oven and up pops your answer but it’s not that simple. Firstly, your machine wouldn’t know the difference between truth and lies. You could feed anything into it and it would believe it”.

“Not so”, argued his brother, “If you entered the facts of a case into the machine, the necessary information and a lie told which was not consistent with that information then the machine would spot the inconsistency. For example if you fed a bus time table into it and a suspect claimed to have taken a bus when there were no busses running, the machine would spot the lie”.

“Alright but how does a machine know if a clue is a false clue that has been left by a murderer in order to lead a detective in the wrong direction?”, said Kelly.

“Well, true”, said his brother, “But if a human detective can be misled by false clues then it is no proof that the human detective is superior to my machine and if there is any inconsistency in the false clue; if it seems out of place then my machine will notice it”.

“Hmm? Well what about psychology; a detective often uses his knowledge of human beings to reach conclusions. If some ones actions or behaviour seems out of character then that often tells you something is amiss”, said Kelly, “What does your machine know of human psychology?”.

“My machine knows what is put into it”, said his brother, “If you tell it what normal human behaviour is and if someone behaves in a way that seems inconsistent with that, again, my machine will notice the inconsistency”.

The detective thought for a moment, rubbing his chin as he did so while looking at the machine when suddenly his eyes lit up,

“Ahh! There is one thing that your machine cannot do in fact which I would challenge it to do. Let me tell you the facts of a curious case I solved recently and see if your infernal contraption can do the same”, he said.

“Very well”, said his brother, picking up a pen and notepaper, “My machine accepts your challenge. Simply tell me the details of the case, I will note them down and then enter them into my machine”.

“Well then”, said Kelly, his eyes becoming more distant as he cast his mind back to the case, “It involved the proprietor of a side show, a kind of circus, like the one run by the famous American showman Mr PT Barnum. It was he who was killed, found stabbed in his hotel room and there was no one else in the hotel room save his baby sleeping in a corner of the room; his wife had gone down stairs to make arrangements for dinner. It was a room upon the 7^th floor of the hotel, there was no balcony outside the window and it would have been an amazing feet requiring the skills of one of this showman’s acrobats and high flying trapeze artists to reach the window, furthermore no one, by the hotel cleaning staff who were cleaning the hallway carpet outside his room, was at any time seen either entering or exiting the hallway or the room before or after the murder except his wife of course who discovered him dead and ran out of the room screaming for help the moment she did but it was quite certain that he was alive when his wife left his room because he was speaking to an agent upon the telephone in his room even after that time, a conversation overheard by his agents secretary, and so he must have been killed sometime in between hanging up the phone and his wife returning to the room”.

“Hmm? That is perplexing. No one in the room except our showman; no one coming in or out unless, as you say, it was by the window… and did you search the hotel room thoroughly?”, asked his brother.

“With a fine tooth comb, which was not hard, given the small size of the hotel room. We searched the wardrobe top to bottom; looked underneath and behind it ; searched all the walls for possible secret entrances; turned the bed over and searched inside it; lifted up the room carpet in case any entrances might be found underneath the carpet; we did the same in the bathroom but nothing; then we checked the window of the room and the doors for signs of forced entry but, again, nothing; finally we questioned witnesses outside the hotel who might have seen someone climbing up the side of it and in through the window of the room and, remarkably, an entire queue was lined up outside the theatre next door during the time of the murder and not one of the people within that queue saw anyone climbing up the side of the hotel or even out of a lower room; by the way, we also searched all the rooms with windows below, above and adjacent to the window of our murdered man. Essentially there was no way, humanly possible, that I could think of that a person could have entered that room; even a contortionist had he been hiding in some small crack or curled up inside a suitcase would have been found”.

“My word”, said his brother, “That is a puzzle for certain and how did the murderer commit the crime?”.

Kelly smiled,

“I’ll tell you once you’ve asked your machine”, he said, “Give your mechanical brainbox a try. If he can solve it, I’ll eat my hat and call you a genius; I’ll even recommend your machine to my superiors at Scotland yard, though I doubt if they’ll take it up, there as old fashioned and suspicious of all that new fangled wizardry as I am”.

“Very well”, said his brother typing the notes that he had jotted down into the typewriter like keyboard of his machine.

Then, as inspector Kelly watched he saw the machine begin to analyse all the evidence, cog wheels of cogitation turning, electrical lights flashing and strange whirring, buzzing and clicking noises emanating from within it, then, finally, a bell ringing, out of the machine came a punched card that, gazing at it like someone deciphering mystical runes, his brother seemed able to read.

“Well?”, asked Kelly, “What does your tin Sherlock Holmes tell you?”.

“It says that I have entered false information. It appears my deductive engine is just as stumped as I am by your remarkable tale”, said his brother in a disappointed voice.

“Well then”, said Kelly, smiling, “Let me tell you and your machine exactly how the murder was done. The showman, it turns out was a very brutal man; often drunk and unbalanced in his temper and had been known on occasion to beat his wife, not to mention, it is rumoured that she was having an affair with one of his business associates”.

“So his wife did it? But how?”, asked his brother, “You said that no one entered or left the room during the murder”.

“Well that is the most interesting part of it, you see, the man’s wife had an accomplice; one of the acts that worked for him and who he had also very badly mistreated and beaten, in a drunken rage, with his walking stick and who he intended to fire and replace with another similar act and can you guess what that act was?”, asked Kelly.

“No”, said his brother, perched upon the edge of his seat, “Please do tell”.

“A little midget by the name of General Tom Tiny”, said the Inspector, “It was he in the baby’s cot, not the man’s child. His wife had brought tiny Tom into the room earlier that day, pretended to nurse him like an infant and then removed him after the murder was discovered; no one thought it peculiar when she requested to remove her baby son and I never would have suspected such a thing had I not found a poster advertising Tom Tiny’s act folded up inside the dead man’s coat pocket. Fortunately, I managed to stop his wife just in time before she could leave the hotel with tiny Tom in her basket and switch him for her real son that she had left in the care of Toms Midget wife, Tina”.

“Remarkable”, said his brother with a look of astonishment upon his face, “And yet I wonder why my machine never thought of the baby?”.

“Well your mechanical brainbox is a remarkable machine, there’s no doubt in that”, replied Kelly, “But perhaps it thinks much too conventionally and we real, flesh and blood detectives often have to think outside the box”.