CHAPTER III
_The Doctors Theory_
It is not easy to make any picture of the horror that lay dark on thehearts of the people of Meirion. It was no longer possible to believe orto pretend to believe that these men and women and children had mettheir deaths through strange accidents. The little girl and the younglaborer might have slipped and fallen over the cliffs, but the woman wholay dead with the dead sheep at the bottom of the quarry, the two menwho had been lured into the ooze of the marsh, the family who were foundmurdered on the Highway before their own cottage door; in these casesthere could be no room for the supposition of accident. It seemed as ifit were impossible to frame any conjecture or outline of a conjecturethat would account for these hideous and, as it seemed, utterlypurposeless crimes. For a time people said that there must be a madmanat large, a sort of country variant of Jack the Ripper, some horriblepervert who was possessed by the passion of death, who prowled darklingabout that lonely land, hiding in woods and in wild places, alwayswatching and seeking for the victims of his desire.
Indeed, Dr. Lewis, who found poor Williams, his wife and childrenmiserably slaughtered on the Highway, was convinced at first that thepresence of a concealed madman in the countryside offered the onlypossible solution to the difficulty.
"I felt sure," he said to me afterwards, "that the Williams's had beenkilled by a homicidal maniac. It was the nature of the poor creatures'injuries that convinced me that this was the case. Some years agothirty-seven or thirty-eight years ago as a matter of fact--I hadsomething to do with a case which on the face of it had a stronglikeness to the Highway murder. At that time I had a practice at Usk, inMonmouthshire. A whole family living in a cottage by the roadside weremurdered one evening; it was called, I think, the Llangibby murder; thecottage was near the village of that name. The murderer was caught inNewport; he was a Spanish sailor, named Garcia, and it appeared that hehad killed father, mother, and the three children for the sake of thebrass works of an old Dutch clock, which were found on him when he wasarrested.
"Garcia had been serving a month's imprisonment in Usk Jail for somesmall theft, and on his release he set out to walk to Newport, nine orten miles away; no doubt to get another ship. He passed the cottage andsaw the man working in his garden. Garcia stabbed him with his sailor'sknife. The wife rushed out; he stabbed her. Then he went into thecottage and stabbed the three children, tried to set the place on fire,and made off with the clockworks. That looked like the deed of a madman,but Garcia wasn't mad--they hanged him, I may say--he was merely a manof a very low type, a degenerate who hadn't the slightest value forhuman life. I am not sure, but I think he came from one of the Spanishislands, where the people are said to be degenerates, very likely fromtoo much inter-breeding.
"But my point is that Garcia stabbed to kill and did kill, with one blowin each case. There was no senseless hacking and slashing. Now thosepoor people on the Highway had their heads smashed to pieces by whatmust have been a storm of blows. Any one of them would have been fatal,but the murderer must have gone on raining blows with his iron hammer onpeople who were already stone dead. And _that_ sort of thing is the workof a madman, and nothing but a madman. That's how I argued the matterout to myself just after the event.
"I was utterly wrong, monstrously wrong. But who could have suspectedthe truth?"
Thus Dr. Lewis, and I quote him, or the substance of him, asrepresentative of most of the educated opinion of the district at thebeginnings of the terror. People seized on this theory largely becauseit offered at least the comfort of an explanation, and any explanation,even the poorest, is better than an intolerable and terrible mystery.Besides, Dr. Lewis's theory was plausible; it explained the lack ofpurpose that seemed to characterize the murders. And yet--there weredifficulties even from the first. It was hardly possible that a strangemadman should be able to keep hidden in a countryside where any strangeris instantly noted and noticed; sooner or later he would be seen as heprowled along the lanes or across the wild places. Indeed, a drunken,cheerful, and altogether harmless tramp was arrested by a farmer and hisman in the fact and act of sleeping off beer under a hedge; but thevagrant was able to prove complete and undoubted alibis, and was soonallowed to go on his wandering way.
Then another theory, or rather a variant of Dr. Lewis's theory, wasstarted. This was to the effect that the person responsible for theoutrages was, indeed, a madman; but a madman only at intervals. It wasone of the members of the Porth Club, a certain Mr. Remnant, who wassupposed to have originated this more subtle explanation. Mr. Remnantwas a middle-aged man, who, having nothing particular to do, read agreat many books by way of conquering the hours. He talked to theclub--doctors, retired colonels, parsons, lawyers--about "personality,"quoted various psychological textbooks in support of his contention thatpersonality was sometimes fluid and unstable, went back to "Dr. Jekylland Mr. Hyde" as good evidence of this proposition, and laid stress onDr. Jekyll's speculation that the human soul, so far from being one andindivisible, might, possibly turn out to be a mere polity, a state inwhich dwelt many strange and incongruous citizens, whose characters werenot merely unknown but altogether unsurmised by that form ofconsciousness which so rashly assumed that it was not only the presidentof the republic but also its sole citizen.
"The long and the short of it is," Mr. Remnant concluded, "that any oneof us may be the murderer, though he hasn't the faintest notion of thefact. Take Llewelyn there."
Mr. Payne Llewelyn was an elderly lawyer, a rural Tulkinghorn. He wasthe hereditary solicitor to the Morgans of Pentwyn. This does not soundanything tremendous to the Saxons of London; but the style is far morethan noble to the Celts of West Wales; it is immemorial; Teilo Sant wasof the collaterals of the first known chief of the race. And Mr. PayneLlewelyn did his best to look like the legal adviser of this ancienthouse. He was weighty, he was cautious, he was sound, he was secure. Ihave compared him to Mr. Tulkinghorn of Lincoln's Inn Fields; but Mr.Llewelyn would most certainly never have dreamed of employing hisleisure in peering into the cupboards where the family skeletons werehidden. Supposing such cupboards to have existed, Mr. Payne Llewelynwould have risked large out-of-pocket expenses to furnish them withdouble, triple, impregnable locks. He was a new man, an _advena_,certainly; for he was partly of the Conquest, being descended on oneside from Sir Payne Turberville; but he meant to stand by the old stock.
"Take Llewelyn now," said Mr. Remnant. "Look here, Llewelyn, can youproduce evidence to show where you were on the night those people weremurdered on the Highway? I thought not."
Mr. Llewelyn, an elderly man, as I have said, hesitated before speaking.
"I thought not," Remnant went on. "Now I say that it is perfectlypossible that Llewelyn may be dealing death throughout Meirion, althoughin his present personality he may not have the faintest suspicion thatthere is another Llewelyn within him, a Llewelyn who follows murder as afine art."
* * * * *
Mr. Payne Llewelyn did not at all relish Mr. Remnant's suggestion thathe might well be a secret murderer, ravening for blood, remorseless as awild beast. He thought the phrase about his following murder as a fineart was both nonsensical and in the worst taste, and his opinion was notchanged when Remnant pointed out that it was used by De Quincey in thetitle of one of his most famous essays.
"If you had allowed me to speak," he said with some coldness of manner,"I would have told you that on Tuesday last, the night on which thoseunfortunate people were murdered on the Highway I was staying at theAngel Hotel, Cardiff. I had business in Cardiff, and I was detainedtill Wednesday afternoon."
Having given this satisfactory alibi, Mr. Payne Llewelyn left the club,and did not go near it for the rest of the week.
Remnant explained to those who stayed in the smoking room that, ofcourse, he had merely used Mr. Llewelyn as a concrete example of histheory, which, he persisted, had the support of a considerable body ofevidence.
"There are several cases of double personality
on record," he declared."And I say again that it is quite possible that these murders may havebeen committed by one of us in his secondary personality. Why, I may bethe murderer in my Remnant B. state, though Remnant A. knows nothingwhatever about it, and is perfectly convinced that he could not kill afowl, much less a whole family. Isn't it so, Lewis?"
Dr. Lewis said it was so, in theory, but he thought not in fact.
"Most of the cases of double or multiple personality that have beeninvestigated," he said, "have been in connection with the very dubiousexperiments of hypnotism, or the still more dubious experiments ofspiritualism. All that sort of thing, in my opinion, is like tinkeringwith the works of a clock--amateur tinkering, I mean. You fumble aboutwith the wheels and cogs and bits of mechanism that you don't reallyknow anything about; and then you find your clock going backwards orstriking 240 at tea-time. And I believe it's just the same thing withthese psychical research experiments; the secondary personality is verylikely the result of the tinkering and fumbling with a very delicateapparatus that we know nothing about. Mind, I can't say that it'simpossible for one of us to be the Highway murderer in his B. state, asRemnant puts it. But I think it's extremely improbable. Probability isthe guide of life, you know, Remnant," said Dr. Lewis, smiling at thatgentleman, as if to say that he also had done a little reading in hisday. "And it follows" therefore, that improbability is also the guide oflife. When you get a very high degree of probability, that is, you arejustified in taking it as a certainty; and on the other hand, if asupposition is highly improbable, you are justified in treating it as animpossible one. That is, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of athousand."
"How about the thousandth case?" said Remnant. "Supposing theseextraordinary crimes constitute the thousandth case?"
The doctor smiled and shrugged his shoulders, being tired of thesubject. But for some little time highly respectable members of Porthsociety would look suspiciously at one another wondering whether, afterall, there mightn't be "something in it." However, both Mr. Remnant'ssomewhat crazy theory and Dr. Lewis's plausible theory became untenablewhen two more victims of an awful and mysterious death were offered upin, sacrifice, for a man was found dead in the Llanfihangel quarry,where the woman had been discovered. And on the same day a girl offifteen was found broken on the jagged rocks under the cliffs nearPorth. Now, it appeared that these two deaths must have occurred atabout the same time, within an hour of one another, certainly; and thedistance between the quarry and the cliffs by Black Rock is certainlytwenty miles.
"A motor could do it," one man said.
But it was pointed out that there was no high road between the twoplaces; indeed, it might be said that there was no road at all betweenthem. There was a network of deep, narrow, and tortuous lands thatwandered into one another at all manner of queer angles for, say,seventeen miles; this in the middle, as it were, between Black Rock andthe quarry at Llanfihangel. But to get to the high land of the cliffsone had to take a path that went through two miles of fields; and thequarry lay a mile away from the nearest by-road in the midst of gorseand bracken and broken land. And, finally, there was no track ofmotor-car or motor-bicycle in the lanes which must have been followed topass from one place to the other.
"What about an airplane, then?" said the man of the motor-car theory.Well, there was certainly an aerodrome not far from one of the twoplaces of death; but somehow, nobody believed that the Flying Corpsharbored a homicidal maniac. It seemed clear, therefore, that there mustbe more than one person concerned in the terror of Meirion. And Dr.Lewis himself abandoned his own theory.
"As I said to Remnant at the Club," he remarked, "improbability is theguide of life. I can't believe that there are a pack of madmen or eventwo madmen at large in the country. I give it up."
And now a fresh circumstance or set of circumstances became manifest toconfound judgment and to awaken new and wild surmises. For at aboutthis time people realized that none of the dreadful events that werehappening all about them was so much as mentioned in the Press. I havealready spoken of the fate of the _Meiros Observer._ This paper wassuppressed by the authorities because it had inserted a brief paragraphabout some person who had been "found dead under mysteriouscircumstances"; I think that paragraph referred to the first death ofLlanfihangel quarry. Thenceforth, horror followed on horror, but no wordwas printed in any of the local journals. The curious went to thenewspaper offices--there were two left in the county--but found nothingsave a firm refusal to discuss the matter. And the Cardiff papers weredrawn and found blank; and the London Press was apparently ignorant ofthe fact that crimes that had no parallel were terrorizing a wholecountryside. Everybody wondered what could have happened, what washappening; and then it was whispered that the coroner would allow noinquiry to be made as to these deaths of darkness.
"In consequence of instructions received from the Home Office," onecoroner was understood to have said, "I have to tell the jury that theirbusiness will be to hear the medical evidence and to bring in a verdictimmediately in accordance with that evidence. I shall disallow allquestions."
One jury protested. The foreman refused to bring in any verdict at all.
"Very good," said the coroner. "Then I beg to inform you, Mr. Foremanand gentlemen of the jury, that under the Defense of the Realm Act, Ihave power to supersede your functions, and to enter a verdict accordingto the evidence which has been laid before the Court as if it had beenthe verdict of you all."
The foreman and jury collapsed and accepted what they could not avoid.But the rumors that got abroad of all this, added to the known factthat the terror was ignored in the Press, no doubt by official command,increased the panic that was now; arising, and gave it a new direction.Clearly, people reasoned, these Government restrictions and prohibitionscould only refer to the war, to some great danger in connection with thewar. And that being so, it followed that the outrages which must be keptso secret were the work of the enemy, that is of concealed Germanagents.
The Terror: A Mystery Page 3