The Crime Doctor Part 4

A deplorable circ.u.mstance was the way the Minister's last hours in town had been embittered by his implacable tormentor, Lady Vera Moyle. That ingrate had celebrated her release by trying to invade the Home Office, and by actually waylaying the Secretary of State in Whitehall. An un.o.btrusive body-guard had nipped the annoyance in the bud; but it had caused Topham Vinson to require champagne at his club, whither he was proceeding on the arm of his last ally and most secret adviser, Doctor John Dollar of Welbeck Street. And before dark the doctor had been invaded in his turn.

"You must blame the Home Secretary for this intrusion," began Lady Vera, with all the precision of a practised speaker who knew what she had to say. "He refused, as you heard, to listen to what I had to say to him this morning; but the detective-in-waiting informed me that you were not only a friend of Mr. Vinson's, but yourself a medical expert in criminology. I have therefore a double reason for coming to you, Doctor Dollar, though it would not have been necessary if Mr. Topham Vinson had treated me with ordinary courtesy."

"I am very glad you have done so, Lady Vera," rejoined the doctor in his most conciliatory manner. "Mr. Vinson, to be frank with you, is not in a fit state for the kind of scene he was afraid you were going to make. He is in a highly nervous condition for a man of his robust temperament.

Truth, Lady Vera, compels me to add that you and your friends have had something to do with this, but the immediate cause is a far more unhappy case which he has just settled."

"_Has_ he settled it?" cried Lady Vera, turning paler than before between her winter sables and a less seasonable hat.

"This morning," said Dollar, with a very solemn air.

"He isn't going to hang that poor man?"

No breath came between the opened lips that prison had bleached and parched, but neither did they tremble as the doctor bowed.

"If you mean Alfred Croucher," said he, "convicted of the murder of Sergeant Simpkins during the last suffragist disturbance, I can only say there would be an end of capital punishment if he had been reprieved."

"Doctor Dollar," returned Lady Vera, under great control, "it was about this case, and nothing else, that I wanted to speak to the Home Secretary. I never heard of it until this morning, for I have been out of the way of newspapers, as you may know; and it is difficult to take in a whole trial at one hurried reading. Do you mind telling me why everybody is so sure that this man is the murderer? Did anybody see him do it?"

The crime doctor smiled as he shook his head.

"Very few murders are actually witnessed, Lady Vera; yet this would have been one of the few, but for the fog. Croucher was plainly seen through the jeweler's window, helping himself one moment, then struggling with the unfortunate sergeant."

"Was the struggle seen as plainly as the robbery?"

"Not quite, perhaps, but the evidence was equally convincing about both. Then the stolen goods were found, some of them, still in Croucher's possession; and the way he tried to account for that, in the witness-box, was only less suicidal than his fatal attempt at an alibi."

"Poor fool!" exclaimed Lady Vera, with perhaps less pity than impatience. "Of course he was there--I saw him!"

Dollar was not altogether unprepared for this.

"You were there yourself, then, Lady Vera?"

"I should think I was!"

"It--it wasn't you who broke the window for him?"

"Of course it was! Yet n.o.body tried to find me as a witness! It is only by pure chance that I come out in time to save an innocent man's life, for innocent he is of everything but theft. _I_ know--too well!"

Her voice was no longer under inhuman control; and there was something in its pa.s.sionate pitch that sent a cold thrill of conviction down Dollar's spine. He gazed in horror at the unhappy girl, in her luxurious sables, drawn up to her last inch in the pitiless glare of his electric light; and even as he gazed--and guessed--all horror melted into the most profound emotion he had ever felt. It was she who first found her voice, and now it was calmer than it had been as yet.

"One thing more about the trial," she said. "What was the weapon he is supposed to have used?"

"His knife."

"Yet it seems to have been a small wound?"

"It had a small blade."

"But was there any blood on it?"

She had to press him for these details; any squeamishness was on his side, and he a doctor!

"There was," he said. "Croucher had an explanation, but it wasn't convincing."

"The truth often isn't," said Lady Vera, bitterly. "You may be surprised to hear that the blow wasn't struck with a knife at all. It was struck with--this!"

Her right hand flew from her glossy m.u.f.f; in it was no flashing steel, but a short, black, round-k.n.o.bbed life-preserver, that she handed over without more words.

"But his skull wasn't smashed!" exclaimed John Dollar, and for an instant he looked at his visitor with the eye of the alienist. "It was a puncture of the carotid artery, and you couldn't do that with this if you tried."

"Hit the floor with it," said Lady Vera, "but don't hold it quite by the end."

Dollar bent down and did as directed; at the blow, a poniard flew out of the opposite end to the round k.n.o.b; the point caught in his sleeve.

"That's how it was done," continued Lady Vera. "And I am the person it was done by, Doctor Dollar!"

"It was--an accident?" he said, hoa.r.s.ely. He could look at her as though the accident had not been fatal; he had less command of his voice.

"I call it one; the law may not," said she resignedly. "Yet I didn't even know that I possessed such a weapon as this; it was sold to me as a life-preserver, and nothing else, out of a p.a.w.nbroker's window, where I happened to see it on the very morning of the raid. I thought it would be just the thing for smashing other windows, especially with that thong to go round one's wrist. I thought, too--I don't mind telling you--that, if I were roughly handled, it was a thing I could use in self-defense as I couldn't very well use a hammer."

And here she showed no more shame than a soldier need feel about his bayonet after battle; and Dollar met her eyes on better terms. He had been making mechanical experiments with the life-preserver. Some spring was broken. That was why it became a dagger at every blow, instead of only when you gave it a jerk.

"And you were roughly handled by Sergeant Simpkins?" he suggested eagerly.

"Very," she said, with a certain reluctance. "But I expect the poor fellow was as excited as I was when I tried to beat him off."

"I suppose you hardly knew what you were doing, Lady Vera?"

"Not only that, Doctor Dollar, but I didn't know what I had done."

"Thank G.o.d for that!"

"But did you imagine it for a moment? That's the whole point and explanation of everything that has happened. The worst was over in a few seconds, in the thick of that awful fog, but, of course I never dreamt what I had done. I did think that I had knocked him out. But that was all that ever entered my head until this very morning."

"Were you close to your broken window at the time?"

"Very close, and yet out of sight in the fog."

"And you had seen nothing of this man Croucher, and his hand in the affair?"

"Not after I'd done my part. I did just before. I'm certain it was the same huge man that they describe. But I heard the whole thing while we were struggling. They were blowing a police-whistle and calling out 'Thieves!' I remember hoping that the policeman would hear them, and let me go. But I suppose his blood was up, as well as mine."

"And after you had--freed yourself?" said the doctor, trying not to set his teeth.

"I ran off, of course! I knew that I had done much more than I ever intended; but that's all I knew, or suspected, even when I found this horrid thing open in my hand. I tried to shut it again, but couldn't. So I hid it in my dress, and ran up Dover Street to my club, where I put it straight into a bag that I had there. Then I made myself decent and--turned out again with a proper hammer."

The doctor groaned; he could not help it. Yet it was his first audible expression of disapproval; he had restrained himself while all the worst was being told; and the girl's face acknowledged his consideration. Her color had come at last. Thus far, in recounting her intentional misdeeds, as though they were all in the great day's work, she had shown a divine indifference to his opinion of her or her proceedings. There had been nothing aggressive about it--he merely doubted whether the question of his views had ever entered her mind. But now he could see that it did; he had shown her something that she did not want to lose, and her fine candor hid that fact as little as any other.

"I didn't know what I'd done, remember!" she said with sharp solicitude.