The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories

by Michael Sims

  To Margate I went, making inquiries, however, when changing trains at Ramsgate, in order to ascertain if there were caves in the cliff of this latter place.

  The reader who knows Margate is aware I was right.

  But we did not catch our felon till ten a.m., for the tide was up, and the caves, which in the eyes of the children are such enormous caverns of darkness, were unapproachable. And, indeed, when the tide had receded sufficiently to allow of the approach of myself and the policeman I employed, I feared for my success, as I could discover no woman walking towards the “second cave,” with her back towards me, and in whom I could trace a resemblance to the person called Lemmins. But the officer was right when he surmised that perhaps she had started from the “other end,” referring to the break in the cliff at the point where the Preventive Service Station is built.

  She was so surprised at the arrest, that she had not a word to say; for, as I implied from the copy of a telegraphic message we found on her, she had been informed that all was going well.

  And as the magistrate of the district police court in which my sister had to appear was more than ordinarily late that morning, we reached the court before Annie was brought forward, and so when her eyes drifted round the court, they met mine. But we had already seen each other at the police cell door, and she knew that the actual thieves were in custody. Seen together, my sister and the younger prisoner were very distinguishable; but had the jeweller’s man, upon oath, declared that Annie was Mrs. Mountjoy’s companion, I do not think he should have been blamed.

  I have now reached the end of my intended narrative. My purpose was to show that action in misfortune is better than grief. I have not referred to any pain, degradation, or consequence, which resulted either to my sister or myself, in consequence of her terrible arrest for shoplifting. I have merely stated, as logically as I could, a series of facts, inferences, and results, with the aim of pointing out that very frequently there is a deal of plain sailing where some people suppose no navigation can be effected.

  W. W.

  (Mary Fortune)

  (c. 1833–c. 1910)

  In 1855 a young Irish-Canadian immigrant named Mary Fortune began publishing stories and poems in the goldfields newspapers of Australia. An editor at another of the fledgling newspapers in the region, the Mount Alexander Mail in Victoria, admired her writing and wrote to offer a position as sub-editor; but when she revealed that he was addressing a woman, he canceled his offer. This rejection seems to symbolize her career. Mary Fortune was successful and influential, but all of her work appeared under pseudonyms.

  After missing out on the editor’s position, Fortune continued to write journalism and fiction, using various aliases. In late 1865 she sent a story to a new Melbourne magazine called the Australian Journal, the first periodical in the colonies to target the general reader and the growing audience of female readers and teenagers. It was modeled after successful British publications such as Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper and Family Herald. Its founding editor, George Arthur Walstab, was a former member of the Victoria Mounted Police and a fan of crime stories; the Journal featured them from its first issue.

  In the January 20, 1866, issue there appeared a story entitled “The Dead Witness; or, The Bush Waterhole”—the first known detective story written by a woman. The fifth entry in the series “Memoirs of an Australian Police Officer,” it was the first written by Fortune. The series, narrated by a young man named James Brooke, had been launched by James Skipp Borlase, a Cornish immigrant to Australia who is remembered now for stories such as “The Night Fossickers,” set in the rough-and-tumble frontier of the goldfields. Borlase also wrote the penny dreadful Ned Kelly, the Ironclad Australian Bushranger, which the Saturday Review described in 1881 as “as disgraceful and disgusting a publication as has ever been printed.” Borlase was a staff writer for the Australian Journal, but he was soon fired for plagiarism and the series discontinued. Later, when the stories were reprinted, he included Fortune’s story without acknowledgment.

  Under the poignant pseudonym Waif Wander, a nickname she had given herself, Fortune began to write regularly for the Australian Journal. In 1867 she launched a new series, “The Detective’s Album,” featuring a policeman named Mark Sinclair. For this series Walstab reduced Fortune’s pen name to a genderless W. W. Not only bias against women kept her identity under wraps; the stories were narrated by a male detective and presented in a factual-sounding and realistic tone.

  For the next four decades, Fortune wrote one story per month for this series, making her not only a pioneer in nineteenth-century crime fiction but one of its most prodigious contributors. The author’s real identity was unknown to readers, however, until John Kinmont Moir, a Melbourne-based bibliophile and collector of Australian literature, unearthed it in the 1950s. Not until 1989 was an entire new volume devoted to her work—the collection The Fortunes of Mary Fortune, edited by Australian writer Lucy Sussex. It reveals the extent of Fortune’s streetwise and literate talents, her skill at plotting and also at bringing characters to life.

  Her style is literate and polished, with educated-looking flourishes including at least a nodding acquaintance with other languages, but it may have resulted from self-education, because there is no record of her attending college. The poignant tale of Mary Helena Wilson began in Belfast, but her family took her to Canada at an early age and she thought of it as home. The daughter of a Scottish engineer, she married in her late teens a man named Joseph Fortune. Four years later she followed her wandering father to Australia, where he had opened a store. When she gave birth to a second son, she listed Fortune as the father, but nothing indicates that he actually accompanied her to Australia, and he is known to have died in Canada. In 1858 she married a mounted policeman named Percy Rollo Brett, but this union, which may have taken place without a divorce from Fortune, also lasted only a short time. No glimpse of her personal life seems happy, and by the 1870s she was being jailed for vagrancy and alcoholism. Yet she continued writing, having launched her career in the genre with this dramatic milestone.

  The Dead Witness;

  or, The Bush Waterhole

  I can scarcely fancy anything more enjoyable to a mind at ease with itself than a spring ride through the Australian bush, if one is disposed to think he can do without any disturbing influence whatever from the outer world, for to a man accustomed to the sights and sounds of nature around him there is nothing distracting in the warble of the magpie or tinkle of the “bell bird.” The little lizards that sit here and there upon logs and stumps, and look at the passer-by with their heads on one side, and such a funny air of knowing stupidity in their small eyes, are such everyday affairs to an old colonist that they scarcely attract any notice from him, and even should a monstrous iguana dart across his path and trail his four feet length up a neighbouring tree, it is not a matter of much curiosity to him. A good horseman, with an easy going nag under him and plenty of time to journey at leisure through the park-like bush of Australia, has, to my notion, as good an opportunity of enjoying the Italians’ dolce far niente as any fellow can have who does not regularly lie down to it.

  Something like all this was coming home to me as I slowly rode through the forest of stringybark, box, peppermint, and other trees that creep close up to the bold ranges which divide as it were into two equal portions the district of Kooama. I had passed fifteen miles of bush and plain without seeing a face or a roof, and now, having but a mile or two before making the station to which I was bound, I loosened the reins and let my horse take his own time. While, however, I thoroughly enjoyed the calm tranquility of nature so unbroken around me, and felt the soothing influence more or less inseparable from such scenes, I cannot exactly say that my mind was enjoying the same “sweetness of doing nothing” as my body. My brain was busily at work, full of a professional case, on the investigation of which I was proceeding; still, thoughts of this kind cannot be said to trouble the mind, being as enjoyable to us, I dare say, as
the pursuit of game to the hunter, or the search for gold to the miner.

  The facts of the case were shortly these: a young photographic enthusiast, in search of colonial scenery upon which to employ his art, had taken a room in a public-house at the township of Kooama, in which he had arranged his photographic apparatus, and where he had perfected the views taken in trips to all the places within twenty or thirty miles that were likely to repay the trouble. The young fellow, who was a gentlemanly and exceedingly handsome youth of barely twenty years of age, became a general favourite at Kooama, his kindness to the children, especially in that out of the way township, endearing him to all the parents.

  Well, one day this young artist, whose name was Edward Willis, left Kooama and returned no more. For a day or two the landlord of the house where he had put up thought but little of his absence, as he had upon more than one occasion before spent the night away on his excursions, but day after day passed, and they began to think it singular. He had himself expressed an intention of visiting some of the ranges to which I have alluded in search of some bolder “bits” of scenery than he had yet acquired, but otherwise they had not the slightest clue to guide them in any attempted search for the missing youth. His decision to leave Kooama, if he had made one, must have been sudden, as nothing was removed from his room. Camera, chemicals, plates, and all the paraphernalia of a photographer’s handicraft, were still scattered about just as he had left them. A week passed away—a fortnight—consumed in guesses and wonders, and then came a letter from his mother in Adelaide to the landlord, inquiring the son’s whereabouts, as they were getting uneasy at not hearing from so regular a correspondent. Then it was considered time to place the thing in the hands of the police, and I was sent for. As I was proceeding through the bush then, at the leisurely pace I have described, I heard the loud crack of a stock whip ring out like the sharp report of a rifle between me and the ranges to my left, and shortly after I heard the sound of rapidly advancing horse’s hoof strokes, which was echoed and re-echoed from the rocks at either side of the horseman’s route. The sound came nearer and nearer, and at last a young man, mounted on a half thoroughbred, and attired like a stock-driver or overseer on a station, galloped into the road which I was following a few yards behind me. Here he pulled up, and was soon by my side. The freemasonry of bush travellers in Australia would scarcely admit of one passing another without speaking, on a road where one might journey for twenty miles without meeting a soul; so there was nothing singular in my addressing the newcomer with all the freedom of an old chum.

  “Aren’t you afraid of breaking your neck, mate,” I inquired, “coming down those ranges at such a pace?”

  “Not a bit of it,” he replied “but at any rate I’m in a devil of a hurry, so had to risk it.”

  “Bound for Kooama, I suppose?”

  “Yes, I’m for the police station, and if I don’t look sharp, it’ll be pitch dark before I get back, so I must go on, goodbye! I’ll meet you again, I dare say.”

  “Stay!” I shouted, as the young fellow made a start, “I might save you a journey, as I’m a policeman myself, and am just on my way to Kooama. Is there anything wrong your way?”

  The young horseman looked at me rather suspiciously, as, of course, I was in plain clothes. I dare say he did not half believe me.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s nothing very particular, and if you are going to the police station, policeman or no policeman, you can tell all I have to say as well as I can, if you will be so kind, and I shall get home before sundown yet.”

  I assured him that I was really connected with the force, when he told me his errand to the camp.

  “There’s been the deuce of a talk at Kooama about a young picture-man who’s been missing for a couple of weeks, and some think he’s come to no good end. Now, I know myself that he has been on our station since he came to Kooama, for I saw him taking views over the range there, but I thought nothing of that, as it was when first he settled at Dycer’s, and he has been photographing miles away since then. This afternoon, however, about ten miles from the home station, the cattle (we’re mustering just now) kicked up such a devil of a row that I couldn’t make it out until I concluded they had come across the scent of blood somehow. Sure enough when I came up to the mob they were bellowing and roaring like mad ones round a spot on the grass that must have been regularly soaked in blood, as it is as red and fresh looking as possible. What made it more suspicious to me was, that the place had been carefully covered up with branches, and no one would ever have noticed it, only the cattle had pawed and scraped the dead bushes quite off it. Heaven knows what might have caused it, or whether it was worth mentioning, but it’s not far from where I saw the poor young chap. I thought I would run down to the camp and tell Cassel about it.”

  “Have you mentioned it to anyone else?” I inquired.

  “No,” he replied, “I haven’t seen a soul since.”

  “Well, don’t say a word, like a good fellow. It’s very strange that I should have met you. I’m Brooke, the detective, and I’m on my way to Kooama about this very business. Will you meet me at sunrise tomorrow morning, and take me to the place?”

  The young man readily promised, and I found that he was the son of a squatter whose station (called Minarra) was situated at the other side of the Rocky Ranges, to which I have so frequently alluded, and then we parted, and spurring my horse to a more rapid pace I soon reached the police camp, at Kooama, and got my horse stalled and my supper, as well as all the information I could from Constable Cassel before I turned in, which I did at an early hour.

  There are a good many fellows—no matter in what anxiety of mind they may be—who are able to forego it all when their usual bedtime reminds them of sleep, and they seem to shake off their troubles with their shoes, and draw up the blankets as an effectual barrier between them and the world generally. It is not so with me, I usually carry my perplexities to bed with me, and roll and tumble, and tumble and roll, under their influence, unless some happy idea of having hit the right nail on the head in my planning soothes me into resignation to my fatigue. So it was on the night in question; nevertheless, the sun was only beginning to shake himself out of the horizon when I met the young squatter at the appointed place, and together we proceeded to the indicated spot on Minarra station.

  Over the range we went, and three or four miles through the primeval forest beyond, and my companion, well acquainted with the landmarks on his “run” stopped before what appeared to be a few decaying branches fallen from a near gum tree. “This is it,” he said, dismounting and removing the dead boughs, “I covered it up again yesterday.”

  Well, there was very little to see, a patch of blood-stained grass—the colour was very evident still—and nothing more. I looked round to see if perchance there was a view to make it worth an artist’s while to visit this spot, and soon perceived that from the very place where we stood a photographer might catch a “bit” of truly beautiful and entirely colonial scenery. At a distance of perhaps two miles the range over which we had come fell abruptly down into the plain in a succession of sheer faces of rock, while at the foot of what might be almost termed the precipice that terminated the whole, a deep gorge or gully ran almost entirely at right angles with it, up which the eye pierced through a vista of richly foliaged and fantastically gnarled trees and huge boulders of grey granite, altogether forming a scene that could scarcely fail to attract the eye of an artist. The sun was up above the trees now, and, closely scanning the ground at my feet, I perceived at a few yards distance a something that caught his brightness and reflected it, and stooping I picked it up; it was a small, a very small, piece of glass, and just such glass too, as might have been used in a camera. But near the piece of glass, which was not far from the blood spot on the grass, I found too, what I had been searching for, which was the triangular marks of the camera stand, which I thought it barely possible might be visible. The holes were indented deeper into the grass than the mere weight of th
e instrument would account for, especially two of them, the third was not so visible. We covered all up again as carefully yet as carelessly as possible, and after having again cautioned the young squatter to be silent, I parted with him for the present, and made the best of my way to Kooama.

  An hour or so later, I was very busy in the deserted room of the young artist, of which I had taken possession, and into which to avoid disturbance I had locked myself. I was quite at home among the poor young fellow’s chemicals, etc., as I happened to be a bit of an amateur photographer myself, and I have found my knowledge in that way of service to me on one or two occasions in connection with my professional duties already. The table and mantelpiece were littered with unfinished plates; they were leaning against the wall, and against every conceivable thing that would form a support for them. Naturally supposing that those last taken would be most come-at-able, I confined my search at first to the outside pictures, and before very long I fancied I was repaid for my trouble. My idea, it will readily be guessed, in searching the plates at all, was the one of finding a face or a view that might possibly be a clue in my hunt for the missing youth, or for the murderer, if murder had been done. Nothing would be more likely than that some chance encounter in his excursions might have resulted in a portrait, the original of which if discovered, might be able to give some useful information. Well, I found more than I hoped for. I lighted on a plate, only parts of which had “come out” under the after process, and which was rubbed in several places, and had evidently been thrown aside as worthless. There were two or three duplicate copies of the same view, and among the perfected and most clear pictures which the artist had laid away more carefully by themselves, was one apparently valued, as in case of danger of damage it was “cased” properly. It was a truly beautiful bit of entirely Australian bush scenery; a steep, rocky bank for a background; at its foot, a still, deep waterhole reflected every leaf of the twisted old white stemmed gum trees that hung over it and dipped their heavy branches in its dark waters, and to the left a reach of bush level, clustered with undergrowth on the slightly undulating ground, and shaded here and there with the tufty foliage of the stringybark. It was an excellent picture, every leaf had come out perfectly, and the shadows were as dark and cool as shadows could be, while the tone was all that could be wished; nevertheless on comparing this with the unfinished and imperfect one on which the artist’s art had failed, my eye rested on a something in the latter which made it a hundred times more valuable to me.