The Demoniacs

by John Dickson Carr

  “Late or no,” he said, “you shall answer me. You shall answer me if we are here until daybreak.”

  “The most part of it,” Jeffrey replied, “you already know or guess.”

  “But I have not heard it from you.”

  “Not all, it may be.”

  Brogden could be heard speaking in a low voice to someone in the passage below. Otherwise they were alone with memories in the two rooms.

  “Do you mean”—and the magistrate-in-chief’s voice grew incredulous—“you would have let these two people go?” He pointed with the switch. “You were mighty secret and evasive as to your plans. If I had not suspected some such matter afoot, and come with two of my people to see what you were about, do you mean you would have suffered these lawbreakers to escape us? To take coach from here to York, to take ship overseas, and perhaps be lost to just punishment forever?”

  “Under the circumstances, no. I think not.”

  “‘Under the circumstances’? What manner of answer is that?”

  “The truest I can give.”

  The blind face inclined forwards under its big three-cornered hat The switch groped as though finding direction to point at the trap-opening in the floor.

  “Come!” said Justice Fielding. “After there has been so much confession, why should you hesitate? When the woman Cresswell screamed out her true opinion of this doctor-murderer, he did not hesitate to confess. He asked only that the woman should not be blamed. In the main, no doubt, it was hypocrisy—”

  “Hypocrisy, sir?”

  “Can you deny he behaved as Tartuffe might have behaved?”

  “So do all of us, at times. But George Abel, for the most part, is no sham or fraud. His kindliness, his Puritan ways, his lifelong devotion to work among the poor, when he is of good family and need not have troubled—these things are real. His head had been turned until he was half demented.”

  “Well, and does that excuse him? He broke the law. Can you deny the wisdom of the law either?”

  “No,” Jeffrey answered after a pause; “no, I suppose not But neither can I preach sermons when I myself might have done the same thing.”

  “You are not asked to preach sermons or to defend your own conduct. I will determine your punishment. Meanwhile …”

  Justice Fielding pondered for a moment

  “This is a perplexed affair, with many strands now neatly woven. I touch each thread, I feel the pattern, in all of it save what directly concerns Dr. Abel, and his murder of Grace Delight, and his relations with the woman Cresswell.

  “Even here, since I know most of the story, I can guess much. But you shall tell me how you came to suspect him, and step by step how you were persuaded of his guilt From the beginning, was it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well?”

  “On Friday night I had not the least suspicion. We were all in a state of overwrought feelings. Odd circumstances were accumulating, including one I felt to be untrue and one I should have known to be untrue if I had stopped to think. But very often we don’t stop to think of what we already know. On Saturday morning, however, and in your parlour—”

  “Ah! Begin from there.”

  Through the window behind his companion’s head, Jeffrey could see the stretch of river pale with dying moonlight But he did not look at it.

  “On that occasion, Justice Fielding, you spoke to me in this fashion. ‘I would draw your attention,’ you said, ‘to a circumstance in your behaviour which was remarked as suspicious. Why, last night, did you desire to remain for some time along in rooms that contained only a dead body?’

  “Now this desire, to be sure, had contained a hidden motive. I wished to open the chest and test my belief that a miser’s hoard was there. And so I had asked Dr. Abel if he would take Peg into his house on the bridge, which was not far away, and guard her there while I explored the rooms for ten, fifteen, perhaps twenty minutes.

  “But who had informed you of this? And why? I was a thief-taker, confessedly investigating; my request ought to have seemed most natural. Why should anyone—anyone, that is, who did not also, know of hidden money or jewels—consider it suspicious at all?

  “Only Peg and Dr. Abel had heard me request this. It was not Peg who informed you, you said; and, though you are not widely famed for your candour, you will not tell a lie if you can be pinned in a direct answer to a direct question.”

  “You speak of candour?” enquired the magistrate. “Well, I pardon it. Continue.”

  “If Peg had not told you, the answer was plain. It was necessary to wake up wits. It left me remembering and much wondering at certain scenes the night before.

  “I met Dr. Abel in the tap-room at the Grapes Inn. Peg had been there a little while before, enquiring of a tapster the way to Grace Delight’s house. She told the tapster, and told Dr. Abel too, that she was ‘taking refuge’ there because she had nowhere else to go. Dr. Abel strongly advised her to turn back. Though he did not give her what he said were his reasons, he did state them to me. The house, he declared, had a foolish repute for being haunted; and there was report that men had died there of fright.

  “It was the first time I had ever heard such specific report of the place. But I was in a state of mind, at that moment, to accept it; it prepared me when later I found a woman dead apparently without wound. And it was next day that the oddness of this struck me in its full garishness.

  “The first suggestion of death by fright came from Dr. Abel; he implanted it, even though he disavowed belief. Furthermore, if truly he had wished to turn back a girl of just under twenty-one, why had he not told her this? Why had he waited to tell me?

  “Peg and I discovered the body; I had my encounter with Hamnet Tawnish, and presently Tubby Beresford came banging at the door with the military. All this had taken some time. I leaned from the window, shouting that I needed medical counsel; if the old woman had not died of a wound, I said, she had died of fright or the Visitation of God.

  “Only then did Dr. Abel—who had promised to follow me immediately—appear in some haste and suddenness as though he had been waiting. He said Mr. Sterne detained him. A man of less confused mind (myself, when this occurred) might have wondered why he had followed at all or what service he thought he could perform there.

  “He was struck all of a heap when he saw the blood-spots from Hamnet Tawnish’s skewered wrist, and blurted out, ‘Whose blood is that?’ I asked him to precede me up those ladder-like Stairs. Though encumbered by lanthorn, cane, box of instruments and phials, he did this with an agility which showed he could also have climbed without difficulty up ladder-like beams to an outside window. At the top of the stairs he blundered badly, if in fact he knew nothing of what had passed.

  “Grace Delight had been his patient; by his own statement, he had visited the house before. A doctor, hearing only that his patient is dead and not asking where she is, will expect to find her in the bedroom. Dr. Abel did not do this. He walked straight towards that chest on which you are sitting now, as though he would seek her on the floor there. I was obliged to turn him and guide him to the bedchamber.

  “He is a poor play-actor, in short; his conscience is forever at him; he was as overwrought as Peg or myself. But these were minor indications compared with what he said when he had examined the woman’s body. Justice Fielding, if you have ever been of the Army and seen active service in the field—”

  Jeffrey, who had been flinging out the words as he paced, stopped abruptly.

  “Sir, I ask your pardon! I had forgot—”

  “Tush!” John Fielding retorted with lofty composure. “You pay me a compliment by forgetting my blindness. Nor are you so wide of the mark as you imagine. I have been stone-blind only since I was eighteen years old; my father was a general; I might have seen service, though in fact I did not. What was it Dr. Abel said?”

  “He said that persons who die by violence, as from a sudden stab-wound, may have their faces contorted and their limbs rigid as Grace Deligh
t’s were.”

  “Well? That is true, surely?”

  “Of course it is true. What we call the rigor of death, which ordinarily will occur only some time afterwards, may seize a man at the moment of death from the shock of bayonet or bullet.”

  “Then wherein did this doctor tell lies?”

  “Because he declared, sir, that these were also the symptoms of one who has died of fright without any wound. And I knew they were not”

  “How?”

  “Once, to my shamed sickness, I was obliged to witness a military execution. The condemned man fell and died before any firelock had been discharged. His limbs and features were limp, not rigid at all.”

  “You knew this, my good Jeffrey, yet you did not suspect Dr. Abel might be telling lies?”

  “No, I did not think it until next day. For I had deluded myself; I had imagined there might still be life in the old woman, and attempted to revive her.”

  “Was this good sense? If you had been open with me on Saturday morning …”

  The hour was very late, as a fray to the tempers of tired men. Jeffrey stopped pacing and looked at him.

  “Come,” struck in John Fielding, before he could answer, “there needs not this tetchiness! But I overlook it. The end of such a case will make a great noise; I must be able to tell people, surely, how I divined the truth?”

  “By God, sir, this at least is frankness! Very well; I am your man.”

  “Continue, then. You became suspicious of Dr. Abel. Quite without authority you borrowed two constables for purposes of your own. You went to London Bridge with intent yourself to steal jewels; and you found them. Well?”

  “Clearly the old woman had died by some physical violence. Dr. Abel would be in the best possible position to conceal the facts by reporting her death to the parish authorities as caused by accidental fright. In that event, as already I had told Peg, there would be no coroner’s quest and no opening of the body. And that is what he did. On the other hand, if he had lulled her, how had he done it? I myself could swear there seemed no wound. And what was his motive?”

  “Motive?” Up went the blind man’s eyebrows. “The jewels; what else? As I could have told you, and later did tell you, there was widespread rumour of such a hoard. Since the woman was his patient, he might well have learned this.”

  “So he might,” Jeffrey agreed, “but why had he not taken them or made no attempt to take them? It was a pressing thing; in two days’ time he would be compelled to leave his home on London Bridge. Was it possible he did not know where the jewels were? I could not have told, without the knowledge of where to look. Grace Delight had trusted in that chest, disdaining lock’s and curtaining only front windows so that nobody might espy her.

  “As for motive, there was a further consideration. A devoted physician, who has worked long among poor people for slender return—’no quack,’ as more persons than the landlord at the Grapes Inn will testify—would seem to be acting entirely out of character, unless he had some overpowering reason not yet revealed to us.

  “Therefore I sent him a note, asking him to meet me at the Rainbow Tavern in Fleet Street If he were a guilty man, he would be sure to come. There I told him a long story, with which you are now familiar …”

  Vilifying me?”

  “In part. It was all true.”

  “And sent him to St. James’s Square? Why? Because you had found some link between Dr. Abel and the woman Cresswell?”

  “No. I am no reader of minds or possessor of Dr. Dee’s black stone. I did not desire him to go to St. James’s Square, and was astonished when he agreed.

  “The tale I recounted, though it was true and gave me opportunity to set my thoughts in order, was in the main for conveying two pieces of information without seeming to convey them. First: that the youthful Grace Delight’s husband had been a cabinet-maker, as indication he might find treasure-trove in the only item of furniture capable of concealing it Second: that I had stumbled on an unexpected source of wealth and would shortly have my hands on it.

  “If he were innocent and this meant nothing to him, no harm was done. If he were guilty, he would try to anticipate me and would walk into a trap. Deering and Lampkin waited across the street at the King’s Head: Lampkin to follow me into the waxwork, Deering to follow Dr. Abel wherever he went.

  “Whereupon Dr. Abel’s conduct at the Rainbow roused fresh speculation. He was much agitated, and kept striking his fist on the table. For some reason he seemed eager to visit Sir Mortimer Ralston’s. Though what I proposed would have horrified the Royal College of Physicians, he agreed almost too quickly after his first demur. I might be making too much of this; Dr. Abel liked Peg and was genuinely concerned for her welfare—”

  “Or so you fancied?”

  “Well, I thought so; I still think so. But there might be more. Kitty was to meet me at the waxwork with information which she said would help Peg, and could do so only if it concerned Mrs. Cresswell. I need not dwell on the circumstance that certain verses of London Bridge Is Falling Down, played and sung as I stood before the figure of a wax woman with limbs as rigid as a dead woman’s, suggested how Dr. Abel could have killed Grace Delight. But I must dwell briefly on the fact that Major Skelly tried to kill me as well as find and seize Kitty Wilkes.

  “There was more here, much more, than my notion that Hamnet Tawnish might well be Lavinia Cresswell’s husband. Questioning of Kitty Wilkes, at the Hummums, eventually disclosed it. It was bigamy, another man in her life before she had been wed to Hamnet Tawnish. The Pamela-like Kitty would not confess slyness by admitting that as Mrs. Cresswell’s maid she had read a second set of marriage-lines writ on parchment.

  “Marriage with whom? Kitty did quote a whispered conversation between Lavinia Cresswell and Hamnet Tawnish. ‘Would you have fared better if you had remained with him?’ sneers Mr. Tawnish. “Would your lot have been more enviable with the cupper?’”

  “The cupper!”

  “In the vernacular, sir, we sometimes use this term for a physician or a surgeon as we also call him ‘leech.’ It is derived from the same practice: blood-letting. The cupping glass is applied to inflamed skin; by suction it draws out blood through small punctures previously made with a lancet

  “They are accustomed to employ this practice at the Hummuns. Indeed, while I was questioning Kitty, there stood beside her tea-service a small sneaker of punch in size and shape exactly like a cupping-glass. The practice, also—”

  “My good young man,” Justice Fielding interrupted with some hauteur, “I am acquainted with the practice, and also with the fact that two and two make four. You need not insist upon it Proceed with matters more relevant.”

  “It was relevant enough to provide the link between Lavinia Cresswell and George Abel. However, I could not pursue it at once. Brogden arrived with news of Peg’s escape from Newgate and your demand that I must find her immediately or she could expect no mercy.”

  “Could I have done otherwise?”

  “Well—”

  “You know I could not Yet one aspect of the events at Ranelagh is not clear. If the woman Cresswell sent Major Skelly for a second attempt on your life, how could she (or he either) have known you would be there?”

  “I much doubt she did. She will not speak as to this or anything else; yet I think he was sent there to find Peg and turn her back to the law. A note to Kitty Wilkes, sent by Peg from Newgate, called for the despatch of any clothes Kitty might choose provided these should include a vizard-mask, an evening-gown of fine quality, and a dark cloak. This note was carelessly left by Kitty in Peg’s room. When news of Peg’s escape arrived in St. James’s Square, the good Lavinia could use her wits as well as another regarding where to look for the errant one. It must have been so, I warrant, else Major Skelly would not have arrived at Ranelagh before me. Yet he was not greatly concerned with Peg; he was concerned to have reckoning with me in case I should appear. What happened could not be called pleasant.

  “Sti
ll, it was Mrs. Cresswell’s last fling of malice against Peg. This lady could concern herself with no more, she had time for no more. This became evident when Peg and I hurried back from Ranelagh at midnight on Saturday.

  “She had fled from St. James’s Square. Though we did not learn at once she had gone for good, I found the drawer of her dressing-table empty. Evidence of her marriage to Hamnet Tawnish had disappeared. So had what I hoped to find as evidence of her marriage to George Abel. There should be a record of this at Doctors’ Commons, where all marriages must be recorded. Meanwhile, what was to be discovered?

  “Much, fortunately.

  “Dr. Abel was still there; circumstances had trapped him into staying. Having called ostensibly to see Sir Mortimer, he could not—and would not—refuse his aid when Sir Mortimer fell down in a fit on receiving that same news of Peg’s escape from Newgate. Afterwards he was still detained; Dr. Hunter, an old friend who thought highly of him, arrived and would not let him go.

  “He and Mrs. Cresswell had pretended not to be acquainted. You quoted him as saying he had exchanged only the briefest word with her when she asked him to attend Sir Mortimer. And that was a flat lie.

  “On the contrary, he had talked for some time with her in her room. If I found no evidence of marriage, I did find evidence of a conference.”

  “You refer,” interposed John Fielding, “to those marks or prints writ in spilled rice-powder on the top of her dressing-table?”

  “I do.”

  “And you interpreted them how?”

  “Once we learned from Hughes of Mrs. Cresswell’s flight, they told the rest of the story.”

  “Stay a moment, Jeffrey!” Sharpness, decision, had returned to Justice Fielding’s manner. “Before we are come to the end, we must hark back to the beginning. We must consider Dr. Abel’s entire conduct and the details of precisely how he encompassed a brutal murder.”

  “These details, sir, are already known to you from the substance of his own confession!”