The Victorian Mystery Megapack (26 page)

Half-past seven came—and she knocked again. But Constant slept on.

His letters, always a strange assortment, arrived at eight, and a telegram came soon after. Mrs. Drabdump rattled his door, shouted, and at last put the wire under it. Her heart was beating fast enough now, though there seemed to be a cold, clammy snake curling round it. She went downstairs again and turned the handle of Mortlake’s room, and went in without knowing why. The coverlet of the bed showed that the occupant had only lain down in his clothes, as if fearing to miss the early train. She had not for a moment expected to find him in the room; yet somehow the consciousness that she was alone in the house with the sleeping Constant seemed to flash for the first time upon her, and the clammy snake tightened its folds round her heart.

She opened the street door, and her eye wandered nervously up and down. It was half-past eight. The little street stretched cold and still in the gray mist, blinking bleary eyes at either end, where the street lamps smoldered on. No one was visible for the moment, though smoke was rising from many of the chimneys to greet its sister mist. At the house of the detective across the way the blinds were still down and the shutters up. Yet the familiar, prosaic aspect of the street calmed her. The bleak air set her coughing; she slammed the door to, and returned to the kitchen to make fresh tea for Constant, who could only be in a deep sleep. But the canister trembled in her grasp. She did not know whether she dropped it or threw it down, but there was nothing in the hand that battered again a moment later at the bedroom door. No sound within answered the clamor without. She rained blow upon blow in a sort of spasm of frenzy, scarce remembering that her object was merely to wake her lodger, and almost staving in the lower panels with her kicks. Then she turned the handle and tried to open the door, but it was locked. The resistance recalled her to herself—she had a moment of shocked decency at the thought that she had been about to enter Constant’s bedroom. Then the terror came over her afresh. She felt that she was alone in the house with a corpse. She sank to the floor, cowering; with difficulty stifling a desire to scream. Then she rose with a jerk and raced down the stairs without looking behind her, and threw open the door and ran out into the street, only pulling up with her hand violently agitating Grodman’s door-knocker. In a moment the first floor window was raised—the little house was of the same pattern as her own—and Grodman’s full, fleshy face loomed through the fog in sleepy irritation from under a nightcap. Despite its scowl the ex-detective’s face dawned upon her like the sun upon an occupant of the haunted chamber.

“What in the devil’s the matter?” he growled. Grodman was not an early bird, now that he had no worms to catch. He could afford to despise proverbs now, for the house in which he lived was his, and he lived in it because several other houses in the street were also his, and it is well for the landlord to be about his own estate in Bow, where poachers often shoot the moon. Perhaps the desire to enjoy his greatness among his early cronies counted for something, too, for he had been born and bred at Bow, receiving when a youth his first engagement from the local police quarters, whence he drew a few shillings a week as an amateur detective in his leisure hours.

Grodman was still a bachelor. In the celestial matrimonial bureau a partner might have been selected for him, but he had never been able to discover her. It was his one failure as a detective. He was a self-sufficing person, who preferred a gas stove to a domestic; but in deference to Glover Street opinion he admitted a female factotum between ten a. m. and ten p. m., and, equally in deference to Glover Street opinion, excluded her between ten p. m. and ten a. m.

“I want you to come across at once,” Mrs. Drabdump gasped. “Something has happened to Mr. Constant.”

“What! Not bludgeoned by the police at the meeting this morning, I hope?”

“No, no! He didn’t go. He is dead.”

“Dead?” Grodman’s face grew very serious now.

“Yes. Murdered!”

“What?” almost shouted the ex-detective. “How? When? Where? Who?”

“I don’t know. I can’t get to him. I have beaten at his door. He does not answer.”

Grodman’s face lit up with relief.

“You silly woman! Is that all? I shall have a cold in my head. Bitter weather. He’s dog-tired after yesterday—processions, three speeches, kindergarten, lecture on ‘the moon,’ article on co-operation. That’s his style.” It was also Grodman’s style. He never wasted words.

“No,” Mrs. Drabdump breathed up at him solemnly, “he’s dead.”

“All right; go back. Don’t alarm the neighborhood unnecessarily. Wait for me. Down in five minutes.” Grodman did not take this Cassandra of the kitchen too seriously. Probably he knew his woman. His small, bead-like eyes glittered with an almost amused smile as he withdrew them from Mrs. Drabdump’s ken, and shut down the sash with a bang. The poor woman ran back across the road and through her door, which she would not close behind her. It seemed to shut her in with the dead. She waited in the passage. After an age—seven minutes by any honest clock—Grodman made his appearance, looking as dressed as usual, but with unkempt hair and with disconsolate side-whisker. He was not quite used to that side-whisker yet, for it had only recently come within the margin of cultivation. In active service Grodman had been clean-shaven, like all members of the profession—for surely your detective is the most versatile of actors. Mrs. Drabdump closed the street door quietly, and pointed to the stairs, fear operating like a polite desire to give him precedence. Grodman ascended, amusement still glimmering in his eyes. Arrived on the landing he knocked peremptorily at the door, crying, “Nine o’clock, Mr. Constant; nine o’clock!” When he ceased there was no other sound or movement. His face grew more serious. He waited, then knocked, and cried louder. He turned the handle, but the door was fast. He tried to peer through the keyhole, but it was blocked. He shook the upper panels, but the door seemed bolted as well as locked. He stood still, his face set and rigid, for he liked and esteemed the man.

“Ay, knock your loudest,” whispered the pale-faced woman. “You’ll not wake him now.”

The gray mist had followed them through the street door, and hovered about the staircase, charging the air with a moist, sepulchral odor.

“Locked and bolted,” muttered Grodman, shaking the door afresh.

“Burst it open,” breathed the woman, trembling violently all over, and holding her hands before her as if to ward off the dreadful vision. Without another word, Grodman applied his shoulder to the door, and made a violent muscular effort. He had been an athlete in his time, and the sap was yet in him. The door creaked, little by little it began to give, the woodwork enclosing the bolt of the lock splintered, the panels bent upward, the large upper bolt tore off its iron staple; the door flew back with a crash. Grodman rushed in.

“My God!” he cried. The woman shrieked. The sight was too terrible.

* * * *

Within a few hours the jubilant news-boys were shrieking “Horrible Suicide in Bow,” and “The Star” poster added, for the satisfaction of those too poor to purchase: “A Philanthropist Cuts His Throat.”

CHAPTER II

But the newspapers were premature. Scotland Yard refused to prejudge the case despite the penny-a-liners. Several arrests were made, so that the later editions were compelled to soften “Suicide” into “Mystery.” The people arrested were a nondescript collection of tramps. Most of them had committed other offenses for which the police had not arrested them. One bewildered-looking gentleman gave himself up (as if he were a riddle), but the police would have none of him, and restored him forthwith to his friends and keepers. The number of candidates for each new opening in Newgate is astonishing.

The full significance of this tragedy of a noble young life cut short had hardly time to filter into the public mind, when a fresh sensation absorbed it. Tom Mortlake had been arrested the same day at Liverpool on suspicion of being concerned in the death of his fellow-lodger. The news fell like a bombshell upon a land in which Tom Mortlake’s name was a household word. That the gifted artisan orator, who had never shrunk upon occasion from launching red rhetoric at Society, should actually have shed blood seemed too startling, especially as the blood shed was not blue, but the property of a lovable young middle-class idealist, who had now literally given his life to the Cause. But this supplementary sensation did not grow to a head, and everybody (save a few labor leaders) was relieved to hear that Tom had been released almost immediately, being merely subpoenaed to appear at the inquest. In an interview which he accorded to the representative of a Liverpool paper the same afternoon, he stated that he put his arrest down entirely to the enmity and rancor entertained toward him by the police throughout the country. He had come to Liverpool to trace the movements of a friend about whom he was very uneasy, and he was making anxious inquiries at the docks to discover at what times steamers left for America, when the detectives stationed there in accordance with instructions from headquarters had arrested him as a suspicious-looking character. “Though,” said Tom, “they must very well have known my phiz, as I have been sketched and caricatured all over the shop. When I told them who I was they had the decency to let me go. They thought they’d scored off me enough, I reckon. Yes, it certainly is a strange coincidence that I might actually have had something to do with the poor fellow’s death, which has cut me up as much as anybody; though if they had known I had just come from the ‘scene of the crime,’ and actually lived in the house, they would probably have—let me alone.” He laughed sarcastically. “They are a queer lot of muddle-heads are the police. Their motto is, ‘First catch your man, then cook the evidence.’ If you’re on the spot you’re guilty because you’re there, and if you’re elsewhere you’re guilty because you have gone away. Oh, I know them! If they could have seen their way to clap me in quod, they’d ha’ done it. Lucky I know the number of the cabman who took me to Euston before five this morning.”

“If they clapped you in quod,” the interviewer reported himself as facetiously observing, “the prisoners would be on strike in a week.”

“Yes, but there would be so many black-legs ready to take their places,” Mortlake flashed back, “that I’m afraid it ’ould be no go. But do excuse me. I am so upset about my friend. I’m afraid he has left England, and I have to make inquiries; and now there’s poor Constant gone—horrible! horrible! and I’m due in London at the inquest. I must really run away. Good-by. Tell your readers it’s all a police grudge.”

“One last word, Mr. Mortlake, if you please. Is it true that you were billed to preside at a great meeting of clerks at St. James’ Hall between one and two today to protest against the German invasion?”

“Whew! so I had. But the beggars arrested me just before one, when I was going to wire, and then the news of poor Constant’s end drove it out of my head. What a nuisance! Lord, how troubles do come together! Well, good-by, send me a copy of the paper.”

Tom Mortlake’s evidence at the inquest added little beyond this to the public knowledge of his movements on the morning of the Mystery. The cabman who drove him to Euston had written indignantly to the papers to say that he had picked up his celebrated fare at Bow Railway Station at about half-past four a. m., and the arrest was a deliberate insult to democracy, and he offered to make an affidavit to that effect, leaving it dubious to which effect. But Scotland Yard betrayed no itch for the affidavit in question, and No. 2,138 subsided again into the obscurity of his rank. Mortlake—whose face was very pale below the black mane brushed back from his fine forehead—gave his evidence in low, sympathetic tones. He had known the deceased for over a year, coming constantly across him in their common political and social work, and had found the furnished rooms for him in Glover Street at his own request, they just being to let when Constant resolved to leave his rooms at Oxford House in Bethnal Green and to share the actual life of the people. The locality suited the deceased, as being near the People’s Palace. He respected and admired the deceased, whose genuine goodness had won all hearts. The deceased was an untiring worker; never grumbled, was always in fair spirits, regarded his life and wealth as a sacred trust to be used for the benefit of humanity. He had last seen him at a quarter past nine p. m. on the day preceding his death. He (witness) had received a letter by the last post which made him uneasy about a friend. Deceased was evidently suffering from toothache, and was fixing a piece of cotton-wool in a hollow tooth, but he did not complain. Deceased seemed rather upset by the news he brought, and they both discussed it rather excitedly.

By a Juryman: Did the news concern him?

Mortlake: Only impersonally. He knew my friend, and was keenly sympathetic when one was in trouble.

Coroner: Could you show the jury the letter you received?

Mortlake: I have mislaid it, and cannot make out where it has got to. If you, sir, think it relevant or essential, I will state what the trouble was.

Coroner: Was the toothache very violent?

Mortlake: I cannot tell. I think not, though he told me it had disturbed his rest the night before.

Coroner: What time did you leave him?

Mortlake: About twenty to ten.

Coroner: And what did you do then?

Mortlake: I went out for an hour or so to make some inquiries. Then I returned, and told my landlady I should be leaving by an early train for—for the country.