by Mike Ashley
It was not a faith that either of the two men wished to shatter, and they let her go. It would be daylight presently and the road through the mountains to the Chesapeake was open.
Randolph came back to the fireside after he had helped her into the saddle, and sat down. He tapped on the hearth for some time idly with the iron poker; and then finally he spoke.
“This is the strangest thing that ever happened,” he said. “Here’s a mad old preacher who thinks that he killed Doomdorf with fire from Heaven, like Elijah the Tishbite; and here is a simple child of a woman who thinks she killed him with a piece of magic of the Middle Ages – each as innocent of his death as I am. And, yet, by the eternal, the beast is dead!”
He drummed on the hearth with the poker, lifting it up and letting it drop through the hollow of his fingers.
“Somebody shot Doomdorf. But who? And how did he get into and out of that shut-up room? The assassin that killed Doomdorf must have gotten into the room to kill him. Now, how did he get in?” He spoke as to himself; but my uncle sitting across the hearth replied:
“Through the window.”
“Through the window!” echoed Randolph. “Why, man, you yourself showed me that the window had not been opened, and the precipice below it a fly could hardly climb. Do you tell me now that the window was opened?”
“No,” said Abner, “it was never opened.”
Randolph got on his feet.
“Abner,” he cried, “are you saying that the one who killed Doomdorf climbed the sheer wall and got in through a closed window, without disturbing the dust or the cobwebs on the window frame?”
My uncle looked Randolph in the face.
“The murderer of Doomdorf did even more,” he said. “That assassin not only climbed the face of that precipice and got in through the closed window, but he shot Doomdorf to death and got out again through the closed window without leaving a single track or trace behind, and without disturbing a grain of dust or a thread of a cobweb.”
Randolph swore a great oath.
“The thing is impossible!” he cried. “Men are not killed today in Virginia by black art or a curse of God.”
“By black art, no,” replied Abner; “but by the curse of God, yes. I think they are.”
Randolph drove his clenched right hand into the palm of his left.
“By the eternal!” he cried. “I would like to see the assassin who could do a murder like this, whether he be an imp from the pit or an angel out of Heaven.”
“Very well,” replied Abner, undisturbed. “When he comes back tomorrow I will show you the assassin who killed Doomdorf.”
When day broke they dug a grave and buried the dead man against the mountain among his peach trees. It was noon when that work was ended. Abner threw down his spade and looked up at the sun.
“Randolph,” he said, “let us go and lay an ambush for this assassin. He is on the way here.”
And it was a strange ambush that he laid. When they were come again into the chamber where Doomdorf died he bolted the door; then he loaded the fowling piece and put it carefully back on its rack against the wall. After that he did another curious thing: He took the blood-stained coat, which they had stripped off the dead man when they had prepared his body for the earth, put a pillow in it and laid it on the couch precisely where Doomdorf had slept. And while he did these things Randolph stood in wonder and Abner talked:
“Look you, Randolph . . . We will trick the murderer . . . We will catch him in the act.”
Then he went over and took the puzzled justice by the arm.
“Watch!” he said. “The assassin is coming along the wall!”
But Randolph heard nothing, saw nothing. Only the sun entered. Abner’s hand tightened on his arm.
“It is here! Look!” And he pointed to the wall.
Randolph, following the extended finger, saw a tiny brilliant disk of light moving slowly up the wall toward the lock of the fowling piece. Abner’s hand became a vise and his voice rang as over metal.
“‘He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword.’ It is the water bottle, full of Doomdorf’s liquid, focusing the sun . . . And look, Randolph, how Bronson’s prayer was answered!”
The tiny disk of light traveled on the plate of the lock.
“It is fire from heaven!”
The words rang above the roar of the fowling piece, and Randolph saw the dead man’s coat leap up on the couch, riddled by the shot. The gun, in its natural position on the rack, pointed to the couch standing at the end of the chamber, beyond the offset of the wall, and the focused sun had exploded the percussion cap.
Randolph made a great gesture, with his arm extended.
“It is a world,” he said, “filled with the mysterious joinder of accident!”
“It is a world,” replied Abner, “filled with the mysterious justice of God!”
MURDER IN THE RUE ROYALE
Michael Harrison
Michael Harrison (1907–1991) was a writer in a variety of fields, but his passion was for mystery fiction, and particularly the world of Sherlock Holmes. He was regarded as one of the foremost Holmesian scholars.
The son of a lawyer and nephew of an architect, Michael sought to follow in his uncle’s footsteps and studied architecture, but turned to writing and journalism when his first novel, Weep for Lycidas (1934), proved a success. Over the next fifty years he wrote over fifty books under his own name and several pseudonyms. Perhaps his most popular was his attempt at an autobiography by Holmes, called I, Sherlock Holmes (1977).
Harrison did not confine his research to the world of Holmes, but also explored Holmes’s fictional predecessor, August Dupin, created by Edgar Allan Poe. He wrote a series of stories in the late 1960s for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. A selection were published in America as The Exploits of Chevalier Dupin (1968), and then expanded for British publication as Murder in the Rue Royale (1972), and it is the title story which is reprinted here.
Harrison’s Dupin reflects perhaps rather more of Holmes than the Poe original, but the stories are fascinating in themselves and provide us with an opportunity to revisit the world of the first ever fictional detective.
The murder of Monsieur Cuvillier-Millot, the eminent banker, in his bedroom in the Rue Royale, caused what the newspapers are always pleased to call “a profound sensation.” Even in a capital city which, as our friend G— would assure you, has the oldest and most efficient police in the world, crimes are still numerous, and murders not unknown.
Yet the bizarre character of this particular crime gave it, as it were, a permanence in the public consciousness which prevented its passing out of the public memory within the traditional period of nine days. All murder is, to a greater or lesser degree, a problem for those who are not killed; but this murder of Monsieur Cuvillier-Millot posed problems over and above those customarily inseparable from the violent taking of another’s life.
For instance, how, in this case, did the murderer make his escape, from a window on the second floor, literally within seconds of his having fired the one shot which killed the well-known banker? Moreover, how had the assassin made his escape with such miraculous speed that those who forced open the door of the bedroom never caught a glimpse of him?
There were other puzzling features, of course, but these two questions were universally held to be the crucial ones compared with which all others were trifling. One might almost have dismissed the idea that there had been a murderer at all, save that there was a very real corpse in evidence, lying in Monsieur Cuvillier-Millot’s four-poster bed, and that the bullet-wound in the back of the corpse’s neck could hardly have been self-inflicted. (Were it even possible to suppose that, where then was the pistol which the deceased must have fired in the act of felo-de-se?)
The more one reflected upon the many puzzling features of this extraordinary crime, the more puzzling it appeared. The police, though promising a “speedy arrest,” within twenty-four hours, as is usual in all
cases where the murderer – or, at least, a promising suspect – is not safely lodged in the Dépôt de la Préfecture de Police, were obviously baffled. They could scarcely hunt for a suspect among the known burglars of Paris – nothing had been taken from the bedroom of Monsieur Cuvillier-Millot; and though it might have been argued that the thief (supposing the assassin to have been a thief) had been scared off before he had time to rob the banker, surely he had time to snatch up the valuables in plain sight – diamond ring, Bréguet watch and guard, diamond scarf-pin, and a liberally-stuffed pocketbook – which were lying on a dressing-table near the bed.
Then, as to motive, the only person – apart from a hypothetical burglar – who could conceivably have had an interest in the death of the banker was his nephew and presumed heir, who lived with Monsieur Cuvillier-Millot and who, indeed, had played a leading part in the events immediately preceding the discovery of his uncle’s dead body. The deceased banker, a widower whose only son had been killed in the Algerian fighting, had sent to London for his sole nephew, the son of a Cuvillier-Millot who had fled to England during the Terror of ’93, and, save for fleeting visits to his far wealthier brother in Paris, had never returned to the land of his birth. Gaspard Cuvillier-Millot, heir to the immense fortune of his murdered uncle, had attended one of those English schools which, removing to France after the Reformation, had returned to England more than two centuries later because of the troubles into which the Revolution of 1789 had plunged France.
Following a few terms at Oxford, young Monsieur Gaspard accepted a clerkship in the renowned banking-house of Herries, Farquhar & Co., of St. James’s Street, London – a move not uncalculated, one felt, to bring him to the sympathetic notice of his prosperous Parisian uncle. In the London banking-house, whose circular and transferable exchange-notes have made it famous and influential throughout Europe, Monsieur Gaspard served with diligence, until the death of his cousin in a skirmish at Tlemcen brought him to Paris, to take the place of that son whom the banker had lost in military action.
So much of the history of this fortunate young man we owed to G—, the Prefect of the Parisian Police, who called on us just after breakfast two days after the murder which had set all Paris by the ears. Now, on this sunless Spring morning of the year 183–, G— sat in our little back library, or book-closet, au troisième, No. 33, Rue Dunôt, Faubourg St. Germain, sipped at his hot chocolate, and gave, generally, the impression of a man at his wits’ end.
“When a banker is murdered,” said G—, harshly peremptory in tone, as he always was when baffled and filled with anxiety for his reputation and his lucrative appointment under Government, “it involves a good deal more than merely his family. The repercussions on the Bourses of all the capitals of Europe – well, you understand me perfectly, I am sure, my dear Chevalier?”
“Yes, yes, I understand well,” replied Dupin, stifling a yawn, for we had sat up late the night before. “Monsieur Cuvillier-Millot had just floated a loan for Brazil of eight million gold francs, another for New Granada of two million, another for Turkey of twenty million, and was about to raise one for Spain of thirty millions, to provide the Iberian Peninsula with a railroad system. Yes, I read the newspapers, too.”
“You will know, then,” said G—, in no wise abashed by my friend’s curt manner, “that we are also too near to the social unrest of 1830 and 1832 not to feel alarmed when something – anything – casts doubt upon the stability of the régime under which we live. Two French Revolutions in less than fifty years are enough – but there are always Radical newspapers and irresponsible demagogues to raise the cry of corruption whenever something happens in the world of banking.”
“I am well aware of this,” said Dupin, reaching out for the heavy pewter tobacco-jar in which he kept his favorite Latakia. “As I am well aware,” he added, beginning to fill his meerschaum pipe, “that you have come to ask my assistance in this matter because your own methods have not produced the hoped-for results. Very well, then: tell me what your own methods have yielded thus far.”
“Very little, I am afraid,” said G— candidly. “We have ascertained the cause of death – that goes without saying – ”
“Indeed!” observed Dupin, though with a strong hint of sarcasm in his intonation. He puffed furiously at his pipe, so that it was almost as if from within a cloud that we heard his voice ask, with a deceptive mildness, “And what, pray, was the cause of Monsieur Cuvillier-Millot’s death?”
“Why, it was in all the newspapers – ”
“I am not concerned with what the newspapers print, or with what I read in their columns. I am asking you. What was the cause of the banker’s death?”
“Why, a pistol-shot fired into the base of the skull.”
“You have recovered the ball?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Well now, Dupin, why should we have probed for the ball? It was evident beyond doubt what had killed the banker.”
“You mean, by that remark, that the usual sequelæ of a pistol-shot were present – powder-burns around the wound, blackening of the skin around the point of entry of the ball, and so on?”
“Precisely,” replied G—, with a little grimace of self-satisfaction and self-congratulation.
“There has been no post-mortem examination of the cadaver?”
“Que diable, Dupin! Of course not. Where the cause of death is so self-evident, why on earth should we offend both the living and the dead by anatomizing the corpse? I tell you, the man died of a bullet-wound in the top of his spinal column, immediately under the cerebellum – here!” And suiting the action to the word, G— bent his head forward and placed the index finger of his right hand on the spot indicated, a half-inch or so above the upper edge of his tall, starched neckcloth. “In such a place, a bullet-wound is, as you well know, inevitably fatal.”
“In such a confoundedly difficult place against which to place the muzzle of a pistol, common justice would hardly deny the assassin the reward of a fatal assault. But tell me, my dear G—, what was the eminent victim doing all this time that the assassin was getting behind him? Was the shot in the back of the neck accidentally aimed there? Was the wound the result of a ricochet? Or – stay!! – was the victim perhaps asleep at the time?”
“No,” said G—, with a vigorous shake of his head, “that is impossible. It was the noise of voices raised in some altercation which brought the members of the household – I should say, rather, the other members of the household – hurrying toward the door of Monsieur Cuvillier-Millot’s bedroom – only, of course, to find it locked, so that the door had to be forced. It was while they were standing outside, debating what to do, that the fatal shot was heard. The door was then attacked vigorously by a couple of footmen – well-built farmer lads from Normandy – and broken open. Their master was lying on his bed – a corpse – and the assassin was nowhere to be seen.”
“And the window, you say, was open?”
“With the dimity curtains blowing in – the heavy drapes had been pulled back. On entering the room of death, some hurried to see what might be done for the victim, others ran to the window. But, scan the surrounding courtyards and streets as they would, they saw no sign of anyone who might have escaped from the bedroom, after having murdered their master. And that, Dupin, is what makes the whole affair so very mysterious.”
“What, precisely, makes this affair so very mysterious? Are you referring to the fact that, on looking through an open window, no one was seen? I find that possibly the least mysterious fact of all. Now,” as he saw that G— was about to protest, “let us consider this matter of the fatal shot, as you call it – ”
“As I call it!”
“As you call it. Whatever you and your colleagues may have surmised, it is still to be proven that the fatal shot was heard – or, rather that what was heard was the fatal shot.”
“But a shot was heard. We have a dozen witnesses to depose to that fact.”
“Possibly. Po
ssibly not. A dozen witnesses may be as wrong as one. Suppose now that you tell me what it was these twelve witnesses claim to have heard?”
“Well, let us begin somewhat farther back. I shall briefly mention that it is Monsieur Gaspard’s custom to rise earlier than the time at which his uncle stirs, so that he may be downstairs at his desk a few minutes before the bank opens for business at 8:30 A.M. He does not – at least customarily – look in on his uncle, who is called by his valet at half-past seven, with a tray of chocolate and rolls and a morning newspaper.
“However, as Monsieur Gaspard walked along the corridor on his way to the bathroom – yes, there is a modern bathroom, fitted with all the latest conveniences, even to a patent English contrivance for heating water by gas – on his way to this bathroom, I say, of which he takes good advantage judging by his fastidious appearance, Monsieur Gaspard passed the door of his uncle’s bedroom. The door, though of solid mahogany, is not particularly thick, and sounds within the room may be heard by anyone in the corridor. Monsieur Gaspard tells me that he has often heard his uncle’s snores as he passed the door.
“Now – to-day is Thursday, so that all this would have happened on Tuesday last – on Tuesday, then, something much out of the ordinary occurred. Monsieur Gaspard rose – I forgot to tell you that no servant calls him; he is awakened by a small alarum-clock which stands on his bed-side table – Monsieur Gaspard rose as usual, donned his robe de chambre, went out into the corridor, and walked along in the direction of the bathroom.”
“All precisely as usual?”
“All precisely as usual. But – certainly not as usual – were the sounds coming through the door of his uncle’s bedroom – sounds of angry voices, of reproaches, of threats, of I don’t-know-what. Monsieur Gaspard stopped at once; he has a natural delicacy in such matters, and hardly relished the thought of listening at his uncle’s door – ”
“Or of being detected in the act of doing so? No matter. Pray proceed with your narrative, which I find most interesting.”
