The Female Detective (16 page)

Yes, I was about to use that past friendship as the means of prosecuting my profession. I know I was but doing my duty—I feel certain at this moment I was but doing my duty; but something, which I suppose was conscience, told me that this was not well.

“Come in,” said a weak voice.

Hearing a quick, beating sound—and which, indeed, was the rushing of my blood through my heart, I opened the door and entered.

My heart failed me as I did so, for hope sank within me.

He was sitting desolately upon his work-stool.

He had not been working.

As I came in he recognised me, but he did not rise or hold out his hand.

“How are you?” he said, abstractedly, and then in a distressingly absent manner he took up one of his most ordinary tools—one he used a thousand times a day—and looked at it with an odd, distant expression, as though he had never seen it before.

Then he laid this down and took up a piece of the wax used in his trade and began abstractedly pressing it into different forms.

The room looked very desolate, and though it had not been distinguishable for cleanliness when I had been in the habit of seeing it, the place now looked indescribably more dirty than it did, while there was a forlorn expression upon it which was totally absent when I had seen it daily.

There was no evidence of the sister—no threads, no shreds of cloth, no waiting chair, or draggled work-basket. The table at which she used to work was put away against the wall, and upon the spot where the covered furniture used to stand.

The linnet's cage still hung in the window.—Ah! I did not mention the tailless linnet the sister fed and called “Tweet.” But the bird was dead surely; at all events the cage was empty, and dry, and dusty.

Kamp looked very worn and broken down; and, for we detectives have to look at everything, I saw that the silky, black hair, which had never had those proper pains taken with it which its natural beauty deserved, was all bestreaked with grey.

I think I need hardly tell the reader that not for two moments had I been in the room before I felt that the old life of that chamber had passed away never to return.

Between him and me, as I entered the room, there was the space of the dusty unswept floor. He was seated on his stool, listless and broken down.

There was an ugly stoop in his shoulders, which had not been there when I was a visitor. His hands, so adroit and earnest as I had seen them, lay inert and drooping one over each knee, and there was a substantial shadow on his face beyond the darkness of his room, for though the day was bright the glass was thick with old, old dirt.

“The sister has not been here for weeks,” I thought, “and perhaps not for months.”

The first volume of “Johnston's Chemistry of Common Life,” lay open and face downwards, on a pile of work-a-day tools and scraps of leather at his feet.

I saw that the heap of dirt and rubbish round about him (and which seems to be a condition of correct shoemaking), was far larger and higher than when I used to come almost every morning for several weeks together, and, I hope, make the time pass pleasantly to him, while I listened to his half-learned and wiser talk.

He looked very desolate—poor fellow.

It seemed to me that his heart was bleeding.

All the brightness had passed from his face; and all the patience, and all the blunted hope. All his countenance sat with despair, all its desire seemed to be annihilation.

For my part I hardly knew what to say.

I looked about for some moments, and then I said—

“I hope you have been well since I saw you last?”

“Yes, well,” he said, looking mournfully round the room.

A pause.

I found that my sense of justice could flag.

At last I said—

“Have you perfected your machine yet?”

For the poor fellow, amongst other ideas, had given his attention to the shaping of a machine at which shoemakers could do their work without bending and curving themselves over it in the ordinary way, to which is attributable so much of the lung and liver disease to which the men of his trade are subject.

“No,” he said, with a dead wild look out beyond him—far past the walls of that narrow dirty room—“I've not thought of it lately.”

And now I fell to my duty.

“But I see you still study your book,” I said, pointing to the volume lying face down upon the ground.

“I've been trying to read,” he said, “but I can't.”

He was speaking like a sick, patient child. I know I might have struck him, say upon the cheek, and he would not have resented it.

I knelt down to take the book—feeling, I am afraid, much like Judas when he held out the red hand for the thirty pieces of silver.

These words stopped my action:

“Those were very happy days when you came here and talked about old Johnston with me—wasn't they?”

I could not take up the book.

“But where is your sister?” I asked. I was going to add in a gayer tone—“married?” But a something, 'twas sympathy I suppose with the place and man, stopped the word.

He did not move, he did not look at me, as he answered, his eyes once more looking forward with that seeing blindness, if I dare use such an expression, to which I have already referred.

“Dead.”

“Dead!” I replied, something like an echo.

“Oh yes; Johanna has been dead a month or more, only I don't quite exactly know how time goes.”

I hardly knew what to say, indeed I had a very great mind to confess to him what my errand was, and to ask him to forgive me for having wronged him.

As the history will show, I did well to keep my confession to myself.

“Indeed,” I said. “It must have been a sad blow to Tom Hapsy.”

A fierce look came over his face for a moment and then died again.

“It was partly his fault,” said he, “since he would not trust her.”

“Not trust her?” I said, and I confess that heartily as I was pitying the poor fellow I saw before me, it struck me as wonderful that Johanna Kamp should have excited jealousy in her lover.

“No,” said Kamp, “he would not trust her. He couldn't understand that she had to be civil at the warehouse, and that it only was civility.”

“Surely they didn't quarrel, John?”

“Yes, they quarrelled.”

“And did they part?”

“Yes, they parted.”

He uttered these sentences with a patience of despair which almost made me love the man.

“And—and what happened then?”

“What happened—why what happens to most women when they are disrespected? Don't they disrespect themselves? She was a good woman,” he continued, with a smile which was sweet though it was so ghastly; “a good woman,” he repeated, with a sound something like a dry hard sob, “and Tom Hapsy should not have been so hard upon her, for she would have lost her work, and I'd give my life on it there was nothing to complain of till he left her.”

“Did he leave her?” I asked.

“Yes; he set to watching for her one night outside the warehouse, and when she came out, laughing, though it was all in the way of business, poor thing, he caught her by the arm. I saw the marks black and blue the next day, and then he flung her away from him as he called her an under-hung—,” here he stopped and a something like a blush overcame his countenance, and he continued, “I beg your pardon, I was going to use a word you would not care to hear.”

“But what happened?”

“What happened?” he asked, with a soft kind of fierceness; “what happens to any woman, whether she is under-hung or not, when she does not care what comes of her? She had lived patient enough, never thinking any man would honourably notice her, living here in my poor home, till Tom Hapsy took up with her—and then when he went off she did not care what became of her.”

He stopped for a moment, and then he went on:

“I was ill at the time, and we were poorer than usual, or I would not have let her go still to the cursed warehouse. How did it end? There—I remember reading amongst the ancients that there was a woman who asked her husband to kill her, and she flung herself upon the sword. That was just the way with poor Johanna. He had not much trouble with her, and he flung her off as you'd fling away a down-at heel shoe.”

“Who was he?” I asked, with my breath coming and going nervously. I was beginning to be afraid that I saw the whole tragedy, and in which I was to play a terrible part that I had brought upon myself.

His answer was as I suspected;
he
was the man who lay dead, shot through the left lung;
he
was the sub army tailoring contractor who had employed Johanna Kamp, and who, to my own knowledge, had distinguished her in a marked manner (whatever the cause) from the other workwomen.

Whatever the cause!

Can it be guessed at?

I think it can. The dead man had been a sensualist in the strictest sense of that term. Now, what is the career of the sensualist? It will be found that as satiety approaches the appetite requires a stronger and stronger stimulation. If it were possible I could here give some awful examples of what depths of depravity the professed sensualist can fall to, but their narration is not admissible. Yet I can illustrate the sin by referring to the opening chapter of a tale of Eugene Sue's, in which the career of a sensualist is depicted. As he sinks and darkens in iniquity beauty palls upon him, innocence is contemptible, and his passions are aroused in exact proportion to the brutality and coarseness of the objects who surround him.

A purer and better-fitted comparison may be found in one's frequent experience of a very handsome man, or beautiful woman, mating with an extremely ordinary companion for life.

I assume that this wretched man—poverty having been the handmaiden of his sin—had luxuriated in so many instances in the youth and good looks of those who sought his employ, as a large army sub-contractor, that by a natural moral decay, or immoral progress, he became enamoured of poor, ugly, unprepossessing Johanna Kamp.

After a pause, a very long pause, the desolate man said—

“I see her there now when they brought her in wet and dead out of the dock. I didn't know her at first, for it's black mud in the docks. I can't get away from poor Joan—there she is,
there
, with her poor hands that worked so hard, down on each side of her, and the black water coming from her closed eyes just like tears. They laid her down just here,” he said plaintively, as he stooped upon one knee, and pointed to a spot with his hard right hand, the fingers of which were flattened with many hard, hard years' work; “and she seemed to be smiling almost. And when I stooped forward to kiss her they pulled me back, and asked me if I was mad. Joan and I were all alone in the world; our mother died when she was an hour old, and father never cared for us. There she was,” he continued, pointing to the spot again, “and she and I was here four days together,” and he pointed to the cupboard-room which she had used as a bedroom. “When they took Joan away, they took my heart and buried it with you, Joan—buried it with you.”

He dropped forward on the ground, and over the spot where the ill-featured sister had been laid. But no tears wetted his face—his grief was too hard for that.

And now, what should I do?

There lay the book; there, farther off, perhaps lay a murderer.

What if he who had been shot had been a heartless wretch—what if he was better out of the world than in it? In the face of the law all men are equal, and their lives are sacred.

Thou shalt not kill.

This rule stands whether it be godly man or fallen, true or false. Thou shalt do no murder.

The book was nearer to me than to him.

And he lay in a kind of stupor, with his eyes gazing in another direction than mine. Had he been looking on me I could not have stooped and turned the pages of the book.

The folios of the half-burnt fragment lying as witness at the station-house were 75, 76. I turned the pages of the book without noise and with the least movement.

Page 74—no pages 75, 76. Then followed page 77.

The leaf comprising the pages 75, 76, had been roughly torn from the book, leaving some jagged fragments about the thread used in the sewing of the sheets.

Certain now that he was a murderer, I looked upon him with dread.

And yet I pitied him.

What was I to do?

What could I do—except my duty.

I do not know how long a time passed from the moment of my discovery until that in which he spoke to me. But by rough calculation, really I think minutes must have elapsed before the silence was broken.

“Good-bye,” he said, “we shan't see each other again.”

“Why not?” I asked, a little shamefacedly.

“I'm going to give myself up to the police.”

Of course there could be no doubt in my mind as to who was the murderer of the Hebrew army contractor.

“Why give yourself up to the police?” I returned, awkwardly.

“Because I have done murder.”

He uttered these words in the simplest and most immoveable manner, with no fear, no pain, no shame. It has since appeared to me that he was in that condition of which most men have had some experience, when a great shock has so stupified the mind that there appears to be no ability to exercise reason; when the acts we commit ourselves, or those of others, affect us so little, that under such circumstances we may be declared in a sort of half-trance.

He was so despairingly callous that he did not notice the absence of all alarm on my part. As for me I could play no double game with this man. He was so candid with me that to lie to him would have been indeed the depth of meanness.

“I am a detective,” I said.

He looked up, but did not by his face betray any astonishment or distrust at my words.

“Do you understand?” I continued, my eyes upon the ground; “I am a female detective.”