Sisters in Crime

by Mike Ashley

  ‘What one?’ asked Mr Furbush.

  ‘The Great Walden Celebration.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ responded Mr Furbush, not letting the rest of his thought reach the air, running as it did: That was the morning of the More murder.

  ‘And we let one of the boys try his hand at the craft,’ resumed the operator, ‘there being nothing doing, and it was such a lively scene in the street below, narrow as it is. And, as was to be expected from him, the crowd and procession turned into dot and line, and the whole of that part of the building opposite came out as if it had sat for its picture.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Mr Furbush, as, rubbing his finger over his lips, he looked at the sheet on which the central portion of that side of the hotel, with its quaint windows and lintels and ornamentation were most minutely given. It was in that very portion of the house that Miss Agatha More’s room had been situated; nay, so well was it all impressed upon him that Mr Furbush could tell the very window of the room in which she had met her cruel fate. Never was there such a coincidence, to Mr Furbush’s mind, before or since, never such an interposition of Providence. The day that an unknown hand had brought Agatha More to her doom, perhaps the very hour, the sun had made a revelation of that room’s interior upon this sheet of sensitized paper; his Ithuriel’s spear had touched this shapeless darkness and turned it into form and truth. The Walden Celebration had defiled through the street and into the square at a somewhat earlier hour than the supposed hour of the murder, since it was to see the procession from a more advantageous point of view that Mr and Mrs Denbigh had driven out, and while they were gone the terrible action was thought to have been committed. Still the window might have a secret of its own to tell even concerning that.

  Straightway Mr Furbush made a prize of the operator, and procuring, through channels always open to him, the strongest glasses and most accurate instruments, had the one chosen window in the picture magnified and photographed, remagnified and rephotographed, until under their powerful, careful, prolonged and patient labour a speck came into sight that would perhaps well reward them. Mr Furbush strained his eyes over it; to him it was a spot of greater possibilities than the nebula in Orion. This little white unresolved cloud again and again they subjected to the same process, and once more, as if a ghost had made apparition, it opened itself into an outline – into a substance – and they saw the fingers of a hand, a white hand, doubled but pliant, strong and shapely; a left hand, on its third finger wearing rings, one of which seemed at first a mere blot of light but, gradually, as the rest, answering the spell of the camera, showed itself a central stone set with five points, each point consisting of smaller stones. The colour, of course, could not be told; the form was that of a star. Held in the tight, fierce fingers of that clenched hand, between the pointed thumb and waxy knuckles, and one edge visible along the tips deep dinted into the thumb’s side, was grasped an end of a laced handkerchief. Now the handkerchief of Agatha More, the instrument of her destruction, was always carried folded in the shape of its running knot in Mr Furbush’s great wallet: a large, laced, embroidered handkerchief. That this was its photograph he needed but a glance to rest assured. All the rest of the dark deed was hidden beyond the angle of light afforded by the window frame. And whosoever the murderer might be, Mr Furbush said to himself with the pleasantry of the headsman, it was evident that the owner of this picture had a hand in it. And here he paid the photographer for his labours and bade him adieu.

  Mr Furbush was now, however, not much better off than he had been before. He had the hand that did the deed in his possession, to be sure, but to whose body was he to affix that hand and how was he to do it? And in what did it differ from any other hand? In nothing but that fetter which made it his prisoner, that five-pointed star, that blot of light upon the third finger above a wedding-ring. A wedding-ring, that would seem to prove the hand to be a woman’s; the five-pointed glittering ring, that proved the woman to be no pauper. Worn above the wedding-ring it must be its guard and was probably as inseparable as that. To identify that hand, to certify that ring, became the recreation of Mr Furbush’s days and nights, so much to the detriment of all his other business that he fell into sad disrepute thereby at the Bureau. Mr Furbush became all at once a gay man, plunged into the dissipations of fashionable life – he had been there before, on similar necessity, and knew how to carry himself. His costume grew singularly correct; he handled his lorgnette at the opera like a coxcomb of the first milk-and-water; he procured invitations to ball and party and watched every lady who, for the moment, daintily ungloved herself; he was as constant at church as the sexton; he made a part of the beau monde. It was all in vain. And though Mr Furbush carried the photograph in his breast pocket, ready at any moment to descend like the hand of the Inquisition upon its victim, he might as well have carried there a pardon to all concerned for all the good it did him.

  But the world goes round.

  One starlit night Mr Furbush, pursuing some scent of other affairs along the princely avenue with its rows of palaces, took in, as was his wont, with every wink a whole scene to its last details. He saw the beggar on these steps shrink into shadow, the housemaid in that area listening to the beguiling voice of the footman-three-doors-off no longer keeping his distance; he saw, there, the gay scene offered by the bright balcony casement with its rich curtains still unclosed; he saw, yet beyond, the light streaming from between open doors down the shining steps at whose foot the carriage waited while a gentleman at its door hurried, with a pleasant word, the stately woman who came down to enter it beside him. She came down slowly, Mr Furbush noted, moving like a person whom organic difficulty of the heart indisposes to quick exertion; she was one of those whom Mr Furbush called magnificent – great coils of blue-black hair, twisted with diamonds, wreathing her queenly head tiara-wise, her features having the firmness and the pallor of marble, her eyes rivalling the diamonds in their steady splendour. A heavy cloak of ermine wrapped her velvet attire, and she was buttoning a glove as she descended. She paused a moment under the carriage lamp, giving her husband the ungloved hand to help her in. The carriage light flashed upon it, and in that second of its lingering Mr Furbush saw, plainly as he saw the stars above him, on the third finger of that left hand, above the wedding-ring, the circlet with its five-pointed star whose duplicate he carried.

  Mr Furbush was thunderstruck. Here was what he had sought for thrice a twelvemonth, and unexpectedly blundering upon it turned him into stone. When he recovered himself with an emphatic ‘Humph!’ the carriage had rolled away and the doors were closed.

  Mr Furbush was not the man to lose opportunities. The business in hand might go to the dogs; tomorrow would answer as well for that as tonight. For this there was no time like the present. Fortified with an outside subordinate he demanded entrance into the mansion alone, and announcing his intention to await the arrival home of the master and mistress made himself agreeable to the footman and butler in the upper hall until hour after hour pealing forth at last struck midnight as if they tolled a knell. The footman was asleep in his chair, the butler heard the mellifluous murmur of the visitor’s voice by starts with a singing sensation as if his fingers were in his ears and out again momentarily. The wheels grated on the curb below, the horses hammered the pavement, the doors were flung apart and the master and mistress of the house returned from the entertainments they had shared. She was a little paler, a little more magnificent, a little more imposing in her height and dignity than before; there was only one emotion, though, apparent through it all, that she valued her beauty and power only for its influence on the man beside her. Mr Furbush’s keen eye saw the quick heave and restless agitation that the heart kept up beneath the velvets, simply in the moment when her husband touched her hand helping her across the threshold, and saw the whole story of her eye as it rested that instant on his. He would have had the entire case at once – if he had not had it before.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Denbigh,’ said he, approaching them then. ‘Ma
y I beg to see you alone for a few moments on a matter of importance?’

  And in conformity with his request he was conducted through other apartments into a library, a place more secluded than they, a rather sombre room, wainscoted all its lofty height in bookcases and with here and there a glimmering bust. Mr Denbigh himself turned up the gas and closed the door.

  ‘Your business, sir?’ said he then to Mr Furbush.

  ‘My business, sir, is more particularly with Mrs Denbigh, although I desire your presence. I am a member of the police …’

  Mrs Denbigh, who yet stood with her hand laid passively along the back of a chair, slowly grasped the back until the glove that she wore with a quick crack ripped down the length of the finger, and the five-pointed ring protruded its sparkling face like the vicious head of a serpent.

  ‘I am a member of the police,’ continued Mr Furbush, quietly. ‘I have something in my possession which I desire Mrs Denbigh to look at and see if it belongs to her.’ Perhaps the woman breathed again. Whether she did or not he proceeded to open his great leathern wallet on the library table beneath the chandelier.

  Mrs Denbigh moved forward with her slow majesty, dragging her velvets heavily and the cloak dropping from her shoulder.

  Queer subjects, women, thought Mr Furbush. Ah! You had more spring in you once. As handsome a thing as a leopard!

  But in spite of that calm deliberate step Mr Furbush saw her heart fluttering there like a white dove in its nest. She did not speak but waited a moment beside him. ‘Will you be so kind,’ said he, ‘as to remove your glove?’

  She quietly did so. Perhaps wonderingly.

  ‘Excuse me, madam,’ then continued he, lifting her hand as he spoke, doubling its cold fingers over one end of a running knot that a soiled handkerchief made, a laced embroidered handkerchief he had produced, and, powerless in his grasp, he laid hand and all – a white hand, doubled, but pliant, strong and shapely, holding in its fingers, between the pointed thumb and waxy knuckles, the laced handkerchief’s end, just an edge visible along the tips deep dinted into the thumb’s side; and with the five-pointed ring burning its bale-fire above it – laid the hand and all on the table beside the photograph that he spread there.

  ‘Is it yours?’ said he.

  A detective has perhaps no right to any pity, but for a moment Mr Furbush would gladly have never heard of the More murder as he saw in the long, slow rise and fall of the bosom this woman’s heart swing like a pendulum, a noiseless pendulum that ceases to vibrate. Her eyes wavered a moment between him and the table then, as if caught and chained by something that compelled their gaze, glared at and protruded over the sight they saw beneath them. Her own hand – her own executioner. A long shudder shook her from head to foot. Iron nerve gave way, the white lips parted, she threw her head back and gasped; with one wild look towards her husband she turned from him as if she would have fled and fell dead upon the floor.

  ‘Hunt’s up,’ said Mr Furbush to his subordinate, coming out an hour or two later, and the two found some congenial oyster-opener while the chief explained how he had gone to get his wife’s spoons from the maid who had appropriated them and taken service elsewhere. Mr Furbush made a night of it, but never a soul longed for daylight as he did. He had a notion that he had scarcely less than murdered – himself – and good fellow as he must needs be abroad that night, indoors the next day he put his household in sackcloth and ashes.

  You will not find Mr Furbush’s name on the list of detectives now. He has sickened of the business. He says there is too much night-work. He has found a patron now – a wealthy one apparently. He has opened one of the largest and most elegant photographing establishments in the city – he was always fond of chemicals, he says. He has still, in an inner drawer, some singular but fast-fading likenesses of a hand, a clenched, murderous hand – among them not the one Mr Denbigh burned. He has a few secrets appertaining to his profession, which no one else has yet obtained. Meanwhile, it has never been exactly explained how the story of the ring found the light.

  Perhaps it was in order that Mr Furbush might never be convicted of compounding a felony!

  Mary Fortune

  TRACES OF CRIME

  Though the names of Mary E. Braddon and Mrs Henry Wood were well known, that of Mary Fortune was for many years completely unknown, yet she was not only one of the most prolific writers of crime fiction, certainly in the Victorian period, but also one of the first to write a regular series about the work of the police. It is only in recent decades that her life and works have been rediscovered by the writer Lucy Sussex and others. Sussex has compiled a volume of Fortune’s autobiographical writings, The Fortunes of Mary Fortune (1989), which is both revealing and makes us aware how much more there is to learn of this remarkable woman. We’re not even sure of her dates of birth and death, though she probably lived from around 1833 to 1910. She was born Mary Wilson in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where her father was a civil engineer. Her mother may well have died in childbirth or soon after, as young Mary never knew her. She and her father emigrated to Canada, and it was there that Mary married Joseph Fortune in 1851. Believing his daughter settled, the father set off to seek his fortune in Australia. However, Mary and her husband must have separated because, though he lived until 1861 (dying at the age of only thirty-five), Mary and her three-year-old son Georgie had already set off in 1855 to find her father in Australia, somewhere in the goldfields of Victoria. She spent the rest of her life in Australia, for many years in the nomadic world of the gold prospector. Alas, young Georgie died in January 1858, probably as a result of the poor living conditions.

  Mary began to write poems and stories for local newspapers almost as soon as she arrived in Australia, but these all paid poorly. Her most important work appeared in the newly formed Australian Journal from 1865 on. All of these writings were published either anonymously or under the alias Waif Wander, later shortened to WW. Fortune maintained an astonishing output in order to scrape a living. It has been estimated that she wrote close on five hundred stories, many of them crime or mystery and often featuring detectives of the Australian police. Only one volume of her work appeared during her lifetime, The Detective’s Album (1871), selecting seven stories from her long-running series in the Australian Journal, and it was the first book of detective fiction to be published in Australia. An expanded version, edited by Lucy Sussex, was published in Canada in 2003, but is currently not widely available.

  Eventually, encroaching blindness and old age forced Fortune to stop writing in 1909, and she probably died soon afterwards. It was not until the 1950s that the identity behind Waif Wander was discovered and not until the 1980s that the scale of her writing became apparent. Though many of these stories are fairly crudely written, especially the early ones, they are an accurate and directly personal reflection of life in the goldfields of Australia in the 1860s and 1870s. The following is one of her earliest such stories, part of a series ‘Memoirs of an Australian Police Officer’, published in the Australian Journal of 2 December 1865.

  Traces of Crime

  THERE ARE MANY who recollect full well the rush at Chinaman’s Flat. It was in the height of its prosperity that an assault upon a female was committed 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.

  Though 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 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.