“I will do my best,” he replied calmly before departing.
Since Mrs. Foster appeared to be recovering, I turned my attention back to the corpse, wondering if the nature of the injuries might not reveal something to my medical instincts. His duvet was drawn up, so I gently reached and turned it down. I found that Dumas was clad only in his long purple night-dress, his knobby ankles and ungainly feet protruding starkly from beneath it. The gown was once fine, but now in great need of repair, as it sported multiple holes, clearly made by bullets. It was only then that I became conscious of a faint hint of gunpowder still lingering in the air of the room. I looked about and soon discovered the likely cause of those holes, as a Colt Single Action Revolver lay on the nightstand beside a guttered bedroom candle. Of course I refrained from handling it, not wanting not contaminate any of the evidence. I stood there, rather perplexed about the next step, as one glance was more than sufficient to show that the man was clearly beyond any aid that I could offer. Fortunately, my indecisive state was soon interrupted by the out-of-breath appearance of my acquaintance from two days earlier, Constable Dunkley. He was dressed similarly to our prior encounter though today he carried a brown wide-awake in his hand.
“Well, that one’s a deader,” he said unceremoniously, obviously un-rattled by the sight. Notwithstanding this callous remark, he immediately took up the case with a great deal of energy. He drew out a memorandum book and pen from his breast pocket and began to take notes. “Now who touched what?” he glared at Sims, Mrs. Foster, and I, the only three people to have entered the fatal room.
“Mrs. Foster and I touched nothing,” replied Sims. “Only the doctor…”
I threw up my hands to ward off his glare. “I was only doing my duty and ensuring that he was in fact expired.”
Dunkley nodded grudgingly. “Fair enough, Doctor. Now tell me, how long has he been dead for?”
I considered this inquiry. “I am not certain that I am fully qualified to answer that question, Constable. You must have a coroner…”
“Rubbish!” said he, waving off my suggestion. “By the time old man Tucker gets here from Hamilton whoever shot this man will be halfway to Virginia. You’ve been around a dead man or two, I suspect, Doctor, so just give it to me straight.”
Reluctantly, I nodded. “I should say that he has been dead about ten hours, judging by the rigidity of the muscles. But, as you likely know, many things can affect the period of rigor mortis and hence that estimate.”
Dunkley pulled out his pocket-watch and consulted it. “Still, we’ll take it as a reasonable starting point. Even if you are off by an hour that places the murder as occurring sometime between midnight and two o’clock. That was right at the height of the storm, so whoever did this was almost certainly a resident of the hotel. Elizabeth,” he said, turning to Mrs. Foster, “has anyone checked out this morning?”
“No,” she replied. “Not officially. I suppose it is possible that someone left without paying their bill.”
“We can only hope so!” exclaimed Dunkley.
I frowned in non-comprehension. “But that means that the murderer would have gotten away.”
Dunkley chuckled. “Not in the slightest, Doctor. Lest you forget, this is an island! The only way someone is getting off Bermuda is via a boat, and no boats are running yet this morning while the sea recovers from last night’s tempest. Once the hue-and-cry is raised over him, it would be a short trip to the rope for any man who has fled this hotel. No, the only purpose served by someone running would be to sign their own confession of guilt. We can only hope that whoever did this foul deed is so obtuse. Now let’s figure out the exact time of death.” He reached up and rapped on the wall to his right. “Elizabeth, who is staying in the adjoining room? There were how many gunshots? Six? Seven? Too many to sleep through, that’s for certain.”
Mrs. Foster glanced at me uncertainly. “That would be the Doctor’s room, Constable,” she replied hesitantly.
Dunkley’s bushy brown eyebrows shot up as he turned to me. “Well, Doctor?”
I felt my brow furrowing. “I am afraid that I did sleep through it.”
Dunkley looked skeptical. “You must be a powerfully deep sleeper, sir.”
“I am afraid that my slumber was not natural.”
“I am not certain that I am following you, Doctor. Are you a consumer of laudanum?”
I shook my head. “No, I rarely take any medications myself. But last night, I was under the influence of some powerful drug, and not intentionally I assure you.”
“Drugged!” Dunkley exclaimed. “By who?”
“That is what we were trying to ascertain when we were rousting Mr. Dumas here. I thought that perhaps it was him.”
“And what made you think that?”
I explained to Dunkley the sharing of the comet vintage the prior evening. As I concluded, he looked around at Mrs. Foster, Mr. Sims, and I with silent astonishment.
“Uncertain of the reason for his reticence, I ventured to ask a question. “Was there any point that I did not make clear?”
He shook his head. “Not at all, Doctor. Your statement is extraordinarily lucid. Well, that certainly is a major clue. If we can ascertain who drugged you, then we have our murderer.”
I nodded slowly. “I suppose that what you say is probably true. It’s unlikely that we have both a murderer and a wine-bottle druggist under this roof.”
“You misunderstand me, Doctor,” said Dunkley, shaking his head. “I was not implying that this was an unlikely coincidence. It is obvious that these events were directly related. You see, the murderer was not trying to drug you and Mr. Sims. His aim was Mr. Dumas here. Look,” said he, pointing at the bedclothes, where some black powder appeared mixed in with the blood. “The powder-blackening demonstrates that the shots were fired from close range. Mr. Dumas was drugged to ensure that the murderer could get close to him. You were simply a bystander in the process.”
Dunkley stopped and looked around the room. “Below us is the billiard-room, so no one would have heard shots there.” He looked up at the ceiling. “What about the garret, Elizabeth? Who is staying up there?”
Mrs. Foster glanced out into the hall, where Mr. Delopolous and Mr. Bey continued to loiter. “Those gentlemen she replied. “But they could not have heard anything, for the slope of the roof is such that the garret room does not extend much over this room. And the noise of the storm would have been loudest up there.”
The two gentlemen in the hallway hastened to assure the Constable that Mrs. Foster’s assessment was correct. They had heard nothing unusual in the night but the winds and the rains.
Dunkley shook his head. “Then what about the room across the hall?” he asked, pointing out the door. “Who is in there?”
Mrs. Foster nodded at the huge man in the room with us. “Mr. Sims.”
Dunkley snorted. “So, anyone who might have heard anything over the noise of the storm was passed out in a drugged stupor?” said he, incredulously. “This will be harder than I thought. Still, our man will be one of the guests, so we should be able to narrow down the list of suspects quickly.” His gaze swept the chamber of death, and I mirrored his behavior, noticing for the first time that it was a near square, much smaller than my L-shaped room.
In so doing, something caught my eye over by the window. I stepped over towards it, and discovered a puddle of water on the floor. I then glanced out of the window and was surprised by what I found there. “I am not so certain about that, Constable.”
“What do you mean?”
I indicated the puddle. “We had to force the door, since it was barred from the inside. So the murderer did not flee through the hotel. He must have left through the window, hence the puddle.”
Dunkley considered this and tested the window, which he found to be unlocked. “That would not have been easy,” he mused. “It was quite a storm last night.”
“Ah, but they were aided by that,” said I, pointing out the window, where
a ladder rested against the frame of the hotel directly under Mr. Dumas’ room. At the bottom was the hotel’s rear garden.
“By Jove!” exclaimed Dunkley. “Still, they could have simply re-entered the hotel through the garden door and returned to their room.”
Mrs. Foster shook her head violently. “That’s not possible. I do a round of the building every night to lock up. I test that door every night, along with all of the others. No one entered this hotel last night.”
“Lock or bar?” inquired Dunkley.
“Both,” she replied.
Dunkley nodded approvingly. “Excellent. Locks can be picked. Therefore, I agree that no one entered this hotel last night, except possibly through this window. I will need to take an inventory of this room and then interview the guests. I must find out if any of them knew Mr. Dumas and can shed light on who would want to kill him.”
“I can set up the downstairs ladies’ parlor for your use,” volunteered Mrs. Foster.
Dunkley nodded his agreement. “That will serve nicely. I will be down in a minute.”
Mrs. Foster and Mr. Sims turned to leave the room. I was about to follow them when Dunkley spoke again. “Hold a minute, Doctor.” Mrs. Foster closed the door behind her to shut off the terrible scene from the other guests.
“Sir?” I inquired.
“Doctor, I would be much obliged if you would deign to assist me.”
“With the body? Of course.”
He shook his head. “More than just the body, Doctor. You have sharp eyes, as evidenced by the puddle. I am going to need your help in questioning the guests. We shall see if you can spot any inconsistencies in their stories that I might miss.”
“But Constable,” I protested, “surely I too am a suspect. How can you trust me?”
He smiled for the first time since our encounter on the town square and I was reminded that he was, at my best guess, no older than me. “There are at least four reasons why I do not think that you are the murderer, Doctor. Would you like me to list them?”
I raised my eyebrows.
“First, you volunteered yourself as a suspect. Few guilty men are cool enough to do that. Second, the evidence that you were drugged has been verified not only by Mr. Sims, who I do not know, but also by Mrs. Foster, who I’ve known all my life. Third, as a medical man, I am certain that you could have devised a less noisy end for Mr. Dumas. Why take the risk that someone would hear the shots? Fourth, you were recently wounded in Afghanistan and were posted here for medical recuperation. It would take a very devious man to engineer that type of posting, and thus I suspect that you are on Bermuda by pure chance alone. And whatever the reason for Mr. Dumas’ killing, this is not the work of a random murderer.”
“You do not you think it was a robbery then?”
Dunkley shook his head violently. “No. Absolutely not. I don’t even have to search his room to know that nothing was stolen from him.” He pointed at Dumas’ head. “A thief does not leave behind two pieces-of-eight upon a dead man’s eyes. Nor does he write letters in blood upon a dead man’s forehead.”
As I contemplated the dead man, something stuck me as odd about the letters, whose vivid red color had not yet begun to oxidize like the rest of his spilled rust-colored blood. I leaned over and touched a small corner of the letter “M.” A bit of the color came away on my index finger, and I realized what was so unusual. “This is not blood,” I exclaimed. “This is paint.”
Dunkley’s dark brown eyes peered at me, as he pursed his lips and shook his head. “These are deep waters, Doctor. Deep waters.”
§
CHAPTER X
A TANGLED SKEIN
Breaking the ominous silence, Constable Dunkley cleared his throat. “Can I rely upon you, Doctor?”
Between my wounds and my recent illness, I may have been only a pale shadow of myself, but I fancy that I have always been a man of action, and I rose to the occasion. “Most certainly,” I replied, simply. “I am your man.”
“Capital! Our first task should be to inventory the room.” He tapped his official notebook and then began to scribble down thoughts. “First, the items of the room itself. There is the gun, of course, presumably the murder weapon.”
I frowned in confusion. “Why ‘presumably?’ Do you doubt it? Surely you are not hypothesizing the presence of a second pistol when this one is staring us in the face? I have not yet attempted to extract one of the bullets, but it would little surprise me to discover that the caliber corresponds to that weapon.”
“No,” said the constable, shaking his head slowly. “But there is a major problem with this weapon. How many bullet holes do you count in this body, Doctor?”
“Seven,” replied I, with confidence.
He grinned sardonically. “That is the problem. You see, the Colt is chambered for only six rounds. So either someone shot Mr. Dumas six times, paused to reload the cylinder, and then shot him once more, or there is a second gun.” He picked up the heavy gun and shook out the cartridges. “Empty.”
I was perplexed by this development. “Neither seems very plausible. Six shots were certainly more than enough to kill the man, especially at such short range. So why reload? But if you had a pair of pistols and used both in a moment of anger, why take only one away with you?”
“Agreed,” replied Dunkley. “A cold-blooded business, that is for certain. Is there a method to this madness? I do not know what to make of it, but we shall file it away as our first clue. The second is, of course, the ladder.”
“Which does not tell us much.”
“No,” he agreed, “but we can inspect the ground beneath the window. If we are lucky we will find a footprint in the mud. Next, we come to the man’s possessions.”
He began to inspect the contents of the bed-stand. On it rested a silver watch with a gold chain. Dunkley picked it up and turned it over. “Barraud’s of London, but not numbered. Not much help there. They make too many watches to help us. And there is no personalized inscription,” said he, with a hint of disappointment.
“He told me his given name was Gustave, so surely it would only say ‘G.D.’”
Dunkley shook his head again. “You are forgetting the initials on his forehead, Doctor. What do you suppose that they stand for?”
“I really couldn’t say. Perhaps it is the mark of some secret society?”
He pursed his lips as if to consider this possibility. “Perhaps. But I am more inclined to the hypothesis that it stands for a name. Since our killer likely was not foolish enough to leave his own initials, I suspect that this may be the true initials of our murdered man.”
“So, ‘Gustave Dumas’ was nothing but a nom-de-plume?” I asked, intrigued.
Dunkley moved on to the dressing table and began going through the litter of personal effects and other débris. He studied the man’s identity papers carefully. “Well,” said he, finally, “if it’s a forgery, it’s a damn good one. Our dead man certainly appears to be none other than Gustave Dumas from Rouen, Normandy. He has been on the go a lot recently. Most recently New York, and before that, all about the Continent. The Dacre Hotel, London. The Hôtel du Louvre, Paris. The Hôtel Dulong, Lyon. The Hôtel National, Lausanne. Copenhagen, Strasbourg, Odessa, Luxembourg, Buda-Pesth. A well-travelled man, our Mr. Dumas,” he concluded, finishing his flipping through the man’s travel documents. The constable quickly examined a box of wax vestas and some cheroots, and then picked up a small cigar holder made from some light green stone. “Now this is interesting. What do you make of this, Doctor?”
I circled the bed in order to get a better look at it. “Ah, I’ve seen something like this before. An officer who had served in China had something quite similar. It’s made of jade.”
“A very well-travelled man, our Mr. Dumas, or whatever his real name is,” observed Dunkley. He emptied out a pouch of sealskin, which contained a dozen gold sovereigns and about twenty fifty-pound notes of the Bank of England, held together by an India-rubber band, which was more
than a year’s pay for someone like myself. “And not lacking for money, either,” he noted pointedly.
An aluminum pencil-case and a disarranged pile of papers also lay scattered about the tabletop, and Dunkley began to scrutinize them. They appeared to be receipted accounts, written in a crabbed foreign hand. “The question is whether Mr. Dumas was a slovenly man, or whether his murderer scattered these papers. And of course, who knows if any have been taken. I will have to study these a bit, Doctor. Perhaps they will tell us exactly who Mr. Dumas was. Hmmm,” he paused, “these appear to be list of Stock Exchange Securities and South American railway bonds.”
I took some of the papers from him and looked them over. “I would have to examine the lists, but if my memory serves, most of these have seen heavy losses in the last few years.”
The Isle of Devils Page 15