An Oxford Scandal

Home > Cook books > An Oxford Scandal > Page 21
An Oxford Scandal Page 21

by Norman Russell


  The song came to an end, and the silent servant stopped the machine. Count Savident sang the first two lines of the song in a light tenor voice. His eyes were filled not with tears, but with glee.

  Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,

  Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home!

  Anthony Jardine began to wonder whether he had, as usual, swallowed his food too quickly. That Médoc, too, had been really formidable.

  ‘How true those words are,’ Savident was saying, ‘whether that home be in a North London suburb, a smiling Oxfordshire village, or in the pleasant Oxford suburb of Summertown, home is where the heart is.’

  ‘I say, Savident,’ said Jardine, ‘do you mind if we leave the table? That Médoc—’

  ‘Not at all, not at all,’ said Savident, rising from the table. ‘There was a cheese soufflé to follow, but maybe we’ll sample that later. Come and sit by the fire.’

  He spoke to his servant in some foreign tongue, and the man left the room. In a few moments Jardine heard the front door slam. Had the man gone out without clearing the table? Savident read his thoughts.

  ‘That was Luigi, my chef, going off duty,’ he explained. ‘He’s earned the rest of the night off. Home, sweet home… Would you like a cigar? No, well, I’ll abstain as well.’

  They sat in silence for a while, but it was not a companionable silence. Savident’s eyes were fixed on him, and he fancied that they were full of malevolence. On one side of the fireplace stood a lacquered display cabinet containing a display of jewelled Italian stilettos. The sight of them made Jardine shudder, and he saw Savident had noticed his reaction. Jardine fancied that he heard furtive noises in the room, and there came into his mind the image of a chess board, where an unseen player was about to declare Check Mate.

  Count Raphael Savident rose from his chair, and stood in the half shadow, leaning with one elbow on the mantelpiece. A little clock standing on a bracket struck half past nine. At the same time, the Turkish clock struck seven. Savident, who had evidently been in a sort of reverie, suddenly spoke.

  ‘Do you know, Jardine,’ said Count Savident, ‘that there are people who regard me as little more than a mountebank. All these “immoment toys”, you know.’ He swept the room with a beringed hand. ‘Are you among that number?’

  ‘Decidedly not,’ said Anthony. ‘Good heavens, I was present at your brilliant interpretation of the journey made by Becket to his resting-place in St Gabriel’s. Anyone who had listened to your account would know that you are a man of profound learning.’

  He was surprised that he could speak so steadily, because he was being assailed by a mounting and irrational fear. He tried to stretch out a leg, but found that he could not do so. He was so listless that he could scarcely move.

  ‘I am very pleased and relieved to hear you say so,’ said Savident. ‘Pleased and flattered. I am a learned man. Would you say that I was also an intelligent man? The two things don’t necessarily go together.’

  ‘Decidedly intelligent, my dear Savident.’

  ‘Well, well, I am gratified with your opinion. And it is because I am decidedly intelligent, Jardine, that I have seen through your mask of hurt innocence, your stoic endurance under life’s afflictions – I have seen through all this, I say, and seen you for the murderer that you are!’

  Count Savident sprang from his chair, and all but ran out of the room.

  Anthony sat motionless in his chair beside the fire. What was happening? Was this another cursed dream, fuelled by his damaged brain? He was able to glance around the room, and saw that the Coptic monk was still in his coffin. That, too, had been an hallucination. Savident could not have uttered those ridiculous words about burning the mummy in the furnace.

  Count Savident reappeared from behind the Japanese screen. He was holding a sheet of paper, which he held in from of Jardine’s eyes.

  ‘You recognize the writing, of course?’

  ‘Yes. It’s mine. But—’

  ‘Well,’ said Savident, ‘it’s a passable imitation. And to save you any trouble, I have signed your name to it at the end.’

  Anthony Jardine sat in terrified silence. He had never felt such fear of another human being as he did at that moment.

  ‘Listen to what it says, Jardine,’ said Count Raphael Savident, ‘and when I’ve finished reading, you will realize that the game is up. Your goose, as they say, will be well and truly cooked. It took a man of my intelligence to fathom what type of man you were.’

  Anthony Jardine sat in his chair as though in a trance. The Count’s words seemed to drive out all other thoughts from his memory. In God’s name, what was happening? Was he dreaming? Was this just another part of his dreadful affliction? For Raphael Savident was reading Jardine’s confession.

  TO THE POLICE

  ‘I, Anthony Jardine, can no longer bear the burden of my guilt. I have posted this my confession to Inspector Antrobus at Oxford Police Station. When he reads this document, I will have escaped from the censures of this world.

  ‘My real name is Ralph Fischbein, and in the year 1869, and on the 5 August, I murdered my uncle, Jacob Fischbein. I knew that he had £15,000 in bearer bonds in his desk, and these I took. After a decent interval, I went abroad for a while, and there I forged for myself a new identity under the name Anthony Jardine.’

  Jardine tried to speak, but to his horror found that he was unable to do so. His limbs, too, were incapable of movement. Whatever vile illness was taking possession of his body, it was evidently reaching its climax.

  ‘I was seen committing my uncle’s murder by a girl whom I knew slightly, and not only was I able to frighten her into silence, but I was also successful in wooing her, and duly marrying her. Bonded by mutual love and fear, we were happy together for many years, but in the end, addicted to drugs and increasingly afraid of me, she began to make careless, dangerous statements to her friend, Jean Hillier. And so, on 13 November 1895, inveigling her with a promise of taking her to a new drug supplier, I rode with her on a tramcar late at night. As a sort of disguise, I wore a gabardine rain coat and a trilby hat, things which I would never wear normally.

  ‘To ensure that we were not seen in our usual haunts, we agreed to board a tramcar in Park End Street. It was a wet night, and Dora was shivering. I took her into a public house which had a dispense bar, and ordered two glasses of brandy. I contrived to pour some chloral hydrate into Dora’s glass, so that she was in a stupor soon after we had boarded the tram.

  ‘As we approached the depot in Cowley Road, I stabbed her to death with a steak knife, and left the tram undetected, dropping the knife down a grid. What happened after that is known to the police.’

  Anthony tried to speak, but uttered only a meaningless sound. He thought of Elodie Deschamps, and of his students, and his friends in St Gabriel’s College. Dear God! Had he done these vile deeds unconsciously, during periods of blackout? How had this fiendishly brilliant man found out?

  Savident was still reading the hideous confession.

  ‘But my danger was not over. I confessed to another friend of my youth, Rachel Noble, who had become my lover, but she turned from me in horror, and said that she would tell the police. It was with quite frantic pain and sorrow that I sent her, too, to her Maker. Since then, I have been driven into a frenzy by dreams and hauntings.

  ‘I cannot face the gallows, and am determined to take poison. You will find my body lying in the shadow of the monument in Culpeper Gardens.

  Signed,

  Ralph Fischbein, alias Anthony Jardine.

  16

  Restorations

  ‘However,’ said Count Raphael Savident, ‘your confession will not be sent to the High Street Police Office. On second thoughts, it would be tidier if the police found it among your effects in the study at 7 Culpeper Gardens. After your body is found, I will call
at your house to convey my respects, and ask, for sentiment’s sake, to see your study. I will secrete the confession in your desk.’

  Count Savident laughed.

  ‘I have a hypodermic syringe here, Jardine, with which I will help you to commit suicide. I put something in that Médoc to render you harmless for a while. And when you are dead, my servant Carlos and I will convey your body to Culpeper Gardens in that empty coffin. There is a van waiting to receive you in the back mews.’

  Count Savident stood over his guest, and his face was suddenly convulsed with rage.

  ‘I could sense, from the way you looked at me when we first met, that your wife must have confided her story to you. I came here to Oxford, and established myself in this house, with the set purpose of ridding myself once and for all of a lifetime’s fear. The invitation to view Becket’s bones was a godsend. It gave me time to get rid of both Dora and Rachel, and secure a damning letter that the one had confided to the other. That letter is now burned.’

  Anthony Jardine found that his power of speech was returning.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he whispered. ‘What letter? What secret? You have just confessed to two murders…’

  His sick brain was playing tricks with him again. He fancied that the Coptic monk had taken a few quiet and careful steps out if its coffin. Savident produced a syringe from the pocket of his tail coat.

  ‘Your questions merit no answer,’ he said. ‘I could see that you despised me, and would ridicule me to your friends behind my back, because I am not the kind of stolid, stupid man you choose for your companions. You are my true scapegoat, Jardine, because in that confession I have offloaded all my sins on to you, and later tonight my servant Carlos and I will drive you out to your own particular wilderness. I saved you, my sneering, leering friend, to the last.’

  The Coptic monk was now standing within a foot of the homicidal maniac. Anthony suddenly realized that it was Detective Sergeant Maxwell. In a moment he had snatched the deadly syringe from Savident’s hand. At the same time, PC Morton and two other uniformed constables appeared from behind the screen.

  ‘Ralph Fischbein,’ said Maxwell, ‘alias Count Raphael Savident, we have heard all that you have said tonight, and find that you have condemned yourself out of your own mouth. PC Morton, manacle this man, and take him out to the van.’

  Anthony Jardine’s ravaged system could stand no more. The last sound that he heard before he fainted was Ralph Fischbein’s high mad shriek of baffled rage and despair.

  *

  Outside, in Beaumont Street, a heavy sleety rain was falling. Fischbein, his hands secured in front of him, cut a grotesque figure, a man in evening dress writhing in Sergeant Maxwell’s grip, and shouting incoherently up at the night sky. From the Worcester College end of the long street a tramcar was rumbling over the rails on its way to St Giles’. Maxwell was joined by another constable, and the rear door of the van was pulled open. The tram came nearer, looming out of the mist of rain, and they could see the passengers huddled in the dimly-lit saloon. The driver, clad in oil skins, held the reins firmly as the horses slipped on the wet cobbles, and blinked the rain out of his eyes.

  Maxwell recalled later that the turn into St Giles’ was notoriously prone to accidents, and that on a number of occasions a vehicle had left the rails and crashed into the walls flanking the entrance to the Ashmolean Museum.

  The madman suddenly found a hidden resource of strength and pulled himself away from his captors. Blinded by the rain, and still manacled, he dashed across Beaumont Street and reached the far pavement just as the tramcar, with a protesting shriek of metal and a shower of sparks, left the rails and with a deafening roar smashed itself into the wall of the Ashmolean. The driver had leapt clear at the last moment, and lay dazed on the pavement. The police officers could hear the cries of distress from the passengers in the saloon.

  The horses stood trembling in the rain, still harnessed to the broken and splintered shafts. The tramcar remained upright, and presently the shaken passengers emerged, and stood in a subdued group on the pavement.

  Maxwell and his officers found the remains of Ralph Fischbein, alias Count Raphael Savident lying under the front wheels, where his body had been thrown after the vehicle had first pinned him to the wall. Sergeant Maxwell had an old-fashioned sense of justice. As he looked down at the pool of blood still spreading over the cobbles, he thought: This man was a lunatic, and would have been confined to the Asylum at Headington, or, if tried in London, to Hanwell Insane Asylum. But now, Justice had prevailed, and although he’d cheated the gallows, the innocent blood of his three victims, Jacob Fischbein, Dora Jardine, and Rachel Noble, had been avenged.

  *

  On Sunday morning, which was bright and sunny, Anthony Jardine accompanied the Gorringes to Sung Matins at St Margaret’s Church. The Prayer Book Calendar said that the eighth of December was the Feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but nothing was said about that. If you wanted that sort of thing, you could join the Papists at St Aloysius’.

  Jardine was not a devout man, but on this particular Sunday he felt profoundly thankful for his deliverance from the clutches of Count Raphael Savident. When the choir sang the Benedictus, he gave heed in particular to the words:

  That we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hands of all that hate us.

  Surely it had been the hand of Providence that had saved him from a cruel death at the hands of his wife’s murderer, and had preserved what reputation he had left from further slander? For that man had contrived to let society think that he, Anthony Jardine, had murdered three people, so that he would be buried in disgrace, his good name ruined for all time. He was more than thankful for that deliverance.

  That we being delivered out of the hands of our enemies: might serve him without fear; In holiness and righteousness before him: all the days of our life.

  Yes, he was profoundly grateful, and would strive to be holier than had been his wont. He’d come to Matins more often, and maybe to Evensong occasionally. But righteousness? Professor Gorringe had called him a ‘scamp’, and he could scarcely suppress a smile as he ruefully admitted to himself the truth of this description. He would try hard to amend his life, but it was going to be a very difficult business.

  He lunched with the Gorringes – boiled ham, with Spanish onions and Savoy cabbage – and then they repaired to his own house next door, where he knew that a company of friends had already assembled to greet him.

  They sat in the large front parlour, Inspector Antrobus, as pale as ever, and with a walking stick beside his chair, Sergeant Maxwell in his Sunday best, an even blacker and stiffer version of his everyday dress, standing in what looked like the place of honour in front of the fireplace, and Dr Sophia Jex-Blake, that extraordinary woman physician who had diagnosed his brain tumour, and delivered him from the fear of madness. He and the Gorringes sat on the two brocaded sofas in the deep bay window. No one spoke. All looked at Sergeant Maxwell, who made some business of clearing his throat before addressing his audience.

  ‘I think you should hear, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘what happened at 13 Beaumont Street last night, and how a chance remark of Miss Jex-Blake’s made me realize the truth underlying the murders of Mrs Dora Jardine and Mrs Rachel Noble.’

  ‘A remark of mine, Mr Maxwell? What on earth did I say?’

  ‘You told me that Mr Jardine was due to dine with an old friend, Count Raphael Savident. I’d not heard that name before, but it rang a bell, and I suddenly remembered that I had seen it on the birth certificate of Ralph Fischbein, a man who I knew had murdered his uncle in London in 1869. I had the relevant case folder on the desk in front of me, and there, sure enough, I saw that name. His father’s name was given as Alexander Fischbein, and his mother’s as Mary Fischbein, née Savident.’

  ‘Well done, Joe,’ Inspector Antrobus
muttered.

  ‘Thank you, sir. I seemed to see the whole truth of the matter in a flash. Ralph Fischbein and Count Raphael Savident were one and the same person. “Ralph” would have been too common a name for a man of that type to use – “Raphael” was much more satisfactory. And his mother’s maiden name had a more exotic ring to it than ‘Fischbein’. As for the title, well, I’m not sure about that. I expect he made it up himself.’

  ‘No, Mr Maxwell, it was genuine enough,’ said Jardine. ‘It was awarded to him by the Pope for services to the Vatican. I’ve no idea what those “services” were.’

  ‘I’d no time to lose,’ Maxwell continued. ‘That man had killed old Joseph Fischbein, Mrs Dora Jardine, and Mrs Rachel Noble. I felt it in my bones that he was going to add you, sir, to his collection of victims. I got PC Morton and a couple of other constables together, and late yesterday afternoon we entered the premises of 13 Beaumont Street through the attic of the house next door – with the owner’s permission, of course – and secreted ourselves in Count Savident’s house.’ He turned and bowed to Inspector Antrobus as he added, ‘The Inspector will tell you that we have ways of doing these things, but it wouldn’t be in the public interest to tell all and sundry about it.’

  ‘That confession,’ said Jardine in a tremulous voice, ‘it was so persuasive that I almost believed it myself. Dr Jex-Blake will tell you that I am suffering from a tumour on the brain, and for the last week or two I’ve not been able to distinguish between illusion and reality. He’d got hold of a specimen of my handwriting, which made that particular illusion even more frightening.’

 

‹ Prev