Detection by Gaslight

by Unknown

  His first works in the crime field were crook stories featuring Rodney Pringle, written in collaboration with a friend, Dr. J. J. Pitcairn, and published under the pseudonym “Clifford Ashdown.” In 1907, Freeman published The Red Thumb Mark, basing the character of the medico-legal detective, Dr. Thorndyke, on Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor. Freeman prefaced John Thorndyke’s Cases (1909) with the note that “the experiments described have in all cases been performed by me,” and he illustrated the book with photographs of the specimens examined through a microscope. The Singing Bone (1912) contains the first inverted detective stories, and the tale that follows, “The Dead Hand,” is in that sub-sub-genre. The story appeared in two issues of Pearson’s Magazine, October and November 1912, and some fourteen years later Freeman expanded it into a novel called The Shadow of the Wolf. As far as I have been able to determine, the original story has never previously been published in America.

  The Dead Hand

  I. How It Happened

  ABOUT HALF-PAST EIGHT on a fine, sunny June morning, a small yacht crept out of Sennen Cove, near the Land’s End, and headed for the open sea. On the shelving beach of the cove two women and a man, evidently visitors (or “foreigners,” to use the local term), stood watching her departure with valedictory waving of cap or handkerchief, and the boatman who had put the crew on board, aided by two of his comrades, was hauling his boat up above the tide-mark.

  A light, northerly breeze filled the yacht’s sails and drew her gradually seaward. The figures of her crew dwindled to the size of dolls, shrank with the increasing distance to the magnitude of insects, and at last, losing all individuality, became mere specks merged in the form of the fabric that bore them.

  On board the receding craft two men sat in the little cockpit. They formed the entire crew, for the Sandhopper was only a ship’s lifeboat, timbered and decked, of light draught and, in the matter of spars and canvas, what the art critics would call “reticent.”

  Both men, despite the fineness of the weather, wore yellow oilskins and sou’westers, and that was about all they had in common. In other respects they made a curious contrast—the one small, slender, sharp-featured, dark almost to swarthiness, and restless and quick in his movements; the other large, massive, red-faced, blue-eyed, with the rounded outlines suggestive of ponderous strength; a great ox of a man, heavy, stolid, but much less unwieldy than he looked.

  The conversation incidental to getting the yacht under way had ceased, and silence had fallen on the occupants of the cockpit. The big man grasped the tiller and looked sulky, which was probably his usual aspect, and the small man watched him furtively.

  The land was nearly two miles distant when the latter broke the silence.

  “Joan Haygarth has come on wonderfully the last few months; getting quite a fine-looking girl. Don’t you think so, Purcell?”

  “Yes,” answered Purcell, “and so does Phil Rodney.”

  “You’re right,” agreed the other. “She isn’t a patch on her sister, though, and never will be. I was looking at Maggie as we came down the beach this morning and thinking what a handsome girl she is. Don’t you agree with me?”

  Purcell stooped to look under the boom, and answered without turning his head:

  “Yes, she’s all right.”

  “All right!” exclaimed the other. “Is that the way—”

  “Look here, Varney,” interrupted Purcell. “I don’t want to discuss my wife’s looks with you or any other man. She’ll do for me or I shouldn’t have married her.”

  A deep, coppery flush stole into Varney’s cheeks. But he had brought the rather brutal snub on himself and apparently had the fairness to recognise the fact, for he mumbled an apology and relapsed into silence.

  When next he spoke he did so with a manner diffident and uneasy, as though approaching a disagreeable or difficult subject.

  “There’s a little matter, Dan, that I’ve been wanting to speak to you about when we got a chance of a private talk.”

  He glanced rather anxiously at his stolid companion, who grunted, and then, without removing his gaze from the horizon ahead, replied: “You’ve a pretty fair chance now, seeing that we shall be bottled up together for another five or six hours. And it’s fairly private unless you bawl loud enough to be heard at the Longships.”

  It was not a gracious invitation. But if Varney resented the rebuff he showed no sign of annoyance, for reasons which appeared when he opened his subject.

  “What I wanted to say,” he resumed, “was this. We’re both doing pretty well now on the square. You must be positively piling up the shekels, and I can earn a decent living, which is all I want. Why shouldn’t we drop this flash note business?”

  Purcell kept his blue eye fixed on the horizon and appeared to ignore the question; but after an interval and without moving a muscle he said gruffly: “Go on,” and Varney continued:

  “The lay isn’t what it was, you know. At first it was all plain sailing. The notes were 1st-class copies and not a soul suspected anything until they were presented at the bank. Then the murder was out, and the next little trip that I made was a very different affair. Two or three of the notes were queried quite soon after I had changed them, and I had to be precious fly, I can tell you, to avoid complications. And now that the second batch has come in to the Bank, the planting of fresh specimens is going to be harder still. There isn’t a money-changer on the Continent of Europe that isn’t keeping his weather eyeball peeled, to say nothing of the detectives that the Bank people have sent abroad.”

  He paused and looked appealingly at his companion. But Purcell, still minding his helm, only growled “Well?”

  “Well, I want to chuck it, Dan. When you’ve had a run of luck and pocketed your winnings it is time to stop play.”

  “You’ve come into some money, then, I take it?” said Purcell.

  “No, I haven’t. But I can make a living now by safe and respectable means, and I’m sick of all this scheming and dodging with the gaol everlastingly under my lee.”

  “The reason I asked,” said Purcell, “is that there is a trifle outstanding. You hadn’t forgotten that, I suppose?”

  “No, I hadn’t forgotten it, but I thought that perhaps you might be willing to let me down a bit easily.”

  The other man pursed up his thick lips and continued to gaze stonily over the bow.

  “Oh, that’s what you thought?” he said; and then, after a pause: “I fancy you must have lost sight of some of the facts when you thought that. Let me just remind you how the case stands. To begin with, you start your career with a little playful embezzlement, you blue the proceeds and you are mug enough to be found out. Then I come in. I compound the affair with old Marston for a couple of thousand, and practically clean myself out of every penny I possess, and he consents to regard your temporary absence in the light of a holiday.

  “Now, why do I do this? Am I a philanthropist? Devil a bit. I’m a man of business. Before I ladle out that two thousand, I make a business contract with you. I have discovered how to make a passable imitation of the Bank of England paper; you are a skilled engraver and a plausible scamp. I am to supply you with paper blanks, you are to engrave plates, print the notes, and get them changed. I am to take two-thirds of the proceeds; and, although I have done the most difficult part of the work, I agree to regard my share of the profits as constituting repayment of the loan.

  “Our contract amounts to this: I lend you two thousand without security—with an infernal amount of insecurity, in fact—you ‘promise, covenant, and agree,’ as the lawyers say, to hand me back ten thousand in instalments, being the products of our joint industry. It is a verbal contract which I have no means of enforcing, but I trust you to keep your word, and up to the present you have kept it. You have paid me a little over four thousand. Now you want to cry off and leave the balance unpaid. Isn’t that the position?”

  “Not exactly,” said Varney. “I’m not crying off the debt; I only want time. Look here, Dan;
I’m making about three fifty a year now. That isn’t much, but I’ll manage to let you have a hundred a year out of it. What do you say to that?”

  Purcell laughed scornfully. “A hundred a year to pay off six thousand! That’ll take just sixty years: and as I’m now forty-three, I shall be exactly a hundred and three years of age when the last instalment is paid. I think, Varney, you’ll admit that a man of a hundred and three is getting past his prime.”

  “Well, I’ll pay you something down to start. I’ve saved about eighteen hundred pounds out of the note business. You can have that now, and I’ll pay off as much I can at a time until I’m clear. Remember, that if I should happen to get clapped in chokee for twenty years or so, you won’t get anything. And, I tell you, it’s getting a risky business.”

  “I’m willing to take the risk,” said Purcell.

  “I daresay you are,” Varney retorted passionately, “because it’s my risk. If I am grabbed, it’s my racket. You sit out. It’s I who passed the notes, and I’m known to be a skilled engraver. That’ll be good enough for them. They won’t trouble about who made the paper.”

  “I hope not,” said Purcell.

  “Of course they wouldn’t; and you know I shouldn’t give you away.”

  “Naturally. Why should you? Wouldn’t do you any good.”

  “Well, give me a chance, Dan,” Varney pleaded. “This business is getting on my nerves. I want to be quit of it. You’ve had four thousand; that’s a hundred per cent. You haven’t done so badly.”

  “I didn’t expect to do badly. I took a big risk. I gambled two thousand for ten.”

  “Yes; and you got me out of the way while you put the screw on poor old Haygarth to make his daughter marry you.”

  It was an indiscreet thing to say, but Purcell’s stolid indifference to his danger and distress had ruffled Varney’s temper.

  Purcell, however, was unmoved. “I don’t know,” he said, “what you mean by getting you out of the way. You were never in the way. You were always hankering after Maggie, but I could never see that she wanted you.”

  “Well, she certainly didn’t want you,” Varney retorted. “And, for that matter, I don’t much think she wants you now.”

  For the first time Purcell withdrew his eye from the horizon to turn it on his companion. And an evil eye it was, set in the great, sensual face, now purple with anger.

  “What the devil do you mean?” he exclaimed furiously; “you infernal, sallow-faced, little whipper-snapper! If you mention my wife’s name again I’ll knock you on the head and pitch you overboard.”

  Varney’s face flushed darkly, and for a moment he was inclined to try the wager a battle. But the odds were impossible, and if Varney was not a coward, neither was he a fool. But the discussion was at an end. Nothing was to be hoped for now. These indiscreet words had rendered further pleading impossible.

  The silence that settled down in the yacht and the aloofness that encompassed the two men were conducive to reflection. Each ignored the presence of the other. When the course was altered southerly, Purcell slacked out the sheets with his own hand as he put up the helm. He might have been sailing singlehanded. And Varney watched him askance, but made no move; sitting hunched up on the locker, nursing a slowly-matured hatred and thinking his thoughts.

  Very queer thoughts they were. He was following out the train of events that might have happened, pursuing them to their possible consequences. Supposing Purcell had carried out his threat? Well, there would have been a pretty tough struggle, for Varney was no weakling. But a struggle with that solid fifteen stone of flesh could end only one way. No, there was no doubt; he would have gone overboard.

  And what then? Would Purcell have gone back to Sennen Cove, or sailed alone into Penzance? In either case, he would have had to make up some sort of story; and no one could have contradicted him whether the story was believed or not. But it would have been awkward for Purcell.

  Then there was the body. That would have been washed up sooner or later, as much of it as the lobsters had left. Well, lobsters don’t eat clothes or bones, and a dent in the skull might take some accounting for. Very awkward this—for Purcell. He would probably have had to clear out; to make a bolt for it, in short.

  The mental picture of this great bully fleeing in terror from the vengeance of the law gave Varney appreciable pleasure. Most of his life he had been borne down by the moral and physical weight of this domineering brute. At school, Purcell had fagged him; he had even bullied him up at Cambridge; and now he had fastened on for ever, like the Old Man of the Sea. And Purcell always got the best of it. When he, Varney, had come back from Italy after that unfortunate little affair, behold! the girl whom they had both wanted (and who had wanted neither of them) had changed from Maggie Haygarth into Maggie Purcell. And so it was even unto this day. Purcell, a prosperous stockjobber now, spent a part of his secret leisure making, in absolute safety, these accursed paper blanks; which he, Varney, must risk his liberty to change into money. Yes, it was quite pleasant to think of Purcell sneaking from town to town, from country to country, with the police at his heels.

  But in these days of telegraphs and extradition there isn’t much chance for a fugitive. Purcell would have been caught to a certainty; and he would have been hanged; no doubt of it. The imagined picture of the execution gave him quite a lengthy entertainment. Then his errant thoughts began to spread out in search of other possibilities. For, after all, it was not an absolute certainty that Purcell could have got him overboard. There was just the chance that Purcell might have gone overboard himself. That would have been a very different affair.

  Varney settled himself composedly to consider the new and interesting train of consequences that would thus have been set going. They were more agreeable to contemplate than the others, because they did not include his own demise. The execution scene made no appearance in this version. The salient fact was that his oppressor would have vanished; that the intolerable burden of his servitude would have been lifted for ever; that he would have been free.

  It was mere idle speculation to while away a dull hour with an uncongenial companion, and he let his thoughts ramble at large. One moment he was dreamily wondering whether Maggie would ever have listened to him, ever have come to care for him; the next, he was back in the yacht’s cabin, where hung from a hook on the bulkhead the revolver that the Rodneys used to practise at floating bottles. It was usually loaded, he knew, but, if not, there was a canvas bag full of cartridges in the starboard locker. Again, he found himself dreaming of the home that he would have had, a home very different from the cheerless lodgings in which he moped at present; and then his thoughts had flitted back to the yacht’s hold, and were busying themselves with the row of half-hundredweights that rested on the timbers on either side of the kelson.

  When Varney had thus brought his mental picture, so to speak, to a finish, its completeness surprised him. It was so simple, so secure. He had actually planned out the scheme of a murder, and he found himself wondering whether many murders passed undetected. They well might if murders were as easy and as safe as this—a dangerous reflection for an injured and angry man. And at this critical point his meditations were interrupted by Purcell, continuing the conversation as if there had been no pause:

  “So you can take it from me, Varney, that I expect you to stick to your bargain. I paid down my money, and I’m going to have my pound of flesh.”

  It was a brutal thing to say, and it was brutally said. But more than that, it was inopportune—or opportune, as you will; for it came as a sort of infernal doxology to the devil’s anthem that had been, all unknown, ringing in Varney’s soul.

  Purcell had spoken without looking round. That was his unpleasant habit. Had he looked at his companion, he might have been startled. A change in Varney’s face might have given him pause; a warm flush, a sparkle of the eye, a look of elation, of settled purpose, deadly, inexorable—the look of a man who has made a fateful resolution.

  It
was so simple, so secure! That was the burden of the song that echoed in Varney’s brain.

  He glanced over the sea. They had opened the south coast now, and he could see, afar off, a fleet of black-sailed luggers heading east. They wouldn’t be in his way. Nor would the big four-master that was creeping away to the west, for she was hull down already, and other ships there were none.

  There was one hindrance, though. Dead ahead the Wolf Rock Lighthouse rose from the blue water, its red-and-white ringed tower looking like some gaudily painted toy. The keepers of lonely lighthouses have a natural habit of watching the passing shipping through their glasses, and it was possible that one of their telescopes might be pointed at the yacht at this very moment. That was a complication.

  Suddenly there came down the wind a sharp report like the firing of a gun, quickly followed by a second. It was the explosive signal from the Longships Lighthouse; but when they looked round there was no lighthouse to be seen—the dark-blue, heaving water faded away at the foot of an advancing wall of vapour.

  Purcell cursed fluently. A pretty place, this, to be caught in, in a fog! And then, as his eye lighted on his companion, he demanded angrily: “What the devil are you grinning at?”

  For Varney, drunk with suppressed excitement, snapped his fingers at rocks and shoals; he was thinking only of the lighthouse keeper’s telescope and of the revolver that hung on the bulkhead. He must make some excuse presently to go below and secure that revolver.