“Well,” Nettings concluded with resignation, “I’m afraid one of us is rather thick-headed. What will you do?”
“Interview the person who took away the body,” Hewitt replied, with a smile.
“But, man alive, why? Why bother about the person if it isn’t the criminal?”
“Never mind—never mind; probably the person will be a most valuable witness.”
“Do you mean you think this person—whoever it is—saw the crime?”
“I think it very probable indeed.”
“Well, I won’t ask you any more. I shall get hold of Goujon; that’s simple and direct enough for me. I prefer to deal with the heart of the case—the murder itself—when there’s such clear evidence as I have.”
“I shall look a little into that, too, perhaps,” Hewitt said, “and, if you like, I’ll tell you the first thing I shall do.”
“What’s that?”
“I shall have a good look at a map of the West Indies, and I advise you to do the same. Good-morning.”
Nettings stared down the corridor after Hewitt, and continued staring for nearly two minutes after he had disappeared. Then he said to the clerk, who had remained: “What was he talking about?”
“Don’t know,” replied the clerk. “Couldn’t make head nor tail of it.”
“I don’t believe there is a head to it,” declared Nettings; “nor a tail either. He’s kidding us.”
* * * *
Nettings was better than his word, for within two hours of his conversation with Hewitt, Goujon was captured and safe in a cab bound for Bow Street. He had been stopped at Newhaven in the morning on his way to Dieppe, and was brought back to London. But now Nettings met a check.
Late that afternoon he called on Hewitt to explain matters. “We’ve got Goujon,” he said, gloomily, “but there’s a difficulty. He’s got two friends who can swear an alibi. Rameau was seen alive at half-past one on Saturday, and the girl found him dead about three. Now, Goujon’s two friends, it seems, were with him from one o’clock till four in the afternoon, with the exception of five minutes when the girl saw him, and then he left them to take a key or something to the housekeeper before finally leaving. They were waiting on the landing below when Goujon spoke to the housemaid, heard him speaking, and had seen him go all the way up to the housekeeper’s room and back, as they looked up the wide well of the staircase. They are men employed near the place, and seem to have good characters. But perhaps we shall find something unfavorable about them. They were drinking with Goujon, it seems, by way of ‘seeing him off.’”
“Well,” Hewitt said, “I scarcely think you need trouble to damage these men’s characters. They are probably telling the truth. Come, now, be plain. You’ve come here to get a hint as to whether my theory of the case helps you, haven’t you?”
“Well, if you can give me a friendly hint, although, of course, I may be right, after all. Still, I wish you’d explain a bit as to what you meant by looking at a map and all that mystery. Nice thing for me to be taking a lesson in my own business after all these years! But perhaps I deserve it.”
“See, now,” quoth Hewitt, “you remember what map I told you to look at?”
“The West Indies.”
“Right! Well, here you are.” Hewitt reached an atlas from his book-shelf. “Now, look here: the biggest island of the lot on this map, barring Cuba, is Hayti. You know as well as I do that the western part of that island is peopled by the black republic of Hayti, and that the country is in a degenerate state of almost unexampled savagery, with a ridiculous show of civilization. There are revolutions all the time; the South American republics are peaceful and prosperous compared to Hayti. The state of the country is simply awful—read Sir Spenser St. John’s book on it. President after president of the vilest sort forces his way to power and commits the most horrible and bloodthirsty excesses, murdering his opponents by the hundred and seizing their property for himself and his satellites, who are usually as bad, if not worse, than the president himself. Whole families—men, women, and children—are murdered at the instance of these ruffians, and, as a consequence, the most deadly feuds spring up, and the presidents and their followers are always themselves in danger of reprisals from others. Perhaps the very worst of these presidents in recent times has been the notorious Domingue, who was overthrown by an insurrection, as they all are sooner or later, and compelled to fly the country. Domingue and his nephews, one of whom was Chief Minister, while in power committed the cruellest bloodshed, and many members of the opposite party sought refuge in a small island lying just to the north of Hayti, but were sought out there and almost exterminated. Now, I will show you that island on the map. What is its name?”
“Tortuga.”
“It is. ‘Tortuga,’ however, is only the old Spanish name; the Haytians speak French—Creole French. Here is a French atlas: now see the name of that island.”
“La Tortue!”
“La Tortue it is—the tortoise. Tortuga means the same thing in Spanish. But that island is always spoken of in Hayti as La Tortue. Now, do you see the drift of that paper pinned to Rameau’s breast?”
“Punished by an avenger of—or from—the tortoise or La Tortue—clear enough. It would seem that the dead man had something to do with the massacre there, and somebody from the island is avenging it. The thing’s most extraordinary.”
“And now listen. The name of Domingue’s nephew, who was Chief Minister, was Septimus Rameau.”
“And this was César Rameau—his brother, probably. I see. Well, this is a case.”
“I think the relationship probable. Now you understand why I was inclined to doubt that Goujon was the man you wanted.”
“Of course, of course! And now I suppose I must try to get a nigger—the chap who wrote that paper. I wish he hadn’t been such an ignorant nigger. If he’d only have put the capitals to the words ‘La Tortue,’ I might have thought a little more about them, instead of taking it for granted that they meant that wretched tortoise in the basement of the house. Well, I’ve made a fool of a start, but I’ll be after that nigger now.”
“And I, as I said before,” said Hewitt, “shall be after the person that carried off Rameau’s body. I have had something else to do this afternoon, or I should have begun already.”
“You said you thought he saw the crime. How did you judge that?”
Hewitt smiled. “I think I’ll keep that little secret to myself for the present,” he said. “You shall know soon.”
“Very well,” Nettings replied, with resignation. “I suppose I mustn’t grumble if you don’t tell me everything. I feel too great a fool altogether over this case to see any farther than you show me.” And Inspector Nettings left on his search; while Martin Hewitt, as soon as he was alone, laughed joyously and slapped his thigh.
* * * *
There was a cab-rank and shelter at the end of the street where Mr. Styles’ building stood, and early that evening a man approached it and hailed the cabmen and the waterman. Any one would have known the new-comer at once for a cabman taking a holiday. The brim of the hat, the bird’s-eye neckerchief, the immense coat-buttons, and, more than all, the rolling walk and the wrinkled trousers, marked him out distinctly.
“Watcheer!” he exclaimed, affably, with the self-possessed nod only possible to cabbies and busmen. “I’m a-lookin’ for a bilker. I’m told one o’ the blokes off this rank carried ’im last Saturday, and I want to know where he went. I ain’t ’ad a chance o’ gettin’ ’is address yet. Took a cab just as it got dark, I’m told. Tallish chap, muffled up a lot, in a long black overcoat. Any of ye seen ’im?”
The cabbies looked at one another and shook their heads; it chanced that none of them had been on that particular rank at that time. But the waterman said: “’Old on—I bet ’e’s the bloke wot old Bill Stammers took. Yorkey was fust on the rank, but the bloke would
n’t ’ave a ’ansom—wanted a four-wheeler, so old Bill took ’im. Biggish chap in a long black coat, collar up an’ muffled thick; soft wide-awake ’at, pulled over ’is eyes; and he was in a ’urry, too. Jumped in sharp as a weasel.”
“Didn’t see ’is face, did ye?”
“No—not an inch of it; too much muffled. Couldn’t tell if he ’ad a face.”
“Was his arm in a sling?”
“Ay, it looked so. Had it stuffed through the breast of his coat, like as though there might be a sling inside.”
“That’s ’im. Any of ye tell me where I might run across old Bill Stammers? He’ll tell me where my precious bilker went to.”
As to this there was plenty of information, and in five minutes Martin Hewitt, who had become an unoccupied cabman for the occasion, was on his way to find old Bill Stammers. That respectable old man gave him full particulars as to the place in the East End where he had driven his muffled fare on Saturday, and Hewitt then begun an eighteen, or twenty hours’ search beyond Whitechapel.
* * * *
At about three on Tuesday afternoon, as Nettings was in the act of leaving Bow Street Police Station, Hewitt drove up in a four-wheeler. Some prisoner appeared to be crouching low in the vehicle, but, leaving him to take care of himself, Hewitt hurried into the station and shook Nettings by the hand. “Well,” he said, “have you got the murderer of Rameau yet?”
“No,” Nettings growled. “Unless—well, Goujon’s under remand still, and, after all, I’ve been thinking that he may know something—”
“Pooh, nonsense!” Hewitt answered. “You’d better let him go. Now, I have got somebody.” Hewitt laughed and slapped the inspector’s shoulder. “I’ve got the man who carried Rameau’s body away!”
“The deuce you have! Where? Bring him in. We must have him—”
“All right, don’t be in a hurry; he won’t bolt.” And Hewitt stepped out to the cab and produced his prisoner, who, pulling his hat farther over his eyes, hurried furtively into the station. One hand was stowed in the breast of his long coat, and below the wide brim of his hat a small piece of white bandage could be seen; and, as he lifted his face, it was seen to be that of a negro.
“Inspector Nettings,” Hewitt said ceremoniously, “allow me to introduce Mr. César Rameau!”
Netting’s gasped.
“What!” he at length ejaculated. “What! You—you’re Rameau?”
The negro looked round nervously, and shrank farther from the door.
“Yes,” he said; “but please not so loud—please not loud. Zey may be near, and I’m ’fraid.”
“You will certify, will you not,” asked Hewitt, with malicious glee, “not only that you were not murdered last Saturday by Victor Goujon, but that, in fact, you were not murdered at all? Also, that you carried your own body away in the usual fashion, on your own legs.”
“Yes, yes,” responded Rameau, looking haggardly about; “but is not zis—zis room publique? I should not be seen.”
“Nonsense!” replied Hewitt rather testily; “you exaggerate your danger and your own importance, and your enemies’ abilities as well. You’re safe enough.”
“I suppose, then,” Nettings remarked slowly, like a man on whose mind something vast was beginning to dawn, “I suppose—why, hang it, you must have just got up while that fool of a girl was screaming and fainting upstairs, and walked out. They say there’s nothing so hard as a nigger’s skull, and yours has certainly made a fool of me. But, then, somebody must have chopped you over the head; who was it?”
“My enemies—my great enemies—enemies politique. I am a great man”—this with a faint revival of vanity amid his fear—“a great man in my countree. Zey have great secret club-sieties to kill me—me and my fren’s; and one enemy coming in my rooms does zis—one, two”—he indicated wrist and head—“wiz a choppa.”
Rameau made the case plain to Nettings, so far as the actual circumstances of the assault on himself were concerned. A negro whom he had noticed near the place more than once during the previous day or two had attacked him suddenly in his rooms, dealing him two savage blows with a chopper. The first he had caught on his wrist, which was seriously damaged, as well as excruciatingly painful, but the second had taken effect on his head. His assailant had evidently gone away then, leaving him for dead; but, as a matter of fact, he was only stunned by the shock, and had, thanks to the adamantine thickness of the negro skull and the ill-direction of the chopper, only a very bad scalp-wound, the bone being no more than grazed. He had lain insensible for some time, and must have come to his senses soon after the housemaid had left the room. Terrified at the knowledge that his enemies had found him out, his only thought was to get away and hide himself. He hastily washed and tied up his head, enveloped himself in the biggest coat he could find, and let himself down into the basement by the coal-lift, for fear of observation. He waited in the basement of one of the adjoining buildings till dark and then got away in a cab, with the idea of hiding himself in the East End. He had had very little money with him on his flight, and it was by reason of this circumstance that Hewitt, when he found him, had prevailed on him to leave his hiding-place, since it would be impossible for him to touch any of the large sums of money in the keeping of his bank so long as he was supposed to be dead. With much difficulty, and the promise of ample police protection, he was at last convinced that it would be safe to declare himself and get his property, and then run away and hide wherever he pleased.
Nettings and Hewitt strolled off together for a few minutes and chatted, leaving the wretched Rameau to cower in a corner among several policemen.
“Well, Mr. Hewitt,” Nettings said, “this case has certainly been a shocking beating for me. I must have been as blind as a bat when I started on it. And yet I don’t see that you had a deal to go on, even now. What struck you first?”
“Well, in the beginning it seemed rather odd to me that the body should have been taken away, as I had been told it was, after the written paper had been pinned on it. Why should the murderer pin a label on the body of his victim if he meant carrying that body away? Who would read the label and learn of the nature of the revenge gratified? Plainly, that indicated that the person who had carried away the body was not the person who had committed the murder. But as soon as I began to examine the place I saw the probability that there was no murder, after all. There were any number of indications of this fact, and I can’t understand your not observing them. First, although there was a good deal of blood on the floor just below where the housemaid had seen Rameau lying, there was none between that place and the door. Now, if the body had been dragged, or even carried, to the door, blood must have become smeared about the floor, or at least there would have been drops, but there were none, and this seemed to hint that the corpse might have come to itself, sat up on the sofa, stanched the wound, and walked out. I reflected at once that Rameau was a full-blooded negro, and that a negro’s head is very nearly invulnerable to anything short of bullets. Then, if the body had been dragged out—as such a heavy body must have been—almost of necessity the carpet and rugs would show signs of the fact, but there were no such signs. But beyond these there was the fact that no long black overcoat was left with the other clothes, although the housekeeper distinctly remembered Rameau’s possession of such a garment. I judged he would use some such thing to assist his disguise, which was why I asked her. Why he would want to disguise was plain, as you shall see presently. There were no towels left in the bath-room; inference, used for bandages. Everything seemed to show that the only person responsible for Rameau’s removal was Rameau himself. Why, then, had he gone away secretly and hurriedly, without making complaint, and why had he stayed away? What reason would he have for doing this if it had been Goujon that had attacked him? None. Goujon was going to France. Clearly, Rameau was afraid of another attack from some implacable enemy whom he was anxious to avoid—one against whom
he feared legal complaint or defense would be useless. This brought me at once to the paper found on the floor. If this were the work of Goujon and an open reference to his tortoise, why should he be at such pains to disguise his handwriting? He would have been already pointing himself out by the mere mention of the tortoise. And, if he could not avoid a shake in his natural, small handwriting, how could he have avoided it in a large, clumsy, slowly drawn, assumed hand? No, the paper was not Goujon’s.”
“As to the writing on the paper,” Nettings interposed, “I’ve told you how I made that mistake. I took the readiest explanation of the words, since they seemed so pat, and I wouldn’t let anything else outweigh that. As to the other things—the evidences of Rameau’s having gone off by himself—well, I don’t usually miss such obvious things; but I never thought of the possibility of the victim going away on the quiet and not coming back, as though he’d done something wrong. Comes of starting with a set of fixed notions.”
“Well,” answered Hewitt, “I fancy you must have been rather ‘out of form,’ as they say; everybody has his stupid days, and you can’t keep up to concert pitch forever. To return to the case. The evidence of the chopper was very untrustworthy, especially when I had heard of Goujon’s careless habits—losing shovels and leaving coal-scuttles on stairs. Nothing more likely than for the chopper to be left lying about, and a criminal who had calculated his chances would know the advantage to himself of using a weapon that belonged to the place, and leaving it behind to divert suspicion. It is quite possible, by the way, that the man who attacked Rameau got away down the coal-lift and out by an adjoining basement, just as did Rameau himself; this, however, is mere conjecture. The would-be murderer had plainly prepared for the crime: witness the previous preparation of the paper declaring his revenge, an indication of his pride at having run his enemy to earth at such a distant place as this—although I expect he was only in England by chance, for Haytians are not a persistently energetic race. In regard to the use of small instead of capital letters in the words ‘La Tortue’ on the paper, I observed, in the beginning, that the first letter of the whole sentence—the ‘p’ in ‘puni’—was a small one. Clearly, the writer was an illiterate man, and it was at once plain that he may have made the same mistake with ensuing words.
The Arthur Morrison Mystery Page 36