CHAPTER III.

When I arrived in New York I had not much opportunity of reading up back numbers of the daily papers, but I was startled to see that the Chief Commissioner of the London Police, Sir Charles Pendreth, had been found dead in his bed by his own hand, and that, immediately following upon his suicide, had occurred that of two of the leading police magistrates of the metropolis.

These occurrences, dire enough in themselves, were rendered still more terrible by the fact that each had killed himself in the same way--by severing his jugular vein with his razor,--and had left behind him a letter in his well-known handwriting explaining why he had committed self-destruction.

In the case of the first suicide the coroner’s jury had found considerable difficulty in avoiding a verdict of _felo-de-se_, as the letter left behind displayed so manifest a purpose; but in the other cases the deaths were unhesitatingly attributed to the spreading of an epidemic of suicide, and the verdict of temporary insanity rendered in both instances threw a merciful veil over the intentions of the self-slain.

On my return to New York from Chicago I found a letter awaiting me. It was from my friend Pasquale, and the sight of his handwriting thrilled me with joy. Heaven alone knew how dry and barren my life had seemed without him all these long weeks spent in dreary, uninteresting travel.

Pasquale stated in his letter that he had found his stay in Paris very agreeable (I winced jealously at the thought) and instructive, and that while there he had seen no reason to moderate his views as to his ability to unravel any criminal plot, or to account for any mental obliquity; and in virtue of this additional confidence in himself, and of the further experience which he had gained, he proposed to go to London shortly to endeavor to solve the mystery of the terrible mania for self-destruction in that city.

Pasquale’s letter was dated the 1st of October; he hoped to arrive in London on the 31st. So did I. Thank God, my old friend and I would soon meet.

On the 1st of November the good ship “Saragossa” landed me safely in Liverpool, and at 7. P.M. the same evening my cab drove up to the door of No. 12 Russell Square.

As I descended from my cumbersome four-wheeler I noticed a hansom cab dash up to the adjoining house, and words would fail me to express the rapture with which I saw my friend alight.

His welcome was like a bath of electrified sunshine, so gay, so bright and thrilling was it in its _empressement_, and as soon as he had seen his portmanteau safely housed he turned to me, his whole voice vibrating with pleasure.

“Wyndham, I can’t ask you into my dull quarters, but you and I must see much of each other to-night to make up for our long separation, so as soon as we have taken our baths and a chop I will run in to spend a couple of hours with you, and I’ve got some lovely French cognac which the occasion will absolve us for using,--dear, dear Wyndham, on my soul I’m glad to see you--” and before I could retreat, much to my embarrassment, he had clasped me by the shoulder and imprinted a hearty kiss, first on one cheek, and then on the other.

“I missed you more than tongue can tell,” he continued, and as he spoke the tears in his voice made it husky, as the glad mist in my own eyes made my vision dim.

I noticed that Pasquale had brought back a French valet with him from Paris, a tall, muscular and rather forbidding man in appearance, with the stamp of the army or police about his square shoulders, stiff neck and mechanical step.

“An old army man,” I murmured to myself; “an officer’s servant, most likely.”

“You are becoming somewhat more fastidious, my friend,” I remarked, in reference to the valet.

“No, no, Wyndham,” was the reply; “Jacques is supposed to be my valet, but he is in reality a detective to help me in the work of penetrating the English mystery. Sometimes one good clue becomes lost while you are hunting up another, and Jacques’ duty will be to follow the scent before it grows cold, while I am doing something else; but, pray don’t tell anyone about him.”

What a delightful couple of hours we spent. As the clock struck eleven my friend rose to go. By that time he had given me a full history of his doings in Paris, and it would certainly have been difficult for a less enterprising individual to have managed to accomplish so much of actual work and positive enjoyment in so short a time.

“Then you never visited London at all during those two months?” I inquired.

“Not once,” was the reply; “I should have hated to visit my old haunts while you were away.”

With Pasquale back the old days returned, bringing with them the sunshine which seemed to crown him like a nimbus, and scatter its radiance all around.

As I stood by the old carved mantelpiece, winding up my watch after the door closed on him that evening, my heart was full of an exhilarating gaiety to which it had long been a stranger.

If I--a man by nature harsh and cold--regarded Pasquale with such tender feelings, what emotions must he arouse in the gentler sex, and what unutterable havoc must he work with their tender susceptibilities!

While this thought was exercising my brain, and as I turned into the inner room, I became conscious of a deep groan uttered on the opposite side of the blind doorway which stood between my bedroom and the room on the same floor in the adjoining house.

I recollected that Pasquale had informed me that the floor under him, that is, the one adjoining my rooms, was occupied by a troublesome old Frenchman whose peculiar ways gave the people of the house a good deal of trouble.

I waited for a time in silence, but the groan was not repeated, and, eventually, I retired to rest, and to enjoy an unbroken and dreamless sleep.

I awoke somewhat late the following morning, and as I was not obliged to report myself at the office at the usual hour on that occasion, and as I was, moreover, somewhat fatigued, I proposed to enjoy my breakfast in bed and my morning’s newspaper as well--- to me an unprecedented luxury.

If I had anticipated that my morning meal should be enjoyed in comfort I was doomed to be disappointed, for I had scarcely tasted my food before a thundering knock at the door announced my friend Pasquale, who burst into my room newspaper in hand, and with outstretched finger pointed to the giant head lines on the newspaper, “Another Suicide--- Death of Inspector Reynolds by his own hand.”

“Now, my friend, you will see whether my boasted skill is of any use. If I do not prove to your satisfaction that there is something more in these suicides than meets the eye, I will agree to forfeit everything in life.”

I was thunderstruck and horrified. I pushed the paper away from me with the first trace of genuine impatience which I think I had ever displayed towards my friend.

“Take your horrid sheet away, Pasquale,” I exclaimed, “I don’t understand your ghoulish glee----,” but my voice failed me when I saw the look of pain and remorse which crossed his face.

“Wyndham, I swear to you before God,” he replied with an earnestness which it is pitiful to remember, “that I would not injure a hair of anyone’s head whom the Good Lord has made, no, not for life itself, if I knew it.”

My friend left shortly afterwards, cast down, it seemed to me, in spite of my reiterated assurance that I had spoken hastily and tetchily, having only just been waked out of my sleep.

When I returned to my apartments that evening there had been up to that time no indication of any clue to the cause of the suicide, beyond the strange, unsatisfactory letter which, as in the other cases of suicide, had been left behind him by the dead man; and the condition of the public mind was, in consequence, one of profound horror and anxiety.

I had hardly dared to hope that my friend Pasquale would forget the hastiness of my morning’s greeting so far as to call upon me, and I was accordingly relieved beyond measure when I heard the old familiar knock.

He came in--with at first a glance askance--almost of timidity, such a glance as a loving, warm-hearted woman might give to an offended and over-sensitive friend. When he noticed my shamefacedness he advanced gracefully towards me with outstretched hands, looking altogether too pretty a picture to waste on a cold-blooded stiff-mannered Briton, and added hugely to my embarrassment by kissing me softly on either cheek.

That terrible foreign fashion--would I ever get accustomed to it! “Thank God! Wyndham, you and I are all right! If we were to quarrel I should give everything up in despair.”

The evening passed as a hundred others had gone before it; in controversy, brilliant and conclusive on the one side, and stupid and dogmatic on the other.

“Your obstinacy almost converts me, it is so magnificent, in its contempt of law and fact.”

Such was the Parthian shaft which Pasquale launched as he bowed himself out, genial and smiling, as if our every sentence had been a harmonious duet; but the parting words rankled in my sensitive breast, and as the door closed behind my friend, I sat still and silent in a cold defiant mood.

“Good-night, old friend,” said a soft and musical voice at my elbow. “Forgive my banter; I won’t sleep a wink if you don’t shake hands with me.”

Pasquale had softly re-entered the room and stood gazing at me with a tender wistful look.

I gave him my hand somewhat grudgingly,--it pains me to remember,--and after one glance at the pathetic eyes I resumed my stare at the dying embers.

Oh, memory! Oh, days and years that have been! how much more bitter than death itself are your whisperings of lost opportunities, of loving deeds undone, loving words unsaid, of loving glances withheld!

After Pasquale had gone I sat for a while reflecting on what he had told me about the result of his preliminary investigations into the cause of the epidemic of suicide which was paralyzing the entire city.

One peculiar feature of these horrors he had especially dwelt upon--namely, the fact that in each case the suicide had left a letter stating that he had determined to take his own life. As to the authenticity of these letters the authorities appeared to have no doubt whatever. On comparison with other specimens of the dead men’s handwriting they could not, it was declared, be called in question.

Then, too, there was the extraordinary similarity as to method. Each man had, with great deliberation, severed his jugular vein, using for the purpose his own razor, which, in every instance, had been found firmly clasped in the right hand of the suicide.

“The Press call it a contagion of suicide,” Pasquale had said, with a smile of contempt which had roused my easily stirred ire, “now I say it is nothing of the kind. It is murder and not suicide, and I will prove it so.”

Yes, that had been the absurdly egotistical remark which had finally exhausted my forbearance. I had no patience with such hair-brained ideas.

During the next week I saw nothing of my volatile friend, and when he finally made his appearance he looked pale and, I imagined, thinner.

“I have been called away,” he explained to me during this visit, “and I must now redouble my efforts to work out my theory as to those so-called suicides.”

On the next occasion when he visited my rooms he told me with great exultation that he had at length received from a prominent expert in handwriting the assurance, after a searching examination, that the letters purporting to have been written by the poor suicides had all been penned by the same hand; and that on careful comparison, although wonderful forgeries, they were all essentially different in character from the handwritings of the dead men.

“Such is the opinion of the expert I employed,” continued Pasquale, “but looking to the gravity of the subject and the responsibility of making so serious a statement, before handing his written report to me he has taken the precaution to obtain the opinion of two other experts on the subject. These opinions,” continued my friend with something of the exultation which had previously repelled me, “entirely endorse the views of the expert which I employed.”

When Pasquale produced the letter received from his expert, I found that his statement had in nowise been exaggerated. The original view and the opinions endorsing it, written in cold and well-weighed language, rested in my hand for a moment; then I dropped the dread papers on the table as I would have thrown from my grasp a cluster of poisonous reptiles.

I was horrified, and expressed myself so. I had never before, it seemed to me, been in such proximity to crime, and I shuddered at the contact with this terrible link.

“And that is not all,” resumed my friend, “the death wounds were not made by the razors grasped in the hands of the dead men, or at least not in the case of the last victim, for, unfortunately, the bodies of the others have been interred and I have not been able to examine them.

“A razor cuts with a slash or gash, but it does not and cannot make a stab, whereas in the last case there was, first of all, a stab penetrating far into the neck, and that was followed by a long cut which severed the great artery and all the surrounding flesh. That is to say, the murderer thrust the knife into the neck, then drew it towards himself, and then the deed was complete.”

As my friend spoke, carried away by his subject apparently and insensible to its revolting character, I grew dumb, petrified with the horror of his revelations. His eyes, always brilliant, shone large and clear and seemed to stand out from the pale ivory features. There was in his appearance the force and pride of elucidation which a successful counsel might show in entangling the criminal in the noose destined to terminate his existence; but there was more than that: there was the physical and mental ardor of the chase, and the flash of eye and teeth which the Zulu Caffre shows when he poises his willing spear to flesh it in his human victims.

“And do you know,” he went on, while I grew sick and giddy beneath the horror of his narration, and the uncanny mesmerism of his eyes, “the murderer, whoever he was, must, after all, have been a bungler, for, just think of it, would any man who had killed himself with the cold premeditation shown by those letters, have done so without first removing the linen from his neck and otherwise preparing himself? When facing the scaffold the murderer dresses in his best, and however brutal and even brutish he may have been in life, he gives much and careful thought to looking decent after death. It seems absurd of course--this anxiety as to how one will look after death, more especially where, as in the case of the murderer, the body will be given up to the tender mercies of quick lime in an hour or two--and yet that this feeling does exist is admitted by every person. Does not one of your great English poets in ‘The Ruling Passion Strong in Death’ put these words into the mouth of the dying coquette?

‘One would not, sure, be frightful when one’s dead And, Betty, give this cheek a little red!’

“Now these men died in each instance without the slightest regard for the _convenances_ of life or death, if I may be permitted to speak deprecatingly of the dead. They had not an atom of regard for after appearances, and glaringly belied human experience. But, unfortunate men, that was no fault of theirs. They were in fact surprised in the seclusion of their own rooms, where all busy and wearied men, thinking themselves secure from intrusion, avail themselves to the utmost of the few opportunities they have of being comfortably _en deshabille_.

“Moreover, they died without leaving behind them the faintest trace of any preparation beyond these formal letters announcing their intentions; such letters as, by the way, are rarely written by intending suicides.

“There is probably not one man amongst the millions on this globe who, if calmly contemplating suicide, would not leave behind him some evidence of preparation for the event; some last duty done, some last message of love or upbraiding to be delivered; yet I have been informed on good authority that there was, in every instance, an absolute omission of any such farewell message, as well as of all sign of preparation.

“On the contrary, there is considerable confusion in the business and also in the domestic affairs of the dead men, such as, from their well-known methodical habits, they would have been certain to provide against had they foreseen their end even thirty minutes.

“So looking to the utter absence in this case of that studied decorum in death observed by all men who do not slay themselves in the heat of passion, and also to the total lack of arrangement in the deceaseds’ affairs, these facts alone would go far to prove that the dead men did not kill themselves, but, taking them in conjunction with the revealed forgeries, why, then, I say that the verdict of suicide is not to be maintained for a moment.

“But even that is not yet all”--and as my friend resumed he rose to his feet with a fire and force in his whole aspect which, together with his marvelous theory, affected me so powerfully that I, too, rose in sympathy, and we faced each other pale as death on the hearthrug. “No!” and the words came almost hissing from his lips, “these men were not _killed_ by the wounds in their throats; they were killed--or at least the last one was killed--by the previous perforation of the base of the skull by a powerful needle or bodkin! I found a small bluish colored puncture at that point on the head of the last victim, and, on following it up by my directions, the surgeon discovered embedded in the brain, and penetrating half way through its entire depth, the needle-like blade of a small dagger.

“Stay!” protested my friend as I was about to speak, “that is not all! The blade had not been broken off; it had been released or discharged from its handle by a powerful spring at the moment of the stab with the intent that it should remain in the skull just beneath the surface and so stop all hemorrhage, and every trace of it be removed by the closing of the skin over it and by the natural covering of the hair.

“And even if the wound should bleed a little, the result would naturally be attributed to the greater wound in the throat.

“And now, my friend, can you conceive a more hideous plot, or one more fiendish in its ingenuity?”

When Pasquale had finished I felt benumbed with the force and fervor of his presentment of the case. To me he was no longer the gay, and brilliant friend, but the fierce and beautiful avenging angel of the murdered men, and repelled though I was by the horror which surrounded the series of crimes, I felt eager to aid him in his work of discovery.

“Have you taken any steps to find out whether the previous deaths were caused in the same way?”

As I put this question there was a knock at the door and Pasquale’s austere valet handed his master a letter which had just arrived, and which being marked “immediate,” he explained, he had taken the liberty of delivering at once.

In silence Pasquale handed me the letter, which stated briefly that in deference to his request an order had been obtained to exhume the bodies of the supposed suicides, with the result that in each case the same needle or dagger point had been found in the skulls of the deceased.

The writer, in conclusion, intimated that the bodies would be held until noon the following day in case Mr. Pasquale should wish to make any further inspection himself.

As I handed back the letter Pasquale dashed off a few lines by way of courteous acknowledgment, and stating that he would avail himself of the offer and call and examine the bodies the following day.

That night was one of the most agitated and unrestful in my hitherto placid life. For hours after Pasquale left I paced the floor of my room possessed with a fever of unrest and a frenzy of excitement which tore through my soul as a cyclone sweeps unresistingly through a bed of reeds. By the morning every thought and aspiration of my life lay prostrate before the one consuming desire to bring the murderer to justice.

At nine o’clock I arrived at my office pale and haggard, and a few minutes later I left to accompany my friend, excused from duty on the plea of urgent business.

When Pasquale and I entered the Mortuary Chamber, where the bodies awaited us, I shuddered for a moment and drew back. I had never seen a dead body and my whole soul shrunk from the sight of a murderer’s victims, in the various stages of decay. But after a time my courage returned; or it were, perhaps, more correct to say, a new impulse possessed me, and I went through the ordeal of the morning without further display of weakness.

There was little additional evidence gleaned; but when the four dagger points, which had been the means used to kill the murdered men, lay side by side on the table, they were found to be exact in size and shape, thereby proving beyond all doubt that the same hand had wrought all the murders.

My friend, who was examining the weapons carefully under the microscope, murmured to himself, “Antonio Seratzzi, Venice,” and in response to the inquiry of my eyes he replied, “As nearly as I can decipher it for the rust, that is the name of the maker of these daggers. It seems to me that I have heard of them before, though for my life I can’t recollect where or in what connection,” and he put his hand to his forehead as if he were trying to recollect.