Collected works of j s f.., p.170
Collected Works of J S Fletcher, page 170
“You merely took him to be one of your host’s friends?”
“Just so.”
“I think it might be just as well if you gave us a description of this man at this juncture. Did you observe him closely?”
“No, because I’d no reason to. But I remember what he was like in a general way. He was a tall, well-built man, neither slim nor stout, good figure. His hair and eyes were dark, his complexion olive. He was good-looking. He had a black moustache, and I noticed that his teeth were very white. He wore a blue or a black overcoat — I think there was fur on the collar — that curly black stuff. Perhaps it isn’t fur, but you know what I mean. That’s about all I remember. In fact, it is all. Stop! I remember he wore dark tan gloves, because he began drawing them off as he came in. And — yes — he was smoking a cigarette. That’s really all.”
Mr. Chrisenbury smiles in an indulgent, and yet in a superior fashion.
“Thank you, Mr. Graye. An excellent and a graphic description — but one which would apply, I think, to several hundred Italian gentlemen who might be met in the neighborhood of Soho or Hatton Garden. Didn’t you notice anything distinctive about this visitor?”
“No, I didn’t. Why should I? I was not there to stare at him.”
“Didn’t notice if he had a scar on his face?”
“No.”
“Nor the colour of his necktie, nor what sort of pin he wore in it?”
“No.”
“Very well. Now tell us, please, what followed his entrance.”
“Oh — well, I thought that Signor Graffi seemed surprised, and perhaps a bit disconcerted to see him, and I also had an idea that the man was a good deal surprised to see me. Signor Graffi rose and shook hands with him; Miss Graffi shook hands with him, too, but she did not speak to him. Then Signor Graffi turned to me, and begged me to excuse him for a few minutes, as he had some business to talk over with his friend. I offered to go, and picked up my cap and stick, but Signor Graffi would not hear of it. He bade his granddaughter show me some of the pictures which were in his study, and then he and the stranger went into the next room and closed the door.”
“Had Signor Graffi previously introduced you to this stranger?”
“Oh, no.”
“Did you by any chance hear his name?”
“No.”
“Not even a Christian name?”
“No — I didn’t hear him addressed by any name.”
“So you were then left alone with Miss Graffi. You talked to her, of course?”
“Yes, as much as I could. I said I was sorry she didn’t like England. She answered that she hated it. And then—”
The witness suddenly paused. He frowns; he looks angry and uncomfortable. Then, while everybody waits, he turns sharply to the coroner:
“Am I obliged, sir, to tell what this young lady said to me? It seems beastly caddish to do it, you know!”
The coroner smiles indulgently: he glances shrewdly at the legal gentlemen.
“I think that it will be best, in the interests of justice, that we should know all we can,” he says. “Perhaps there may not be so much of importance in what the young lady said as you think.”
The witness seems to be debating matters. Suddenly he plunges ahead, more rapidly than before.
“Oh, well, perhaps it was because she was a foreigner! I have never met foreigners much. Well, she suddenly held out her hands to me, and said that she had seen that her grandfather had taken a great fancy to me, and would I intercede with him to send her back to Italy at once, for she should die if she lived any longer in this sad and miserable London, and if I would, she would never forget me, and say prayers for me, an all that sort of stuff, you know, and she had tears in her eyes, and it was all — well, it made me think of (the theatre, and I didn’t know what to say, and fortunately just then Signor Graffi and the other man came back. That’s all, really, except that as they came in, Miss Graffi vanished into another room and shut the door.”
The court hears of this episode with considerable delight; it indulges again in laughter; it is only recalled to a sense of gravity and decorum by the loud remonstrances of the officials and the clear-cut tones of Mr. Chrisenbury.
“And the stranger — did he remain long?”
“No; he went at once — there and then.”
“Did Signor Graffi go down with him?”
“No. He didn’t even go to the door of the flat. The man just went.”
“Did you notice anything about Signor Graffi?”
“Yes. I thought he looked grave, anxious. Looked, you know, like a man who has heard some disturbing news. He was silent for a moment. Then I said I would go. He jumped up from his chair and said I mustn’t think of it. I had told him I lived at Kilburn. He said I should never get home in that fog, and reminded me that the spare bedroom was quite at my disposal. So I accepted his offer. We drank another glass or two of the wine, and then he showed me to my room.”
“Now, did you see Miss Graffi again that night?”
“No, I did not. I never saw her after she vanished into what I now know was her own room. In fact, I have never seen her since.”
That last answer — or, rather, the final part of it — comes out with a curious abruptness. It is as though the witness, without premeditation, was suddenly minded to take Mr. Chrisenbury and everybody, anybody, into his confidence. He has not been asked if he had ever seen Miss Graffi since. Of his own free will, prompted by some thought at which nobody can guess, he volunteers the statement that he has not. And Mr. Chrisenbury smiles a little as he puts in his next question:
“You never saw Miss Graffi again. Well, Signor Graffi took you to the room he had offered you. Did you think it rather — shall we say an unusual thing to accept the hospitality of a man who was a stranger to you?”
The witness flushes and looks a little indignant.
“No, I did not think so! The circumstances were unusual — I had gone out of my way to help him. And I have already told you that as soon as Signor Graffi gave me his name I knew who he was — he was given — was giving, rather — lessons to some of our fellows. He gave lessons at one time to my friend there — Mr. Herbert.”
Everybody regards Mr. Herbert. So he, too, has known the man around whose death all this mystery hangs! This makes him a personage. But the eyes quickly turn to the witness-box again.
“Well, Signor Graffi took you to your room. Was it comfortable?”
“It was such a room as one would expect to find in a gentleman’s house or flat. Of course it was comfortable!”
“Did you go to bed at once?”
“I went to bed at once, and I went to sleep at once — as I always do.”
“Sleep all through the night?”
“Yes, I slept all through the night — I was unusually tired.”
“So, of course, you never heard anything during the night?”
“I never heard or knew anything until I woke at my regular hour — seven o’clock.”
“Tell us briefly, in your own way, what happened after that.”
“Well, I presently got up and dressed, after having a bath — Signor Graffi had shown me the bathroom, which was next to my bedroom. It was about ten or twelve minutes to eight when I had finished dressing, so I set off to the study, passing through the intervening rooms — the class-room and the private room. That was the way Signor Graffi had brought me to my bedroom. I went into the study. The blinds were not drawn up then, so I drew them up. Then I saw that the door of Signor Graffi’s room was half-open — I knew it was his room, because he had taken me into it to show me a rare print. And I saw him lying in his bed, the bed-clothes partly disarranged about his chest, and I saw — well, I saw blood.”
The people in the public benches heave a concerted sigh — a sigh curiously suggestive of a combination of great horror and infinite satisfaction. Blood! That is what they wanted to hear about — blood, of course. In them still runs the primordial instinct which made fair ladies flock to the Roman amphitheatres, which attracted crowds to beheadings, which, in another, more subtle fashion, brought mobs to Newgate in the old days. In the Colosseum, at Tyburn, at a thousand dark places of the world in the evil times, one could see blood, smell blood; now one can only hear of it in the public courts. But it tickles, delights, gives infinite satisfaction to something in the baser planes of human nature to hear of it — let us hear more. The young gentleman in the witness-box says he saw blood on Signor Graffi’s linen as he looked through the half-open bedroom door in the grey morning light — let us hear more of this, by all means let us hear much more!
Nobody has any wish to interrupt this narrative: Mr. Chrisenbury’s lips look as if they were never going to open again. And the witness goes on, quietly, coolly: “When I saw that, I went straight into the room. I saw at once that Signor Graffi had been stabbed through the heart, and I was sure that the blow had been dealt while he was asleep. His limbs were slightly contracted as if by a sudden spasm of pain; but I came to the conclusion that he had died instantaneously. I gave a quick glance around the room, but I saw nothing out of place, and no weapon. Then I thought what was best to be done. I was afraid of Miss Graffi’s coming out of her room and receiving a shock. After a moment I went to her door and knocked. There was no answer. I repeated the knock — there was still no answer. So I opened the door and looked in — there was no one there. Then, scarcely knowing what I did, I walked across to the window. I caught sight of a policeman on the other side of the road. I threw up the window, beckoned to him, and called softly down to him. In a minute or two he and the caretaker — Acock — came hurrying up. I told them in a few words how I came to be there. Acock called up his wife, while the policeman went for help. And — well, that is all I can tell.”
So there is the end of the testimony of the principal witness — the man who slept calmly and soundly within a few feet of the terrible murder. And as if his last words Were more final, more impressive, than their mere sound, no one — coroner, legal gentlemen, jurymen — wants to ask him anything more at that moment — the recollection of all he has said in the last few minutes is too strong, too fresh.
But since this young man made his awful discovery in the yellow light of that dull November morning, the Law has been at work. Its sleuth-hounds have had their muzzles to the ground on such trail as there was. One of them is here, ready to tell what he can, be it of much or little. So the medical student steps down with a sigh of relief, and where he stood now stands a man from New Scotland Yard.
CHAPTER VI
THE DETECTIVE
STRANGE AS IT may seem, there are people in this court who have never seen a real, live detective. They have heard much of detectives: are they not for ever reading about them in those cheap, Sunday newspapers, the columns of which are filled with little else than police-court news, inquest news, murder, divorce, and the like? Some have read a little on ‘higher lines — they have dim notions of persons named Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Javert, Hawkshaw, though, if they were severely taxed on the matter, they could not be quite positive if these gentlemen were real flesh and blood individuals or men written about — imagined — in books and plays. But the man now in the box is a real, proper detective; a great many of those who stare at him are familiar with his name. An individual who has managed to squeeze himself inside the door by dint of crushing his proportions into a space many sizes too small for him, whispers chokingly to his nearest neighbour (whose ear is only the fraction of an inch from his own) that this was ’im as foun’ aht that there blinkin’ Befnal Green affair; another remarks, under a voice thickly impregnated with bad gin, that this ’ere war ’im as run dahn the Shifter and adds that ‘ee’s a ‘ot ‘un, ‘ee is, an’ no error. “Wherefore, they all regard the man from New Scotland Yard as country cousins and suburban inhabitants regard the lions in Trafalgar Square, wondering greatly that they should not suddenly arise and open their mouths and roar.
The lion in the witness-box, however, manifests no disposition to roar. To the people in the back benches, indeed, he does not seem much of a lion. He is not at all their idea of a detective. He does not wear a slouch hat; his moustache is obviously natural. One lady observes to her friend that he might be anything, he might. The friend says he reminds her of Mr. Sparks, the butcher down the road when Mr. Sparks has his Sunday clothes on and takes the missus and kids to the Park. And in point of fact, the new witness does indeed look like a highly-respectable, well-dressed, well-fed tradesman, who can sport a silk hat, and a pearl cravat-pin, and a gold chain across his comfortably-filled waistcoat, and he further heightens the impression by the fact that he has a merry, blue eye, and a naturally cheery expression, and a healthy glow on his cheek. There are those in court who feel that it would be quite pleasant to be suddenly held up by such a pleasant-looking gentleman, even if the final interview with him led to an eventual interview with the hangman.
Formality reveals this gentleman as John Wirlescombe, of the Criminal Investigation Department, New Scotland Yard — rank: detective-sergeant.
“In answer to a telephone message, you were sent up from the Yard, early in the morning of November fifth, to the flat number five in Austerlitz Mansions, Paddington?”
“I was.”
“About what time was that?”
“I arrived at the flat at a quarter to nine.”
“What and whom did you find there?”
“I found there an inspector and two constables from the local police-station, the police-surgeon, the caretaker and his wife, and the last witness, Mr. Adrian Graye. A few minutes after my arrival, the landlord, Mr. Quarendon, came in. As soon as I got there I was shown the body of the dead man.”
“What were your first proceedings?”
“Having heard a general statement from some of those present, notably Mr. Graye, I, in company with the inspector, made a thorough examination of the room in which the body lay — that is to say, a thorough superficial examination. I did not at that time examine any trunks, boxes, chests of drawers, or anything of that sort for papers or documents.”
“You took a general observation?”
“Just so.”
“Did you notice anything of moment?”
“Nothing whatever. There were no signs of any struggle. Everything in the room appeared to be in proper order. The window was securely closed from the inside. Outside there was communication with a fire-escape, but, as I say, the window was properly fastened within the room.”
“What were your next proceedings?”
“We had a careful look all over the flat. I saw nothing to arouse my suspicions or to give any clue. The room which Mr. Graye pointed out to us as the one he had occupied had been slept in; that into which he told us the girl, Miss Graffi, had retired on the previous evening, had not — at any rate, the bed was made. Of this room I made a more careful examination.”
“To what purpose?”
“I wished to know, as the girl had apparently gone, In what clothes she had left, if she had carried anything away with her, if she had taken a handbag, for instance. I accordingly took Mrs. Acock, the caretaker’s wife into the room with me. Mrs. Acock had a very good idea of what Miss Graffi possessed in the way of clothes — it was not an extensive wardrobe. After she and I had gone through everything I came to the conclusion that the girl had left the flat in a dark blue, tailor-made costume, that she wore a black fur stole, and had a toque, or hat trimmed with similar fur.”
Mr. Chrisenbury desires to interpolate a question and answer to and from the last witness, and does so. Does he remember what Miss Graffi was wearing when he saw her retire for the night? Yes, he does quite well. She was wearing the costume which Detective-Sergeant Wirlescombe has just described, and she carried the fur and the toque in her hand, having thrown them off in the study when she came in. Mr. Chrisenbury nods to the detective to go on with his story.
“I also came to the conclusion that she had not taken anything else away with her — not even an umbrella. Mrs. Acock was able to show me everything that the girl possessed; that is, that she knew her to possess. There was, in Mrs. Acock’s opinion, nothing whatever missing. far as I could judge from what I saw, from what Mrs. Acock said, the girl had simply walked out in her ordinary going-out costume.”
“What did you do then!”
“I made a thorough examination of her room with the idea that I might find something which would give me a clue to her disappearance and her whereabouts. I thought she might have a lover, and that there might be correspondence. So I went through a trunk, which was not locked, and through a chest of drawers. All the drawers were unlocked, and I examined the pockets — where there were any — of all her dresses.”
“Did you find anything to help you?”
“I found absolutely nothing. There was literally nothing of what one could call a personal nature in the room, beyond a few trinkets of no value, a prayer book with the name ‘Gemma’ on the fly-leaf, and a rosary of Venetian glass beads. There were no letters, and there were no scraps of destroyed letters. In fact, as I have just said there was nothing — I mean nothing that could give me any clue.”
“Did you notice anything in the room which would have given one the impression that the girl had meditated flight?”
“Nothing at all. The room was quite tidy, quite orderly. I came to the conclusion that whatever Miss Graffi’s connection with the death of her grandfather was or was not, she had gone off in a hurry without making any preparation. I accordingly questioned Mrs. Acock and her husband with a view to finding out if the girl was likely to be provided with money. I found out from them that it was most unlikely that she could possibly have more than a few shillings in her possession. It appears that Signor Graffi, who had lived entirely alone until he brought his granddaughter to live with him, was a man of very simple tastes, and of frugal manner of living. Although he presumably earned a considerable income, he was very careful, though he must have spent largely on books, pictures, and scientific instruments. It appears that it was his custom to hand to Mrs. Acock every Friday evening a certain sum of money, which she laid out in certain provisions for him; other provisions he always purchased himself, visiting an Italian warehouse in Soho for the purpose, for he kept up his Italian tastes. He was very absent-minded in some ways, and Mrs. Acock had more than once to suggest to him after he brought his granddaughter to London, that the girl needed certain things, and that he ought to give her pocket-money. He invariably bought the things, but as regards the pocket-money answered that young people were better without money. Therefore, I concluded that Miss Graffi could not possibly have had much money on her when she left.”
