Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries

by Martin Edwards

  ‘Paradou’s statue, no doubt,’ observed Gale. ‘No wonder they threw things at it.’

  ‘I think not,’ replied the doctor, in the same hard voice. ‘It wasn’t because it was Paradou’s statue, but because it was Boyg’s statue. It was the same business as the museum and the medallion. No, there’s been something like a French Revolution here on the subject; the French are like that. You remember the riot in the Breton village where Renan was born, against having a statue of him. You know, I suppose, that Boyg was a Norwegian by birth, and only settled here because the geological formation, and the supposed mineral properties of that stream there, offered the best field for his investigations. Well, besides the fits the parsons were in at his theories in general, it seems he bumped into some barbarous local superstition as well; about it being a sacred stream that froze snakes into ammonites at a wink; a common myth, of course, for the same was told about St. Hilda at Whitby. But there are peculiar conditions that made it pretty hot in this place. The theological students fight with the medical students, one for Rome and the other for Reason; and they say there’s a sort of raving lunatic of a Peter the Hermit, who lives in that hermitage on the hill over there, and every now and then comes out waving his arms and setting the place on fire.’

  ‘I heard something about that,’ remarked Armitage. ‘The priest who showed me over the monastery; I think he was the head man there—anyhow, he was a most learned and eloquent gentleman—told me about a holy man on the hill who was almost canonized already.’

  ‘One is tempted to wish he were martyred already; but the martyrdom, if any, was not his,’ said Garth darkly. ‘Allow me to continue my story in order. I had crossed the market-place to find Professor Boyg’s private house, which stood at the corner of it. I found the shutters up and the house apparently empty, except for one old servant, who refused at first to tell me anything; indeed, I found a good deal of rustic reluctance on both sides to tell a foreigner anything. But when I had managed to make the nature of my introduction quite plain to him, he finally broke down; and told me his master was dead.’

  There was a pause, and then Gale, who seemed for the first time somewhat impressed, asked abstractedly:

  ‘Where is his tomb? Your tale is really rather strange and dramatic, and obviously it must go on to his tomb. Your pilgrimage ought to end in finding a magnificent monument of marble and gold, like the tomb of Napoleon, and then finding that even the grave had been desecrated.’

  ‘He has no tomb,’ replied Garth sternly, ‘though he will have many monuments. I hope to see the day when he will have a statue in every town, he whose statue is now insulted in his own town. But he will have no tomb.’

  ‘And why not?’ asked the staring Armitage.

  ‘His body cannot be found,’ answered the doctor; ‘no trace of him can be found anywhere.’

  ‘Then how do you know he is dead?’ asked the other.

  There was an instant of silence, and then the doctor spoke out in a voice fuller and stronger than before:

  ‘Why, as to that,’ he said, ‘I think he is dead because I am sure he is murdered.’

  Armitage shut his note book, but continued to look down steadily at the table. ‘Go on with your story,’ he said.

  ‘Boyg’s old servant,’ resumed the doctor, ‘who is a queer, silent, yellow-faced old card, was at last induced to tell me of the existence of Boyg’s assistant, of whom I think he was rather jealous. The Professor’s scientific helper and right-hand man is a man of the name of Bertrand, and a very able man, too, eminently worthy of the great man’s confidence, and intensely devoted to his cause. He is carrying on Boyg’s work so far as it can be carried on; and about Boyg’s death or disappearance he knows the little that can be known. It was when I finally ran him to earth in a little house full of Boyg’s books and instruments, at the bottom of the hill just beyond the town, that I first began to realize the nature of this sinister and mysterious business. Bertrand is a quiet man, though he has a little of the pardonable vanity which is not uncommon in assistants. One would sometimes fancy the great discovery was almost as much his as his master’s; but that does no harm, since it only makes him fight for his master’s fame almost as if it were his. But in fact he is not only concerned about the discovery; or rather, he is not only concerned about that discovery. I had not looked for long at the dark bright eyes and keen face of that quiet young man before I realized that there was something else that he is trying to discover. As a matter of fact, he is no longer merely a scientific assistant, or even a scientific student. Unless I am much mistaken, he is playing the part of an amateur detective.

  ‘Your artistic training, my friends, may be an excellent thing for discovering a poet, or even a sculptor; but you will forgive me for thinking a scientific training rather better for discovering a murderer. Bertrand has gone to work in a very workmanlike way, I consider, and I can tell you in outline what he has discovered so far. Boyg was last seen by Bertrand descending the hillside by the water-course, having just come away from the studio of Gale’s friend the sculptor, where he was sitting for an hour every morning. I may say here, rather for the sake of logical method than because it is needed by the logical argument, that the sculptor at any rate had no quarrel with Boyg, but was, on the contrary, an ardent admirer of him as an advanced and revolutionary character.’

  ‘I know,’ said Gale, seeming to take his head suddenly out of the clouds. ‘Paradou says realistic art must be founded on the modern energy of science; but the fallacy of that—’

  ‘Let me finish with the facts first before you retire into your theories,’ said the doctor firmly. ‘Bertrand saw Boyg sit down on the bare hillside for a smoke; and you can see from here how bare a hillside it is; a man walking for hours on it would still be as visible as a fly crawling on a ceiling. Bertrand says he was called away to the crisis of an experiment in the laboratory; when he looked again he could not see his master, and he has never seen him from that day to this.

  ‘At the foot of the hill, and at the bottom of the flight of steps which runs up to the hermitage, is the entrance to the great monastic buildings on the very edge of the town. The very first thing you come to on that side is the great quadrangle, which is enclosed by cloisters, and by the rooms or cells of the clerical or semi-clerical students. I need not trouble you with the tale of the political compromise by which this part of the institution has remained clerical, while the scientific and other schools beyond it are now entirely secular. But it is important to fix in your mind the fact itself: that the monastic part is on the very edge of the town, and the other part bars its way, so to speak, to the inside of the town. Boyg could not possibly have gone past that secular barrier, dead or alive, without being under the eyes of crowds who were more excited about him than about anything else in the world. For the whole place was in a fuss, and even a riot for him as well as against him. Something happened to him on the hillside, or anyhow before he came to the internal barrier. My friend the amateur detective set to work to examine the hillside, or all of it that could seriously count; an enormous undertaking, but he did it as if with a microscope. Well, he found that rocky field, when examined closely, very much what it looks even from here. There are no caves or even holes, there are no chasms or even cracks in that surface of blank stone for miles and miles. A rat could not be hidden in those few tufts of prickly pear. He could not find a hiding-place; but for all that, he found a hint. The hint was nothing more than a faded scrap of paper, damp and draggled from the shallow bed of the brook, but faintly decipherable on it were words in the writing of the Master. They were but part of a sentence, but they included the words, “will call on you tomorrow to tell you something you ought to know.”

  ‘My friend Bertrand sat down and thought it out. The letter had been in the water, so it had not been thrown away in the town, for the highly scientific reason that the river does not flow uphill. There only remained on the higher groun
d the sculptor’s studio and the hermitage. But Boyg would not write to the sculptor to warn him that he was going to call, since he went to his studio every morning. Presumably the person he was going to call on was the hermit; and a guess might well be made about the nature of what he had to say. Bertrand knew better than anybody that Boyg had just brought his great discovery to a crushing completeness, with fresh facts and ratifications; and it seems likely enough that he went to announce it to his most fanatical opponent, to warn him to give up the struggle.’

  Gale, who was gazing up into the sky with his eye on a bird, again abruptly intervened.

  ‘In these attacks on Boyg,’ he said, ‘were there any attacks on his private character?’

  ‘Even these madmen couldn’t attack that,’ replied Garth with some heat. ‘He was the best sort of Scandinavian, as simple as a child, and I really believe as innocent. But they hated him for all that; and you can see for yourself that their hatred begins to appear on the horizon of our inquiry. He went to tell the truth in the hour of triumph; and he never reappeared to the light of the sun.’

  Armitage’s far-away gaze was fixed on the solitary cell half-way up the hill. ‘You don’t mean seriously,’ he said, ‘that the man they talk about as a saint, the friend of my friend the abbot, or whatever he is, is neither more nor less than an assassin?’

  ‘You talked to your friend the abbot about Romanesque sculpture,’ replied Garth. ‘If you had talked to him about fossils, you might have seen another side to his character. These Latin priests are often polished enough, but you bet they’re pointed as well. As for the other man on the hill, he’s allowed by his superiors to live what they call the eremitical life; but he’s jolly well allowed to do other things, too. On great occasions he’s allowed to come down here and preach, and I can tell you there is Bedlam let loose when he does. I might be ready to excuse the man as a sort of a maniac; but I haven’t the slightest difficulty in believing that he is a homicidal maniac.’

  ‘Did your friend Bertrand take any legal steps on his suspicions?’ asked Armitage, after a pause.

  ‘Ah, that’s where the mystery begins,’ replied the doctor.

  After a moment of frowning silence, he resumed. ‘Yes, he did make a formal charge to the police, and the Juge d’Instruction examined a good many people and so on, and said the charge had broken down. It broke down over the difficulty of disposing of the body; the chief difficulty in most murders. Now the hermit, who is called Hyacinth, I believe, was summoned in due course; but he had no difficulty in showing that his hermitage was as bare and as hard as the hill-side. It seemed as if nobody could possibly have concealed a corpse in those stone walls, or dug a grave in that rocky floor. Then it was the turn of the abbot, as you call him, Father Bernard of the Catholic College. And he managed to convince the magistrate that the same was true of the cells surrounding the college quadrangle, and all the other rooms under his control. They were all like empty boxes, with barely a stick or two of furniture; less than usual, in fact, for some of the sticks had been broken up for the bonfire demonstration I told you of. Anyhow, that was the line of defence, and I dare say it was well conducted, for Bernard is a very able man, and knows about many other things besides Romanesque architecture; and Hyacinth, fanatic as he is, is famous as a persuasive orator. Anyhow, it was successful, the case broke down; but I am sure my friend Bertrand is only biding his time, and means to bring it up again. These difficulties about the concealment of a corpse—Hullo! why here he is in person.’

  He broke off in surprise as a young man walking rapidly down the street paused a moment, and then approached the café table at which they sat. He was dressed with all the funereal French respectability: his black stove-pipe hat, his high and stiff black neck-cloth resembling a stock, and the curious corners of dark beard at the edges of his chin, gave him an antiquated air like a character out of Gaboriau. But if he was out of Gaboriau, he was nobody less than Lecocq; the dark eyes in his pale face might indeed be called the eyes of a born detective. At this moment, the pale face was paler than usual with excitement, and as he stopped a moment behind the doctor’s chair, he said to him in a low voice:

  ‘I have found out.’

  Dr Garth sprang to his feet, his eyes brilliant with curiosity; then, recovering his conventional manner, he presented M. Bertrand to his friends, saying to the former, ‘You may speak freely with us, I think; we have no interest except an interest in the truth.’

  ‘I have found the truth,’ said the Frenchman, with compressed lips. ‘I know now what these murderous monks have done with the body of Boyg.’

  ‘Are we to be allowed to hear it?’ asked Armitage gravely.

  ‘Everyone will hear it in three days’ time,’ replied the pale Frenchman. ‘As the authorities refuse to reopen the question, we are holding a public meeting in the market-place to demand that they do so. The assassins will be there, doubtless, and I shall not only denounce but convict them to their faces. Be there yourself, monsieur, on Thursday at half-past two, and you will learn how one of the world’s greatest men was done to death by his enemies. For the moment I will only say one word. As the great Edgar Poe said in your own language, “Truth is not always in a well.” I believe it is sometimes too obvious to be seen.’

  Gabriel Gale, who had rather the appearance of having gone to sleep, seemed to rouse himself with an unusual animation.

  ‘That’s true,’ he said, ‘and that’s the truth about the whole business.’

  Armitage turned to him with an expression of quiet amusement.

  ‘Surely you’re not playing the detective, Gale,’ he said. ‘I never pictured such a thing as your coming out of fairyland to assist Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Perhaps Gale thinks he can find the body,’ suggested Dr Garth laughing.

  Gale lifted himself slowly and loosely from his seat, and answered in his dazed fashion:

  ‘Why, yes, in a way,’ he said; ‘in fact, I’m pretty sure I can find the body. In fact, in a manner of speaking, I’ve found it.’

  ***

  Those with any intimations of the personality of Mr Arthur Armitage will not need to be told that he kept a diary; and endeavoured to note down his impressions of foreign travel with atmospheric sympathy and the mot juste. But the pen dropped from his hand, so to speak, or at least wandered over the page in a mazy desperation, in the attempt to describe the great mob meeting, or rather the meeting of two mobs, which took place in the picturesque market-place in which he had wandered alone a few days before, criticising the style of the statue, or admiring the sky-line of the basilica. He had read and written about democracy all his life; and when first he met it, it swallowed him like an earthquake. One actual and appalling difference divided this French mob in a provincial market from all the English mobs he had ever seen in Hyde Park or Trafalgar Square. These Frenchmen had not come there to get rid of their feelings, but to get rid of their enemies. Something would be done as a result of this sort of public meeting; it might be murder, but it would be something.

  And although, or rather because, it had this militant ferocity, it had also a sort of military discipline. The clusters of men voluntarily deployed into cordons, and in some rough fashion followed the command of leaders. Father Bernard was there, with a face of bronze, like the mask of a Roman emperor, eagerly obeyed by his crowd of crusading devotees, and beside him the wild preacher, Hyacinth, who looked himself like a dead man brought out of the grave, with a face built out of bones, and cavernous eye-sockets deep and dark enough to hide the eyes. On the other side were the grim pallor of Bertrand and the rat-like activity of the red-haired Dr Garth; their own anti-clerical mob was roaring behind them, and their eyes were alight with triumph. Before Armitage could collect himself sufficiently to make proper notes of any of these things, Bertrand had sprung upon a chair placed near the pedestal of the statue, and announced almost without words, by one dramatic gesture, that he had
come to avenge the dead.

  Then the words came, and they came thick and fast, telling and terrible; but Armitage heard them as in a dream till they reached the point for which he was waiting; the point that would awaken any dreamer. He heard the prose poems of laudation, the hymn to Boyg the hero, the tale of his tragedy so far as he knew it already. He heard the official decision about the impossibility of the clerics concealing the corpse, as he had heard it already. And then he and the whole crowd leapt together at something they did not know before; or rather, as in all such riddles, something they did know and did not understand.

  ‘They plead that their cells are bare and their lives simple,’ Bertrand was saying, ‘and it is true that these slaves of superstition are cut off from the natural joys of men. But they have their joys; oh, believe me, they have their festivities. If they cannot rejoice in love, they can rejoice in hatred. And everybody seems to have forgotten that on the very day the Master vanished, the theological students in their own quadrangle burnt him in effigy. In effigy.’

  A thrill that was hardly a whisper, but was wilder than a cry, went through the whole crowd; and men had taken in the whole meaning before they could keep pace with the words that followed.

  ‘Did they burn Bruno in effigy? Did they burn Dolet in effigy?’ Bertrand was saying, with a white, fanatical face. ‘Those martyrs of the truth were burned alive for the good of their Church and for the glory of their God. Oh, yes, progress has improved them; and they did not burn Boyg alive. But they burned him dead; and that is how they obliterated the traces of the way they had done him to death. I have said that truth is not always hidden in a well, but rather high on a tower. And while I have searched every crevice and cactus bush for the bones of my master, it was in truth in public, under the open sky, before a roaring crowd in the quadrangle, that his body vanished from the sight of men.’