"Yes, yes," responded Rameau, looking haggardly about; "but is not zis--zis room publique? I should not be seen."
"Nonsense!" replied Hewitt rather testily; "you exaggerate your danger and your own importance, and your enemies" abilities as well. You"re safe enough."
"I suppose, then," Nettings remarked slowly, like a man on whose mind something vast was beginning to dawn, "I suppose--why, hang it, you must have just got up while that fool of a girl was screaming and fainting upstairs, and walked out. They say there"s nothing so hard as a n.i.g.g.e.r"s skull, and yours has certainly made a fool of me. But, then, _somebody_ must have chopped you over the head; who was it?"
"My enemies--my great enemies--enemies politique. I am a great man"--this with a faint revival of vanity amid his fear--"a great man in my countree.
Zey have great secret club-sieties to kill me--me and my fren"s; and one enemy coming in my rooms does zis--one, two"--he indicated wrist and head--"wiz a choppa."
Rameau made the case plain to Nettings, so far as the actual circ.u.mstances of the a.s.sault on himself were concerned. A negro whom he had noticed near the place more than once during the previous day or two had attacked him suddenly in his rooms, dealing him two savage blows with a chopper. The first he had caught on his wrist, which was seriously damaged, as well as excruciatingly painful, but the second had taken effect on his head. His a.s.sailant had evidently gone away then, leaving him for dead; but, as a matter of fact, he was only stunned by the shock, and had, thanks to the adamantine thickness of the negro skull and the ill-direction of the chopper, only a very bad scalp-wound, the bone being no more than grazed.
He had lain insensible for some time, and must have come to his senses soon after the housemaid had left the room. Terrified at the knowledge that his enemies had found him out, his only thought was to get away and hide himself. He hastily washed and tied up his head, enveloped himself in the biggest coat he could find, and let himself down into the bas.e.m.e.nt by the coal-lift, for fear of observation. He waited in the bas.e.m.e.nt of one of the adjoining buildings till dark and then got away in a cab, with the idea of hiding himself in the East End. He had had very little money with him on his flight, and it was by reason of this circ.u.mstance that Hewitt, when he found him, had prevailed on him to leave his hiding-place, since it would be impossible for him to touch any of the large sums of money in the keeping of his bank so long as he was supposed to be dead. With much difficulty, and the promise of ample police protection, he was at last convinced that it would be safe to declare himself and get his property, and then run away and hide wherever he pleased.
Nettings and Hewitt strolled off together for a few minutes and chatted, leaving the wretched Rameau to cower in a corner among several policemen.
"Well, Mr. Hewitt," Nettings said, "this case has certainly been a shocking beating for me. I must have been as blind as a bat when I started on it. And yet I don"t see that you had a deal to go on, even now. What struck you first?"
"Well, in the beginning it seemed rather odd to me that the body should have been taken away, as I had been told it was, after the written paper had been pinned on it. Why should the murderer pin a label on the body of his victim if he meant carrying that body away? Who would read the label and learn of the nature of the revenge gratified? Plainly, that indicated that the person who had carried away the body was _not_ the person who had committed the murder. But as soon as I began to examine the place I saw the probability that there was no murder, after all. There were any number of indications of this fact, and I can"t understand your not observing them. First, although there was a good deal of blood on the floor just below where the housemaid had seen Rameau lying, there was none between that place and the door. Now, if the body had been dragged, or even carried, to the door, blood must have become smeared about the floor, or at least there would have been drops, but there were none, and this seemed to hint that the corpse might have come to itself, sat up on the sofa, stanched the wound, and walked out. I reflected at once that Rameau was a full-blooded negro, and that a negro"s head is very nearly invulnerable to anything short of bullets. Then, if the body had been dragged out--as such a heavy body must have been--almost of necessity the carpet and rugs would show signs of the fact, but there were no such signs. But beyond these there was the fact that no long black overcoat was left with the other clothes, although the housekeeper distinctly remembered Rameau"s possession of such a garment. I judged he would use some such thing to a.s.sist his disguise, which was why I asked her. _Why_ he would want to disguise was plain, as you shall see presently. There were no towels left in the bath-room; inference, used for bandages. Everything seemed to show that the only person responsible for Rameau"s removal was Rameau himself.
Why, then, had he gone away secretly and hurriedly, without making complaint, and why had he stayed away? What reason would he have for doing this if it had been Goujon that had attacked him? None. Goujon was going to France. Clearly, Rameau was afraid of another attack from some implacable enemy whom he was anxious to avoid--one against whom he feared legal complaint or defense would be useless. This brought me at once to the paper found on the floor. If this were the work of Goujon and an open reference to his tortoise, why should he be at such pains to disguise his handwriting? He would have been already pointing himself out by the mere mention of the tortoise. And, if he could not avoid a shake in his natural, small handwriting, how could he have avoided it in a large, clumsy, slowly drawn, a.s.sumed hand? No, the paper was not Goujon"s."
"As to the writing on the paper," Nettings interposed, "I"ve told you how I made that mistake. I took the readiest explanation of the words, since they seemed so pat, and I wouldn"t let anything else outweigh that. As to the other things--the evidences of Rameau"s having gone off by himself--well, I don"t usually miss such obvious things; but I never thought of the possibility of the _victim_ going away on the quiet and not coming back, as though _he"d_ done something wrong. Comes of starting with a set of fixed notions."
"Well," answered Hewitt, "I fancy you must have been rather "out of form,"
as they say; everybody has his stupid days, and you can"t keep up to concert pitch forever. To return to the case. The evidence of the chopper was very untrustworthy, especially when I had heard of Goujon"s careless habits--losing shovels and leaving coal-scuttles on stairs. Nothing more likely than for the chopper to be left lying about, and a criminal who had calculated his chances would know the advantage to himself of using a weapon that belonged to the place, and leaving it behind to divert suspicion. It is quite possible, by the way, that the man who attacked Rameau got away down the coal-lift and out by an adjoining bas.e.m.e.nt, just as did Rameau himself; this, however, is mere conjecture. The would-be murderer had plainly prepared for the crime: witness the previous preparation of the paper declaring his revenge, an indication of his pride at having run his enemy to earth at such a distant place as this--although I expect he was only in England by chance, for Haytians are not a persistently energetic race. In regard to the use of small instead of capital letters in the words "La Tortue" on the paper, I observed, in the beginning, that the first letter of the whole sentence--the "p" in "puni"--was a small one. Clearly, the writer was an illiterate man, and it was at once plain that he may have made the same mistake with ensuing words.
"On the whole, it was plain that everybody had begun with a too ready disposition to a.s.sume that Goujon was guilty. Everybody insisted, too, that the body had been carried away--which was true, of course, although not in the sense intended--so I didn"t trouble to contradict, or to say more than that I guessed who _had_ carried the body off. And, to tell you the truth, I was a little piqued at Mr. Styles" manner, and indisposed, interested in the case as I was, to give away my theories too freely.
"The rest of the job was not very difficult. I found out the cabman who had taken Rameau away--you can always get readier help from cabbies if you go as one of themselves, especially if you are after a bilker--and from him got a sufficiently near East End direction to find Rameau after inquiries. I ventured, by the way, on a rather long shot. I described my man to the cabman as having an injured arm or wrist--and it turned out a correct guess. You see, a man making an attack with a chopper is pretty certain to make more than a single blow, and as there appeared to have been only a single wound on the head, it seemed probable that another had fallen somewhere else--almost certainly on the arm, as it would be raised to defend the head. At Limehouse I found he had had his head and wrist attended to at a local medico"s, and a big n.i.g.g.e.r in a fright, with a long black coat, a broken head, and a lame hand, is not so difficult to find in a small area. How I persuaded him up here you know already; I think I frightened him a little, too, by explaining how easily I had tracked him, and giving him a hint that others might do the same. He is in a great funk. He seems to have quite lost faith in England as a safe asylum."
The police failed to catch Rameau"s a.s.sailant--chiefly because Rameau could not be got to give a proper description of him, nor to do anything except get out of the country in a hurry. In truth, he was glad to be quit of the matter with nothing worse than his broken head. Little Goujon made a wild storm about his arrest, and before he did go to France managed to extract twenty pounds from Rameau by way of compensation, in spite of the absence of any strictly legal claim against his old tormentor. So that, on the whole, Goujon was about the only person who derived any particular profit from the tortoise mystery.
THE END.