“So that was your weakness!” The plain comment was icier than any sneer. “Picking and stealing — and your hand still keeps its cunning!”
“Yes. That was how my wound had taken me.” There was less shame in the hoarse voice, thanks to the bracing coldness of the other. “It started in the field hospital — orderlies laughed and encouraged me — nurses at Netley just as bad! Everybody treated it as a joke; the doctor used to ask for his watch or his handkerchief after every visit; and the great score was when he thought I had one, and it was really the other — or both — or the keys out of his trousers pocket! It amused the ward and made me popular — made me almost suicidal — because I alone knew that I couldn’t help doing it to save my life.... And the rest you know.”
“I do, indeed!”
“This beastly kit, I had it made on purpose so that I could run after you one minute with what I’d taken from you the minute before! It was a last attempt to gain your ear — to get you interested. And now — —”
“And now,” said Topham Vinson, with a kind hand on the bent shoulders, yet a keen eye on the bent head— “and now I suppose you think you’ve put the lid on it? So you have, my dear doctor — on any sneaking doubts I had about you! You’ve struck a job after my own heart, and you’ve led me into it as I never was led into anything in my life before. Well, you’ve just got to keep me in it now; and I’m conceited enough to believe I shall be worth my place. Don’t you think you might turn round, Doctor Dollar, and let us shake hands on that?”
THE LIFE-PRESERVER
The Lady Vera Moyle had made herself notorious in a cause that scored some points through her allegiance. She it was who cajoled the Home Secretary outside Palace Yard, and sent him about his weighty business with the colors of a hated Union pinned to his unconscious back. It is true that some of her excesses had less to redeem them, but all were committed with a pious zest which recalled the saying that the Moyles were a race of Irish rebels who had intermarried with the saints. It was reserved for Lady Vera to combine the truculence of her forefathers with the serene solemnity of their wives, and to enact her devilments, as she took their consequences, with a buxom austerity all her own.
But she was not at her best when she went to see Doctor Dollar on Christmas Eve; for it was just two months after the autumn raid, which had caused the retirement of Lady Vera Moyle, and some of her political friends, for precisely that period. Otherwise, the autumn raid had been a triumph for the raiders, thanks to a fog of providential density, which had fought on their side as the stars in their courses fought against Sisera for the earliest militant. Never had private property been destroyed on so generous a scale, with fewer casualties on the side of the destroying angels; and yet there had been one unnecessary blot on the proceedings, which they were the first to repudiate and condemn.
A vile male member of the common criminal classes had not only taken occasion to loot a jeweler’s window, broken by some innocent lady, but had coolly murdered a policeman who interfered with him in the perpetration of his selfish crime. Fortunately the wretch had been traced through the stolen trinkets, expeditiously committed and condemned, and was on the point of paying the supreme penalty. No sane person could doubt his guilt, and yet there were those who sought to fix a certain responsibility on the women! The charge of moral complicity had disgraced and stultified both Press and platform, and the Home Secretary, pestered for a reprieve, had only sealed the murderer’s fate at the eleventh hour. Even the steel nerves of the Vinsons had suffered under a complex strain: it was just as well that he was on the point of departure for the holidays.
A deplorable circumstance was the way the Minister’s last hours in town had been embittered by his implacable tormentor, Lady Vera Moyle. That ingrate had celebrated her release by trying to invade the Home Office, and by actually waylaying the Secretary of State in Whitehall. An unobtrusive body-guard had nipped the annoyance in the bud; but it had caused Topham Vinson to require champagne at his club, whither he was proceeding on the arm of his last ally and most secret adviser, Doctor John Dollar of Welbeck Street. And before dark the doctor had been invaded in his turn.
“You must blame the Home Secretary for this intrusion,” began Lady Vera, with all the precision of a practised speaker who knew what she had to say. “He refused, as you heard, to listen to what I had to say to him this morning; but the detective-in-waiting informed me that you were not only a friend of Mr. Vinson’s, but yourself a medical expert in criminology. I have therefore a double reason for coming to you, Doctor Dollar, though it would not have been necessary if Mr. Topham Vinson had treated me with ordinary courtesy.”
“I am very glad you have done so, Lady Vera,” rejoined the doctor in his most conciliatory manner. “Mr. Vinson, to be frank with you, is not in a fit state for the kind of scene he was afraid you were going to make. He is in a highly nervous condition for a man of his robust temperament. Truth, Lady Vera, compels me to add that you and your friends have had something to do with this, but the immediate cause is a far more unhappy case which he has just settled.”
“Has he settled it?” cried Lady Vera, turning paler than before between her winter sables and a less seasonable hat.
“This morning,” said Dollar, with a very solemn air.
“He isn’t going to hang that poor man?”
No breath came between the opened lips that prison had bleached and parched, but neither did they tremble as the doctor bowed.
“If you mean Alfred Croucher,” said he, “convicted of the murder of Sergeant Simpkins during the last suffragist disturbance, I can only say there would be an end of capital punishment if he had been reprieved.”
“Doctor Dollar,” returned Lady Vera, under great control, “it was about this case, and nothing else, that I wanted to speak to the Home Secretary. I never heard of it until this morning, for I have been out of the way of newspapers, as you may know; and it is difficult to take in a whole trial at one hurried reading. Do you mind telling me why everybody is so sure that this man is the murderer? Did anybody see him do it?”
The crime doctor smiled as he shook his head.
“Very few murders are actually witnessed, Lady Vera; yet this would have been one of the few, but for the fog. Croucher was plainly seen through the jeweler’s window, helping himself one moment, then struggling with the unfortunate sergeant.”
“Was the struggle seen as plainly as the robbery?”
“Not quite, perhaps, but the evidence was equally convincing about both. Then the stolen goods were found, some of them, still in Croucher’s possession; and the way he tried to account for that, in the witness-box, was only less suicidal than his fatal attempt at an alibi.”
“Poor fool!” exclaimed Lady Vera, with perhaps less pity than impatience. “Of course he was there — I saw him!”
Dollar was not altogether unprepared for this.
“You were there yourself, then, Lady Vera?”
“I should think I was!”
“It — it wasn’t you who broke the window for him?”
“Of course it was! Yet nobody tried to find me as a witness! It is only by pure chance that I come out in time to save an innocent man’s life, for innocent he is of everything but theft. I know — too well!”
Her voice was no longer under inhuman control; and there was something in its passionate pitch that sent a cold thrill of conviction down Dollar’s spine. He gazed in horror at the unhappy girl, in her luxurious sables, drawn up to her last inch in the pitiless glare of his electric light; and even as he gazed — and guessed — all horror melted into the most profound emotion he had ever felt. It was she who first found her voice, and now it was calmer than it had been as yet.
“One thing more about the trial,” she said. “What was the weapon he is supposed to have used?”
“His knife.”
“Yet it seems to have been a small wound?”
“It had a small blade.”
“But was there any blood
on it?”
She had to press him for these details; any squeamishness was on his side, and he a doctor!
“There was,” he said. “Croucher had an explanation, but it wasn’t convincing.”
“The truth often isn’t,” said Lady Vera, bitterly. “You may be surprised to hear that the blow wasn’t struck with a knife at all. It was struck with — this!”
Her right hand flew from her glossy muff; in it was no flashing steel, but a short, black, round-knobbed life-preserver, that she handed over without more words.
“But his skull wasn’t smashed!” exclaimed John Dollar, and for an instant he looked at his visitor with the eye of the alienist. “It was a puncture of the carotid artery, and you couldn’t do that with this if you tried.”
“Hit the floor with it,” said Lady Vera, “but don’t hold it quite by the end.”
Dollar bent down and did as directed; at the blow, a poniard flew out of the opposite end to the round knob; the point caught in his sleeve.
“That’s how it was done,” continued Lady Vera. “And I am the person it was done by, Doctor Dollar!”
“It was — an accident?” he said, hoarsely. He could look at her as though the accident had not been fatal; he had less command of his voice.
“I call it one; the law may not,” said she resignedly. “Yet I didn’t even know that I possessed such a weapon as this; it was sold to me as a life-preserver, and nothing else, out of a pawnbroker’s window, where I happened to see it on the very morning of the raid. I thought it would be just the thing for smashing other windows, especially with that thong to go round one’s wrist. I thought, too — I don’t mind telling you — that, if I were roughly handled, it was a thing I could use in self-defense as I couldn’t very well use a hammer.”
And here she showed no more shame than a soldier need feel about his bayonet after battle; and Dollar met her eyes on better terms. He had been making mechanical experiments with the life-preserver. Some spring was broken. That was why it became a dagger at every blow, instead of only when you gave it a jerk.
“And you were roughly handled by Sergeant Simpkins?” he suggested eagerly.
“Very,” she said, with a certain reluctance. “But I expect the poor fellow was as excited as I was when I tried to beat him off.”
“I suppose you hardly knew what you were doing, Lady Vera?”
“Not only that, Doctor Dollar, but I didn’t know what I had done.”
“Thank God for that!”
“But did you imagine it for a moment? That’s the whole point and explanation of everything that has happened. The worst was over in a few seconds, in the thick of that awful fog, but, of course I never dreamt what I had done. I did think that I had knocked him out. But that was all that ever entered my head until this very morning.”
“Were you close to your broken window at the time?”
“Very close, and yet out of sight in the fog.”
“And you had seen nothing of this man Croucher, and his hand in the affair?”
“Not after I’d done my part. I did just before. I’m certain it was the same huge man that they describe. But I heard the whole thing while we were struggling. They were blowing a police-whistle and calling out ‘Thieves!’ I remember hoping that the policeman would hear them, and let me go. But I suppose his blood was up, as well as mine.”
“And after you had — freed yourself?” said the doctor, trying not to set his teeth.
“I ran off, of course! I knew that I had done much more than I ever intended; but that’s all I knew, or suspected, even when I found this horrid thing open in my hand. I tried to shut it again, but couldn’t. So I hid it in my dress, and ran up Dover Street to my club, where I put it straight into a bag that I had there. Then I made myself decent and — turned out again with a proper hammer.”
The doctor groaned; he could not help it. Yet it was his first audible expression of disapproval; he had restrained himself while all the worst was being told; and the girl’s face acknowledged his consideration. Her color had come at last. Thus far, in recounting her intentional misdeeds, as though they were all in the great day’s work, she had shown a divine indifference to his opinion of her or her proceedings. There had been nothing aggressive about it — he merely doubted whether the question of his views had ever entered her mind. But now he could see that it did; he had shown her something that she did not want to lose, and her fine candor hid that fact as little as any other.
“I didn’t know what I’d done, remember!” she said with sharp solicitude. “I never did know until this morning, when I heard of the case for the first time, and for the first time saw the stains on the dagger — at which you’ve been trying so hard not to look! Do look at them, Doctor Dollar. Of course, there can be no doubt what they are, but I shall be only too glad for you to prove it to everybody’s satisfaction.”
“‘Only too glad,’ Lady Vera?”
They gazed at each other for several seconds. Her face was tragic to him now; but emotion, apparently, was the one thing she would condescend to hide. But for her eyes, she might have been incredibly callous and cold-blooded; her blue Irish eyes were great and glassy with a grief not soluble in tears.
“Doctor Dollar,” she said, tensely, “nothing can undo this hideous thing, though I hope to live long enough to make such poor amends as a human being can. But in this other direction they must be made at once. It’s no use thinking of what can’t be undone till we have undone what we can — if we are quick! That’s why I tried to go straight to the Home Secretary, and why I have come straight to you. Take me to him, Doctor Dollar, and help me to convince him that what I have told you is the whole truth and nothing else! If you think it will make it easier, satisfy yourself about those blood-stains. Then we can take the dagger with us.”
The doctor applied a crude test on the spot. He stooped over the fire, heated the stained steel between the bars, cooled it at the open window, picked off a scale and examined it briefly under a microscope. All this was done with tremendous energy tempered by extreme precision and nicety. And Lady Vera followed the operation with an impersonal interest that could not but include the operator, so intent upon his task, so obviously thankful to have a task of any sort in hand. But when he rose from his microscope it was with a shrug of the shoulders, an almost angry shake of the head.
“Of course, this is all no good, you know!” he cried, as if it were her test. “It would take hours to make the analysis that’s really wanted.”
“But as far as you have gone, Doctor Dollar?”
“As far as I have gone — which isn’t a legal or medical inch — it certainly does look like blood, Lady Vera.”
“Of course it is blood. There’s another thing that will help us, too.”
“What’s that?”
“One of the best points in the defense, so far as I’ve had time to make out, was about the prisoner’s knife. Now, if we take this with us, either to the Home Secretary, or, if he still refuses to see me, to New Scotland Yard — —”
“Lady Vera!” the doctor interrupted, aghast at her suicidal zeal. “Is it possible that you realize the position you are in? It isn’t only a situation that you’ve got to face; that you have already done, superbly! But have you any conception of the consequences?”
“I think I have,” said Lady Vera, smiling. “I don’t believe they will hang me; it would be affectation to pretend I did. But, of course, that’s their business — mine is to change places with an innocent man.”
“That you will never do,” replied the doctor warmly. “There’s no innocent man in the case; this Croucher is a thief and a perjurer, besides being an old convict who has spent half his life in prison! He would have had five years for the other night’s work, without any question of a murder; they’ll simply pack him off to Dartmoor or Portland when we’ve saved his miserable neck. And save it we will, no fear about that; but at what a price — at what a price!”
“I don’t see that you
need trouble about it,” said Lady Vera, concerned at his distress, “beyond putting me in touch with Mr. Vinson. The rest will be up to him, as they say; and, after all, it won’t be anything so very terrible to me. I am an old prisoner myself, you must remember!”
There was a gleam of her notorious audacity with all this; but it was like the glow of flowers on a grave. The horror of things to happen had never possessed her valiant eyes, and yet it must have been there, for all at once Dollar missed it. He read her look. He had relieved her mind about the man in the cell, only to open it at last to the man in his grave. Grief crippled her as horror had not; prisons could be broken, but not the prison to which her hand had sent a fellow creature. Yet her grief was mastered in its turn, forced out of sight before his eyes, even while her flippant speech rang through him as the bravest utterance he had ever heard.
It blew a bugle in the man’s brain, and the call was clear and definite. He knew his own mind only less instantaneously than he had penetrated hers. Never in all his days had he known his mind quite so well as when she thought better of the very words which had enlightened him, and went on to add to them in another key:
“So now, Doctor Dollar, will you crown all your great kindness by taking me to see the Home Secretary at once?”
“Lady Vera,” he exclaimed, with unreasonable irritation, “what is the good of asking impossibilities? I couldn’t take you to Topham Vinson even if I would. He would begin by doubting your sanity; there would be all manner of silly difficulties. Moreover, he’s not in town.”
She showed displeasure at the statement of fact only.
“Doctor Dollar, are you serious?”
“Perfectly.”
“Have you forgot that I saw you together at almost two o’clock?”
“I think not quite so late as that. The Home Secretary left Euston at 2:45.”
“Where for?”
She looked panic-stricken.
“I’ll tell you, Lady Vera, if you promise not to follow him by the next train.”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 502
