In the Shadow of Agatha Christie

by Leslie S. Klinger

  “There is no account of the murder at Bath in that paper?” Mr. Davis, who had finished taking his notes, and was preparing to go, stopped short, and asked,—

  “Has there been a murder at Bath? No! I have not seen anything of it—who was murdered?”

  “Oh! it was a shocking, terrible murder!” said Mr. Higgins, not raising his look from the fire, but gazing on with his eyes dilated till the whites were seen all round them. “A terrible, terrible murder! I wonder what will become of the murderer? I can fancy the red glowing centre of that fire—look and see how infinitely distant it seems, and how the distance magnifies it into something awful and unquenchable.”

  “My dear sir, you are feverish; how you shake and shiver!” said Mr. Davis, thinking privately that his companion had symptoms of fever, and that he was wandering in his mind.

  “Oh, no!” said Mr. Higgins. “I am not feverish. It is the night which is so cold.” And for a time he talked with Mr. Davis about the article in the Gentleman’s Magazine, for he was rather a reader himself, and could take more interest in Mr. Davis’s pursuits than most of the people at Barford. At length it drew near to ten, and Mr. Davis rose up to go home to his lodgings.

  “No, Davis, don’t go. I want you here. We will have a bottle of port together, and that will put Saunders into good humour. I want to tell you about this murder,” he continued, dropping his voice, and speaking hoarse and low. “She was an old woman, and he killed her, sitting reading her Bible by her own fireside!” He looked at Mr. Davis with a strange searching gaze, as if trying to find some sympathy in the horror which the idea presented to him.

  “Who do you mean, my dear sir? What is this murder you are so full of? No one has been murdered here.”

  “No, you fool! I tell you it was in Bath!” said Mr. Higgins, with sudden passion; and then calming himself to most velvet-smoothness of manner, he laid his hand on Mr. Davis’s knee, there, as they sat by the fire, and gently detaining him, began the narration of the crime he was so full of; but his voice and manner were constrained to a stony quietude: he never looked in Mr. Davis’s face; once or twice, as Mr. Davis remembered afterwards, his grip tightened like a compressing vice.

  “She lived in a small house in a quiet old-fashioned street, she and her maid. People said she was a good old woman; but for all that, she hoarded and hoarded, and never gave to the poor. Mr. Davis, it is wicked not to give to the poor—wicked—wicked, is it not? I always give to the poor, for once I read in the Bible that ‘Charity covereth a multitude of sins.’ The wicked old woman never gave, but hoarded her money, and saved, and saved. Some one heard of it; I say she threw temptation in his way, and God will punish her for it. And this man—or it might be a woman, who knows?—and this person—heard also that she went to church in the mornings, and her maid in the afternoons; and so, while the maid was at church, and the street and the house quite still, and the darkness of a winter afternoon coming on, she was nodding over the Bible—and that, mark you! is a sin, and one that God will avenge sooner or later,—and a step came in the dusk up the stair, and that person I told you of stood in the room. At first he—no! At first, it is supposed—for, you understand, all this is mere guess-work—it is supposed that he asked her civilly enough to give him her money, or to tell him where it was; but the old miser defied him, and would not ask for mercy and give up her keys, even when he threatened her, but looked him in the face as if he had been a baby.—Oh, God! Mr. Davis, I once dreamt when I was a little innocent boy that I should commit a crime like this, and I wakened up crying; and my mother comforted me—that is the reason I tremble so now—that and the cold, for it is very very cold!”

  “But did he murder the old lady?” asked Mr. Davis. “I beg your pardon, sir, but I am interested by your story.”

  “Yes! He cut her throat; and there she lies yet in her quiet little parlour, with her face upturned and all ghastly white, in the middle of a pool of blood. Mr. Davis, this wine is no better than water; I must have some brandy!”

  Mr. Davis was horror-struck by the story, which seemed to have fascinated him as much as it had done his companion.

  “Have they got any clue to the murderer?” said he. Mr. Higgins drank down half a tumbler of raw brandy before he answered.

  “No! No clue whatever. They will never be able to discover him; and I should not wonder, Mr. Davis—I should not wonder if he repented after all, and did bitter penance for his crime; and if so—will there be mercy for him at the last day?”

  “God knows!” said Mr. Davis, with solemnity. “It is an awful story,” continued he, rousing himself; “I hardly like to leave this warm light room and go out into the darkness after hearing it. But it must be done”—buttoning on his greatcoat—“I can only say I hope and trust they will find out the murderer and hang him. If you’ll take my advice, Mr. Higgins, you’ll have your bed warmed, and drink a treacle posset just the last thing; and, if you’ll allow me, I’ll send you my answer to Philologus before it goes up to old Urban.”††

  The next morning, Mr. Davis went to call on Miss Pratt, who was not very well; and, by way of being agreeable and entertaining, he related to her all he had heard the night before about the murder at Bath; and really he made a very pretty connected story out of it, and interested Miss Pratt very much in the fate of the old lady—partly because of a similarity in their situations; for she also privately hoarded money, and had but one servant, and stopped at home alone on Sunday afternoons to allow her servant to go to church.

  “And when did all this happen?” she asked.

  “I don’t know if Mr. Higgins named the day; and yet I think it must have been on this very last Sunday.”

  “And to-day is Wednesday. Ill news travels fast.”

  “Yes, Mr. Higgins thought it might have been in the London newspaper.”

  “That it could never be. Where did Mr. Higgins learn all about it?”

  “I don’t know; I did not ask. I think he only came home yesterday: he had been south to collect his rents, somebody said.”

  Miss Pratt grunted. She used to vent her dislike and suspicions of Mr. Higgins in a grunt whenever his name was mentioned.

  “Well, I shan’t see you for some days. Godfred Merton has asked me to go and stay with him and his sister; and I think it will do me good. Besides,” added she, “these winter evenings—and these murderers at large in the country—I don’t quite like living with only Peggy to call to in case of need.”

  Miss Pratt went to stay with her cousin, Mr. Merton. He was an active magistrate, and enjoyed his reputation as such. One day he came in, having just received his letters.

  “Bad account of the morals of your little town here, Jessy!” said he, touching one of his letters. “You’ve either a murderer among you, or some friend of a murderer. Here’s a poor old lady at Bath had her throat cut last Sunday week; and I’ve a letter from the Home Office, asking to lend them my “very efficient aid,” as they are pleased to call it, towards finding out the culprit. It seems he must have been thirsty, and of a comfortable jolly turn; for before going to his horrid work he tapped a barrel of ginger wine the old lady had set by to work; and he wrapped the spigot round with a piece of a letter taken out of his pocket, as may be supposed; and this piece of a letter was found afterwards; there are only these letters on the outside, “ns, Esq., -arford, -egworth,” which some one has ingeniously made out to mean Barford, near Kegworth. On the other side there is some allusion to a race-horse, I conjecture, though the name is singular enough—Church-and-King-and-down-with-the-Rump.”

  Miss Pratt caught at this name immediately; it had hurt her feelings as a Dissenter only a few months ago, and she remembered it well.

  “Mr. Nat Hearn has, or had (as I am speaking in the witness-box, as it were, I must take care of my tenses), a horse with that ridiculous name.”

  “Mr. Nat Hearn,” repeated Mr. Merton, making a note of the intelligence; then he recurred to his letter from the Home Office again.

&n
bsp; “There is also a piece of a small key, broken in the futile attempt to open a desk—well, well. Nothing more of consequence. The letter is what we must rely upon.”

  “Mr. Davis said that Mr. Higgins told him—” Miss Pratt began.

  “Higgins!” exclaimed Mr. Merton, “ns. Is it Higgins, the blustering fellow that ran away with Nat Hearn’s sister?”

  “Yes!” said Miss Pratt. “But though he has never been a favourite of mine—”

  “ns,” repeated Mr. Merton. “It is too horrible to think of; a member of the hunt—kind old Squire Hearn’s son-in-law! Who else have you in Barford with names that end in ns?”

  “There’s Jackson, and Higginson, and Blenkinsop, and Davis, and Jones. Cousin! One thing strikes me—how did Mr. Higgins know all about it to tell Mr. Davis on Tuesday what had happened on Sunday afternoon?”

  There is no need to add much more. Those curious in lives of the highwayman may find the name of Higgins as conspicuous among those annals as that of Claude Duval. Kate Hearn’s husband collected his rents on the highway, like many another gentleman of the day; but, having been unlucky in one or two of his adventures, and hearing exaggerated accounts of the hoarded wealth of the old lady at Bath, he was led on from robbery to murder, and was hung for his crime at Derby, in 1775.

  He had not been an unkind husband; and his poor wife took lodgings in Derby to be near him in his last moments—his awful last moments. Her old father went with her everywhere but into her husband’s cell; and wrung her heart by constantly accusing himself of having promoted her marriage with a man of whom he knew so little. He abdicated his squireship in favour of his son Nathaniel. Nat was prosperous, and the helpless silly father could be of no use to him; but to his widowed daughter the foolish fond old man was all in all; her knight, her protector, her companion, her most faithful loving companion. Only he ever declined assuming the office of her counsellor; shaking his head sadly, and saying,

  “Ah! Kate, Kate! if I had had more wisdom to have advised thee better, thou need’st not have been an exile here in Brussels, shrinking from the sight of every English person as if they knew thy story.”

  I saw the White House not a month ago; it was to let, perhaps for the twentieth time since Mr. Higgins occupied it; but still the tradition goes in Barford that once upon a time a highwayman lived there, and amassed untold treasures; and that the ill-gotten wealth yet remains walled up in some unknown concealed chamber; but in what part of the house no one knows.

  Will any of you become tenants, and try to find out this mysterious closet? I can furnish the exact address to any applicant who wishes for it.

  * Uncomfortably small and crowded.

  † Thick and viscous.

  ‡ This means “either a huntsman or nothing.”

  § This refers to the length of a rider’s legs, the lower part of the rider’s body.

  ¶ That is, the capture of the fox in the fox hunt.

  # Vulgarly comic.

  ** Comical members of the Town Watch in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

  †† “Philologus” was the pseudonym of an occasional correspondent to the Gentleman’s Magazine. Sylvanus Urban was the magazine editor.

  Mary Helena Fortune (1833–1910) is sadly overlooked. An Australian, Fortune wrote more crime/detective fiction than any other women in the nineteenth century (over 500 stories) and was the first to write detective fiction specifically. Her first collection of short stories, The Detective’s Album (1871), precedes Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Case by seven years. Her lack of fame is probably attributable to the anonymity which applied to all of her work. The following story, featuring an official police detective, first appeared in The Australian Journal for December 2, 1865, and, typically, her authorship was uncredited.

  TRACES OF CRIME

  MARY FORTUNE

  There are many who recollect full well the rush at Chinaman’s Flat. It was in the height of its prosperity that an assault was committed upon a female of a character so diabolical in itself, as to have aroused the utmost anxiety in the public as well as in the police, to punish the perpetrator thereof.

  The case was placed in my hands, and as it presented difficulties so great as to appear to an ordinary observer almost insurmountable, the overcoming of which was likely to gain approbation in the proper quarter, I gladly accepted the task.

  I had little to go upon at first. One dark night, in a tent in the very centre of a crowded thoroughfare, a female had been preparing to retire to rest, her husband being in the habit of remaining at the public-house until a late hour, when a man with a crape mask who—must have gained an earlier entrance—seized her, and in the prosecution of a criminal offence, had injured and abused the unfortunate woman so much that her life was despaired of. Although there was a light burning at the time, the woman was barely able to describe his general appearance; he appeared to her like a German, had no whiskers, fair hair, was low in stature, and stoutly built.

  With one important exception, that was all the information she was able to give me on the subject. The exception, however, was a good deal to a detective, and I hoped might prove an invaluable aid to me. During the struggle she had torn the arm of the flannel shirt he wore, and was under a decided impression that upon the upper part of the criminal’s arm there was a small anchor and heart tattooed.

  Now, I was well aware that in this colony to find a man with a tattooed arm was an everyday affair, especially on the diggings, where, I dare say, there is scarcely a person with who has not come in contact more than once or twice with half a dozen men tattooed in the style I speak of—the anchor or heart, or both, being a favourite figure with those gentlemen who are in favour of branding. However, the clue was worth something, and even without its aid, not more than a couple of weeks had elapsed when, with the assistance of the local police, I had traced a man bearing in appearance a general resemblance to the man who had committed the offence, to a digging about seven miles from Chinaman’s Flat.

  It is unnecessary that I should relate every particular as to how my suspicions were directed to this man, who did not live on Chinaman’s Flat, and to all appearances, had not left the diggings where he was camped since he first commenced working there. I say to all appearances, for it was with a certain knowledge that he had been absent from his tent on the night of the outrage that I one evening trudged down the flat where his tent was pitched, with my swag on my back, and sat down on a log not far from where he had kindled a fire for culinary or other purposes.

  These diggings I will call McAdam’s. It was a large and flourishing goldfield, and on the flat where my man was camped there were several other tents grouped, so that it was nothing singular that I should look about for a couple of bushes, between which I might swing my little bit of canvas for the night.

  After I had fastened up the rope, and thrown my tent over it in regular digger fashion, I broke down some bushes to form my bed, and having spread thereon my blankets, went up to my man—whom I shall in future call “Bill”—to request permission to boil my billy* on his fire.

  It was willingly granted, and so I lighted my pipe and sat down to await the boiling of the water, determined if I could so manage it to get this suspected man to accept me as a mate before I lay down that night.

  Bill was also engaged in smoking, and had not, of course, the slightest suspicion that in the rough, ordinary looking digger before him he was contemplating the “make-up” of a Victorian detective, who had already made himself slightly talked of among his comrades by one or two clever captures.

  “Where did you come from, mate?” inquired Bill, as he puffed away leisurely at a cutty.†

  “From Burnt Creek,” I replied, “and a long enough road it is in such d— hot weather as this.”

  “Nothing doing at Burnt Creek?”

  “Not a thing—the place is cooked.”

  “Are you in for a try here, then?” he asked, rather eagerly I thought.

  “Well, I th
ink so; is there any chance do you think?”

  “Have you got a miner’s right?” was his sudden question.

  “I have,” said I taking it out of my pocket, and handing the bit of parchment for his inspection.

  “Are you a hatter?”‡ inquired Bill, as he returned the document.

  “I am,” was my reply.

  “Well, if you have no objections then, I don’t mind going mates with you—I’ve got a pretty fair prospect, and the ground’s going to run rather deep for one man, I think.”

  “All right.”

  So here was the very thing I wanted, settled without the slightest trouble.

  My object in wishing to go mates with this fellow will, I dare say, readily be perceived. I did not wish to risk my character for cuteness by arresting my gentleman, without being sure that he was branded in the way described by the woman, and besides, in the close supervision which I should be able to keep over him while working together daily, heaven knows what might transpire as additional evidence against him, at least so I reasoned with myself; and it was with a partially relieved mind that I made my frugal supper, and made believe to turn in, fatigued, as I might be supposed to be, after my long tramp.

  But I didn’t turn in, not I. I had other objects in view, if one may be said to have an object in view on one of the darkest nights of a moonless week—for dark enough the night in question became, even before I had finished my supper, and made my apparent preparations for bed.

  We were not camped far enough from the business part of the rush to be very quiet, there was plenty of noise—the nightly noise of a rich gold-field—came down our way, and even in some of the tents close to us, card-playing, and drinking, and singing, and laughing, were going on; so it was quite easy for me to steal unnoticed to the back of Bill’s little tent, and, by the assistance of a small slit made in the calico by my knife, have a look at what my worthy was doing inside, for I was anxious to become acquainted with his habits, and, of course, determined to watch him as closely as ever I could.