The Female Detective (15 page)

He knew much of medicine, and more of its philosophy. His favourite work was “Johnston's Chemistry of Common Life.” He knew the book almost by heart, and he would dilate upon it in a manner which was almost touching, when was taken into consideration his hopeless passion for a profession in which in all probability he could never practise.

In politics he was of course a thorough liberal, but he was not governed by those extreme views which it must be confessed are generally held by the self-educated. Self-educated this man wholly was. In after times I received letters from him, and I am bound to say they showed a height of education which was most praiseworthy. It could be seen he had been his own master perhaps. There were too many capital letters, and much faint obscurity in the composition, but it could be seen that the man was earnest and straight-forward. Every sentence had bone in it, and every line had something in it, and every letter was a something perfect in its way, and in itself.

No, he was not in the ordinary sense of the word a chartist.

He has said to me—

“I once went to a chartist meeting, but I never attended a second. If chartism means anything it means that those who suffer shall suffer no longer. Well, I went, and found the men there were hearty hale mechanics, they were those especially who are luckiest amongst us workers—such as engineers and smiths—the men who get the best pay amongst us.
They
had little cause of complaint, whereas now those mechanics who are really down-trod—I mean all those that use the needle, such as shoemakers and tailors—they that can hardly get a bit o' bread, much less cheese,
they
weren't at the meeting at all. They had not got time to go. I was shouldered out of the way, and my voice could not have been heard amongst all those big men, shouting and yelling. It struck me I had never imagined so tyrannical a meeting as that. So I did not go to another of them, for they are a lie, and no better.”

During these talkings, while he worked, and I also, the sister said nothing, but bent over her hard, hard work, which was military tailoring.

I have seen her fingers quite blue and rough through the action of the harsh serge used for artillery uniforms, and at other times I have seen her looking wonderfully faded and worn in the midst of red linesmen's tunics.

I think I have said she was very pleasant-faced, apart from the under-hung jaw; but the mass of people had not looked beyond her deformity, which was very apparent when she ate her poor meals, and they had been prejudiced against her. She had accepted this life-long condemnation in a quiet way, without resentment, but not without knowledge, and had fallen into a kind of meekly-repelling apathy which must have tended, in a general way, to increase that want of prepossession with which people I am afraid regarded her.

It was about two weeks after I came to know this far from ordinary man that, as I was talking with Kamp on one of the chapters of Johnston's Chemistry, a copy of which I admit I purchased and read up, and as Johanna Kamp was working under new conditions, as far as my experience went, for she was surrounded by the white flannel devoted to the summer wear of the marines—I say it was as we were thus occupied, it being at three o'clock in the afternoon and a pleasant April day, with the one window open and the light wind waving over a quivering penny pot of primroses, that a heavy, solid step was heard on the stairs.

Upon this Kamp looks up at his sister, and she at the door. And it may be it was only that her pale countenance was heightened in colour by being contrasted with the unordinary white materials about her, but it seemed to me a something like warm-hearted blood rose to the poor woman's face.

Without any preliminary tap, the door was rattled open, and a well-built but intolerably plain soldier of the line entered the room.

It may be that my presence made a difference in their meeting, but whether this was the case or not I am bound to say that the working woman met the soldier's “how do ye do?” with no enthusiasm, but with much pleasant, calm cordiality.

He was a very honest sort of man, this soldier, who, I gathered, had (like most of the soldiery) gone a little astray in youth, and been brought back again by the discipline of the army.

“My company's back at the Tower, Johanna,” he said cheerily to the woman; adding, to Kamp, “So you'll see plenty of me, Jack.”

“Perhaps I am intruding,” I said, at this point.

“Oh no, ma'am,” replied the soldier, evidently with the air of having some proprietorship in the room himself—“it ull hold four on us”—looking about the premises with a soldierly air.

Then he slipped off his coat, unhitched his braces, and taking a seat at Johanna's table, he began to thread a needle.

For the poor have no time to waste, and I saw at a glance he was at an old office—he helped to gain bread in that poor place.

As he took up the pieces of cloth Johanna laid efore him ready basted together, he said, “And where's the table and them other things?”

She pointed to a covered pile in the room, which had often given me cause to wonder of what it was composed.

“One half look,” said the soldier (he was a corporal, I saw). “One half look”—already apologizing for wasting time—and he went in three strides to the pile, took off the dingy cover, gave a glance at a table, two or three chairs, and other matters, covered the whole again, and then returned with three more strides to his seat. I think these three strides were taller and handsomer than those which had preceded them.

As he sat down, he tapped himself with one hand upon the other arm.

“I shall get 'em soon now, Johnny, and then!”

Here a bright look came on his face, which made it momentarily prepossessing.

Of course, it did not require any profound detection to comprehend what was going on.

The soldier and seamstress were engaged to be married, some of the furniture had been bought, and they were only waiting till he got his serjeant's stripes upon his coat.

Well, well, it was very pleasant to see them hard at work. He was no bad needle-man, as indeed few soldiers are. Indeed, I believe the army contractor got better work out of him than any one. He did certainly appear to take every stitch with a will.

This was the only occasion on which I saw the soldier.

One day in the same week, and when Johanna was away taking home a huge bundle of completed clothing to her employer, a sub army clothing contractor, whom I had once seen (he was a kind of Hebrew Adonis)—on that day Kamp told me the history of the engagement.

Exactly as she had met with nothing but inattention from men during her life, so he had been made the butt of women. When they by chance met (in that little East London paradise, the Victoria Park), it was clear they had both felt grateful for the frankness with which each met the other, and the conversation had begun by his picking up her umbrella. They had experienced a good deal of pain at the way in which the world had treated them, and as it is the knack of mental pain to purify people, why they soon found out that they were fitted to each other.

When they walked out of a Sunday (this I learnt from Kamp) they were frequently laughed at. And I must confess at first sight they were an ugly pair, and their ugliness was all the more remarkable from the contrast between them, for his chin and jaw shelved away in a very remarkable manner. But I believe the public ridicule gave them the benefit of feeling a kind of mutual pity for the public unkindness, which after a time was a kind of satisfaction to them, as showing how much they ought to be to one another.

For my part I think, in a quiet, sad, earnest way, Johanna Kamp and Tom Hapsy were happy, and loved each other very truly in a poor, plain way.

I have said that I did not see the corporal again. This loss—I felt it one, for I had taken a liking to the ugly fellow—arose from the fact that I was recalled from the neighbourhood and set upon other business.

I heard nothing more of the Kamps. I may add that they had never learnt my true occupation, but supposed me a small annuitant, a little eccentric, but very kindly disposed upon the whole.

Six months passed away—six months to me in my profession of very great importance.

I had been out of London, and it was the second night after my return, that, going down to the office, I found my fellow-workwomen very earnestly discussing a piece of news which had arrived. This was made up of the particulars of a murder in the east of London.

Two hours before, and at about eight o'clock in the evening, and when, therefore, the night had fairly set in, a tradesman in a large way of business had been shot dead. He had received the charge full in the breast, and therefore his enemy must have faced him; but though the alarm was immediately taken and the murdered man was alive when several people reached his side, he was unable to utter a word, and he died speechless as when found.

This affair had occurred at a place called New Ford, and very near to a running stream.

The spot upon which the unfortunate man fell was not many hundred yards from his own house, and he had been seen walking up and down a field as though waiting for some one. I may add at once that this was so—he expecting a young person who it appeared was notoriously in the habit of meeting him in the field where he was found dying.

The usual government reward in cases of evident murder was in this case very rapidly advertised.

Now, I need not tell the reader that detectives are as much excited by one of these rich government rewards as—as a ladies' school by the appearance of a new and an elegant master.

Every man or woman amongst us has an equal chance in the first place of gaining the prize, and as one hundred pound bank notes are not going begging every day in the week, we of the force look upon them with a considerable amount of respect.

I went down to New Ford and obtained a view of the dead man.

I knew the face, for I never forget features I have once seen, but I could not identify it, owing to that marvellous new expression which death lays on the human countenance.

For a full hour I tried to recall where I had seen the face, and what were the associations connected with it.

I confess I failed, and I turned once more into the station at which the chief particulars of the case were known—the station within the district of which the crime had been committed—and sat down more fatigued than though I had been walking half a score miles.

I was known well at the office, and therefore no impediment was thrown in my way in relation to this matter.

“Have you got any clue?” I asked in, I am quite sure, a worn and tired voice.

“Only a bit of a one,” said to me a sergeant, who at horse and turf cases is supposed to be quite unapproachable.

The clue to which he referred is one which in cases of ordinary shooting has on many occasions brought home his guilt to the actual murderer. I refer to the wadding, or rather stopping, used to fix the charge in the barrel of the firearm. If this stopping is not a disc of pasteboard, or a material sold for charging purposes, it frequently happens that it is a piece of paper torn from a supply in the possession of the person using the firearm.

It has in many instances happened where this stopping has not taken fire and burnt itself out, that enough of the paper, either written or printed on, has been found to bring home the shot to certain parties; and indeed there are cases on record where the rough line of the edge of the bit of half-burnt paper has agreed so certainly with another morsel found in the pocket of a suspected man, that upon such circumstantial evidence as this to begin upon, murder has been brought home to the guilty man.

In the case under consideration a crumpled stopping, which had in all probability been in the barrel of a firearm, in company with the bullet that had been found in the body of Mr. Higham, was picked up near the spot at which the murdered man had fallen, and within an hour of the catastrophe.

It was the scorched blackened remains of the upper half of a printed page of what the printers would call a demy-octavo book.

It bore the title of the work in the running-head line—“Johnston's Chemistry of Common Life.”

I knew now where I had seen the dead man when in life. Once accompanying Johanna Kamp, with a large bundle of work to her employer's (it was in the evening, and she feared she might have the work snatched away if she went alone), I recalled that we saw the dead man, and I further recalled that in taking her work he had paid her a kind of marked attention which was half mirthful and half real.

I recalled also that she said to me, it was hard how much poor folk had to put up with in order to get a crust.

I declare that the idea shot into my brain in the moment of seeing the scrap of printed paper—had it been torn from John Kamp's copy.

This was a matter which, as far as I was concerned, could easily be found out. I had but to pay the shoemaker a visit to bring the conversation round to Johnston, and then ask to see the book.

Perhaps it was cruel to spy upon the man who had met me daily as a something more than an acquaintance; but if such a consideration were always to arrest the course of justice the ordinary affairs of the world could not go on.

A man is your friend, but if he transgresses that law which it is your duty to see observed you have no right to spare him because he is so; for in doing this you admit, by implication, that you did not spare other men because they were no friends.

I went down to Kamp's house next morning.

I did not knock at the swinging door of the house. The knocker was still hanging to the door all askew, and still wanting the anvil.

I went direct upstairs—something beating at my heart and saying, “cruel, cruel!” as I did so. I tapped at the door.

I remember how earnest and emphatic those sounds appeared to me. The last time I stood in that room I was there as the man's friend; now I was entering it as his enemy—as one suspecting him of murder, for that was my errand.