The Perfect Crime: The Big Bow Mystery

by Israel Zangwill

  ‘You good-for-nothing, disreputable scarecrow, where have—’

  ‘Hush, mother. Let him drink. Mr Cantercot is thirsty.’

  ‘Does he care if my children are hungry?’

  Denzil tossed the water greedily down his throat almost at a gulp, as if it were brandy.

  ‘Madam,’ he said, smacking his lips, ‘I do care. I care intensely. Few things in life would grieve me more deeply than to hear that a child, a dear little child—the Beautiful in a nutshell—had suffered hunger. You wrong me.’ His voice was tremulous with the sense of injury. Tears stood in his eyes.

  ‘Wrong you? I’ve no wish to wrong you,’ said Mrs Crowl. ‘I should like to hang you.’

  ‘Don’t talk of such ugly things,’ said Denzil, touching his throat nervously.

  ‘Well, what have you been doin’ all this time?’

  ‘Why, what should I be doing?’

  ‘How should I know what became of you? I thought it was another murder.’

  ‘What!’ Denzil’s glass dashed to fragments on the floor. ‘What do you mean?’

  But Mrs Crowl was glaring too viciously at Mr Crowl to reply. He understood the message as if it were printed. It ran: ‘You have broken one of my best glasses. You have annihilated threepence, or a week’s school fees for half the family.’ Peter wished she would turn the lightning upon Denzil, a conductor down whom it would run innocuously. He stooped down and picked up the pieces as carefully as if they were cuttings from the Koh-i-noor. Thus the lightning passed harmlessly over his head and flew toward Cantercot.

  ‘What do I mean?’ Mrs Crowl echoed, as if there had been no interval. ‘I mean that it would be a good thing if you had been murdered.’

  ‘What unbeautiful ideas you have, to be sure!’ murmured Denzil.

  ‘Yes; but they’d be useful,’ said Mrs Crowl, who had not lived with Peter all these years for nothing. ‘And if you haven’t been murdered what have you been doing?’

  ‘My dear, my dear,’ put in Crowl, deprecatingly, looking up from his quadrupedal position like a sad dog, ‘you are not Cantercot’s keeper.’

  ‘Oh, ain’t I?’ flashed his spouse. ‘Who else keeps him, I should like to know?’

  Peter went on picking up the pieces of the Koh-i-noor.

  ‘I have no secrets from Mrs Crowl,’ Denzil explained courteously. ‘I have been working day and night bringing out a new paper. Haven’t had a wink of sleep for three nights.’

  Peter looked up at his bloodshot eyes with respectful interest.

  ‘The capitalist met me in the street—an old friend of mine—I was overjoyed at the rencontre and told him the Idea I’d been brooding over for months and he promised to stand all the racket.’

  ‘What sort of a paper?’ said Peter.

  ‘Can you ask? To what do you think I’ve been devoting my days and nights but to the cultivation of the Beautiful?’

  ‘Is that what the paper will be devoted to?’

  ‘Yes. To the Beautiful.’

  ‘I know,’ snorted Mrs Crowl, ‘with portraits of actresses.’

  ‘Portraits? Oh, no!’ said Denzil. ‘That would be the True—not the Beautiful.’

  ‘And what’s the name of the paper?’ asked Crowl.

  ‘Ah, that’s a secret, Peter. Like Scott, I prefer to remain anonymous.’

  ‘Just like your Fads. I’m only a plain man, and I want to know where the fun of anonymity comes in? If I had any gifts, I should like to get the credit. It’s a right and natural feeling, to my thinking.’

  ‘Unnatural, Peter; unnatural. We’re all born anonymous, and I’m for sticking close to Nature. Enough for me that I disseminate the Beautiful. Any letters come during my absence, Mrs Crowl?’

  ‘No,’ she snapped. ‘But a gent named Grodman called. He said you hadn’t been to see him for some time, and looked annoyed to hear you’d disappeared. How much have you let him in for?’

  ‘The man’s in my debt,’ said Denzil, annoyed. ‘I wrote a book for him and he’s taken all the credit for it, the rogue! My name doesn’t appear even in the Preface. What’s that ticket you’re looking so lovingly at, Peter?’

  ‘That’s for tonight—the unveiling of Constant’s portrait. Gladstone speaks. Awful demand for places.’

  ‘Gladstone!’ sneered Denzil. ‘Who wants to hear Gladstone? A man who’s devoted his life to pulling down the pillars of Church and State.’

  ‘A man’s who’s devoted his whole life to propping up the crumbling Fads of Religion and Monarchy. But, for all that, the man has his gifts, and I’m burnin’ to hear him.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go out of my way an inch to hear him,’ said Denzil; and went up to his room, and when Mrs Crowl sent him up a cup of nice strong tea at tea time, the brat who bore it found him lying dressed on the bed, snoring unbeautifully.

  The evening wore on. It was fine frosty weather. The Whitechapel Road swarmed, with noisy life, as though it were a Saturday night. The stars flared in the sky like the lights of celestial costermongers. Everybody was on the alert for the advent of Mr Gladstone. He must surely come through the Road on his journey from the West Bow-wards. But nobody saw him or his carriage, except those about the Hall. Probably he went by tram most of the way. He would have caught cold in an open carriage, or bobbing his head out of the window of a closed.

  ‘If he had only been a German prince, or a cannibal king,’ said Crowl bitterly, as he plodded toward the Club, ‘we should have disguised Mile End in bunting and blue fire. But perhaps it’s a compliment. He knows his London, and it’s no use trying to hide the facts from him. They must have queer notions of cities, those monarchs. They must fancy everybody lives in a flutter of flags and walks about under triumphal arches, like as if I were to stitch shoes in my Sunday clothes.’ By a defiance of chronology Crowl had them on today, and they seemed to accentuate the simile.

  ‘And why shouldn’t life be fuller of the Beautiful,’ said Denzil. The poet had brushed the reluctant mud off his garments to the extent it was willing to go, and had washed his face, but his eyes were still bloodshot from the cultivation of the Beautiful. Denzil was accompanying Crowl to the door of the Club out of good fellowship. Denzil was himself accompanied by Grodman, though less obtrusively. Least obtrusively was he accompanied by his usual Scotland Yard shadows, Wimp’s agents. There was a surging nondescript crowd about the Club, and the police, and the doorkeeper, and the stewards could with difficulty keep out the tide of the ticketless, through which the current of the privileged had equal difficulty in permeating. The streets all around were thronged with people longing for a glimpse of Gladstone. Mortlake drove up in a hansom (his head a self-conscious pendulum of popularity, swaying and bowing to right and left) and received all the pent-up enthusiasm.

  ‘Well, good-bye, Cantercot,’ said Crowl.

  ‘No, I’ll see you to the door, Peter.’

  They fought their way shoulder to shoulder.

  Now that Grodman had found Denzil he was not going to lose him again. He had only found him by accident, for he was himself bound to the unveiling ceremony, to which he had been invited in view of his known devotion to the task of unveiling the Mystery. He spoke to one of the policemen about, who said, ‘Ay, ay, sir,’ and he was prepared to follow Denzil, if necessary, and to give up the pleasure of hearing Gladstone for an acuter thrill. The arrest must be delayed no longer.

  But Denzil seemed as if he were going in on the heels of Crowl. This would suit Grodman better. He could then have the two pleasures. But Denzil was stopped half-way through the door.

  ‘Ticket, sir!’

  Denzil drew himself up to his full height.

  ‘Press,’ he said, majestically. All the glories and grandeurs of the Fourth Estate were concentrated in that haughty monosyllable. Heaven itself is full of journalists who have overawed St Peter. But the doorkeeper was a veritable dragon.

  ‘What paper, sir?’

  ‘New Pork Herald,’ said Denzil sharply. He did not relish his word being
distrusted.

  ‘New York Herald,’ said one of the bystanding stewards, scarce catching the sounds. ‘Pass him in.’

  And in the twinkling of an eye, Denzil had eagerly slipped inside.

  But during the brief altercation Wimp had come up. Even he could not make his face quite impassive, and there was a suppressed intensity in the eyes and a quiver about the mouth. He went in on Denzil’s heels, blocking up the doorway with Grodman. The two men were so full of their coming coups that they struggled for some seconds, side by side, before they recognized each other. Then they shook hands heartily.

  ‘That was Cantercot just went in, wasn’t it, Grodman?’ said Wimp.

  ‘I didn’t notice,’ said Grodman, in tones of utter indifference.

  At bottom Wimp was terribly excited. He felt that his coup was going to be executed under very sensational circumstances. Everything would combine to turn the eyes of the country upon him—nay, of the world, for had not the Big Bow Mystery been discussed in every language under the sun? In these electric times the criminal achieves a cosmopolitan reputation. It is a privilege he shares with few other artists. This time Wimp would be one of them; and, he felt, deservedly so. If the criminal had been cunning to the point of genius in planning the murder, he had been acute to the point of divination in detecting it. Never before had he pieced together so broken a chain. He could not resist the unique opportunity of setting a sensational scheme in a sensational framework. The dramatic instinct was strong in him; he felt like a playwright who has constructed a strong melodramatic plot, and has the Drury Lane stage suddenly offered him to present it on. It would be folly to deny himself the luxury, though the presence of Mr Gladstone and the nature of the ceremony should perhaps have given him pause. Yet, on the other hand, these were the very factors of the temptation. Wimp went in and took a seat behind Denzil. All the seats were numbered, so that everybody might have the satisfaction of occupying somebody else’s. Denzil was in the special reserved places in the front row just by the central gangway; Crowl was squeezed into a corner behind a pillar near the back of the hall. Grodman had been honoured with a seat on the platform, which was accessible by steps on the right and left, but he kept his eye on Denzil. The picture of the poor idealist hung on the wall behind Grodman’s head, covered by its curtain of brown holland. There was a subdued buzz of excitement about the hall, which swelled into cheers every now and again as some gentleman known to fame or Bow took his place upon the platform. It was occupied by several local M.P.s of varying politics, a number of other Parliamentary satellites of the great man, three or four labour leaders, a peer or two of philanthropic pretensions, a sprinkling of Toynbee and Oxford Hall men, the president and other honorary officials, some of the family and friends of the deceased, together with the inevitable percentage of persons who had no claim to be there save cheek. Gladstone was late—later than Mortlake, who was cheered to the echo when he arrived, someone starting ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ as if it were a political meeting. Gladstone came in just in time to acknowledge the compliment. The noise of the song, trolled out from iron lungs, had drowned the huzzahs heralding the old man’s advent. The convivial chorus went to Mortlake’s head, as if champagne had really preceded it. His eyes grew moist and dim. He saw himself swimming to the Millennium on waves of enthusiasm. Ah, how his brother toilers should be rewarded for their trust in him!

  With his usual courtesy and consideration, Mr Gladstone had refused to perform the actual unveiling of Arthur Constant’s portrait. ‘That,’ he said in his postcard, ‘will fall most appropriately to Mr Mortlake, a gentleman who has, I am given to understand, enjoyed the personal friendship of the late Mr Constant, and has co-operated with him in various schemes for the organization of skilled and unskilled classes of labour, as well as for the diffusion of better ideals—ideals of self-culture and self-restraint—among the working-men of Bow, who have been fortunate, so far as I can perceive, in the possession (if in one case unhappily only temporary possession) of two such men of undoubted ability and honesty to direct their divided counsels and to lead them along a road, which, though I cannot pledge myself to approve of it in all its turnings and windings, is yet not unfitted to bring them somewhat nearer to goals to which there are few of us but would extend some measure of hope that the working classes of this great Empire may in due course, yet with no unnecessary delay, be enabled to arrive.’

  Mr Gladstone’s speech was an expansion of his postcard, punctuated by cheers. The only new thing in it was the graceful and touching way in which he revealed what had been a secret up till then—that the portrait had been painted and presented to the Bow Break o’ Day Club by Lucy Brent, who in the fulness of time would have been Arthur Constant’s wife. It was a painting for which he had sat to her while alive, and she had stifled yet pampered her grief by working hard at it since his death. The fact added the last touch of pathos to the occasion. Crowl’s face was hidden behind his red handkerchief; even the fire of excitement in Wimp’s eye was quenched for a moment by a tear-drop, as he thought of Mrs Wimp and Wilfred. As for Grodman, there was almost a lump in his throat. Denzil Cantercot was the only unmoved man in the room. He thought the episode quite too Beautiful, and was already weaving it into rhyme.

  At the conclusion of his speech Mr Gladstone called upon Tom Mortlake to unveil the portrait. Tom rose, pale and excited. His hand faltered as he touched the cord. He seemed overcome with emotion. Was it the mention of Lucy Brent that had moved him to his depths?

  The brown holland fell away—the dead stood revealed as he had been in life. Every feature, painted by the hand of Love, was instinct with vitality: the fine, earnest face, the sad kindly eyes, the noble brow seeming still a-throb with the thought of Humanity. A thrill ran through the room—there was a low, undefinable murmur. O, the pathos and the tragedy of it! Every eye was fixed, misty with emotion, upon the dead man in the picture and the living man who stood, pale and agitated, and visibly unable to commence his speech, at the side of the canvas. Suddenly a hand was laid upon the labour leader’s shoulder, and there rang through the hall in Wimp’s clear, decisive tones the words: ‘Tom Mortlake, I arrest you for the murder of Arthur Constant!’

  CHAPTER IX

  FOR a moment there was an acute, terrible silence. Mortlake’s face was that of a corpse; the face of the dead man at his side was flushed with the hues of life. To the overstrung nerves of the onlookers, the brooding eyes of the picture seemed sad and stern with menace, and charged with the lightnings of doom.

  It was a horrible contrast. For Wimp, alone, the painted face had fuller, more tragical, meanings. The audience seemed turned to stone. They sat or stood—in every variety of attitude—frozen, rigid. Arthur Constant’s picture dominated the scene, the only living thing in a hall of the dead.

  But only for a moment. Mortlake shook off the detective’s hand.

  ‘Boys!’ he cried, in accents of infinite indignation, ‘this is a police conspiracy.’

  His words relaxed the tension. The stony figures were agitated. A dull, excited hubbub answered him. The little cobbler darted from behind his pillar, and leaped upon a bench. The cords of his brow were swollen with excitement. He seemed a giant overshadowing the hall.

  ‘Boys!’ he roared, in his best Victoria Park voice, ‘listen to me. This charge is a foul and damnable lie.’

  ‘Bravo!’ ‘Hear, hear!’ ‘Hooray!’ ‘It is!’ was roared back at him from all parts of the room. Everybody rose and stood in tentative attitudes, excited to the last degree.

  ‘Boys!’ Peter roared on, ‘you all know me. I’m a plain man, and I want to know if it’s likely a man would murder his best friend.’

  ‘No!’ in a mighty volume of sound.

  Wimp had scarcely calculated upon Mortlake’s popularity. He stood on the platform, pale and anxious as his prisoner.

  ‘And if he did, why didn’t they prove it the first time?’

  ‘HEAR, HEAR!’

  ‘And if they wan
t to arrest him, why couldn’t they leave it till the ceremony was over? Tom Mortlake’s not the man to run away.’

  ‘Tom Mortlake! Tom Mortlake! Three cheers for Tom Mortlake! Hip, hip, hip, hooray!’

  ‘Three groans for the police.’ ‘Hoo! Oo! Oo!’

  Wimp’s melodrama was not going well. He felt like the author to whose ears is borne the ominous sibilance of the pit. He almost wished he had not followed the curtain-raiser with his own stronger drama. Unconsciously the police, scattered about the hall, drew together. The people on the platform knew not what to do. They had all risen and stood in a densely-packed mass. Even Mr Gladstone’s speech failed him in circumstances so novel. The groans died away; the cheers for Mortlake rose and swelled and fell and rose again. Sticks and umbrellas were banged and rattled, handkerchiefs were waved, the thunder deepened. The motley crowd still surging about the hall took up the cheers, and for hundreds of yards around people were going black in the face out of mere irresponsible enthusiasm. At last Tom waved his hand—the thunder dwindled, died. The prisoner was master of the situation.

  Grodman stood on the platform, grasping the back of his chair, a curious mocking Mephistophelian glitter about his eyes, his lips wreathed into a half smile. There was no hurry for him to get Denzil Cantercot arrested now. Wimp had made an egregious, colossal blunder. In Grodman’s heart there was a great glad calm as of a man who has strained his sinews to win in a famous match, and has heard the judge’s word. He felt almost kindly to Denzil now.