Mr. Claridge looked dolorously down at the floor. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that I took an unsuitable rôle when I undertook to rely on my wits to deceive men like you. I thought there wasn’t a single vulnerable spot in my defense, but you walk calmly through it at the first attempt. Why did I never think of those raindrops?”
“Come,” said Hewitt, with a smile, “that sounds unrepentant. I am going, now, to Lord Stanway’s. If I were you, I think I should apologize to Mr. Woollett in some way.”
Lord Stanway, who, in the hour or two of reflection left him after parting with Hewitt, had come to the belief that he had employed a man whose mind was not always in order, received Hewitt’s story with natural astonishment. For some time he was in doubt as to whether he would be doing right in acquiescing in anything but a straightforward public statement of the facts connected with the disappearance of the cameo, but in the end was persuaded to let the affair drop, on receiving an assurance from Mr. Woollett that he unreservedly accepted the apology offered him by Mr. Claridge.
As for the latter, he was at least sufficiently punished in loss of money and personal humiliation for his escapade. But the bitterest and last blow he sustained when the unblushing Hahn walked smilingly into his office two days later to demand the extra payment agreed on in consideration of the sale. He had been called suddenly away, he exclaimed, on the day he should have come, and hoped his missing the appointment had occasioned no inconvenience. As to the robbery of the cameo, of course he was very sorry, but “pishness was pishness,” and he would be glad of a check for the sum agreed on. And the unhappy Claridge was obliged to pay it, knowing that the man had swindled him, but unable to open his mouth to say so.
The reward remained on offer for a long time; indeed, it was never publicly withdrawn, I believe, even at the time of Claridge’s death. And several intelligent newspapers enlarged upon the fact that an ordinary burglar had completely baffled and defeated the boasted acumen of Mr. Martin Hewitt, the well-known private detective.
THE AFFAIR OF THE TORTOISE
Very often Hewitt was tempted, by the fascination of some particularly odd case, to neglect his other affairs to follow up a matter that from a business point of view was of little or no value to him. As a rule, he had a sufficient regard for his own interests to resist such temptations, but in one curious case, at least, I believe he allowed it largely to influence him. It was certainly an extremely odd case—one of those affairs that, coming to light at intervals, but more often remaining unheard of by the general public, convince one that, after all, there is very little extravagance about Mr. R.L. Stevenson’s bizarre imaginings of doings in London in his “New Arabian Nights.” “There is nothing in this world that is at all possible,” I have often heard Martin Hewitt say, “that has not happened or is not happening in London.” Certainly he had opportunities of knowing.
The case I have referred to occurred some time before my own acquaintance with him began—in 1878, in fact. He had called one Monday morning at an office in regard to something connected with one of those uninteresting, though often difficult, cases which formed, perhaps, the bulk of his practice, when he was informed of a most mysterious murder that had taken place in another part of the same building on the previous Saturday afternoon. Owing to the circumstances of the case, only the vaguest account had appeared in the morning papers, and even this, as it chanced, Hewitt had not read.
The building was one of a new row in a partly rebuilt street near the National Gallery. The whole row had been built by a speculator for the purpose of letting out in flats, suites of chambers, and in one or two cases, on the ground floors, offices. The rooms had let very well, and to desirable tenants, as a rule. The least satisfactory tenant, the proprietor reluctantly admitted, was a Mr. Rameau, a negro gentleman, single, who had three rooms on the top floor but one of the particular building that Hewitt was visiting. His rent was paid regularly, but his behavior had produced complaints from other tenants. He got uproariously drunk, and screamed and howled in unknown tongues. He fell asleep on the staircase, and ladies were afraid to pass. He bawled rough chaff down the stairs and along the corridors at butcher-boys and messengers, and played on errand-boys brutal practical jokes that ended in police-court summonses. He once had a way of sliding down the balusters, shouting: “Ho! ho! ho! yah!” as he went, but as he was a big, heavy man, and the balusters had been built for different treatment, he had very soon and very firmly been requested to stop it. He had plenty of money, and spent it freely; but it was generally felt that there was too much of the light-hearted savage about him to fit him to live among quiet people.
How much longer the landlord would have stood this sort of thing, Hewitt’s informant said, was a matter of conjecture, for on the Saturday afternoon in question the tenancy had come to a startling full-stop. Rameau had been murdered in his room, and the body had, in the most unaccountable fashion, been secretly removed from the premises.
The strongest possible suspicion pointed to a man who had been employed in shoveling and carrying coals, cleaning windows, and chopping wood for several of the buildings, and who had left that very Saturday. The crime had, in fact, been committed with this man’s chopper, and the man himself had been heard, again and again, to threaten Rameau, who, in his brutal fashion, had made a butt of him. This man was a Frenchman, Victor Goujon by name, who had lost his employment as a watchmaker by reason of an injury to his right hand, which destroyed its steadiness, and so he had fallen upon evil days and odd jobs.
He was a little man of no great strength, but extraordinarily excitable, and the coarse gibes and horse-play of the big negro drove him almost to madness. Rameau would often, after some more than ordinarily outrageous attack, contemptuously fling Goujon a shilling, which the little Frenchman, although wanting a shilling badly enough, would hurl back in his face, almost weeping with impotent rage. “Pig! Canaille!” he would scream. “Dirty pig of Africa! Take your sheelin’ to vere you ‘ave stole it! Voleur! Pig!”
There was a tortoise living in the basement, of which Goujon had made rather a pet, and the negro would sometimes use this animal as a missile, flinging it at the little Frenchman’s head. On one such occasion the tortoise struck the wall so forcibly as to break its shell, and then Goujon seized a shovel and rushed at his tormentor with such blind fury that the latter made a bolt of it. These were but a few of the passages between Rameau and the fuel-porter, but they illustrate the state of feeling between them.
Goujon, after correspondence with a relative in France who offered him work, gave notice to leave, which expired on the day of the crime. At about three that afternoon a housemaid, proceeding toward Rameau’s rooms, met Goujon as he was going away. Goujon bade her good-by, and, pointing in the direction of Rameau’s rooms, said exultantly: “Dere shall be no more of the black pig for me; vit ’im I ’ave done for. Zut! I mock me of ’im! ’E vill never tracasser me no more.” And he went away.
The girl went to the outer door of Rameau’s rooms, knocked, and got no reply. Concluding that the tenant was out, she was about to use her keys, when she found that the door was unlocked. She passed through the lobby and into the sitting-room, and there fell in a dead faint at the sight that met her eyes. Rameau lay with his back across the sofa and his head—drooping within an inch of the ground. On the head was a fearful gash, and below it was a pool of blood.
The girl must have lain unconscious for about ten minutes. When she came to her senses, she dragged herself, terrified, from the room and up to the housekeeper’s apartments, where, being an excitable and nervous creature, she only screamed “Murder!” and immediately fell in a fit of hysterics that lasted three-quarters of an hour. When at last she came to herself, she told her story, and, the hall-porter having been summoned, Rameau’s rooms were again approached.
The blood still lay on the floor, and the chopper, with which the crime had evidently been committed, rested against the fender; but
the body had vanished! A search was at once made, but no trace of it could be seen anywhere. It seemed impossible that it could have been carried out of the building, for the hall-porter must at once have noticed anybody leaving with so bulky a burden. Still, in the building it was not to be found.
When Hewitt was informed of these things on Monday, the police were, of course, still in possession of Rameau’s rooms. Inspector Nettings, Hewitt was told, was in charge of the case, and as the inspector was an acquaintance of his, and was then in the rooms upstairs, Hewitt went up to see him.
Nettings was pleased to see Hewitt, and invited him to look around the rooms. “Perhaps you can spot something we have overlooked,” he said. “Though it’s not a case there can be much doubt about.”
“You think it’s Goujon, don’t you?”
“Think? Well, rather! Look here! As soon as we got here on Saturday, we found this piece of paper and pin on the floor. We showed it to the housemaid, and then she remembered—she was too much upset to think of it before—that when she was in the room the paper was laying on the dead man’s chest—pinned there, evidently. It must have dropped off when they removed the body. It’s a case of half-mad revenge on Goujon’s part, plainly. See it; you read French, don’t you?”
The paper was a plain, large half-sheet of note-paper, on which a sentence in French was scrawled in red ink in a large, clumsy hand, thus:
puni par un vengeur de la tortue.
“Puni par un vengeur de la tortue,” Hewitt repeated musingly. “‘Punished by an avenger of the tortoise,’ That seems odd.”
“Well, rather odd. But you understand the reference, of course. Have they told you about Rameau’s treatment of Goujon’s pet tortoise?”
“I think it was mentioned among his other pranks. But this is an extreme revenge for a thing of that sort, and a queer way of announcing it.”
“Oh, he’s mad—mad with Rameau’s continual ragging and baiting,” Nettings answered. “Anyway, this is a plain indication—plain as though he’d left his own signature. Besides, it’s in his own language—French. And there’s his chopper, too.”
“Speaking of signatures,” Hewitt remarked, “perhaps you have already compared this with other specimens of Goujon’s writing?”
“I did think of it, but they don’t seem to have a specimen to hand, and, anyway, it doesn’t seem very important. There’s ‘avenger of the tortoise’ plain enough, in the man’s own language, and that tells everything. Besides, handwritings are easily disguised.”
“Have you got Goujon?”
“Well, no; we haven’t. There seems to be some little difficulty about that. But I expect to have him by this time tomorrow. Here comes Mr. Styles, the landlord.”
Mr. Styles was a thin, querulous, and withered-looking little man, who twitched his eyebrows as he spoke, and spoke in short, jerky phrases.
“No news, eh, inspector, eh? eh? Found out nothing else, eh? Terrible thing for my property—terrible! Who’s your friend?”
Nettings introduced Hewitt.
“Shocking thing this, eh, Mr. Hewitt? Terrible! Comes of having anything to do with these blood-thirsty foreigners, eh? New buildings and all—character ruined. No one come to live here now, eh? Tenants—noisy niggers—murdered by my own servants—terrible! You formed any opinion, eh?”
“I dare say I might if I went into the case.”
“Yes, yes—same opinion as inspector’s, eh? I mean an opinion of your own?” The old man scrutinized Hewitt’s face sharply.
“If you’d like me to look into the matter—” Hewitt began.
“Eh? Oh, look into it! Well, I can’t commission you, you know—matter for the police. Mischief’s done. Police doing very well, I think—must be Goujon. But look about the place, certainly, if you like. If you see anything likely to serve my interests, tell me, and—and—perhaps I’ll employ you, eh, eh? Good-afternoon.”
The landlord vanished, and the inspector laughed. “Likes to see what he’s buying, does Mr. Styles,” he said.
Hewitt’s first impulse was to walk out of the place at once. But his interest in the case had been roused, and he determined, at any rate, to examine the rooms, and this he did very minutely. By the side of the lobby was a bath-room, and in this was fitted a tip-up wash-basin, which Hewitt inspected with particular attention. Then he called the housekeeper, and made inquiries about Rameau’s clothes and linen. The housekeeper could give no idea of how many overcoats or how much linen he had had. He had all a negro’s love of display, and was continually buying new clothes, which, indeed, were lying, hanging, littering, and choking up the bedroom in all directions. The housekeeper, however, on Hewitt’s inquiring after such a garment in particular, did remember one heavy black ulster, which Rameau had very rarely worn—only in the coldest weather.
“After the body was discovered,” Hewitt asked the housekeeper, “was any stranger observed about the place—whether carrying anything or not?”
“No, sir,” the housekeeper replied. “There’s been particular inquiries about that. Of course, after we knew what was wrong and the body was gone, nobody was seen, or he’d have been stopped. But the hall-porter says he’s certain no stranger came or went for half an hour or more before that—the time about when the housemaid saw the body and fainted.”
At this moment a clerk from the landlord’s office arrived and handed Nettings a paper. “Here you are,” said Nettings to Hewitt; “they’ve found a specimen of Goujon’s handwriting at last, if you’d like to see it. I don’t want it; I’m not a graphologist, and the case is clear enough for me anyway.”
Hewitt took the paper. “This” he said, “is a different sort of handwriting from that on the paper. The red-ink note about the avenger of the tortoise is in a crude, large, clumsy, untaught style of writing. This is small, neat, and well formed—except that it is a trifle shaky, probably because of the hand injury.”
“That’s nothing,” contended Nettings. “handwriting clues are worse than useless, as a rule. It’s so easy to disguise and imitate writing; and besides, if Goujon is such a good penman as you seem to say, why, he could all the easier alter his style. Say now yourself, can any fiddling question of handwriting get over this thing about ‘avenging the tortoise’—practically a written confession—to say nothing of the chopper, and what he said to the housemaid as he left?”
“Well,” said Hewitt, “perhaps not; but we’ll see. Meantime”—turning to the landlord’s clerk—“possibly you will be good enough to tell me one or two things. First, what was Goujon’s character?”
“Excellent, as far as we know. We never had a complaint about him except for little matters of carelessness—leaving coal-scuttles on the staircases for people to fall over, losing shovels, and so on. He was certainly a bit careless, but, as far as we could see, quite a decent little fellow. One would never have thought him capable of committing murder for the sake of a tortoise, though he was rather fond of the animal.”
“The tortoise is dead now, I understand?”
“Yes.”
“Have you a lift in this building?”
“Only for coals and heavy parcels. Goujon used to work it, sometimes going up and down in it himself with coals, and so on; it goes into the basement.”
“And are the coals kept under this building?”
“No. The store for the whole row is under the next two houses—the basements communicate.”
“Do you know Rameau’s other name?”
“César Rameau he signed in our agreement.”
“Did he ever mention his relations?”
“No. That is to say, he did say something one day when he was very drunk; but, of course, it was all rot. Some one told him not to make such a row—he was a beastly tenant—and he said he was the best man in the place, and his brother was Prime Minister, and all sorts of things. Mere drunken rant! I never heard
of his saying anything sensible about relations. We know nothing of his connections; he came here on a banker’s reference.”
“Thanks. I think that’s all I want to ask. You notice,” Hewitt proceeded, turning to Nettings, “the only ink in this place is scented and violet, and the only paper is tinted and scented, too, with a monogram—characteristic of a negro with money. The paper that was pinned on Rameau’s breast is in red ink on common and rather grubby paper, therefore it was written somewhere else and brought here. Inference, premeditation.”
“Yes, yes. But are you an inch nearer with all these speculations? Can you get nearer than I am now without them?”
“Well, perhaps not,” Hewitt replied. “I don’t profess at this moment to know the criminal; you do. I’ll concede you that point for the present. But you don’t offer an opinion as to who removed Rameau’s body—which I think I know.”
“Who was it, then?”
“Come, try and guess that yourself. It wasn’t Goujon; I don’t mind letting you know that. But it was a person quite within your knowledge of the case. You’ve mentioned the person’s name more than once.”
Nettings stared blankly. “I don’t understand you in the least,” he said. “But, of course, you mean that this mysterious person you speak of as having moved the body committed the murder?”
“No, I don’t. Nobody could have been more innocent of that.”
The Arthur Morrison Mystery Page 35