Delphi Complete Works of Arthur Morrison

by Arthur Morrison

  “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 t
hat he may have made the same mistake with ensuing words.

  “On the whole, it was plain that everybody had begun with a too ready disposition to assume that Goujon was guilty. Everybody insisted, too, that the body had been carried away — which was true, of course, although not in the sense intended — so I didn’t trouble to contradict, or to say more than that I guessed who had carried the body off. And, to tell you the truth, I was a little piqued at Mr. Styles’ manner, and indisposed, interested in the case as I was, to give away my theories too freely.

  “The rest of the job was not very difficult. I found out the cabman who had taken Rameau away — you can always get readier help from cabbies if you go as one of themselves, especially if you are after a bilker — and from him got a sufficiently near East End direction to find Rameau after inquiries. I ventured, by the way, on a rather long shot. I described my man to the cabman as having an injured arm or wrist — and it turned out a correct guess. You see, a man making an attack with a chopper is pretty certain to make more than a single blow, and as there appeared to have been only a single wound on the head, it seemed probable that another had fallen somewhere else — almost certainly on the arm, as it would be raised to defend the head. At Limehouse I found he had had his head and wrist attended to at a local medico’s, and a big nigger in a fright, with a long black coat, a broken head, and a lame hand, is not so difficult to find in a small area. How I persuaded him up here you know already; I think I frightened him a little, too, by explaining how easily I had tracked him, and giving him a hint that others might do the same. He is in a great funk. He seems to have quite lost faith in England as a safe asylum.”

  The police failed to catch Rameau’s assailant — chiefly because Rameau could not be got to give a proper description of him, nor to do anything except get out of the country in a hurry. In truth, he was glad to be quit of the matter with nothing worse than his broken head. Little Goujon made a wild storm about his arrest, and before he did go to France managed to extract twenty pounds from Rameau by way of compensation, in spite of the absence of any strictly legal claim against his old tormentor. So that, on the whole, Goujon was about the only person who derived any particular profit from the tortoise mystery.

  THE END

  CHRONICLES OF MARTIN HEWITT

  The Ivy Cottage Mystery is the first story in Morrison’s second collection of Hewitt tales. It revolves around the death of Mr. Kingscote, apparently murdered in his own home. Brett had a nodding acquaintance with the deceased and when he finds out that Hewitt has been engaged by the man’s brother, who is unhappy with the way the murder is being investigated, Brett teams up with Hewitt to travel to the scene of the crime. Details of the inquest are followed by an account of the questioning by Hewitt of key witnesses. Then it is the turn of the scene of crime, Ivy House, to receive the forensic attentions of Hewitt, who before long announces that this is no ordinary crime.

  The Nicobar Bullion Case refers to £200,000 worth of gold bullion being transported to Plymouth by the vessel Nicobar. The second officer, who is in charge of the locked bullion hold on board, feels the weight of this responsibility greatly and frets over the inadequacies of the hold for such a cargo. After a difficult spell at sea, Nicobar founders after a collision and sinks. When the salvage operation begins to recover the bullion, everyone is aghast to find that two crates of gold are missing. Enter Hewitt, who has been charged with the task of researching the last hours of the Nicobar and finding the missing gold.

  The Holford Will Case centres on the death of Mr. Holford, friend of Mr. Crellan, one of Hewitt’s former employers. Mr. Crellan cannot find his friend’s will, which bequeathed most of the estate to Holford’s ward, Miss Garth. If the will cannot be found, the estate will be assigned to the deceased’s nephew, Mr. Mellis. Miss Garth is a decent and honourable young lady, so it is baffling that the evidence starts to implicate her in some kind of plot to manipulate the estate. Hewitt must act to preserve her reputation, and uncover the truth about the events occurring after Holford’s death.

  The Case of the Missing Hand starts out as a seemingly ordinary story of revenge, in which two brothers are accused of murdering their father as retribution for his abuse of their mother. When the body is found hanging from a tree, one hand is missing. The family concerned are gypsies and Hewitt does not believe the two men committed murder, so he must look to his knowledge of gypsy lore to help him solve the mystery. Unfortunately for the modern reader, this story is marred by the negative light in which traveller peoples are depicted, but one has to view the story in the context of its times – that although gypsies were seen as quaint and colourful, equally they were viewed as devious and cruel, even worse: foreign!

  The Case of Laker, Absconded is about that cornerstone of Victorian middle class respectability, the high street bank. A “walking clerk” for a bank named Charles William Laker has apparently absconded for France with £15,000 of other people’s invested money. Hewitt uses his great attention to detail to reconstruct Laker’s movements just before the apparent escape to the continent and concludes that other more sinister forces are at work.

  Another alien group is under pursuit in The Case of the Lost Foreigner, in which a Frenchman who seems to have lost the power of speech and writing, draws a series of pictures that Hewitt must interpret to find out what has happened to the man and what the threat is. What Hewitt uncovers is a threat to the very establishment and society of Britain.

  An early frontispiece

  CONTENTS

  THE IVY COTTAGE MYSTERY.

  THE NICOBAR BULLION CASE.

  THE HOLFORD WILL CASE.

  THE CASE OF THE MISSING HAND.

  THE CASE OF LAKER, ABSCONDED.

  THE CASE OF THE LOST FOREIGNER.

  The first edition

  THE IVY COTTAGE MYSTERY.

  I had been working double tides for a month: at night on my morning paper, as usual; and in the morning on an evening paper as locum tenens for another man who was taking a holiday. This was an exhausting plan of work, although it only actually involved some six hours’ attendance a day, or less, at the two offices. I turned up at the headquarters of my own paper at ten in the evening, and by the time I had seen the editor, selected a subject, written my leader, corrected the slips, chatted, smoked, and so on, and cleared off, it was very usually one o’clock. This meant bed at two, or even three, after supper at the club.

  This was all very well at ordinary periods, when any time in the morning would do for rising, but when I had to be up again soon after seven, and round at the evening paper office by eight, I naturally felt a little worn and disgusted with things by midday, after a sharp couple of hours’ leaderette scribbling and paragraphing, with attendant sundries.

  But the strain was over, and on the first day of comparative comfort I indulged in a midday breakfast and the first undisgusted glance at a morning paper for a month. I felt rather interested in an inquest, begun the day before, on the body of a man whom I had known very slightly before I took to living in chambers.

  His name was Gavin Kingscote, and he was an artist of a casual and desultory sort, having, I believe, some small private means of his own. As a matter of fact, he had boarded in the same house in which I had lodged myself for a while, but as I was at the time a late homer and a fairly early riser, taking no regular board in the house, we never became much acquainted. He had since, I understood, made some judicious Stock Exchange speculations, and had set up house in Finchley.

  Now the news was that he had been found one morning murdered in his smoking-room, while the room itself, with others, was in a state of confusion. His pockets had been rifled, and his watch and chain were gone, with one or two other small articles of value. On the night of the tragedy a friend had sat smoking with him in the room where the murder took place, and he had been the last person to see Mr. Kingscote alive. A jobbing gardener, who kept the garden in order by casual work from time to time, had been arrested in consequence of footprints e
xactly corresponding with his boots, having been found on the garden beds near the French window of the smoking-room.

  I finished my breakfast and my paper, and Mrs. Clayton, the housekeeper, came to clear my table. She was sister of my late landlady of the house where Kingscote had lodged, and it was by this connection that I had found my chambers. I had not seen the housekeeper since the crime was first reported, so I now said:

  “This is shocking news of Mr. Kingscote, Mrs. Clayton. Did you know him yourself?”

  She had apparently only been waiting for some such remark to burst out with whatever information she possessed.

  “Yes, sir,” she exclaimed: “shocking indeed. Pore young feller! I see him often when I was at my sister’s, and he was always a nice, quiet gentleman, so different from some. My sister, she’s awful cut up, sir, I assure you. And what d’you think ‘appened, sir, only last Tuesday? You remember Mr. Kingscote’s room where he painted the woodwork so beautiful with gold flowers, and blue, and pink? He used to tell my sister she’d always have something to remember him by. Well, two young fellers, gentlemen I can’t call them, come and took that room (it being to let), and went and scratched off all the paint in mere wicked mischief, and then chopped up all the panels into sticks and bits! Nice sort o’ gentlemen them! And then they bolted in the morning, being afraid, I s’pose, of being made to pay after treating a pore widder’s property like that. That was only Tuesday, and the very next day the pore young gentleman himself’s dead, murdered in his own ‘ouse, and him going to be married an’ all! Dear, dear! I remember once he said — —”