Capital Crimes: London Mysteries Read online

  ‘There are one hundred pounds there,’ said he, ‘and I promise you that it will not take you an hour. I have a cab ready at the door.’

  Douglas Stone glanced at his watch. An hour would not make it too late to visit Lady Sannox. He had been there later. And the fee was an extraordinarily high one. He had been pressed by his creditors lately, and he could not afford to let such a chance pass. He would go.

  ‘What is the case?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, it is so sad a one! So sad a one! You have not, perhaps, heard of the daggers of the Almohades?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Ah, they are Eastern daggers of a great age, and of a singular shape, with the hilt like what you call a stirrup. I am a curiosity dealer, you understand, and that is why I have come to England from Smyrna, but next week I go back once more. Many things I brought with me, and I have few things left, but among them, to my sorrow, is one of these daggers.’

  ‘You will remember that I have an appointment, sir,’ said the surgeon, with some irritation. ‘Pray confine yourself to the necessary details.’

  ‘You will see that it is necessary. To-day my wife fell down in a faint in the room in which I keep my wares, and she cut her lower lip upon this cursed dagger of Almohades.’

  ‘I see,’ said Douglas Stone, rising. ‘And you wish me to dress the wound?’

  ‘No, no, it is worse than that.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘These daggers are poisoned.’

  ‘Poisoned!’

  ‘Yes, and there is no man, East or West, who can tell now what is the poison or what the cure. But all that is known I know, for my father was in this trade before me, and we have had much to do with these poisoned weapons.’

  ‘What are the symptoms?’

  ‘Deep sleep, and death in thirty hours.’

  ‘And you say there is no cure. Why then should you pay me this considerable fee?’

  ‘No drug can cure, but the knife may.’

  ‘And how?’

  ‘The poison is slow of absorption. It remains for hours in the wound.’

  ‘Washing, then, might cleanse it?’

  ‘No more than in a snake bite. It is too subtle and too deadly.’

  ‘Excision of the wound, then?’

  ‘That is it. If it be on the finger, take the finger off. So said my father always. But think of where this wound is, and that it is my wife. It is dreadful!’

  But familiarity with such grim matters may take the finer edge from a man’s sympathy. To Douglas Stone this was already an interesting case, and he brushed aside as irrelevant the feeble objections of the husband.

  ‘It appears to be that or nothing,’ said he, brusquely. ‘It is better to lose a lip than a life.’

  ‘Ah, yes, I know that you are right. Well, well, it is kismet, and it must be faced. I have the cab, and you will come with me and do this thing.’

  Douglas Stone took his case of bistourie from a drawer, and placed it with a roll of bandage and a compress of lint in his pocket. He must waste no more time if he were to see Lady Sannox.

  ‘I am ready,’ said he, pulling on his overcoat. ‘Will you take a glass of wine before you go out into this cold air?’

  His visitor shrunk away, with a protesting hand upraised.

  ‘You forget that I am a Mussulman, and a true follower of the Prophet,’ said he. ‘But tell me what is the bottle of green glass which you have placed in your pocket?’

  ‘It is chloroform.’

  ‘Ah, that also is forbidden to us. It is a spirit, and we make no use of such things.’

  ‘What! You would allow your wife to go through an operation without an anæsthetic?’

  ‘Ah! she will feel nothing, poor soul. The deep sleep has already come on, which is the first working of the poison. And then I have given her of our Smyrna opium. Come, sir, for already an hour has passed.’

  As they stepped out into the darkness, a sheet of rain was driven in upon their faces, and the hall lamp, which dangled from the arm of a marble Caryatid, went out with a fluff. Pim, the butler, pushed the heavy door to, straining hard with his shoulder against the wind, while the two men groped their way towards the yellow glare which showed where the cab was waiting. An instant later they were rattling upon their journey.

  ‘Is it far?’ asked Douglas Stone.

  ‘Oh, no. We have a very little quiet place off the Euston Road.’

  The surgeon pressed the spring of his repeater and listened to the little tings which told him the hour. It was a quarter past nine. He calculated the distances, and the short time which it would take him to perform so trivial an operation. He ought to reach Lady Sannox by ten o’clock. Through the fogged windows he saw the blurred gas lamps dancing past, with occasionally the broader glare of a shop front. The rain was pelting and rattling upon the leathern top of the carriage, and the wheels swashed as they rolled through puddle and mud. Opposite to him the white headgear of his companion gleamed faintly through the obscurity. The surgeon felt in his pockets and arranged his needles, his ligatures, and his safety-pins that no time might be wasted when they arrived. He chafed with impatience and drummed his foot upon the floor.

  But the cab slowed down at last and pulled up. In an instant Douglas Stone was out, and the Smyrna merchant’s toe was at his very heel. ‘You can wait,’ said he to the driver.

  It was a mean-looking house in a narrow and sordid street. The surgeon, who knew his London well, cast a swift glance into the shadows, but there was nothing distinctive, no shop, no movement, nothing but a double line of dull flat-faced houses, a double stretch of wet flagstones which gleamed in the lamplight, and a double rush of water in the gutters which swirled and gurgled towards the sewer gratings. The door which faced them was blotched and discoloured, and a faint light in the fan pane above it served to show the dust and the grime which covered it. Above, in one of the bedroom windows, there was a dull yellow glimmer. The merchant knocked loudly, and, as he turned his dark face towards the light, Douglas Stone could see that it was contracted with anxiety. A bolt was drawn, and an elderly woman with a taper stood in the doorway, shielding the thin flame with her gnarled hand.

  ‘Is all well?’ gasped the merchant.

  ‘She is as you left her, sir.’

  ‘She has not spoken?’

  ‘No, she is in a deep sleep.’

  The merchant closed the door, and Douglas Stone walked down the narrow passage, glancing about him in some surprise as he did so. There was no oilcloth, no mat, no hat-rack. Deep gray dust and heavy festoons of cobwebs met his eyes everywhere. Following the old woman up the winding stair, his firm footfall echoed harshly through the silent house. There was no carpet.

  The bedroom was on the second landing. Douglas Stone followed the old nurse into it, with the merchant at his heels. Here, at least, there was furniture and to spare. The floor was littered and the corners piled with Turkish cabinets, inlaid tables, coats of chain mail, strange pipes, and grotesque weapons. A single small lamp stood upon a bracket on the wall. Douglas Stone took it down, and, picking his way among the lumber, walked over to a couch in the corner, on which lay a woman dressed in the Turkish fashion with yashmak and veil. The lower part of the face was exposed, and the surgeon saw a jagged cut which zigzagged along the border of the under lip.

  ‘You will forgive the yashmak,’ said the Turk. ‘You know our views about woman in the East.’

  But the surgeon was not thinking about the yashmak. This was no longer a woman to him. It was a case. He stooped and examined the wound carefully.

  ‘There are no signs of irritation,’ said he. ‘We might delay the operation until local symptoms develop.’

  The husband wrung his hands in incontrollable agitation.

  ‘Oh! sir, sir,’ he cried. ‘Do not trifle. You do not know. It is deadly. I know, and I give
you my assurance that an operation is absolutely necessary. Only the knife can save her.’

  ‘And yet I am inclined to wait,’ said Douglas Stone.

  ‘That is enough,’ the Turk cried, angrily. ‘Every minute is of importance, and I cannot stand here and see my wife allowed to sink. It only remains for me to give you my thanks for having come, and to call in some other surgeon before it is too late.’

  Douglas Stone hesitated. To refund that hundred pounds was no pleasant matter. But of course if he left the case he must return the money. And if the Turk were right and the woman died his position before a coroner might be an embarrassing one.

  ‘You have had personal experience of this poison?’ he asked.

  ‘I have.’

  ‘And you assure me that an operation is needful.’

  ‘I swear it by all that I hold sacred.’

  ‘The disfigurement will be frightful.’

  ‘I can understand that the mouth will not be a pretty one to kiss.’

  Douglas Stone turned fiercely upon the man. The speech was a brutal one. But the Turk has his own fashion of talk and of thought, and there was no time for wrangling. Douglas Stone drew a bistoury from his case, opened it, and felt the keen straight edge with his forefinger. Then he held the lamp closer to the bed. Two dark eyes were gazing up at him through the slit in the yashmak. They were all iris, and the pupil was hardly to be seen.

  ‘You have given her a very heavy dose of opium.’

  ‘Yes, she has had a good dose.’

  He glanced again at the dark eyes which looked straight at his own. They were dull and lustreless, but, even as he gazed, a little shifting sparkle came into them, and the lips quivered.

  ‘She is not absolutely unconscious,’ said he.

  ‘Would it not be well to use the knife while it will be painless?’

  The same thought had crossed the surgeon’s mind. He grasped the wounded lip with his forceps, and with two swift cuts he took out a broad V shaped piece. The woman sprang up on the couch with a dreadful gurgling scream. Her covering was torn from her face. It was a face that he knew. In spite of that protruding upper lip and that slobber of blood, it was a face that he knew. She kept on putting her hand up to the gap and screaming. Douglas Stone sat down at the foot of the couch with his knife and his forceps. The room was whirling round, and he had felt something go like a ripping seam behind his ear. A bystander would have said that his face was the more ghastly of the two. As in a dream, or as if he had been looking at something at the play, he was conscious that the Turk’s hair and beard lay upon the table, and that Lord Sannox was leaning against the wall with his hand to his side, laughing silently. The screams had died away now, and the dreadful head had dropped back again upon the pillow, but Douglas Stone still sat motionless, and Lord Sannox still chuckled quietly to himself.

  ‘It was really very necessary for Marion, this operation,’ said he, ‘not physically, but morally, you know, morally.’

  Douglas Stone stooped forwards and began to play with the fringe of the coverlet. His knife tinkled down upon the ground, but he still held the forceps and something more.

  ‘I had long intended to make a little example,’ said Lord Sannox, suavely. ‘Your note of Wednesday miscarried, and I have it here in my pocket-book. I took some pains in carrying out my idea. The wound, by the way, was from nothing more dangerous than my signet ring.’

  He glanced keenly at his silent companion, and cocked the small revolver which he held in his coat pocket. But Douglas Stone was still picking at the coverlet.

  ‘You see you have kept your appointment after all,’ said Lord Sannox.

  And at that Douglas Stone began to laugh. He laughed long and loudly. But Lord Sannox did not laugh now. Something like fear sharpened and hardened his features. He walked from the room, and he walked on tiptoe. The old woman was waiting outside.

  ‘Attend to your mistress when she awakes,’ said Lord Sannox. Then he went down to the street. The cab was at the door, and the driver raised his hand to his hat.

  ‘John,’ said Lord Sannox, ‘you will take the doctor home first. He will want leading downstairs, I think. Tell his butler that he has been taken ill at a case.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  ‘Then you can take Lady Sannox home.’

  ‘And how about yourself, sir?’

  ‘Oh, my address for the next few months will be Hotel di Roma, Venice. Just see that the letters are sent on. And tell Stevens to exhibit all the purple chrysanthemums next Monday, and to wire me the result.’

  A Mystery of the Underground

  John Oxenham

  John Oxenham was a pen name often used by William Arthur Dunkerley (1852–1941), a journalist, poet and prolific writer of fiction. Like Conan Doyle, he was not a native Londoner; born in Manchester, he moved to Ealing in 1882, and lived there for the next forty years. His six children included the well-known writer of stories aimed mainly at girls, Elsie J. Oxenham.

  This is an abridged version of a story originally serialised in To-Day, a weekly magazine edited by Jerome K. Jerome. The idea of a Tube-travelling serial killer caused such a sensation that passenger numbers slumped, and the Underground authorities wrote a letter of protest to Jerome. Dunkerley worked for the magazine, but had not revealed his authorship—the episodes of the story purported to come from an author in Scotland who insisted on anonymity. Dunkerley persuaded Jerome to continue to publish the serial, but did not come out as Oxenham until a couple of years later.

  ***

  The underground station at Charing Cross was the scene of considerable excitement on the night of Tuesday, the fourth of November. As the 9.17 London and North-Western train rumbled up the platform, a lady was seen standing at the door of one of the first-class carriages, frantically endeavouring to get out, and screaming wildly.

  The station inspector ran up to the carriage, and pulled open the door, when the lady literally sprang into his arms. She was in a state of violent hysterics, and it was with difficulty that he assisted her across the platform to a seat.

  Meanwhile, a small crowd gathered round the open carriage door. The guard of the train had come up, elbowed his way through, and entered the carriage. The spectators could see a man sitting in the further corner, apparently asleep, his hat over his eyes, his head sunk forward.

  ‘Drunken brute! he’s frightened the lydy!’

  ‘Pitch him out, guard, and we’ll jump on ’im!’

  The guard shook the man roughly, his hat rolled off, and the crowd jeered.

  Then, suddenly, the guard came back to the door, waved his flag to a porter, and said hurriedly:

  ‘Block the line behind—quick—and send the inspector.’

  The porter hurried off, shouted to the inspector, and ran down the train to the signal-box.

  The inspector left his charge in care of some ladies, and pushed his way into the carriage. The guard said a word to him, and they bent over the man in the corner. Then, with startled faces and compressed lips, after a momentary hesitation, they stopped and lifted him out of the carriage. The head fell back as they carried him awkwardly across the platform, and the crowd shrank away, silent and scared, at sight of the ghastly limpness and the stains of blood.

  ‘Where to?’ said the guard.

  ‘Upstairs, I suppose,’ said the inspector; and then added: ‘Best thing would be to take him right on to Westminster. It’s a Scotland Yard job, is this!’

  ‘That’s so!’ said the guard. ‘And her, too?’ nodding towards the hysterical lady on the seat.

  ‘Yes. Put him in again, and lock the door. I’ll see to her. Tell Bob to keep the line blocked till they get the word from Westminster.’

  They put the body back into the carriage, locked the door, and the guard went off to the signal-box, while the inspector took in hand the more difficult task of gettin
g the lady, still in a state of hysterics, back into a carriage.

  Finally, he had to have her carried in; he stepped in himself, and the train rolled off through the fog, past the line of scared faces on the platform, into the darkness which led towards Westminster; and the red stern light blinked ghoulishly back at the crowd, and tremulously disappeared up the tunnel like a great clot of blood.

  Within seven minutes of the arrival of the train at Westminster, Scotland Yard was in possession of the facts, and of the chief factors in the case—the body—and the lady—by this time in a state of extreme nervous prostration. A couple of detectives were minutely examining the carriage as it sped on its journey, and the traffic on the Underground resumed its normal course.

  The morning papers contained a brief announcement of the discovery. The evening papers imaginatively worked up all the details they had been able to obtain, and promoted the item to a prominent position among the day’s news, in large type, well spaced out. But with the inquest, held next day, the excitement increased. Briefly, all that was learned was this:

  From letters and papers found upon the deceased, the body was identified as that of Conrad Grosheim, a financier and speculator in the City. The identification was confirmed by Grosheim’s clerk, and by the landlady of the room he occupied in King’s Road, Chelsea.

  The station inspector at Charing Cross and the guard of the train spoke to the finding of the body.

  Maud Jones stated that she had a race to catch the train at Temple station. She was running up towards the second-class carriages when the train started and the inspector flung open the door of a first-class and assisted her in, telling her to change at the next station. She had not noticed anything wrong with the gentleman in the corner—thought he was asleep—remembered his cigarette had slipped from his fingers, and was still smoking on the floor, when suddenly her eyes caught sight of blood dripping from his coat, and it flashed upon her that he was dead. She was so horrified that she nearly lost her senses. Was positive the cigarette on the floor was smoking when she got in. No, she did not smell anything like powder—nothing but the cigarette. The window next to the dead man was up. She touched nothing in the carriage, and got out of it as soon as she could. She was a waitress at Belloni’s Restaurant, in the Strand. She had never seen the gentleman before, and was only sorry she had ever set eyes on him at all.