The Female Detective (17 page)

“Are you?” he said, with piteous simplicity.

“What made you kill him?”

Suddenly he looked wild, as he replied—

“Why should bad men live?”

I shook my head. I replied—

“Why should better men kill the bad?”

“They ought not to live—they are no good on the earth.”

You see the poor creature had been so “hardly entreated” by the world, that he had turned against it when a common crime which the world does not punish very rigorously had crushed
his
home.

It is very well, perhaps, to preach, but there are times and places for sermons, and I felt that before his despair there was no need for me to give out a text. If despair outrages the law, well and good. The law must be satisfied. But let us leave despair alone, if we can only preach to it. For my part, whatever the man, I think I feel inclined to take his hand if he is despairing.

So I turned to facts.

“How did you do it?” I asked.

He got up from the floor where they had laid down the ill-favoured sister—the boards were still marked with the black dock mud in which the body was enveloped when brought to the poorhouse (for I may add the dead face was recognised while yet the water was streaming from it by a fellow-workwoman of the deceased), he got up from the ground quite mechanically, if that expression is allowable, and going to the pile of dirt and leather cuttings which lay heaped near his working stool, he put his hand in a wandering, awkward manner into the rubbish, and after feeling for a few moments, produced a common rusty pistol.

It was charged
.

The natural thought to occur to a detective was this—“Why is the pistol loaded?”

So I said to him—

“Why, it's charged.”

“Yes,” he replied, with some appearance of stupid confusion.

“Surely,” I said, “you were not going to—to let anything happen to yourself?”

He looked up. And this was the only moment throughout our interview when anything like an expression which was not abject dejection appeared upon his face. And as he raised his face he said—

“Do you think I could kill myself? No! I know myself too well for that.”

I will leave the reader to ponder on the apparent contradiction in his declaration of murder on the one hand, and his evident abhorrence of suicide on the other.

“Then, why is the pistol loaded?” I asked.

“I—I don't know,” said he.

So I continued—

“But how came you to do this?”

“How?” he replied, relapsing into his apathy, “I thought he ought to be killed, like so much carrion, and I bought the pistol, and paid the shopboy to show me how to load it; and then I went to the field where I knew he was to meet another of 'em. I learnt that from one of the women at the warehouse, who knew all about it. I came up with him, that is near him, and then—”

Here he stopped, and appeared to fall into an abstruse chain of thought.

“Well?” I asked.

“Why—why, then he fell, shot!” he replied, in a quick, half-astonished manner.

His words even then appeared to me extraordinary, from the peculiar mode in which they were put together.

But the great question stood—Why was the pistol loaded?

I will pass over the actual giving of the poor fellow into custody, for there can be no need to launch into detail upon so painful a subject. Suffice it to say, that he exhibited no emotion whatever upon being charged with wilful murder, and went with many sighs, but no repugnance, to the dark cell.

For my part, I felt there was something, beyond what he had said, wanted in order to elucidate the matter.

Now, when we detectives doubt we question.

This was my plan in the case of which I am now writing.

The first person I questioned was the girl who was to have met Higham on the night when he was killed.

She only had benefited by that crime—she benefited but for a short time. She was a pert, saucy, bold-eyed, young person, who replied to my questions in a tone which clearly argued that she should much prefer slapping my face to answering me.

Had she seen a stooping man about the spot, with long black hair hanging quite to his shoulders? No, she had
not
. How should she?
She
had not been looking for persons with long black hair,
she
had been looking for poor Mr. Higham. What? Had she seen anybody about? No; of course not. She did not go there to be seen by
any
body but poor Mr. Higham. What? Had she seen anybody about? Yes, if she must answer. She had seen a soldier. What? Could she describe him? No, she could not describe him. She saw him once under the gas-lamp at the corner of the field near the road, and that was quite enough for
her
. Why was it quite enough for her? Why, because when
she
looked at a man a second time it was because he was worth looking at. Yes.

This was all the information I got from this extremely pert young person, who, I may remark, in quitting her at this place, came under my especial attention about two years after the termination of the case, “A Judgment of Conscience.”

Now to the detective all people who by any chance may be guilty, are not considered innocent till they have been proved guiltless.

Therefore, the confession of the shoemaker apart, the unknown soldier who had been seen by the girl I had questioned was quite likely to be the guilty person.

The inquest was to take place that evening—the evening following the giving in custody of John Kamp. Of course I attended.

The case created some commotion, by the fact that the murderer had given himself up to justice; but I need not tell you that the inquest proceeded, as far as evidence went, precisely as though Kamp had been still at liberty.

I need here only refer to the evidence of the medical man, for his depositions alone affect the course of this tale.

He produced the bullet he had extracted from the body of the dead man, and then proceeded to describe the course the ball had taken.

Judge my surprise when upon asking for and fitting the bullet to the pistol Kamp had given me, I found that it would not run down the barrel.

Therefore it was evident that if Kamp had shot the man, he had used some other weapon than the one he had given me. But if so, why had he deceived me in reference to the pistol? Not seeking to hide the crime, why should he seek to mystify me in reference to the weapon?

Nay, upon further consideration, I saw that he could not, of course, know that the evidence of the bullet would be in his favour.

I gave my testimony, which exhibited very fully the discrepancy between Kamp's statement and the evidence given by the doctor in relation to the bullet.

It was quite impossible to reconcile the contradictions, and, after much bald and unequal suggestion, the inquest was adjourned.

The night, however, was not to pass without the mystery being cleared up.

I was at the district station, and it was about eleven p.m., when the ears of all the officers at the station were pricked up at hearing a crowd of approaching footsteps.

We went to the door, the jailer, I remember, clashing his keys loudly, and there coming towards us was a stretcher carried by a couple of policemen and surrounded by a number of people—for the greater part, of the lowest class—the hum of whose voices on our practised ears told us that it was no drunken case which was being carried in.

A policeman leading the
cortége
, and who had an air of startled dignity upon him, stopped as he approached the office-door.

“It's sooicide for a pot!” said the jailer, who stood behind me.

“Sooicide!” said the sergeant, as he stopped, and as the official part of the procession followed his example—not followed however by the rabble, who flocked round and gorged intelligence with all their eyes, their mouths meanwhile being wide open with excitement.

“I know'd it,” said the jailer. “
I
should have won.”

“What is it, Brogley?” asked the inspector of the sergeant.

“Military case, sir,” said the sergeant; “soldier shot hisself in a room in Hare's-street, in the room where the prisoner Kamp, the shoemaker, lived.”

It was no good guess on my part, after hearing these words, to feel certain that the soldier was Tom Hapsy.

I raised the poor quilt that had been thrown over the body—a quilt that had been taken from “the prisoner Kamp's” room—and there sure enough I saw, as the eager crowd herded about me, glad of this chance to see a horror—there I saw what remained of the features of Tom Hapsy.

So in six months, I thought, as after some official directions the body was borne on towards the dead house, Johanna Kamp had destroyed herself, so also had the cheerful soldier Tom Hapsy, and the third of that humble trio, John Kamp, lay in prison self-accused of murder.

Nor let the reader suppose this case untrue because it may appear overdrawn. The poor and the wretched too often find death sweeter than life. And indeed in this particular case, the man and woman, by reason of their physical drawbacks, had been so desolate before they met, that it is no wonder they fell into despair when the love they felt for each other was broken down by a selfish, heartless man.

The searcher at the dead-house found that letter on the poor dead body which exculpated John Kamp, though I could have saved him had the letter fallen from the body in its passage to the dead-house.

For the bullet extracted from Higham's body exactly fitted the pistol found in Hapsy's right hand, and what is more, the bullet taken from Tom's temple, where it had lodged, had been cast in the same mould (as the mark of a fracture proved) as the lead which the doctor produced at the inquest upon the sub-army contractor.

Thereupon I went by permission to John Kamp's cell.

By the way I will not reproduce Tom Hapsy's letter found on his dead body, for it was badly spelt, and written in a highflown, sentimental style, which might appear ridiculous to the more unthinking of my readers. It is sufficient to say that he declared he had taken the law into his own hands, first in destroying “Johanna's seducer,” and then himself.

I went, I say, to John Kamp's cell.

“John Kamp,” said I, “you did not kill Mr. Higham.”

He looked up amazedly.

And then I told him all the news.

He did not weep. He was too thoroughly broken-down for that. He did not betray any surprise when I told him about the cartridge-paper being a leaf from the work of which he was so fond. He took little notice of my explanation to the effect that the soldier must have torn the leaf from the book when contemplating the murder.

All he said was—“Poor Tom.”

Some time afterwards I comprehended how it happened that both men were at the same time in the field where the catastrophe occurred.

The young person who was to meet Higham, viciously proud of the interview, had confided the news to a companion (who of course knew all about the talk concerning Johanna's death), and she it was who informed the brother and soldier the of the coming meeting. With what intention I have never learnt. But I have surmised that she did so with some idea of that rough, terrible justice called vengeance, and which more or less lurks in every human heart.

Yes, all he said was, “Poor Tom!”

At last I said to him—“But, John, why did you say you killed the man?”

He looked up to me with most weary simplicity, and he said—

“I went out to kill him, and should have done so if Tom had not. I did not know who shot him at the time. I was a murderer in intention, and I gave myself up.”

So, there you have my tale of “The Judgment of Conscience.”

John Kamp is in Australia now, and doing well. Nor am I sorry that I helped him to do well. He has long since paid me back; and he tells me if ever I want a pound or two I am to let him know.

I think he is happy for being in Australia, where they are not so socially particular as in England, even in the matter of doctors. He has long since managed to become a kind of under-assistant at a dispensary; and I am sure that I for one would not at all hesitate to swallow a prescription made up by him, even though he had put the dose together in the dark.

A Child Found Dead: Murder Or No Murder

I have had great doubts as to the desirability of printing the following narrative. I do so, because I think it worth record. Strictly speaking, it is no experience whatever of mine. It was given to me in manuscript by the medical man who induced me to follow up the Bridge mystery. Perhaps flattered by the respect I paid his first communication, he offered me a second. I give it precisely as he handed it to me, believing this to be the only justifiable way in which to present it to the public. To begin [It is the doctor speaking]:—
5

I was sitting, perhaps a little sadly, looking out into the street from a drear tavern window, and thinking of a lost home, when I heard these words in a low soft voice—

“There's no reason in the whole business from beginning to end.”

I knew the tones in a moment, or suspected I did, which is pretty much about the same thing, for suspicion is frequently but cautious certainty; and starting up, I looked over the screen which separated my dismal dinner-table from the next.

It was Hardal beyond a doubt. Hardal himself—as frail, wild-looking, and attractive as ever—a man neither beautiful nor elegant, and yet one after whom clear-headed and observant passers-by generally looked with an inquiring and a puzzled air.

Hardal is a thin, short, sallow-faced man, with mournful-looking yet penetrating eyes, and he has a habit of looking at people, which as frequently irritates some as it awes others.

This peculiarity I marked at our school, and I have, during the last year or so, had ample opportunities of observing my old school-chum's odd qualification—for I need not say that, recognising him, I made myself known immediately. Amongst men who have gone to school and been thrashed together, there is always much mutual candour to be found, and plenty of the hail-fellow-well-met good fellowship.

Hardal was known at school as the queerest fellow out—he is known at this moment at the common-law bar as the most eccentric barrister who ever donned a stuff gown and a wig. At school he was doubted for his oddity—now he is questioned for his eccentricity. At school he never got on amongst his school-fellows, and now he does not progress in the midst of his fellow-men. The man is the child of the youth, and the same prejudices pervade both. They but follow the law of hereditary transmission. It is the misfortune of unknown genius to be doubted, as it is the glory of known genius to be held in awe. Hardal was and is an unknown genius. As a boy he was thought to be mad, this being one of the privileges of genius, and as a man I doubt if his associates feel quite sure that he is sane. He knows his own position as well as any man, and he says—“I shall never rise out of nothingness (because I am not an ordinary man) unless extraordinary circumstances surround me, when nothing will impede my rise. I am a man who cannot make an opportunity, but who, having an opportunity given him, will use it to good account, unless pulled down by the vain or ignorant, or both kinds of fools, about him.”

At school, nothing would turn Hardal from what he thought to be right. I remember the especial case which caused him to be dubbed a sneak, and which was really the cause of his abandoning the academy where we met.

A very mild, modest, junior Latin master had arrived, and as boys are cowards enough to be unable to forgive mildness and modesty, the new man was turned into a butt. The grossest questions were put to him, and letters of the nastiest character slipped into his desk through the crack on the top of it. He took all these performances very quietly, though it was whispered about that he had been heard to sob in his own room. But the hat business, at the end of his first week, outraged even his rosewater blood.

The poor man had quietly taken his hat from a peg and put it on his head, preparatory to going out with a copy of his beloved Persius under his arm, when down fell the body and crown of the hat to the ground, leaving above the junior Latin master's surprised countenance the rim, like a queer crown, turned up on the edge next the head with the leather lining of the hat itself.

Boys never spare the ridiculous, and this spectacle created such a roar of laughter, that Bargee, the
nom-de-ferule
of the immense doctor who governed us, came tramping out of his private room, to which we used to go for judgment, with the air of an outraged elephant.

There stood the young Latin master, still crowned. Of course Bargee, the unjustest of men, fell upon the junior master at once, and bullied him handsomely, and this bringing about a general explanation of the performance, Bargee delivered himself of this ukase—no boy to enter the playground till the culprit was found out, five shillings being offered as a reward to any Bargee's evidence, witness not being an actual accomplice.

Every community has its cowards, and within five minutes Seth Cundle, the stupidest and most thrashed of boys, was accused by Allen Buckenham of the crime.

Seth hadn't a word to say—he believed himself born to blows and injustice, and of course soon involved himself in such a whirl of contradictions, that ignorant old Bargee set him down as guilty at once, and being hoisted, he received thrashing number one.

Now this thrashing shook Bargee's state desk, at which the operation took place, and the hat-rim, which had been brought forward in accusation, fell with the shock upon the school desk below and close up to the Bargee's. This desk was shared by Hardal and myself. We sat side by side.

I saw Hardal pick it up; turn it over and over; then he smelt the leather.

All that morning he was, I saw, uneasy. He had said to me, “Look here, Roddy; you know the rim was stuck on to the body with gum; now you know Cundle isn't a dandy, and hasn't got any gum; and besides, if he had,
he
would not have thought to stick on the rim. You know, Roddy, it
wasn't
Cundle; and I mean to find out who it was.”

Now I want the reader to mark this perception, forecasting as it does that which he applied to the discovery of a certain mysterious slaying of a child. Hardal knew that a number of our boys used gum-water, scented with various perfumes, for making kiss-curls, and sticking them on their foreheads. These were the boys we called dandies. Cundle certainly wasn't one of them; his hair was always as rough as a long-haired mat. Hardal was quite sure, by smelling the gum on the inner part of the rim, that Cundle was not the guilty party—who was? Of this I felt sure, knowing him well, that he, if any one, would find out the culprit—and he did.

It was in the afternoon, and poor old Seth was about to get his third elevation, when Hardal, as though unable to restrain himself, started up and said, “Sir, Dr.——, Cundle didn't do it.” The school became immediately as silent as the grave.

Hardal's case was opened, and looked into to the bottom in no time. He showed the gum marks, pointed out that only a few boys had gum-bottles, and then told Dr.——that the gum on the hat, if wetted, smelt strongly of roses. Of course the reader sees the argument. Old Bargee, with the air of having found it all out himself, ordered every box to be searched. But one bottle of rose-scented gum was found—in the box of Dandy Buckenham, who, panic-stricken, admitted his guilt, and literally “got it.”

“I knew it,” said Hardal to me; “and he fixed upon Seth because he is a fool.” I saw tears in my schoolmate's eye as he spoke; and
yet
the boys made such war against him for that evidence of his love of truth and justice, that actually he left the doctor's, and I never heard of or saw him till we met by the sign of his voice, in that dull dining-room in the Strand tavern.

I will pass over the meeting between us. I had always known Hardal to be no common man; and therefore I was not disturbed by the extreme emotion he betrayed in seeing me. “It's like a dip in the past,” he said; “and the past with me is always brighter than the present.”

Of course our talk soon referred to the accident of our recognition; the words Hardal had used, and what I had heard, “There's no reason in it from beginning to end.”

“I suppose,” said I, referring to the words, “you were at your old game again?”

“Yes,” said he, “I am trying to elucidate the mystery of that murder, if murder it was, in the house of that Mr. Cumberland, in the North of England. It is the most contradictory business I ever came across.”

“It is,” I answered. “But why did you say ‘if murder it is?' Surely there can be no doubt of that?”

“Surely?” Hardal returned. “You think there can be no doubt of murder because you think in ordinary channels. You hear of a body
found
under the ordinary conditions of a murdered person; and therefore you jump at the conclusion that a murder has been committed. This is ridiculous, when the whole facts of the case are taken into consideration; but, Roddy, as I used to call you, I noticed just now that when I mentioned the name Cumberland—there, you have started again—why?”

“I know the Cumberlands,” I said, “well, and pity them much. They are nice people, and are suffering horribly, as I know.”

“You are acquainted with them?”

“Well—thoroughly,” I returned.

“Tell me,” Hardal eagerly continued, “do they wish this affair of the loss of the child investigated? Or after the horrible investigations which have taken place, do they shrink from further examination?”

“On the contrary,” I returned, “nobody is more anxious than the father of the dead child to learn the cause by which he came to his death.”

“Then you can give me an introduction to this Mr. Cumberland, if I assure you I think I have the clue to the catastrophe?”

“I will go down with you to his place,” I said, “and put myself at your service; but in the first instance you must really convince me you have a good basis to rest your attempts upon.”

For you see, even I, knowing Hardal well, doubted him. I do firmly believe that to be doubted is one of the inherent curses of genius.

“That's but rational,” said Hardal; “but don't be judicial,” he urged, “or you will doubt. This murder, as I will call it for the sake of brevity, was no common crime, and must be accounted for by no common reasoning. When Newton made his great gravity discovery, he did not judge by ordinary efforts; had he, he would have perhaps died nameless. Now listen. There are two conditions of absolute murder, which should be both present to exhibit absolute murder, and of which the first cannot be absent. The first is motive; the second, concealment of the body. If a man kill another without motive, then the act is not murder, which is wilful taking away of life; while if a man kill another, motive being present, without taking either the precaution of concealing the body, or deflecting suspicion from himself, the plot is defective, and argues insanity, or a weakness which may be called insanity, in the perpetrator. For instance, if I kill a man in my office on a second floor by shooting him, is not the act weak? I warn those about me with the pistol, and I have no means of hiding the body. I have been acting either in a state of permanent or temporary insanity; I am no true murderer, who should not only show motive, but a perfectly logical self-preservation.

“Now what real
motive
has there been for the destruction of the child in this case?

“Now what self-preservative means by the hiding of the body have been shown by the destroyer?

“Let me lay the facts of this history before you. The family went to bed at the ordinary hours on a given night. In the nursery are three beds, one under the window in which a child about four years old is asleep, a second in which a younger child sleeps, and a third in which a nurse sleeps, generally by herself, but which, on the occasion of the murder, as I will still call it, is partly occupied by a friend of the nurse's.

“The nurse falls to sleep at eleven o'clock, and wakes at five in the morning, it then having been light two hours, for the catastrophe takes place towards the end of June. As would be natural, she looks over the room to the cot in which the boy is sleeping, and misses him from the bed. Supposing that the child has gone, or been taken, to the mother's room, which is only across the passage, the nurse falls asleep again, and only wakes when it is time to rise. She gets up, dresses the little girl who sleeps in the cot near her, and then very naturally goes to the mother's door, and asks for the child. He is not there. Supposed to be upstairs in an elder sister's room, application is made there without success. The alarm is taken, and the house searched, with no results beyond these—the drawing-room door and one of the drawing-room windows are found open. The father immediately sets out in a vehicle for a police-constable, believing the child to have been stolen, and the search for the child is continued. While the father is still away, the body of the child is found, thrust out of sight, not concealed, just below the seat of the servant's closet, and wrapped in a blanket.

“These are the broad outlines of the case, and though we already find two far from comprehended facts, we are not yet staggered. These facts are—First, that one of the drawing-room windows is open; and second, that the concealment of the body betrays as much
weakness
as that of the ostrich, which hides its head in a bush and thinks itself concealed from the hunter. The body was concealed—if concealment it can be called—exactly in the place and in a manner where it must be immediately discovered, and is thrust into the closet under circumstances which could not remain unseen. Indeed, this concealment is so weak that it suggests idiocy.

“But when we come to investigate the many peculiar facts of this act, each one of which takes it out of the list of ordinary sentient murders, we must feel that to apply the ordinary rules of causes and effects to this affair, is taking exactly that road which must lead to nothing but disappointment.

“In the first place, it is extraordinary that any human being could have entered the room without waking some of the inmates. However, let this pass, and come to the removal of the child. He was removed with
womanly
care, being wrapped in a blanket. Now comes the question—Whence came the blanket? The answer is—From between the sheet and counterpane which formed the upper clothing of the bed. Well, we can understand that, in
stealing
a child, even a man might think of removing it in a blanket; but when it comes to a question of murder, this use of the blanket is inexplicable.