The Perfect Crime: The Big Bow Mystery. Israel Zangwill
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face lit up with relief.
‘You silly woman! Is that all? I shall have a cold in my head. Bitter weather. He’s dog-tired after yesterday—processions, three speeches, kindergarten, lecture on “the moon”, article on co-operation. That’s his style.’ It was also Grodman’s style. He never wasted words.
‘No,’ Mrs Drabdump breathed up at him solemnly, ‘he’s dead.’
‘All right; go back. Don’t alarm the neighbourhood unnecessarily. Wait for me. Down in five minutes.’ Grodman did not take this Cassandra of the kitchen too seriously. Probably he knew his woman. His small, bead-like eyes glittered with an almost amused smile as he withdrew them from Mrs Drabdump’s ken, and shut down the sash with a bang. The poor woman ran back across the road and through her door, which she would not close behind her. It seemed to shut her in with the dead. She waited in the passage. After an age—seven minutes by any honest clock—Grodman made his appearance, looking as dressed as usual, but with unkempt hair and with disconsolate side-whisker. He was not quite used to that side-whisker yet, for it had only recently come within the margin of cultivation. In active service Grodman had been clean-shaven, like all members of the profession—for surely your detective is the most versatile of actors. Mrs Drabdump closed the street door quietly, and pointed to the stairs, fear operating like a polite desire to give him precedence. Grodman ascended, amusement still glimmering in his eyes. Arrived on the landing he knocked peremptorily at the door, crying, ‘Nine o’clock, Mr Constant; nine o’clock!’ When he ceased there was no other sound or movement. His face grew more serious. He waited, then knocked, and cried louder. He turned the handle, but the door was fast. He tried to peer through the keyhole, but it was blocked. He shook the upper panels, but the door seemed bolted as well as locked. He stood still, his face set and rigid, for he liked and esteemed the man.
‘Ay, knock your loudest,’ whispered the pale-faced woman. ‘You’ll not wake him now.’
The grey mist had followed them through the street door, and hovered about the staircase, charging the air with a moist, sepulchral odour.
‘Locked and bolted,’ muttered Grodman, shaking the door afresh.
‘Burst it open,’ breathed the woman, trembling violently all over, and holding her hands before her as if to ward off the dreadful vision. Without another word, Grodman applied his shoulder to the door, and made a violent muscular effort. He had been an athlete in his time, and the sap was yet in him. The door creaked, little by little it began to give, the woodwork enclosing the bolt of the lock splintered, the panels bent upward, the large upper bolt tore off its iron staple; the door flew back with a crash. Grodman rushed in.
‘My God!’ he cried. The woman shrieked. The sight was too terrible.
Within a few hours the jubilant news-boys were shrieking ‘Horrible Suicide in Bow,’ and The Moon poster added, for the satisfaction of those too poor to purchase: ‘A Philanthropist Cuts His Throat.’
BUT the newspapers were premature. Scotland Yard refused to prejudice the case despite the penny-a-liners. Several arrests were made, so that the later editions were compelled to soften ‘Suicide’ into ‘Mystery’. The people arrested were a nondescript collection of tramps. Most of them had committed other offences for which the police had not arrested them. One bewildered-looking gentleman gave himself up (as if he were a riddle), but the police would have none of him, and restored him forthwith to his friends and keepers. The number of candidates for each new opening in Newgate is astonishing.
The full significance of this tragedy of a noble young life cut short had hardly time to filter into the public mind, when a fresh sensation absorbed it. Tom Mortlake had been arrested the same day at Liverpool on suspicion of being concerned in the death of his fellow-lodger. The news fell like a bombshell upon a land in which Tom Mortlake’s name was a household word. That the gifted artisan orator, who had never shrunk upon occasion from launching red rhetoric at Society, should actually have shed blood seemed too startling, especially as the blood shed was not blue, but the property of a lovable young middle-class idealist, who had now literally given his life to the Cause. But this supplementary sensation did not grow to a head, and everybody (save a few labour leaders) was relieved to hear that Tom had been released almost immediately, being merely subpoenaed to appear at the inquest. In an interview which he accorded to the representative of a Liverpool paper the same afternoon, he stated that he put his arrest down entirely to the enmity and rancour entertained towards him by the police throughout the country. He had come to Liverpool to trace the movements of a friend about whom he was very uneasy, and he was making anxious inquiries at the docks to discover at what times steamers left for America, when the detectives stationed there in accordance with instructions from headquarters had arrested him as a suspicious-looking character. ‘Though,’ said Tom, ‘they must very well have known my phiz, as I have been sketched and caricatured all over the shop. When I told them who I was they had the decency to let me go. They thought they’d scored off me enough, I reckon. Yes, it certainly is a strange coincidence that I might actually have had something to do with the poor fellow’s death, which has cut me up as much as anybody; though if they had known I had just come from the “scene of the crime”, and actually lived in the house, they would probably have—let me alone.’ He laughed sarcastically. ‘They are a queer lot of muddle-heads are the police. Their motto is, “First catch your man, then cook the evidence”. If you’re on the spot you’re guilty because you’re there, and if you’re elsewhere you’re guilty because you have gone away. Oh, I know them! If they could have seen their way to clap me in quod, they’d ha’ done it. Lucky I know the number of the cabman who took me to Euston before five this morning.’
‘If they clapped you in quod,’ the interviewer reported himself as facetiously observing, ‘the prisoners would be on strike in a week.’
‘Yes, but there would be so many blacklegs ready to take their places,’ Mortlake flashed back, ‘that I’m afraid it ’ould be no go. But do excuse me. I am so upset about my friend. I’m afraid he has left England, and I have to make inquiries; and now there’s poor Constant gone—horrible! horrible! and I’m due in London at the inquest. I must really run away. Goodbye. Tell your readers it’s all a police grudge.’
‘One last word, Mr Mortlake, if you please. Is it true that you were billed to preside at a great meeting of clerks at St James’s Hall between one and two today to protest against the German invasion?’
‘Whew! So I was. But the beggars arrested me just before one, when I was going to wire, and then the news of poor Constant’s end drove it out of my head. What a nuisance! Lord, how troubles do come together! Well, goodbye, send me a copy of the paper.’
Tom Mortlake’s evidence at the inquest added little beyond this to the public knowledge of his movements on the morning of the Mystery. The cabman who drove him to Euston had written indignantly to the papers to say that he had picked up his celebrated fare at Bow Railway Station at about half-past four a.m., and the arrest was a deliberate insult to democracy, and he offered to make an affidavit to that effect, leaving it dubious to which effect. But Scotland Yard betrayed no itch for the affidavit in question, and No. 2138 subsided again into the obscurity of his rank. Mortlake—whose face was very pale below the black mane brushed back from his fine forehead—gave his evidence in low, sympathetic tones. He had known the deceased for over a year, coming constantly across him in their common political and social work, and had found the furnished rooms for him in Glover Street at his own request, they just being to let when Constant resolved to leave his rooms at Oxford House in Bethnal Green and to share the actual life of the people. The locality suited the deceased, as being near the People’s Palace. He respected and admired the deceased, whose genuine goodness had won all hearts. The deceased was an untiring worker; never grumbled, was always in fair spirits, regarded his life and wealth as a sacred trust to be used for the benefit of humanity. He had last seen him at a quarter past nine p.m. on the day preceding his death.