Byways to Evil. Lloyd Biggle, jr.

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      “Not yet. A decent labouring type from the looks of him.”

      “Why are your men wandering about like that?”

      “They’re looking for tracks. We’ve got to find out where the creature went before it attacks someone else. We also would like to know what sort of animal we have to deal with. An expert can tell us that with a glance if we can find an impression of its foot or pug-mark. My guess makes it a tiger, but I suppose it could have been a leopard, and Sergeant Grower, who has travelled in America, thinks a grizzly bear could have done it. If we can find just one pug-mark, we’ll soon know.”

      Lady Sara returned her attention to the corpse. She regarded it for a few moments with calm reflection, and then she walked in a slow circle around it. “If I were you, I wouldn’t waste time looking for an animal,” she announced finally. “I would search the victim’s background. Either he was a considerable threat to someone or someone was threatening him. This man was murdered. He was hit on the head and killed. The clawing was done afterward for effect.” She paused, continuing to study the mutilated corpse. “And it is effective, isn’t it?”

      The Chief Inspector shook his head. “It’d be a rare ‘someone’ who’d leave claw marks like that!”

      “But ‘someone’ did,” Lady Sara said. “Not only did someone want him dead, but he wanted to leave his body in the most gruesome condition possible. I congratulate you, Chief Inspector. You have a remarkably interesting case on your hands. Come and see me tomorrow afternoon, and I may be able to tell you something about it. Shall we say—two o’clock? Come, Colin. You’ve had a long day.”

      We turned away, leaving the Chief Inspector staring after us.

      In the carriage, I asked, “Is this another case for the board?” After a doldrums that had lasted through much of the summer, a night that turned up two worthwhile cases would be one to remember.

      A dearth of important cases did not mean Lady Sara hadn’t been busy. She was always furiously busy, but the trivial problems she handled daily were mere grist to keep her mind sharp until something significant came her way.

      She reflected for a moment. “It’s too early to say. I’ll point the Chief Inspector in the right direction and see how he manages. Stripped of its bizarre embellishments, this may be a simple case. If he muddles it completely, which wouldn’t surprise either of us, then of course we’ll have to help him out.”

      She paused, and then she added thoughtfully, “A deliberately disfigured corpse is rare in Britain. This wasn’t done in a frenzy of lust or blood lust like the Jack-the-Ripper murders. This murderer had a purpose, however deranged and perverted, and the mutilation was done for coldly calculated effect. The murderer has left his own distinctive signature on the corpse. I wonder whether his purpose was fully achieved with one murder, or whether he will require more.”

      We made our turn onto St. George Street, and the unusually warm September night had suddenly began to feel chill and threatening.

      CHAPTER 2

      It rained during the night—a rain such as London rarely experiences, with savage thrusts of lightning tearing apart the darkness while thunder rolled like the artillery of a besieging army. Water fell in cascading floods. Sleep was impossible, so I lay awake thinking about the search for a ferocious animal among London’s wharves and docks and wondering how Lady Sara could be so certain there was none.

      I had no doubt she was right. She always knew; she always saw what no one else saw, or she had information everyone else had overlooked or hadn’t bothered to acquire. Chief Inspector Mewer never seemed able to grasp that fact. With every case she interested herself in, he had to grapple with it anew as though there were something unnatural about a woman from a titled family becoming a criminal investigator.

      I tried to think what she could have seen in her scrutiny of the mutilated corpse. Of course I had seen it, also, but it meant nothing to me. Too frequently I lacked the essential bits of knowledge that made deduction possible. Such detective talent as I possessed could be exercised only with intense effort. Lady Sara seemed to use hers with ease though she claimed to have worked as hard as I did in the beginning.

      She was often asked how she happened to acquire an interest in crime, and she answered that she came by it honestly—she inherited it. Her mother, Lady Ranisford, the Dowager Countess, was, like so many titled ladies, a great enthusiast of murders and murder trials. It was a life-long interest. One of Lady Sara’s earliest memories was of her mother sending a maid or a footman to buy copies of broadsheets—penny plain or tuppence coloured, the Countess of course bought the tuppence version—or the latest newspaper from street hawkers who shouted an account of a murder. The Countess also was an avid frequenter of murder trials at Old Bailey, one of a number of stylishly dressed, bejewelled ladies of family, position, and wealth who never missed a session of a sensational trial.

      Lady Sara vividly recalled her mother’s jubilant return home at a late hour in 1877 with news of a conviction in the sordid Penge murder trial. A man named Louis Staunton had married a feeble-minded girl for her money. Once he gained this, he, his brother, and two females of irregular status had maltreated and starved the poor girl to death.

      Lady Ranisford’s delight over the verdict changed to absolute fury at Charles Reade, the author, when he wrote a series of letters for the Daily Telegraph claiming that Staunton was innocent because the wife already had a fatal disease, tubercular meningitis. “As if it were perfectly all right to starve an ill person to death!” the Countess exclaimed indignantly. She banished all of Reade’s books from the house forthwith, a severe hardship on her because she was fond of them, especially The Cloister and the Hearth.

      When the Earl of Ranisford was looking for a London town house, it was understandable that his wife would direct his attention to Connaught Place. For one thing, the architect ingeniously placed the entrances in the rear, leaving the splendid terraces with unobstructed views of Hyde Park and allowing access to them from a lightly travelled side street rather than busy Bayswater Road. For another, the address was eminently respectable. Caroline, Princess of Wales, had lived there in the early years of the nineteenth century. Finally, the location—at the convergence of Oxford Street and Park Lane, which earlier had been called Tyburn Street or Tyburn Lane—was the site where the notorious Tyburn Tree once stood. The “tree” had been replaced at an early date by a gallows, and the gallows was repeatedly enlarged until as many as twenty-four criminals could be hanged there simultaneously. The place had been the nemesis of London’s convicted malefactors from the twelfth century until 1783 when the gallows was moved to Newgate Prison. It was estimated that as many as sixty thousand people were executed at Tyburn over the centuries.

      If this weren’t titillation enough for a murder enthusiast, during the excavation for the Connaught Place terraces, quantities of human bones were uncovered, relics of those same malefactors. At least a cartload was hauled away to be buried in a pit in Connaught Mews. When Lady Ranisford discovered this, the Connaught Place address became irresistible to her.

      But Lady Ranisford’s interest in sensational crimes could not begin to account for Lady Sara’s amazing talent for serious criminal investigation. Lord Anstee, a long-time friend of the Earl of Ranisford and Lady Sara’s confidant after her father died, once told me this about her: “The first thing you must understand is that she is brilliant. She has blazing intelligence—one of the best minds in England. I would go book with her against the best. And because she was born a woman, she grew up with nothing for that wonderful mind to do. Women doctors are a rarity; they were almost unheard of when she was young. Nursing was becoming a recognized profession, thanks to Florence Nightingale, but it was still battling for respectability, and it was СКАЧАТЬ