The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime

by Michael Sims

  “There was no other man!”

  Madelyn gathered up her possessions from the desk. From the edge of the row of books she lifted a small, red-bound volume, perhaps four inches in width, and then with a second thought laid it back.

  “By the way, Nora, I wish you would come back here at eight o’clock. If this book is still where I am leaving it, please bring it to me! I think that will be all for the present.”

  “All?” I gasped. “Do you realize that—”

  Madelyn moved toward the door.

  “I think eight o’clock will be late enough for your errand,” she said without turning.

  The late June twilight had deepened into a somber darkness when, my watch showing ten minutes past the hour of my instructions, I entered the room on the second floor that had been assigned to Miss Mack and myself. Madelyn at the window was staring into the shadow-blanketed yard.

  “Well?” she demanded.

  “Your book is no longer in the library!” I said crossly.

  Madelyn whirled with a smile.

  “Good! And now if you will be so obliging as to tell Peters to ask Miss Jansen to meet me in the rear drawing room, with any of the friends of the family she desires to be present, I think we can clear up our little puzzle.”

  It was a curious group that the graceful Swiss clock in the bronze drawing room of the Marsh house stared down upon as it ticked its way past the half hour after eight. With a grave, rather insistent bow, Miss Mack had seated the other occupants of the room as they answered her summons. She was the only one of us that remained standing.

  Before her were Sheriff Peddicord, Homer Truxton, Dr. Dench, and Muriel Jansen. Madelyn’s eyes swept our faces for a moment in silence, and then she crossed the room and closed the door.

  “I have called you here,” she began, “to explain the mystery of Mr. Marsh’s death.” Again her glance swept our faces. “In many respects it has provided us with a peculiar, almost an unique problem.

  “We find a man, in apparently normal health, dead. The observer argues at once foul play; and yet on his body is no hint of wound or bruise. The medical examination discovers no trace of poison. The autopsy shows no evidence of crime. Apparently we have eliminated all forms of unnatural death.

  “I have called you here because the finding of the autopsy is incorrect, or rather incomplete. We are not confronted by natural death—but by a crime. And I may say at the outset that I am not the only person to know this fact. My knowledge is shared by one other in this room.”

  Sheriff Peddicord rose to his feet and rather ostentatiously stepped to the door and stood with his back against it. Madelyn smiled faintly at the movement.

  “I scarcely think there will be an effort at escape, Sheriff,” she said quietly.

  Muriel Jansen was crumpled back into her chair, staring. Dr. Dench was studying Miss Mack with the professional frown he might have directed at an abnormality on the operating table. It was Truxton who spoke first in the fashion of the impulsive boy.

  “If we are not dealing with natural death, how on earth then was Mr. Marsh killed?”

  Madelyn whisked aside a light covering from a stand at her side, and raised to view Raleigh’s red sandstone pipe. For a moment she balanced it musingly.

  “The three-hundred-year-old death tool of Orlando Julio,” she explained. “It was this that killed Wendell Marsh!”

  She pressed the bowl of the pipe into the palm of her hand. “As an instrument of death, it is almost beyond detection. We examined the ashes, and found nothing but harmless tobacco. The organs of the victim showed no trace of foul play.”

  She tapped the long stem gravely.

  “But the examination of the organs did not include the brain. And it is through the brain that the pipe strikes, killing first the mind in a nightmare of insanity, and then the body. That accounts for the wreckage that we found—the evidences apparently of two men engaged in a desperate struggle. The wreckage was the work of only one man—a maniac in the moment before death. The drug with which we are dealing drives its victim into an insane fury before his body succumbs. I believe such cases are fairly common in India.”

  “Then Mr. Marsh was poisoned after all?” cried Truxton. He was the only one of Miss Mack’s auditors to speak.

  “No, not poisoned! You will understand as I proceed. The pipe you will find, contains apparently but one bowl and one channel, and at a superficial glance is filled only with tobacco. In reality, there is a lower chamber concealed beneath the upper bowl, to which extends a second channel. This secret chamber is charged with a certain compound of Indian hemp and dhatura leaves, one of the most powerful brain stimulants known to science—and one of the most dangerous if used above a certain strength. From the lower chamber it would leave no trace, of course, in the ashes above.

  “Between the two compartments of the pipe is a slight connecting opening, sufficient to allow the hemp beneath to be ignited gradually by the burning tobacco. When a small quantity of the compound is used, the smoker is stimulated as by no other drug, not even opium. Increase the quantity above the danger point, and mark the result. The victim is not poisoned in the strict sense of the word, but literally smothered to death by the fumes!”

  In Miss Mack’s voice was the throb of the student before the creation of the master.

  “I should like this pipe, Miss Jansen, if you ever care to dispose of it!”

  The girl was still staring woodenly.

  “It was Orlando Julio, the medieval poisoner,” she gasped, “that Uncle described—”

  “In his seventeenth chapter of ‘The World’s Great Cynics,’” finished Madelyn. “I have taken the liberty of reading the chapter in manuscript form. Julio, however, was not the discoverer of the drug. He merely introduced it to the English public. As a matter of fact, it is one of the oldest stimulants of the East. It is easy to assume that it was not as a stimulant that Julio used it, but as a baffling instrument of murder. The mechanism of the pipe was his own invention, of course. The smoker, if not in the secret, would be completely oblivious to his danger. He might even use the pipe in perfect safety—until its lower chamber was loaded!”

  Sheriff Peddicord, against the door, mopped his face with his red handkerchief, like a man in a daze. Dr. Dench was still studying Miss Mack with his intent frown. Madelyn swerved her angle abruptly.

  “Last night was not the first time the hemp-chamber of Wendell Marsh’s pipe had been charged. We can trace the effect of the drug on his brain for several months—hallucinations, imaginative enemies seeking his life, incipient insanity. That explains his astonishing letter to me. Wendell Marsh was not a man of nine lives, but only one. The perils which he described were merely fantastic figments of the drug. For instance, the episode of the poisoned cherry pie. There was no pie at all served at the table yesterday.

  “The letter to me was not a forgery, Miss Jansen, although you were sincere enough when you pronounced it such. The complete change in your uncle’s handwriting was only another effect of the drug. It was this fact, in the end, which led me to the truth. You did not perceive that the dates of your notes and mine were six months apart! I knew that some terrific mental shock must have occurred in the meantime.

  “And then, too, the ravages of a drug-crazed victim were at once suggested by the curtains of the library. They were not simply torn, but fairly chewed to pieces!”

  A sudden tension fell over the room. We shifted nervously, rather avoiding one another’s eyes. Madelyn laid the pipe back on the stand. She was quite evidently in no hurry to continue. It was Truxton again who put the leading question of the moment.

  “If Mr. Marsh was killed as you describe, Miss Mack, who killed him?”

  Madelyn glanced across at Dr. Dench.

  “Will you kindly let me have the red leather book that you took from Mr. Marsh’s desk this evening, Doctor?”

  The physician met her glance steadily.

  “You think it—necessary?”

&n
bsp; “I am afraid I must insist.”

  For an instant Dr. Dench hesitated. Then, with a shrug, he reached into a coat pocket and extended the red-bound volume, for which Miss Mack had dispatched me on the fruitless errand to the library. As Madelyn opened it we saw that it was not a printed volume, but filled with several hundred pages of close, cramped writing. Dr. Dench’s gaze swerved to Muriel Jansen as Miss Mack spoke.

  “I have here the diary of Wendell Marsh, which shows us that he had been in the habit of seeking the stimulant of Indian hemp, or ‘hasheesh’ for some time, possibly as a result of his retired, sedentary life and his close application to his books. Until his purchase of the Bainford relics, however, he had taken the stimulant in the comparatively harmless form of powdered leaves or ‘bhang,’ as it is termed in the Orient. His acquisition of Julio’s drug-pipe, and an accidental discovery of its mechanism, led him to adopt the compound of hemp and dhatura, prepared for smoking—in India called ‘charas.’ No less an authority than Captain E. N. Windsor, bacteriologist of the Burmese government, states that it is directly responsible for a large percentage of the lunacy of the Orient. Wendell Marsh, however, did not realize his danger, nor how much stronger the latter compound is than the form of the drug to which he had been accustomed.

  “Dr. Dench endeavored desperately to warn him of his peril and free him from the bondage of the habit as the diary records, but the victim was too thoroughly enslaved. In fact, the situation had reached a point just before the final climax when it could no longer be concealed. The truth was already being suspected by the older servants. I assume this was why you feared my investigations in the case, Miss Jansen.”

  Muriel Jansen was staring at Madelyn in a sort of dumb appeal.

  “I can understand and admire Dr. Dench’s efforts to conceal the fact from the public—first, in his supervision of the inquest, which might have stumbled on the truth, and then in his removal of the betraying diary, which I left purposely exposed in the hope that it might inspire such an action. Had it not been removed, I might have suspected another explanation of the case—in spite of certain evidence to the contrary!”

  Dr. Dench’s face had gone white.

  “God! Miss Mack, do you mean that after all it was not suicide?”

  “It was not suicide,” said Madelyn quietly. She stepped across toward the opposite door.

  “When I stated that my knowledge that we are not dealing with natural death was shared by another person in this room, I might have added that it was shared by still a third person—not in the room!”

  With a sudden movement she threw open the door before her. From the adjoining anteroom lurched the figure of Peters, the butler. He stared at us with a face grey with terror, and then crumpled to his knees. Madelyn drew away sharply as he tried to catch her skirts.

  “You may arrest the murderer of Wendell Marsh, Sheriff!” she said gravely. “And I think perhaps you had better take him outside.”

  She faced our bewildered stares as the drawing-room door closed behind Mr. Peddicord and his prisoner. From her stand she again took Raleigh’s sandstone pipe, and with it two sheets of paper, smudged with the prints of a human thumb and fingers.

  “It was the pipe in the end which led me to the truth, not only as to the method but the identity of the assassin,” she explained. “The hand, which placed the fatal charge in the concealed chamber, left its imprint on the surface of the bowl. The fingers, grimed with the dust of the drug, made an impression which I would have at once detected had I not been so occupied with what I might find inside that I forgot what I might find outside! I am very much afraid that I permitted myself the great blunder of the modern detective—lack of thoroughness.

  “Comparison with the fingerpints of the various agents in the case, of course, made the next step a mere detail of mathematical comparison. To make my identity sure, I found that my suspect possessed not only the opportunity and the knowledge for the crime, but the motive.

  “In his younger days Peters was a chemist’s apprentice; a fact which he utilized in his master’s behalf in obtaining the drugs which had become so necessary a part of Mr. Marsh’s life. Had Wendell Marsh appeared in person for so continuous a supply, his identity would soon have made the fact a matter of common gossip. He relied on his servant for his agent, a detail which he mentions several times in his diary, promising Peters a generous bequest in his will as a reward. I fancy that it was the dream of this bequest, which would have meant a small fortune to a man in his position, that set the butler’s brain to work on his treacherous plan of murder.”

  Miss Mack’s dull gold hair covered the shoulders of her white peignoir in a great, thick braid. She was propped in a nest of pillows, with her favorite romance, The Three Musketeers, open at the historic siege of Porthos in the wine cellar. We had elected to spend the night at the Marsh house.

  Madelyn glanced up as I appeared in the doorway of our room.

  “Allow me to present a problem to your analytical skill, Miss Mack,” I said humbly. “Which man does your knowledge of feminine psychology say Muriel Jansen will reward—the gravely protecting physician, or the boyishly admiring Truxton?”

  “If she were thirty,” retorted Madelyn, yawning, “she would be wise enough to choose Dr. Dench. But, as she is only twenty-two, it will be Truxton.”

  With a sigh, she turned again to the swashbuckling exploits of the gallant Porthos.

  ANNA KATHARINE GREEN

  (1846-1935)

  More than three and a half decades after Ebenezer Gryce’s debut in The Leavenworth Case, and almost twenty years after Amelia Butterworth first appeared in That Affair Next Door, the now rich and famous Anna Katharine Green launched yet another detective. In 1915 G. P. Putnam’s Sons published The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange. Strange is a wealthy young New York socialite, about as far away on several spectrums from working-class policeman Gryce as it is possible to imagine, and quite some distance even from Butterworth. Strange appears in ten stories. In the first in the series, “The Golden Slipper,” the head of the agency for which she occasionally works points her out at the theatre to a prospective client. The man is skeptical about her value as a detective, considering her youth and her social status:

  “And do you mean to say—”

  “I do—”

  “That yon silly little chit, whose father I know, whose fortune I know, who is seen everywhere, and who is called one of the season’s belles is an agent of yours; a—a—”

  “No names here, please. You want a mystery solved. It is not a matter for the police—that is, as yet—and so you come to me, and when I ask for the facts, I find that women and only women are involved, and that these women are not only young but one and all of the highest society. Is it a man’s work to go to the bottom of a combination like this? No. Sex against sex, and, if possible, youth against youth. Happily, I know such a person—a girl of gifts and extraordinarily well placed for the purpose. Why she uses her talents in this direction—why, with means enough to play the part natural to her as a successful debutante, she consents to occupy herself with social and other mysteries, you must ask her, not me. Enough that I promise you her aid if you want it. That is, if you can interest her. She will not work otherwise.... That’s all, except this. In no event give away her secret. That’s part of the compact, you remember.”

  ... She was a small, slight woman whose naturally quaint appearance was accentuated by the extreme simplicity of her attire. In the tier upon tier of boxes rising before his eyes, no other personality could vie with hers in strangeness, or in the illusive quality of her ever-changing expression. She was vivacity incarnate and, to the ordinary observer, light as thistle-down in fibre and in feeling. But not to all....

  Not until the series’ final story, “Violet’s Own,” does Green reveal the reason behind Strange’s sneaking around to investigate crimes while keeping such work secret from her social equals. It turns out that long ago her sister was unjustly
disinherited and young Strange is trying to raise money for her education as a musician. Thus she manages to be adventurous and heroic through numerous cases, only to prove in the end to be doing so for acceptably noble and ladylike reasons. Readers learn this only when she ceases investigative work, when she marries and reveals to her husband the origin of her seemingly illicit need for money.

  “The Second Bullet,” the final story in this anthology, is also perhaps the most tragic.

  (For biographical information about Green, see the introduction to That Affair Next Door.)

  THE SECOND BULLET

  “You must see her.”

  “No. No.”

  “She’s a most unhappy woman. Husband and child both taken from her in a moment; and now, all means of living as well, unless some happy thought of yours—some inspiration of your genius—shows us a way of re-establishing her claims to the policy voided by this cry of suicide.”

  But the small wise head of Violet Strange continued its slow shake of decided refusal.

  “I’m sorry,” she protested, “but it’s quite out of my province. I’m too young to meddle with so serious a matter.”

  “Not when you can save a bereaved woman the only possible compensation left her by untoward fate?”

  “Let the police try their hand at that.”

  “They have had no success with the case.”

  “Or you?”

  “Nor I either.”

  “And you expect—”

  “Yes, Miss Strange. I expect you to find the missing bullet which will settle the fact that murder and not suicide ended George Hammond’s life. If you cannot, then a long litigation awaits this poor widow, ending, as such litigation usually does, in favour of the stronger party. There’s the alternative. If you once saw her—”

  “But that’s what I’m not willing to do. If I once saw her I should yield to her importunities and attempt the seemingly impossible. My instincts bid me say no. Give me something easier.”