August Derleth - The Solar Pons Omnibus Volume 1

by August Derleth

  He ignored me, as he often does. "There is, too, an abundance of prattle about guilt. 'Crime and the criminal are the fault of society,' and it follows to these people who talk in this manner, that 'the criminal is not responsible, society is.' Now, it would be idle to deny that poverty and filth are fertile soil for crime, but it is nothing short of lunacy to suggest that it follows upon this admission that all crime rises from such a background, and that all criminals are therefore free of social responsibility. But this ridiculous claim is being made by ever noisier elements of our society. The denial of personal responsibility is fatuous. I do not know a single jurist of my considerable acquaintance who will subscribe to such nonsense."

  "You cannot very well rehabilitate a man who has been hanged," I said.

  "Ah, well, if he deserved hanging in the first place, there is very little that can be said in favour of trying to rehabilitate him. We are coming dangerously close to a world in which everything is done on behalf of the law-breaker —and at the expense of the law- abiding citizen. That is the road to anarchic chaos. It is the end result of indulgence in idealistic sentimentality, not of rational thought. We have always had the conflict between the individual and society, and the ultimate goal is to protect society by legal means at the least possible loss to the rights of the individual. But as the earth's population increases, it becomes inevitable that the rights of the individual must give way increasingly to the well-being of the social structure as a whole. Yet here we see the beginnings of a movement that goes counter to this inescapable fact —the outcry is for the protection of the rights of precisely those elements of society who have forfeited their right to demand such protection by antisocial acts. We are reversing Darwin—by insisting that the unfit survive."

  I thought him unduly harsh and said as much.

  He brushed this aside impatiently. "It is not a matter of harshness or softness. It is simply a failure to see the forest for the trees. Miss Morris's lawyer has certainly taken the correct course. Contesting the forged will meant charging the forger. He should get what is coming to him, though, in view of what happens in our courts all too often, it may be thought infantile to expect adequate justice."

  14 December 1919

  Pons was speaking of the commonplaceness of the average crime this morning when Inspector Jamison paid us a visit.

  "I put it to you, Jamison," said Pons, "is it not true that the majority of capital crimes committed in England are utterly without imagination?"

  Jamison nodded. "Dull, if I may say so. Very dull. Of course, it's not every crime that has one of these private inquiry agents hanging about to colour it up a bit."

  "Touche!" cried Pons.

  "It's little more most of the time than some bloke breaking in and killing a man in the course of a robbery —or a man killing his wife out of jealousy or something of that kind —open and shut cases. The only trouble we have is in the courts —we know we've got our man, but the lawyers confuse everybody."

  Pons smiled. "What problem troubles you today, Jamison?"

  "This is just a friendly call," said the Inspector, faintly indignant.

  "Not a mystery to be solved in all London?" pressed Pons with a note of disappointment in his voice.

  Jamison shook his head. "We've had three murders and one accidental death in the past week."

  "All solved, I take it," said Pons dryly.

  Jamison hedged a little. "We've got one murderer —and we're onto the other two."

  "Capital!" exclaimed Pons. "And the accidental death?"

  "Ah, that's a miserable business," said Jamison. "Young woman fell off a train on the London, Brighton, and South Coast Railway on Sunday night." "I don't recall reading about it in the papers."

  "I believe it would make nothing more than a small paragraph on the inside pages," said Jamison.

  "I see by your preoccupied air and the way you finger your waistcoat button, Jamison, you're not happy about it."

  "She was badly injured, Pons —fractured skull, one leg cut off."

  "How old was she?"

  "Just twenty-three. I'd have called her a good-looking woman. Angela Morell. A clerk in a dairy in Lavender Hill."

  "Go on," urged Pons.

  "The body was found in Merstham tunnel. There seems to be no question but that a fall from the train was the cause of her death. None. She couldn't have fallen from any train but the 9:13 P.M. from London Bridge to Brighton, or the 9:33 P.M. to Reading. But both these trains came out of the tunnel with all carriage doors shut. I don't know what kind of feat it would be to fall from a carriage and shut the door behind you. It may not be impossible."

  "But it is certainly improbable," conceded Pons.

  "Then, too, she had a bit of veil in her mouth."

  "Her hat had a veil attached?"

  "None."

  "Ah," said Pons, his interest quickening.

  "Caught on a tooth, in fact."

  "A gag."

  "Perhaps. But let us say somebody pushed her. Then we come up to the question of why? — and who?"

  "I take it she was unmarried."

  Jamison nodded.

  "You've traced her movements?"

  "That's routine, as you know. She left her lodgings at seven that night, saying she was going for only a short walk, and would be back within the hour. But one of her friends said that in the afternoon she had looked through a railway timetable."

  "She had an assignation then," suggested Pons. "Was she accustomed to walking out?"

  "The landlady said she had two gentlemen friends. But there were nights when she went out alone. She was always back by eleven on such nights. She didn't speak of them to anyone."

  "Assuming that she permitted two gentlemen to call for her openly, there must then have been a strong reason why she should

  be clandestine with a third — if her assignation was with a man."

  "Why do you intimate it may not have been?"

  "I wonder what manner of man carries a veil about with him. But I am out of touch with the world of fashion."

  "No, no, it's true—a woman would be more likely to carry a veil."

  "A woman perhaps who had followed her husband to a clandestine meeting with another woman."

  "You are certainly colouring it up, Pons," said Jamison.

  "Ah, well, if you are content with a verdict of accidental death, there is surely no need to pursue the matter further. I submit, however, that you are anything but satisfied with that verdict. Let us be as objective as we can about the matter. We are given a young woman —not ill-favoured in looks —who is attractive enough to appeal to members of the opposite sex. She goes off to what must certainly be an assignation and is found dead. Very well, then. Eliminating accidental death, we are left with suicide or murder. Had she any patent reason for suicide?"

  "We are aware of none."

  "Then we come back to murder. Certain limited possibilities are open to us. Though the young woman had been careful to maintain a reputation for good character, we do not have in hand any proof that she was indeed a woman of good character. She could have been conducting a liaison with a married man —and fallen victim either to him or his wife. She could have been a prostitute engaged in blackmailing selected victims, one of whom took this method of disposing of her. She could as easily have been followed by someone violently jealous of her liaison and murdered by him in a rage. Within the boundaries of the known facts we can hardly speculate further without entering the realm of pure imagination. I submit, however, that the fragment of veil found in her mouth suggests a certain premeditation."

  "A contrived accident is what you make it, Pons."

  "I think it unlikely that it was accidental death," replied Pons. "The fragment of veil caught on her tooth and the closed carriage doors both suggest the presence of some other person in the compartment from which she was thrust. You saw the body?"

  "A horrible sight."

  "Were there any marks suggesting that her hands and feet
had been tied?"

  "None."

  "Very well, then —she might have been stunned to keep her quiet, and gagged to prevent her crying out if she came to her senses before the tunnel was reached. I take it there was nothing to suggest robbery?"

  "She was carrying five pounds and wore two rings —one a diamond, one a ruby."

  "On the wages of a dairy clerk?"

  Inspector Jamison was disconcerted.

  "I put it to you, Jamison, it might be interesting to pursue the inquiry with the conviction that Miss Morell was murdered. Try to ascertain where she got on to the train, whether she was accompanied by anyone, and what her destination was. I rather suspect that the place of the assignation was in a specific compartment on the train, not on the platform, so that her murderer need take no chance of being seen with her."

  After Inspector Jamison had gone, Pons said, "I take a dim view of the Yard's finding her murderer. That young woman, if indeed she had been engaged in some criminal activity or a course that would not meet with social approval, seems to have covered herself very well —so well, in fact, that she may defeat all attempts to discover the identity of her murderer. The kind of clandestine affair in which she may have been engaged is commonly extremely difficult to uncover."

  21 December 1919

  I touched Pons on a sensitive point today when I observed that the evidence offered to convict the Moat Farm murderer was almost entirely circumstantial.

  "I seem to detect a note of disapproval, Parker," he said with some asperity. "Yet circumstantial evidence is the strongest of all possible evidence."

  "As strong as the testimony of eye-witnesses?"

  He chuckled dryly. "Stronger! Circumstances cannot lie. They may be misinterpreted, but they cannot lie. Eye-witnesses can, and do —sometimes by design, but usually because they are simply mistaken. I put it to you that no half-dozen eye-witnesses will tell precisely the same story; their accounts are certain to vary. All things being relative, some will see a short man, some a tall one, some a fat one, some a thin man, some brown, some hazel, some blue, some green. But that is not so of circumstances."

  "The outcry against circumstantial evidence cannot be that ill- founded," I protested.

  "It can and it is. I suspect it was begun by criminals who were fairly caught by circumstances. Wills in On Principles of Circumstantial Evidence puts the case well when he says, 'The distinct and specific proving power of circumstantial evidence depends upon its incompatibility with any reasonable hypothesis other than that of the truth of the principal fact in proof of which it is adduced; so that, after the exhaustion of every other mode of solution, we must either conclude that the accused has been guilty of the act imputed, or renounce as illusory the results of consciousness and experience, and such knowledge as we possess of the workings of the human mind.' And Lord Coleridge, summing up in the trial of Dickman, the railway murderer, in 1910, said: 'If we find a variety of circumstances all pointing in the same direction, convincing in proportion to the number and variety of those circumstances and their independence one of another, although each separate piece of evidence, standing by itself, may admit of an innocent interpretation, yet the cumulative effect of such evidence may be overwhelming evidence of guilt.' I recognize no intelligent argument that runs counter to these statements."

  "Why, we read interminably of the police trying to convict on evidence that is demolished readily enough by counsel," I said.

  "I fear that is only too true. I submit, nevertheless, that you are taking issue with a police action, or the flawed decision of the prosecution. That is a matter of attempting to make of circumstances what they are not. I have no sympathy with it —but it does not bear any relation to the proper interpretation and use of circumstantial evidence."

  "But surely you cannot deny that circumstantial evidence takes strength from inference, and that is a matter of opinion."

  "It is opinion supported by facts. Indeed, it is opinion rising out of the available facts. I think, if you care to examine the records, you will find that far more wrong convictions have resulted from false and mistaken direct and positive testimony than from the wrong inferences drawn from circumstantial evidence. No one fact is employed alone in the building of a case on circumstantial evidence; no, it is the accumulation of facts that, taken together, related together, are so strong as to establish a clear indication of guilt. Compared to the fallibility of human beings, circumstances invariably present the stronger case."

  23 December 1919

  Pons's wholehearted respect for time was clearly demonstrated today. Having no problem to engage him, he spent the entire day adding to his store of knowledge, which far exceeds my own. He reads reference books, once he had done with the papers —the current issue of Whitaker's Almanack—Skeat's Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language—A Dictionary of Dates — Isaac Taylor's Words and Places—Burke's Peerage —a guide to the cathedrals of France —certainly a hodgepodge of books on a singular variety of subjects.

  Seeing me observing him, he smiled and said, "Nothing is as unique as a fact, my dear fellow, and nothing as fascinating. You and I —indeed, the entire universe, depends on facts."

  "It is even more fascinating to realize what some people make of facts," I said.

  "Is it not!" he agreed, his eyes twinkling.

  27 December 1919

  A note today from Jamison.

  " 'In regard to that Merstham tunnel murder,' " Pons read, interjecting, "Aha! he now clearly calls it 'murder'! —'the woman Morell appears to have been involved with a number of men from her past. New evidence suggests that she has been blackmailing them. A search of her room turned up a small notebook with seventeen names —two of them women. No addresses, but we'll find them. Curious notations under each name indicating payments. Apparently none ever came to her address —she met them by appointment. It will take time, but we'll find him (or her!) eventually. Other than these occasional appointments, her life in Lavender Hill would seem to have been straightforward enough.' " Pons's eyes twinkled as he dropped the note into the coal-scuttle at the fireplace. "I daresay Jamison will have it, in time to come; we coloured it up a bit."

  7 January 1920

  Mrs. Johnson this morning showed up to our quarters a clergyman who had sent ahead his card announcing himself as the Reverend Howard Foster. He proved to be a lean shank of a man, with a face like a closed rat-trap, very dour and grim. His jaws were clamped together, and his bushy sideboards, now greying, were wiry and stiff. He wore clerical garb, withal a trifle shiny from wear, and carried an umbrella rolled up under his arm, though the day was fair and rather cold.

  He addressed himself forthrightly to Pons. "I am taking the liberty, sir, of bringing to you a small problem which I believe is not one for the police. I understand you have some little knowledge in these matters."

  "There are those who say so," admitted Pons.

  The Reverend Foster drew from the inner pocket of his long black coat an envelope which he handed to Pons.

  "Addressed to a lady," ventured Pons. "And typewritten."

  "My niece."

  Pons opened the envelope and took out the paper inside. From where I sat, it appeared to be a half page of proof or print. It was ragged along one edge, as if it had been torn from a book.

  Pons narrowed his eyes. A kind of gleam came into them. He gazed provocatively at our visitor.

  "My niece received this yesterday by post. I was in the study when she opened it. She gazed at it, and I presume she read it. Her face went pale. Then she moaned softly and ran —no, let me amend that, Mr. Pons —she tottered from the room. I ran to her aid, but she thrust me aside. I begged her to tell me what the matter was, but all she did was shake her head and say, 'It's no use. I must go away —far away!' Since then she has hardly come from her room and I have not had a word from her. She walks about like a dead woman. Can you make anything of that? I picked it up when she dropped it, but I cannot make head or tail of it save t
hat it appears to be from a book — not the kind of text that I with my limited time would be likely to read."

  "I will need a little time to examine it," said Pons. "I take it your niece has not always lived with you?"

  "Only since the death of my wife almost two years ago. She came back unexpectedly from America. She had gone there in 1910 intending to return in a few years, but the war caught her there, and she stayed until it was no longer dangerous to come back. Her father—her last surviving parent, my brother —had died in the meantime; so she naturally came to live with me."

  "Ah, she is then no longer a very young woman."

  "She is thirty-four."

  Pons glanced again at the envelope. "Posted in London. And not far away." He looked up. "I see that you have come up from the country, since the address on the envelope is obviously your home.

  Presumably you have other errands in London. If you will return in an hour or two, I believe I may have some explanation of this mysterious communication."

  The clergyman moved as if dismissed by his bishop.

  He had hardly left our quarters —indeed, his footsteps could still be heard on the stairs — before Pons subjected me to one of those little games he enjoys playing so much. He thrust the page from the envelope at me.

  "What do you make of that, Parker?" he asked.

  I had only to glance at it to say, "It is clearly a page torn from a book."

  "No, no," cried Pons vigorously. "It is clearly a torn page —but not necessarily from a book. Have a closer look at it."

  I read it with care —

  "Faithless Dick," said Silver. "I've a gauge on the keg of rum, mind, wretch. There's the key; fill a pannikin and bring it up."

  Terrified as I was, I could not help thinking to myself that this way Mr. Arrow will have got the strong waters that destroyed him.

  Dick was not to come for a while, and during his lengthy absence Israel spoke straight and soft for the cook to hear. I caught but a word or two — "I" and "you," yet I gathered some very important news, that it was certain that not all the crew could be made to join in a mutiny against the captain or yet in any crew of John Silver's, no matter what the circumstances. It made me feel good to hear, and I knew that whatever happened there was still time to stand with valor against Silver.