The Crime Doctor Part 31

On one occasion Dollar was the prime offender. It was the day after Croucher's introduction to De Quincey and the first bad night spent by anybody in the Chamber of Peace. He declared he had not slept a wink, and was advised to get up and go for a walk.

"Alone?" said Croucher in a low voice.

"Why not? This isn't prison, and I never hear you cough. _You_ are not going to die just yet, Croucher!"

"I 'ope n.o.body is, not 'ere," said Croucher, with a horrid twitch. "I feel as it _might_ buck me up--a breff of air on a nice fine day like this." His eyes rolled undecidedly, and the oil ran out of his voice.

"But it ain't no fun goin' out alone."

"Haven't you any friends you could go and see?"

"No!" cried Croucher, with an emphasis that pulled him up. "I--I might write a letter, though--if you could spare me a bit o' paper wiv the address."

It was a very short letter that Alfred Croucher wrote, but a remarkably thick envelope that he himself took to the post, after looking many times up and down the street. And at the pillar-box, which was not many yards from the door, he again hesitated sadly before thrusting it in.

In the afternoon Dollar took him out in the car, and then it was that for once the poisonous topic was not introduced by Mr. Croucher.

"See that house?" said Dollar, pointing out one of the most modest in the purlieus of Park Lane. "There was no end of a murder _there_ once.

Swiss valet cut his master's throat, made what he flattered himself were the hall-marks of burglars, and had the nerve to go into the room to wake the dead man up next morning."

"Fair swine, eh?" said Mr. Croucher, with all the symptoms of disgust.

"A very fair artist, too," rejoined the disciple of De Quincey. "That wasn't his only good touch. He cut the old gentleman's throat from ear to ear, and yet there wasn't a spot of blood on his garments. How do you suppose he managed that? It's a messy operation, Croucher; you or I would have made a walking shambles of ourselves!"

"How did he manage it?" asked Croucher, in a shaky growl.

"By taking off every st.i.tch before he did the trick. How about that for a tip?"

Croucher made no reply. His teeth were clenched like those of a man bearing physical pain. They were nearly out of town, and Dollar had discoursed upon autumn tints and the nip in the air before being abruptly interrogated as to the "fair swine's" fate.

"Need you ask?" said he. "The poor devil was too clever by half, and made a big mistake for each of his strokes of genius. He was taken, tried, condemned, and all the rest of it! And a greater writer than the gentleman who kept you awake last night wrote the best description of--all the rest of it--in existence. But don't you ask me to lend you that!"

"They always seem to forget somefink," said Alfred Croucher, another long mile out of town.

"The first thing being that the best murders oughtn't to look like murders," the criminologist agreed. "They ought to look like accidents, or suicides at the most. But it takes a Mostyn Scarth to cut as deep as that."

"Wot the 'ell mikes yer fink of 'im?" cried Croucher, in a fury at the very name.

"Well, among other things, the fact that he saw us off in the car just now. Do you mean to say you didn't see through the false beard of the gentleman who was picking up his umbrella as we turned into Wigmore Street?"

III

Never again did Alfred Croucher venture out alone, even as far as the pillar-box; not another letter had he to post, though he received one, wrapped round a stone, once when his window was open, and literally devoured every word. He did go out, but only with the crime doctor in his car, for an hour or two in the afternoon.

More than once they got out at Richmond Park, sent the car across to one of the other gates, and followed at a brisk walk, shoulder to shoulder, with Croucher often peeping over his, but Dollar never. The walk was sometimes broken for as long as it took Croucher to smoke a pipe in one or another of the beautiful wooded enclosures which are the inner glory of the most glorious of all public parks. There, under red canopies of dying leaves, their feet upon a russet carpet of the dead, the smoker would rest in a restless silence, because the one subject which had made him eloquent was now tabooed. Even in the Chamber of Peace there was no peace for Alfred Croucher, and but little sleep, although the doctor had walked him off his legs and would sit beside him till all hours. So the literary and conversational treatment had been altered once for all; and now the patient would hardly read or speak a word.

Late one night, in the second half of the month, the crime doctor, seated like a waxwork in a chair that never creaked, had just made sure that his man was asleep at last. He decided to steal out and write some letters, and take them to the post himself before locking up; and was getting by inches to his catlike feet, when some sense held him bent like a bow. It could hardly have been his hearing, in his own sound-proof sanctuary between double windows and triple doors. Yet suddenly he was all on edge, listening with nerves laid bare by forced vigils in that slumberous room, brown as an Arab in its weird lighting; the silver patch in his hair changed from a florin to a new penny, the whites of his eyes like broad gold rings; their one flaw augmented by an infinite fatigue, their one care the human wreckage on the bed--shattered utterly by him, to be by him built up afresh, but not in the midst of excursions and alarms. And here was the inmost door opening, so softly, so slowly, at deadliest dead of night!

It was a woman who entered like a ghost, and he knew her step, though he could not hear it even now. And though her cloak and head-dress were those of a trained nurse, he knew, rather than saw, that the wearer was Lady Vera Moyle.

"Hush!" she was the first to whisper, and very softly closed the last door, through which he would have hurried her out again. Already her soundless movements, her air of vast precaution, puzzled him even more than her presence or her dress; but he still had anxieties on this side of the door.

"Just asleep," he whispered, pointing to the bed. "Bad time I've given him, poor brute, but a better one coming, I do believe. Did you come to see how he was doing?" Even in the stained light she looked so beaming now, so frankly triumphant, he made sure that was it. "I'd have written, but thought you were away. Who let you in?"

"This!"

And she held up a new Yale key.

"Where did you get it?"

"Specially cut for me." Every line in his red man's face was a note of blank interrogation. "Mostyn Scarth has another--cut specially for him!

I've had him watched."

"Vera!"

"_I_ was watching _for_ him--from the nursing home opposite--suffrage friends of mine."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"You had enough to do."

He shook his head. "Well?"

"He's somewhere in the house."

"This house?"

"Why didn't you tell me?"

She nodded. "Hiding--in your room, I think."

"I'll soon have him out!"

"Wait!" She had eyes for the amber bed at last. "Are you sure he's asleep?"

Dollar stole across and back. The great frame was breathing gently and evenly as a child. "But he's a terribly light sleeper; we mustn't disturb him, if we can help it."

"Disturb him!" She clutched his hand for the first time. "I wish to G.o.d I had never brought him to you! There's a plot between them, doctor--I know there's some plot!"

"There _was_, of course," he said, smiling, but wincing at his own "of course" that instant. "I'm delighted you brought him," he rea.s.sured her.

"I've taken some of the plot out of him--and now for Mr. Scarth!"

He reached past her to open the door. In a flash she put something in his hand. It was a showy little revolver, the handle mother-of-pearl, the barrel golden in that light.

"Thanks," he said-briefly--but there was a whole novel in his look. "Now will you do something more for me?"

"No!" she said flatly, and was at his elbow when he opened his own door across the landing.

It was such a plain little room that there was indeed small danger of a surprise from the concealed intruder. The only possible cover was under the bed, behind the curtains, or in the wardrobe. Dollar just went through the form of glancing under the bed, as he whipped up the poker in his left hand; with it he parted the curtains, and in the same second had his man comfortably covered at arm's length.