The Guilty Abroad

by Peter J. Heck

  “I haven’t changed, sir,” I said. “To tell the truth, I was worried that the man I fought might come after you if I didn’t stop him first. He wasn’t looking for a fair fight, you know.”

  “Nor a clean one, either,” he agreed. “You’re lucky you downed him before he grabbed a broken bottle, or had one of his chums club you with a chair. And I’d probably have gotten bushwhacked if I’d done anything but watch ’em work you over. So I reckon I owe you my thanks again—that’s the second time today. I’d give you a raise, except I already did that.”

  “I won’t be greedy,” I said. Then an idea struck me. “Do you think that man’s sudden belligerence might have had something to do with your asking for Mulligan? Snooping around, as Tony Parkhurst might have put it?”

  “That crossed my mind,” said Mr. Clemens, with a nod. “But that Harry was giving us the evil eye before I ever mentioned Mulligan or McPhee. He was mad at us for being prosperous-looking foreigners, that’s all. He’s no more mixed up in the murder than the Throckmorton brothers.”

  “Good Lord,” I said, remembering McPhee’s old Arkansas cronies. “I certainly hope he hasn’t brought them along with him.”

  “Coals to Newcastle, as they say over here,” said Mr. Clemens. “Not even Ed’s fool enough to pay those bullies’ way across the ocean when he can go to any corner bar in London and find their like. There’s no shortage of illiterate apes ready to do a little rough work, anywhere in the world. If you’re not too picky, you can get a whole crew of ’em for not much more than beer money.”

  “That makes sense,” I agreed. I took a sip of my drink, then said, “I wish the rest of this case made half as much sense. We’ve ended today with twice as many suspects as we began with, and we still haven’t the foggiest notion of how the doctor was killed.”

  “You’re coming at it from the wrong angle, Wentworth,” said Mr. Clemens. He started to take a sip of his drink, then realized that his glass was empty, and made a face. He stood up and went over to the sideboard, where the bottle was sitting, then continued as he poured. “We started off without any idea who might want to kill the man, or what for. Now we’ve got a barge load of suspects, most of ’em with first-rate motives. If that ain’t progress, I don’t know what is.” He put another two fingers of whisky in his glass, then shot me an inquiring look.

  I shook my head, declining the drink, then said, “I’d be far happier if the killer had murdered the doctor in the middle of a railway station, in front of a thousand witnesses. Or almost anyplace else where you and I didn’t have to get mixed up in it. There must be a hundred more convenient places to murder someone.”

  “I doubt the doctor would have considered any of ’em convenient,” said Mr. Clemens. He took a sip of his drink, still standing by the sideboard. “But you’re right, in a way, Wentworth. Whoever did this went to a good bit of trouble. I’d say that’s one of our main clues. This murder took too much planning to pull it off. I reckon that’s why Lestrade has Ed in the clink—the killer obviously had advance knowledge of how things were supposed to go that night, and Lestrade figures Ed must have tipped him off.”

  “In that case, shouldn’t he be trying to find out which of the suspects knew McPhee before the séance?”

  “Hell, it looks like everybody except the victim knew him—or knew Martha, which amounts to the same thing,” said my employer. “You don’t think they got that crowd there by putting an advertisement in the newspapers, do you?”

  “Tony Parkhurst doesn’t seem to have known McPhee,” I pointed out. “And I’d doubt the victim’s partner, Dr. Ashe, did, either—at least, not unless we can find some connection.”

  “Well, we’ll talk to Dr. Ashe,” said Mr. Clemens. “We can fish around for that connection then. But I think it’s more important to talk to the other people in that room—they’re the ones who had the best opportunity to shoot the fellow. And they had the best chance to see or hear whoever did it. I’m especially interested in finding out what Sir Denis DeCoursey has to say.”

  “Why, I would have thought he and his wife were the least likely suspects of all,” I said. I put down my empty glass on the table next to the well-padded armchair I was in. I felt tired enough to fall asleep right where I sat. “Or are you interested in him because he’s reputed to be a sharpshooter?”

  He walked over to an armchair and perched on the arm, holding his drink, before answering. “Reason enough, don’t you think? Tony thought of him right away when he learned he’d been there, and Villiers suggested he might have done it, too—though I doubt he meant it seriously. But I’ve got a better reason to see him. Back in New Orleans, when we had two people killed by poison, we talked to a woman who knew all about herbs and poisons. Now we’ve had somebody shot—why don’t we talk to a firearms expert? Maybe he can tell us how to shoot a gun and keep it from going bang.”

  “You keep coming back to that,” I said, yawning. “But why didn’t he offer some explanation at the time? We were all commenting on how we hadn’t heard the gunshot. You’d think he’d have said something then.”

  “We’ll ask him that,” Mr. Clemens said. “Lestrade’s probably not going to ask it, so we get that job. Luckily, my name opens a few doors—even in England.”

  Another thought crept up from the back of my sleepy mind. “What if Tony Parkhurst’s right, and Sir Denis is the murderer?”

  He muttered something in reply, but I didn’t hear it clearly. In fact, I heard nothing at all until I realized he had his hand on my shoulder and was saying, “Wentworth? Are you awake?”

  “I suppose I am,” I said, blinking at the light. “But I think it’s time for me to take my hot water upstairs and soak my bruises—and try not to fall asleep in the tub. It’s been a long day.”

  “That’s the truth,” said my employer. “And unless I miss my guess, tomorrow will be even longer. Try to get some sleep, and we’ll see what we can do when the sun’s up again.”

  Whether from exhaustion, or the nightcap, or the warm bath, I slept as soundly as I can remember. (Indeed, I did nearly fall asleep in the tub, and had to make a distinct effort to drag myself out of the warm water into the chilly night air.) In any case, when I finally opened my eyes, it was almost nine o’clock. I jumped out of bed—quite aware of my strains and bruises—quickly shaved, threw on my clothes, and rushed downstairs, where I learned that Mr. Clemens had already gone out to use the telephone again. Mrs. Clemens forced me to sit down with a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of American-style coffee (she had brewed a pot herself, the English cook’s attempts at that beverage being undrinkable). I tried to focus my attention on a newspaper while I awaited my employer’s return from his errands.

  As luck would have it, the paper had an article on the investigation of Dr. Parkhurst’s murder, under a headline reading MARK TWAIN WITNESSES A MURDER. While the details of the case were reported fairly accurately, most of the article was given over to Mr. Clemens’s presence at the scene of the crime. Much was made of the person detained for questioning (McPhee) being a previous acquaintance of Mr. Clemens. The writer even ventured to speculate whether, given his recent successes as an amateur detective, the murderer had chosen this occasion to “cock a snook at the famous American,” as the reporter put it. Chief Inspector Lestrade was quoted as being confident of a breakthrough at any minute, although there was no hint of what might have inspired that confidence.

  I was just mulling over the final paragraphs of the article when Mr. Clemens came strolling in, almost as unobtrusively as one of his lecture-stage entrances. “Oh, good, Wentworth, you’re up,” he said. “All your parts seem to be in working order?”

  “As far as I can tell,” I said. “Did you see this article on the murder?”

  “Yes, the usual pack of lies,” he said, waving his hand. “Those vultures don’t have any real news, so they jump on the details they figure might sell some papers. And Lestrade’s playing right along with them. He must figure that making a big deal about me
trying to solve the case will make him look even better when he arrests somebody, and of course the public will eat it up, their Scotland Yard man versus the foreigner. It’s a rare newspaperman who can resist pandering to local prejudice, and when he does, it’s usually because he’s calculated he can boost circulation by pretending to be impartial when the competition ain’t.”

  “Still, you’d think they’d try to get their facts straight,” I said, standing up and tossing the paper onto the table.

  “Well, they did get one thing right,” said Mr. Clemens. “I’m getting more and more annoyed that the murderer decided to shoot that fellow right under my nose. It’s a damned insult, and it’s only made me more determined to find the rat who did it.”

  “Why, we weren’t even invited to the séance until the day before. The murderer could hardly have contrived anything as elaborate as he appears to have done in that short a time, just to spite you.”

  “I reckon you’re right as far as that goes,” said Mr. Clemens. “But here—you haven’t heard my news yet. Sir Denis doesn’t have a phone, but I sent him a telegram and got the answer back in jig time. Take a look.” He handed me a piece of paper, slightly different from the familiar Western Union messages, but recognizably a telegram. I picked it up and read: TODAY SUITS, TAKE NOON TRAIN, WILL MEET YOU AT STATION—DECOURSEY.

  “Today? Noon?” I said, surprised.

  “Sure enough. The old coot doesn’t waste any time,” said Mr. Clemens. “So if you’re all done with breakfast, we’d better get down to work and see how much we can get done before we have to go out to catch the train. Don’t want to keep an English baronet waiting at the station, do we?”

  Somewhat to my surprise, we actually managed to finish a reasonable amount of work before donning our overcoats and calling the carriage around front to take us to Waterloo Station, whence we would take the railroad out to Sir Denis’s country estate in Kent. The train station, like those I knew from my travels in America, was a large building full of bustling crowds and the noise and smell of steam engines.

  But while the trains and tracks were familiar enough in design, it was easy enough to tell that we were not in any American train depot. For one thing, there were hardly any Negroes in sight. The porters, the vendors of snacks and reading material, even the shoeshine boys and the old codger pushing a broom, were all white. In fact, most of those I saw were of very similar type—there were very few of the olive skins that bespeak Mediterranean origins, nor of the sturdy, round-faced Dutch and German stock, nor of the tall Scandinavian blonds one sees in Minnesota—and if there were any Creoles or Indians in the place, they were keeping well hidden. I did see one Scotsman, sporting fiery red whiskers and a plaid tam-o’-shanter, but he was the only exotic specimen in the place.

  And while there was a remarkable diversity of accents and idioms, they were all British—there were none of the gutturals of a native German, none of the extra vowels that an Italian would have added to the ends of words, let alone any of the more esoteric inflections one might hear in a large American city. Still, as odd as the lingo of New Orleans or Minnesota sounded to my New England ears, purebred Cockney or Oxonian drawl sounded more foreign. And there were voices here that I could barely understand—though enough recognizable English words came through to show that they were really speaking the same language as I—at least, in name. I wondered whether the British had as much trouble understanding their neighbors as I did—and, for that matter, whether they could understand me.

  The enormous station was laid out according to some plan that made absolutely no sense to me—unless it were designed to hold a Minotaur. We stopped and asked directions at least three times before finding the right platform for our train, and in the end we barely made it aboard in time. To add to the anxiety, as we pushed through the crowd toward the platform where our train was loading, we were jostled every two or three steps. “Keep a hand on your wallet,” said Mr. Clemens, at my elbow. “A crowd like this is a pickpocket’s delight, and London is the closest thing you’ll find to a Yale College for the dip artists.”

  “Dip artists?” I said, instinctively reaching down to pat the pocket where my wallet resided. “I never heard of such a thing.”

  “It’s what the other criminals call pickpockets,” my employer explained. “Well, at least that’s what they called ’em in America, last time I talked to somebody that knew. They may call ’em something different here—but that don’t mean there’s any shortage of ’em.” He pushed ahead, I followed, and finally we found ourselves at the track where the train to Kent would be leaving. There, the crowds thinned out somewhat. As we stood waiting, a nearby newsboy began his chant, enticing the crowd to buy his papers. His Cockney accent was so thick that it took me several moments to understand what he was saying; but suddenly it became crystal clear: “Murder by a ghost! Read all about the murder by a ghost!”

  Mr. Clemens recognized its significance at the same time I did. “Go get one of those papers, Wentworth,” he said. I fished the change out of my pocket, handed it to the newsboy, and brought the paper (not the Times) back to Mr. Clemens. He scanned the front page rapidly, then sputtered, “I should have known better than to get involved with those scalawags! Look at this hogwash!” He shoved the paper at me, and I dutifully examined the front page.

  The headline read, SPIRITUALISTS VOW TO INVESTIGATE MURDER AT SÉANCE; ACCUSE GHOST OF KILLING DOCTOR. Underneath was a drawing of several men and ladies sitting at a table. Above them was a hand emerging from a dark cloud, firing a pistol at one of the number. One of the sitters bore a distinct resemblance to Mr. Clemens—a bit taller and thinner than my employer, but not in the least unflattering. “Actually, it’s not a bad likeness,” I said, hoping to calm him down.

  “To hell with the likeness, look at the story!” he said, his voice indignant.

  I looked back at the paper. The pertinent sections of the story read:

  Sir Ellington Tichbourne, secretary of the London Spiritualist Society, told our reporter that the Spiritualist Society believe the murder weapon to have been an ectoplasmic pistol extruded by an evil spirit. He further revealed that the Spiritualist Society have plans to convene another sitting to call up the same spirits and confirm this finding . . . Asked whether the spirits had actually fired the deadly shot, Sir Ellington said, “That is what we mean to discover. Scotland Yard are welcome to send representatives to interview the spirits.” He added that a sufficiently powerful medium should be able to prevent a recurrence of the tragedy . . . The American writer Mark Twain, who witnessed the murder, and Inspector G. Lestrade of Scotland Yard, who is leading the police investigation, were not available for comment . . .

  “This is preposterous,” I said, looking back at Mr. Clemens.

  “You have a remarkable gift for understatement, Wentworth,” said my employer, shaking his head. “The damned newspaper never even tried to get my comment, or I’d have told ’em the whole thing was a pack of moonshine.”

  I opened my mouth to reply to this, only to be interrupted by a station attendant announcing the arrival of our train. We joined the rest of the passengers pressing to the front of the platform, and boarded one of the carriages in plenty of time for our departure.

  I had not previously been on an English train, and I was surprised to find that the train was divided into a number of separate compartments, each seating four to six passengers. If an American train car was modeled on an omnibus or streetcar, this arrangement had more in common with a stagecoach. Mr. Clemens and I found an empty compartment, and as luck would have it, when the train left the station shortly after, we two were still the only ones in it. This unexpected privacy was a pleasant change from an open train car, where one could hear and be overheard by passengers several seats away—not to mention having to smell their tobacco or perfume, or other less pleasant aromas. I suppose a bawling infant would have made its voice heard even through the partitions, but we were fortunate enough not to have that supposition pu
t to the test.

  It seemed a good opportunity for me to ask my employer’s opinion on a subject that had been on my mind since our first discovery that Martha McPhee had set up as a medium. Now the newspaper story had brought it back to my attention. Mr. Clemens might not be the ultimate authority on questions of spiritualism, but he unquestionably had strong opinions, and hearing them might help me make up my own mind on this puzzling subject.

  “It’s amazing to think that all this affair came of my chance meeting with Martha McPhee,” I said. “Was that the first séance you had been to?”

  Mr. Clemens turned to peer at me—he had been looking out the train window at the backs of buildings we were passing—and snorted. “Not the first,” he said. “Not the first by a long margin, though it’s probably the first one where anything the least bit interesting happened. And that was the murder, which I don’t think Martha or her ‘spirits’ can take any credit for, despite what that nincompoop said to the newspaper.”

  “I doubt she wants to take credit for that,” I said. “Do you really mean to say that none of the séances you’ve been to were genuine, in your opinion?”

  “I reckon that depends on what you mean by genuine,” Mr. Clemens drawled. “I won’t go so far as to claim that all mediums are deliberate frauds. I couldn’t prove that, even if I believed it. Hell, it’s as plain as the nose on your face that McPhee and his wife were trying to pull the wool over our eyes, but until Lestrade found those trick bellpulls, I couldn’t have told you how they were doing what they did.”

  “That was rather disappointing.” I conceded. “I had a hope that Martha really had found some sort of inner gift, though I suppose I should know better than to place much faith in anything McPhee is involved with.”

  “You’re learning, Wentworth,” said Mr. Clemens, with a wry smile. “If Slippery Ed told me the sun was going to rise in the east tomorrow morning, I’d check with Greenwich Observatory to make sure he didn’t have an eclipse up his sleeve somewhere. So when his wife claimed to be setting up as a medium, I figured it was bogus from the start. Gave me a good bit of satisfaction to find out I was right.”