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

by Michael Sims

  On the other hand, he must have been very dear to the woman, since, knowing him, she did not give him up, and without hesitation sacrificed to him her husband.

  Well!

  Oh! my God! The conclusion was all in a definite shape. The murderer could only be a miserable hypocrite, who had taken advantage of the husband’s affection and confidence to take possession of the wife.

  In short, Madame Monistrol, belieing her reputation, certainly had a lover, and that lover necessarily was the culprit.

  All filled by this certitude, I was torturing my mind to think of some infallible stratagem which would lead us to this wretch.

  “And this,” I said to M. Mechinet, “is how I think we ought to operate. Madame Monistrol and the murderer must have agreed that after the crime they would not see each other for some time; this is the most elementary prudence. But you may believe that it will not be long before impatience will conquer the woman, and that she will want to see her accomplice. Now place near her an observer who will follow her everywhere, and before twice forty-eight hours have passed the affair will be settled.”

  Furiously fumbling after his empty snuffbox, M. Mechinet remained a moment without answering, mumbling between his teeth I know not what unintelligible words.

  Then suddenly, leaning toward me, he said:

  “That isn’t it. You have the professional genius, that is certain, but it is practise that you lack. Fortunately, I am here. What! a phrase regarding the crime puts you on the trail, and you do not follow it.”

  “How is that?”

  “That faithful dog must be made use of.”

  “I do not quite catch on.”

  “Then know how to wait. Madame Monistrol will go out at about two o’clock, in order to be at the court-house at three; the little maid will be alone in the shop. You will see. I only tell you that.”

  I insisted in vain; he did not want to say anything more, taking revenge for his defeat by this innocent spite. Willing or unwilling, I had to follow him to the nearest café, where he forced me to play dominoes.

  Preoccupied as I was, I played badly, and he, without shame, was taking advantage of it to beat me, when the clock struck two.

  “Up, men of the post,” he said to me, letting go of his dice.

  He paid, we went out, and a moment later we were again on duty under the carriage entrance from which we had before studied the front of the Monistrol store.

  We had not been there ten minutes, when Madame Monistrol appeared in the door of her shop, dressed in black, with a long crape veil, like a widow.

  “A pretty dress to go to an examination,” mumbled M. Mechinet.

  She gave a few instructions to her little maid, and soon left.

  My companion patiently waited for five long minutes, and when he thought the young woman was already far away, he said to me:

  “It is time.”

  And for the second time we entered the jewelry store.

  The little maid was there alone, sitting in the office, for pastime nibbling some pieces of sugar stolen from her mistress.

  As soon as we appeared she recognized us, and reddening and somewhat frightened, she stood up. But without giving her time to open her mouth, M. Mechinet asked:

  “Where is Madame Monistrol?”

  “Gone out, monsieur.”

  “You are deceiving me. She is there in the back shop.”

  “I swear to you, gentlemen, that she is not. Look in, please.”

  With the most disappointed looks, M. Mechinet was striking his forehead, repeating:

  “How disagreeable. My God! how distressed that poor Madame Monistrol will be.” And as the little maid was looking at him with her mouth wide open and with big, astonished eyes, he continued:

  “But, in fact, you, my pretty girl, you can perhaps take the place of your mistress. I came back because I lost the address of the gentleman on whom she asked me to call.”

  “What gentleman?”

  “You know. Monsieur—well, I have forgotten his name now. Monsieur—upon my word! you know, only him—that gentleman whom your devilish dog obeys so well.”

  “Oh! M. Victor?”

  “That’s just it. What is that gentleman doing?”

  “He is a jeweler’s workman; he is a great friend of monsieur; they were working together when monsieur was a jeweler’s workman, before becoming proprietor, and that is why he can do anything he wants with Pluton.”

  “Then you can tell me where this M. Victor resides?”

  “Certainly. He lives in the Rue du Roi-Doré, No. 23.”

  She seemed so happy, the poor girl, to be so well informed; but as for me, I suffered in hearing her so unwittingly denounce her mistress.

  M. Mechinet, more hardened, did not have any such scruples. And even after we had obtained our information, he ended the scene with a sad joke.

  As I opened the door for us to go out, he said to the young girl:

  “Thanks to you. You have just rendered a great service to Madame Monistrol, and she will be very pleased.”

  XI.

  As soon as I was on the sidewalk I had but one thought: and that was to shake out our legs and to run to the Rue du Roi-Doré and arrest this Victor, evidently the real culprit.

  One word from M. Mechinet fell on my enthusiasm like a shower-bath.

  “And the court,” he said to me. “Without a warrant by the investigating judge I can not do anything. It is to the court-house that we must run.”

  “But we shall meet there Madame Monistrol, and if she sees us she will have her accomplice warned.”

  “Be it so,” answered M. Mechinet, with a badly disguised bitterness. “Be it so, the culprit will escape and formality will have been saved. However, I shall prevent that danger. Let us walk, let us walk faster.”

  And, in fact, the hope of success gave him deer legs. Reaching the court-house, he jumped, four steps at a time, up the steep stairway leading to the floor on which were the judges of investigation, and, addressing the chief bailiff, he inquired whether the magistrate in charge of the case of the “little old man of Batignolles” was in his room.

  “He is there,” answered the bailiff, “with a witness, a young lady in black.”

  “It is she!” said my companion to me. Then to the bailiff: “You know me,” he continued. “Quick, give me something to write on, a few words which you will take to the judge.”

  The bailiff went off with the note, dragging his boots along the dusty floor, and was not long in returning with the announcement that the judge was awaiting us in No. 9.

  In order to see M. Mechinet, the magistrate had left Madame Monistrol in his office, under his clerk’s guard, and had borrowed the room of one of his colleagues.

  “What has happened?” he asked in a tone which enabled me to measure the abyss separating a judge from a poor detective.

  Briefly and clearly M. Mechinet described the steps taken by us, their results and our hopes.

  Must we say it? The magistrate did not at all seem to share our convictions.

  “But since Monistrol confesses,” he repeated with an obstinacy which was exasperating to me.

  However, after many explanations, he said:

  “At any rate, I am going to sign a warrant.”

  The valuable paper once in his possession, M. Mechinet escaped so quickly that I nearly fell in precipitating myself after him down the stairs. I do not know whether it took us a quarter of an hour to reach the Rue du Roi-Doré. But once there: “Attention,” said M. Mechinet to me.

  And it was with the most composed air that he entered in the narrow passageway of the house bearing No. 23.

  “M. Victor?” he asked of the concierge.

  “On the fourth floor, the right-hand door in the hallway.”

  “Is he at home?”

  “Yes.”

  M. Mechinet took a step toward the staircase, but seemed to change his mind, and said to the concierge:

  “I must make a present of a good
bottle of wine to that dear Victor. With which wine-merchant does he deal in this neighborhood?”

  “With the one opposite.”

  We were there in a trice, and in the tone of a customer M. Mechinet ordered:

  “One bottle, please, and of good wine—of that with the green seal.”

  Ah! upon my word! That thought would never have come to me at that time. And yet it was very simple.

  When the bottle was brought, my companion exhibited the cork found at the home of M. Pigoreau, called Antenor, and we easily identified the wax.

  To our moral certainty was now added a material certainty, and with a firm hand M. Mechinet knocked at Victor’s door.

  “Come in,” cried a pleasant-sounding voice.

  The key was in the door; we entered, and in a very neat room I perceived a man of about thirty, slender, pale, and blond, who was working in front of a bench.

  Our presence did not seem to trouble him.

  “What do you want?” he politely asked.

  M. Mechinet advanced toward him, and, taking him by the arm, said:

  “In the name of the law, I arrest you.”

  The man became livid, but did not lower his eyes.

  “Are you making fun of me?” he said with an insolent air. “What have I done?”

  M. Mechinet shrugged his shoulders.

  “Do not act like a child,” he answered; “your account is settled. You were seen coming out from old man Antenor’s home, and in my pocket I have a cork which you made use of to prevent your dagger from losing its point.”

  It was like a blow of a fist in the neck of the wretch. Overwhelmed, he dropped on his chair, stammering:

  “I am innocent.”

  “You will tell that to the judge,” said M. Mechinet good-naturedly; “but I am afraid that he will not believe you. Your accomplice, the Monistrol woman, has confessed everything.”

  As if moved by a spring, Victor jumped up.

  “That is impossible!” he exclaimed. “She did not know anything about it.”

  “Then you did the business all alone? Very well. There is at least that much confessed.”

  Then addressing me in a tone of a man knowing what he is talking about, M. Mechinet continued:

  “Will you please look in the drawers, my dear Monsieur Godeuil; you will probably find there the dagger of this pretty fellow, and certainly also the love-letters and the picture of his sweetheart.”

  A flash of rage shone in the murderer’s eyes, and he was gnashing his teeth, but M. Mechinet’s broad shoulders and iron grip extinguished in him every desire for resistance.

  I found in a drawer of the bureau all the articles my companion had mentioned. And twenty minutes later, Victor, “duly packed in,” as the expression goes, in a cab, between M. Mechinet and myself, was driving toward Police Headquarters.

  “What,” I said to myself, astonished by the simplicity of the thing, “that is all there is to the arrest of a murderer; of a man destined for the scaffold!”

  Later I had occasion to learn at my expense which of criminals is the most terrible.

  This one, as soon as he found himself in the police cell, seeing that he was lost, gave up and told us all the details of his crime.

  He knew for a long time, he said, the old man Pigoreau, and was known by him. His object in killing him was principally to cause the punishment of the crime to fall on Monistrol. That is why he dressed himself up like Monistrol and had Pluton follow him. The old man once murdered, he had had the terrible courage to dip in the blood a finger of the body, to trace these five letters, MONIS, which almost caused an innocent man to be lost.

  “And that had been so nicely arranged,” he said to us with cynic bragging. “If I had succeeded, I would have killed two birds with the same stone. I would have been rid of my friend Monistrol, whom I hate and of whom I am jealous, and I would have enriched the woman I love.”

  It was, in fact, simple and terrible.

  “Unfortunately, my boy,” M. Mechinet objected, “you lost your head at the last moment. Well, one is never perfect. It was the left hand of the body which you dipped in the blood.”

  With a jump, Victor stood up.

  “What!” he exclaimed, “is that what betrayed me?”

  “Exactly.”

  With a gesture of a misunderstood genius, the wretch raised his arm toward heaven.

  “That is for being an artist,” he exclaimed.

  And looking us over with an air of pity, he added:

  “Old man Pigoreau was left-handed!”

  Thus it was due to a mistake made in the investigation that the culprit was discovered so promptly.

  The day following Monistrol was released.

  And when the investigating judge reproached him for his untrue confession, which had exposed the courts to a terrible error, he could not obtain any other answer than:

  “I love my wife, and wanted to sacrifice myself for her. I thought she was guilty.”

  Was she guilty? I would have taken an oath on it. She was arrested, but was acquitted by the same judgment which sentenced Victor to forced labor for life.

  M. and Mme. Monistrol to-day keep an ill-reputed wineshop on the Vincennes Road. Their uncle’s inheritance has long ago disappeared; they live in terrible misery.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  (1859–1930)

  “It was very superficial, my dear Sacker, I assure you,” said Sherrinford Holmes, as he and his companion, the physician and Sudan war veteran Ormond Sacker, sat before the cozy fire at 221B Upper Baker Street.

  It almost turned out this way. Surviving pages from Arthur Conan Doyle’s early notes for A Study in Scarlet indicate some of the names he considered for the characters. Eventually he not only changed Holmes’s given name but altered even the country in which his assistant received a war wound and the street in which they lived together. With history’s twenty-twenty hindsight, the memorable name Sherlock seems fated to be matched with Holmes. The sidekick, in contrast, needed a more mundane designation, to represent his role as admiring everyman. Therefore the novel included this title page note: “Being a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., late of the Army Medical Department.”

  In the same early notes, Conan Doyle was already thinking about Holmes’s ancestors in the field. “Lecoq was a bungler,” he scrawled in snippets of dialogue. “Dupin was better. Dupin was decidedly smart—his trick of following a train of thought was more sensational than clever but still he had superficial genius.” Eventually Holmes expresses these thoughts, in slightly different wording, to Watson, who dares to compare his new friend’s feats of mental legerdemain to those of fictional forebears. In The Dead Witness, Holmes is represented by the opening chapters of the debut novel. One reason to reprint the early interactions between Holmes and Watson is to remind us how much Arthur Conan Doyle purloined, as he himself admitted, from Edgar Allan Poe. Compare Holmes with Dupin as he appears in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” earlier in this volume.

  Soon other authors were relating their protagonist to Holmes rather than Dupin. In 1894, immediately after Conan Doyle plunged Holmes and Moriarty over the Reichenbach Falls—because he was tired of detective stuff and wanted to move on to something that would make his name in literature—the Strand magazine launched a replacement. Arthur Morrison, author of Tales of Mean Streets, deliberately created the antithesis of Sherlock Holmes. Martin Hewitt is ordinary-looking, not hawk-nosed and eagle-eyed, and chubby, rather than whippet-skinny from Persian tobacco and cocaine. Some female detectives, such as Hugh Weir’s Madelyn Mack, are presented as a kind of Holmes. Mack even consumes cola berries, her version of Holmes’s 7 percent solution of cocaine, when the primary-colored excitement of crime-solving fades and she must face the pastel hues of everyday life.

  Arthur Conan Doyle complained that his fictional detective’s popularity kept the author from achieving better things. Whatever his other books’ virtues, however, relatively few people today are
reading Micah Clarke and The White Company instead of “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” and The Hound of the Baskervilles. Neither Conan Doyle’s work as a missionary for spiritualism nor as a defender of the British Empire—not his work as physician, historical novelist, patriot, journalist, celebrity, or occasionally even sleuth asked to solve real-life crimes—can rival his creation of the immortal consulting detective invented during off hours waiting for patients to wander into his new medical office in Southsea, Portsmouth. He wrote the book in three weeks.

  At first publishers did not applaud. “Verily,” Conan Doyle sighed to his mother in 1885, “literature is a difficult oyster to open.” A few months later he received one of the less promising publisher-to-author letters on record, from Ward, Lock & Co. in London: “We have read your story A Study in Scarlet, and are pleased with it. We could not publish this year, as the market is flooded at present with cheap fiction.” They offered a flat £25 for full copyright if he was willing to wait until the following year. When he requested royalties, they turned him down. Poor and unknown, Conan Doyle nonetheless hesitated over this almost insulting offer. He worried more about the delay than anything else; he hoped this book might attract some attention. Finally he said yes. “I never at any time,” he wrote in his autobiography, “received another penny for it.”

  The brief novel appeared in November 1887 as the cover story in a magazine called Beeton’s Christmas Annual. (Today Beeton’s is considered the most expensive magazine in collecting history. In 2007 one of the thirty-one known extant copies—few of which are in private hands—was auctioned at Sotheby’s for $156,000.) In 1889, during a dinner at which Oscar Wilde was also a guest, Conan Doyle was commissioned to write a second Holmes novel, The Sign of the Four. In each, Holmes disappears during the middle half while a historical flashback unfolds. Although both books were popular, neither attracted as much attention as seemed to burst into flame when the first dozen stories began appearing monthly in The Strand, starting with “A Scandal in Bohemia” in 1891. Eventually there would be four novels and fifty-six stories.