Adventures of Martin Hewitt (20 page)

“That decided me. I said that after what he had said, and particularly in
view of his whole manner and bearing, I should insist, by every means in my
power, on having the body properly examined, and I went off at once to
Cullanin to set the telegraph going, and see whatever local authority might
be proper. When I returned in the afternoon Stanley Main had packed his bag
and vanished, and I have not heard nor seen anything of him since. I stayed
in the neighbourhood that day and the next, and left for London in the
evening. By the help of my solicitors proper representations were made at the
Home Office, and, especially in view of Main’s flight, a prompt order was
made for exhumation and medical examination preliminary to an inquest. I am
expecting to hear that the disinterment has been effected to-day. What I want
you to do of course is chiefly to find Main. The Irish constabulary in that
district are fine big men, and no doubt most excellent in quelling a faction
fight or shutting up a shebeen, but I doubt their efficiency in anything
requiring much more finesse. Perhaps also you may be able to find out
something of the means by which the murder—it is plain it is
one—was committed. It is quite possible that Main may have adopted some
means to give the body the appearance, even to a medical man, of death from
small-pox.”

“That,” Hewitt said, “is scarcely likely, else, indeed, why did he not
take care that another doctor should see the body before the burial? That
would have secured him. But that is not a thing one can deceive a doctor
over. Of course in the circumstances exhumation is desirable, but if the case
is
one of smallpox, I don’t envy the medical man who is to examine. At
any rate the business is, I should imagine, not likely to be a very long one,
and I can take it in hand at once. I will leave to-night for Ireland by the
6.30 train from Euston.”

“Very good. I shall go over myself, of course. If anything comes to my
knowledge in the meanwhile, of course I’ll let you know.”

An hour or two after this a cab stopped at the door, and a young lady
dressed in black sent in her name and a minute later was shown into Hewitt’s
room. It was Miss Mary Rewse. She wore a heavy veil, and all she said she
uttered in evidently deep distress of mind. Hewitt did what he could to calm
her, and waited patiently.

At length she said: “I felt that I must come to you, Mr. Hewitt, and yet
now that I am here I don’t know what to say. Is it the fact that Mr. Bowyer
has commissioned you to investigate the circumstances of my poor brother’s
death, and to discover the whereabouts of Mr. Main?”

“Yes, Miss Rewse, that is the fact. Can you tell me anything that will
help me?”

“No, no, Mr. Hewitt, I fear not. But it is such a dreadful thing, and Mr.
Bowyer is—I’m afraid he is so much prejudiced against Mr. Main that I
felt I ought to do something—to say something at least to prevent you
entering on the case with your mind made up that he has been guilty of such
an awful thing. He is really quite incapable of it, I assure you.”

“Pray, Miss Rewse,” Hewitt replied, “don’t allow that apprehension to
disturb you. If Mr. Main is, as you say, incapable of such an act as perhaps
he is suspected of, you may rest assured no harm will come to him. So far as
I am concerned at any rate I enter the case with a perfectly open mind. A man
in my profession who accepted prejudices at the beginning of a case would
have very poor results to show indeed. As yet I have no opinion, no theory,
no prejudice—nothing indeed but a bare outline of fads. I shall derive
no opinion and no theory from anything but a consideration of the actual
circumstances and evidences on the spot. I quite understand the relation in
which Mr. Main stands in regard to yourself and your family Have you heard
from him lately?”

“Not since the letter informing us of my brother’s death.”

“Before then?”

Miss Rewse hesitated.

“Yes,” she said, “we corresponded. But—but there was really
nothing—the letters were of a personal and private sort—they
were—”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Hewitt answered, with his eyes fixed keenly on the
veil which Miss Rewse still kept down. “Of course I understand that. Then
there is nothing else you can tell me?”

“No, I fear not. I can only implore you to remember that no matter what
you may see and hear, no matter what the evidence may be, I am sure, sure,
sure
that poor Stanley could never do such a thing.” And Miss Rewse
buried her face in her hands.

Hewitt kept his eyes on the lady, though he smiled slightly, and asked,
“How long have you known Mr. Main?”

“For some five or six years now. My poor brother knew him at school,
though of course they were in different forms, Mr. Main being the elder.”

“Were they always on good terms?”

“They were always like brothers.”

Little more was said. Hewitt condoled with Miss Rewse as well as he might,
and she presently took her departure. Even as she descended the stairs a
messenger came with a short note from Mr. Bowyer enclosing a telegram just
received from Cullanin. The telegram ran thus:—

BODY EXHUMED. DEATH FROM SHOT-WOUND. NO TRACE OF
SMALL-POX. NOTHING YET HEARD OF MAIN. HAVE COMMUNICATED WITH
CORONER.—O’REILLY.

Hewitt and Mr. Bowyer travelled towards Mayo together, Mr. Bowyer restless
and loquacious on the subject of the business in hand, and Hewitt rather
bored thereby. He resolutely declined to offer an opinion on any single
detail of the case till he had examined the available evidence, and his
occasional remarks on matters of general interest, the scenery and so forth,
struck his companion, unused to business of the sort which had occasioned the
journey, as strangely cold-blooded and indifferent. Telegrams had been sent
ordering that no disarrangement of the contents of the cottage was to be
allowed pending their arrival, and Hewitt well knew that nothing more was
practicable till the site was reached. At Ballymaine, where the train was
left at last, they stayed for the night, and left early the next morning for
Cullanin, where a meeting with Dr. O’Reilly at the mortuary had been
appointed. There the body lay stripped of its shroud, calm and gray, and
beginning to grow ugly, with a scarcely noticeable breach in the flesh of the
left breast.

“The wound has been thoroughly cleansed, closed and stopped with a
carbolic plug before interment,” Dr. O’Reilly said. He was a middle-aged,
grizzled man, with a face whereon many recent sleepless nights had left their
traces. “I have not thought it necessary to do anything in the way of
dissection. The bullet is not present, it has passed clean through the body,
between the ribs both back and front, piercing the heart on its way. The
death must have been instantaneous.”

Hewitt quickly examined the two wounds, back and front, as the doctor
turned the body over, and then asked: “Perhaps, Dr. O’Reilly, you have had
some experience of a gunshot wound before this?”

The doctor smiled grimly. “I think so,” he answered, with just enough of
brogue in his words to hint his nationality and no more. “I was an army
surgeon for a good many years before I came to Cullanin, and saw service in
Ashanti and in India.”

“Come then,” Hewitt said, “you’re an expert. Would it have been possible
for the shot to have been fired from behind?”

“Oh, no. See! the bullet entering makes a wound of quite a different
character from that of the bullet leaving.”

“Have you any idea of the weapon used?”

“A large revolver, I should think; perhaps of the regulation size; that
is, I should judge the bullet to have been a conical one of about the size
fitted to such a weapon—smaller than that from a rifle.”

“Can you form an idea of from what distance the shot was fired?”

Dr. O’Reilly shook his head. “The clothes have all been burned,” he said,
“and the wound has been washed, otherwise one might have looked for powder
blackening.”

“Did you know either the dead man or Dr. Main personally?”

“Only very slightly. I may say I saw just such a pistol as might cause
that sort of wound in his hands the day before he gave out that Rewse had
been attacked by smallpox. I drove past the cottage as he stood in the
doorway with it in his hand. He had the breach opened, and seemed to be
either loading or unloading it—which it was I couldn’t say.”

“Very good, doctor, that may be important. Now is there any single
circumstance, incident or conjecture that you can tell me of in regard to
this case that you have not already mentioned?”

Doctor O’Reilly thought for a moment, and replied in the negative.

“I heard of course,” he said, “of the reported new case of small-pox, and
that Main had taken the case in hand himself. I was indeed relieved to hear
it, for I had already more on my hands than one man can safely be expected to
attend to. The cottage was fairly isolated, and there could have been nothing
gained by removal to an asylum—indeed there was practically no
accommodation. So far as I can make out nobody seems to have seen young
Rewse, alive or dead, after Main had announced that he had the small-pox. He
seems to have done everything himself, laying out the body and all, and you
may be pretty sure that none of the strangers about was particularly anxious
to have anything to do with it. The undertaker (there is only one here, and
he is down with the small-pox himself now) was as much overworked as I was
myself, and was glad enough to send off a coffin by a market cart and leave
the laying out and screwing down to Main, since he had got those orders. Main
made out the death certificate himself, and, since he was trebly qualified,
everything seemed in order.”

“The certificate merely attributed the death to small-pox, I take it, with
no qualifying remarks?”

“Small-pox simply.”

Hewitt and Mr. Bowyer bade Dr. O’Reilly good morning, and their car was
turned in the direction of the cottage where Algernon Rewse had met his
death. At the Town Hall in the market place, however, Hewitt stopped the car
and set his watch by the public clock. “This is more than half an hour before
London time,” he said, “and we mustn’t be at odds with the natives about the
time.”

As he spoke Dr. O’Reilly came running up breathlessly. “I’ve just heard
something,” he said. “Three men heard a shot in the cottage as they were
passing, last Tuesday week.”

“Where are the men?”

“I don’t know at the moment; but they can be found. Shall I set about
it?”

“If you possibly can,” Hewitt said, “you will help us enormously. Can you
send them messages to be at the cottage as soon as they can get there to-day?
Tell them they shall have half-a-sovereign apiece.”

“Right, I will. Good-day.”

“Tuesday week,” said Mr. Bowyer as they drove off; “that was the date of
Main’s first letter, and the day on which, by his account, Rewse was taken
ill. Then if that was the shot that killed Rewse he must have been lying dead
in the place while Main was writing those letters reporting his sickness to
his mother. The cold-blooded scoundrel!”

“Yes,” Hewitt replied, “I think it probable in any case that Tuesday was
the day that Rewse was shot. It wouldn’t have been safe for Main to write the
mother lying letters about the small-pox before. Rewse might have written
home in the meantime, or something might have occurred to postpone Main’s
plans, and then there would be impossible explanations required.”

Over a very bad road they jolted on and in the end arrived where the road,
now become a mere path, passed a tumble-down old farmhouse.

“This is where the woman lives who cooked and cleaned house for Rewse and
Main,” Mr. Bowyer said. “There is the cottage, scarce a hundred yards off, a
little to the right of the track.”

“Well,” replied Hewitt, “suppose we stop here and ask her a few questions?
I like to get the evidence of all the witnesses as soon as possible. It
simplifies subsequent work wonderfully.”

They alighted, and Mr. Bowyer roared through the open door and tapped with
his stick. In reply to his summons a decent-looking woman of perhaps fifty,
but wrinkled beyond her age, and better dressed than any woman Hewitt had
seen since leaving Cullanin, appeared from the hinder buildings and curtsied
pleasantly.

“Good morning, Mrs. Hurley, good morning,” Mr. Bowyer said, “this is Mr.
Martin Hewitt, a gentleman from London, who is going to look into this
shocking murder of our young friend Mr. Rewse and sift it to the bottom. He
would like you to tell him something, Mrs. Hurley.”

The woman curtsied again. “An’ it’s the jintleman is welcome, sor, sad
doin’s as ut is.” She had a low, pleasing voice, much in contrast with her
unattractive appearance, and characterised by the softest and broadest brogue
imaginable. “Will ye not come in? Mother av Hiven! An’ thim two livin’
together, an’ fishin’ an’ readin’ an’ all, like brothers! An’ trut’ ut is he
was a foine young jintleman indade, indade!”