The Complete Simon Iff Read online

  Ffoulkes extended his hand. “It’s a bet”

  “You’re really game?”

  “Dying oath.”

  “Dying oath. And now, O king, for I perceive that thou art weary, hie thee to thy chaste couch, and thy faitful slave shall doss it on the sofa.”

  In the morning Ffoulkes said, over the breakfast-table, “About that bet.” “It’s on?” cried Flynn in alarm. “Oh, yes! Only—er—I suppose I need about another seven or eight of law; I stipulate that—what is thrown away—shall be as worthless as possible.” “Certainly,” said Flynn, “I’m going to Ostend.” “Good for you. Newspaper accounts shall be evidence; but send me the whole paper, and mark another passage, not the one referring to the bet.”

  “O intellectual subtley and stamina!”

  “Have some more coffee?”

  “Thanks.”

  An hour later each, in his appointed lighthouse, was indicating the sure path of virtue and justice to the admiring English.

  II

  The Trinity sittings were over. Sir Richard Ffoulkes—for the king’s birthday had not left him without honor—was contemplating his wig and gown with disgust. On the table before him was a large leather book, containing many colored flies; and he had just assured himself that his seventeen-foot split cane was in good order. In fact, he had been boyish enough to test the check on his Hardy reel by practicing casts out of the window, to the alarm of the sparrows. It was the common routine for him on the brink of a holiday, but it never lost its freshness.

  Then there came back to him the realization that this was to be no ordinary holiday. He was pledged to do murder.

  He went over to the mirror, and studied his face steadily. He was perfectly calm; no trace of excitement showed in his keen features. “I have always thought,” he mused, “That the cries of life are usually determined by accident. It is not possible to foresee events with mathematical accuracy, and in big things it is the small things that count. Hence the cleverest criminal may always make some slip, and the clumsiest by a piece of luck. Let me never forget the story of the officer at Gibraltar who, focussing a new field-glass, chanced to pick up a shepard in the very act of crime. On the other hand, how many men have got clear away through stupid people disturbing the clues: from Jack the Ripper downwards! But it is the motive that counts. Where that does not exist, the strongest clues lead nowhere. For our surest faith is that men’s actions are founded upon reason or upon desire. Hence the utter impossibility of guarding against lunatics or anarchists. I should hardly believe the evidence of my senses in such a case as this: Suppose the Master of the Rolls dropped in to see me, and in the course of a perfectly sound conversation, broke up my fishing-rod without explanation or apology, and, when questioned, calmly denied that he had done so. Who would believe my story? Hence I think that I could walk into the Strand, shoot a perfect stranger in the crowd, and throw away the gun, with no danger of being caught, provided only that the gun could not be traced to me. The evidence of those who saw me fire would be torn to pieces in cross-examination; they could even be made to disbelieve their own eyes.

  “From this I draw these conclusions as to the proper conditions for my murder: First, there must be no conceivable reason for the act; second, there must be no way of tracing the weapon to my possession. I need not trouble to hide my traces, except in obvious matters like blood; for it is exceedingly stupid to attempt to prove a false alibi. In fact, there is no bigger booby-trap for a criminal, pace the indignant ghost of Mr. Weller, Senior.

  “My plan is therefore a simple one; I have only to get hold of a weapon without detection, and use it upon an inoffensive stranger at any time when there happens to be nobody looking—though this is not so important.”

  He returned to his fishing tackle. “It’s rather a big bet, though,” he added; “there’s more than a thousand pounds to it. I think I will be pretty careful over details. Practice may not be quite so simple as theory!”

  However, the first part of his programme turned out to be delightfully easy. It was his custom to train during the holiday by taking long walks, on his way to the lake or river where he fished. He detested motor-cars. As luck would have it, during the first week, as he tramped a lonely road, his eye was caught by an object lying on the ground. It was a heavy motor spanner, evidently left behind by some chauffeur who had had a breakdown. His mind instantly grasped the situation. There was no one in sigh. The spanner was already rusted, had lain there some days. Any of a hundred people might have picked it up. It could never be traced to him. He had never possessed such a tool in his life; besides, the pattern was common. He thrust it quickly into his pocket. When he got home, he packed it away carefully in his traveling cashbox, a solid steel affair of which there was but one key, which never left his chain. “Now,” said he, “the problem is to find the onoffensive stranger. I had better leave Scotland. Every one in Scotland is offensive. Also, in the matter of motive, our common humanity urges us all to kill Scotchmen. So goodbye, land o’ cakes!”

  Further meditations were in this key following: since he was to kill with the spanner, certain precautions must be taken. It must be a very clean kill, with no outcry or struggle. At the end of his cogitations, he decided that the victim had better be asleep. His legally trained mind had snapped its last link with the idea of adventure or sport; his motto was “safety first.” His attitude to his projected crime was simply that of preparing a brief; he wished to meet every contingency; the atrocity of his proceedings was invisible to his intellectuality. Reason is perfectly amoral.

  It was on his way from Edingburgh to London that the brilliant idea occured to him. He would kill old miss marsden! She was now Mrs. Robinson, by the way, for she had testified to the faith that was in her by marrying her protégé directly after his acquittal. Ffoulkes knew the house well; he had stayed there several days while working up the case. It was a lonely place, and the old lady was a fresh-air fiend, and slept on the veranda, winter and summer. She was perfectly, had paid most liberally for the defense. Everything was in his favor. Even if Ezra happened to see the murder committed, his tongue was tied; indeed, he stood the strongest chance of being arrested for it himself. The servants slept far away from the veranda, at the other end of the old rambling house; there were no neighbors, and no dogs. His presence in the vicinity would excite no remark, for there was good dry-fly fishing in the streams. He would rent a cottage in the district for the second half of his holiday, walk over the downs, five miles or so, nothing to him, one moonless night, do the job, and walk back. A thousand to one that no one would know that he had ever left his cottage.

  On this plan he acted. The only additional precautions suggested themselves to him on the spot; he cultivated the vicar assiduously, playing chess with him every evening; and he feigned a considerable devotion to that worthy gentleman’s only daughter. It will be well, he thought, to seem to have my mind well occupied with the pleasures of a simpler chase. Further, the villagers would see nothing in a lover taking long walks by nights, in case he were seen leaving the cottage or returning to it.

  A last refinement shot across his mental horizon when he began to calculate the time of the new moon. She would be just a week old on the anniversary of the Marsden murder. That would be the night for the job; the clever-clever novelist-detectives would fabricate a mystery of revenge in connection with the date. Ezra, too, would be away to meet Maud. There was, of course, a possibility that poignancy of memory would keep the old lady awake on that particular night; but he must chance that.

  Things turned out for him even better that he had hoped. Three nights before the proposed crime the vicar mentioned casually that he had met young Robinson— “the charming lad whom you defended so brilliantly”—motoring to London—called away suddenly on business. He expected to be back in a week or ten days. No, Mrs. Robinson was not with him; “she is slightly ailing, poor lady, it appears.”

  When the great night came Ffoulkes made his master-stroke by propos
ing to the vicar’s daughter. He was obviously accepted, and the young people, after dinner, went gaily arm-in-arm through the village, and received the congratulations of the few belated travelers in that early-to-bed-and-early-to-rise corner of the planet. But Ffoulkes had the spanner in his pocket, and after bestowing his fiancée at the vicarage, went, deviously at first, then swiftly and directly, over the downs. Luck followed him to the last; he found his victim fast asleep. A single blow of the spanner, which he had wrapped in a paper bag to deaden the sound, smashed in the skull; he made his way home without being seen or heard by anybody.

  Two days later he wrote to Flynn, with a cutting from the local paper.

  “My dear Jack, here’s a terrible sequal to the Marsden murder. It is now clear that there is some family feud connected with the fatal date. Probably an affair going back a generation. Shocking, indeed, even to a hardened lawyer like myself; but you see how right I was to insist that there must have been a strong motive for Marsden’s murder. Shall we ever know the truth? It sounds like an Arabian Nights’ tale.”

  A month later he returned to London; he had had no answer from Flynn, and supposed him to be still away on his holiday.

  There were no arrests, and no clues, in the matter of Mrs. Robinson. The spanner, which Ffoulkes had dropped by the veranda, served merely to suggest a tramp, who might conceivably have been a chauffeur gone to the bad. But the mystery was deepened by an amazing development; her husband had disappeared completely. There was no question of his complicity in the crime; for on the previous evening he had dined with the British Vice-Consul in Marseilles; and it was physically impossible for him to have returned in time to commit the murder.

  The obvious deduction was that whoever hated the Marsdens had included him in the schedule.

  “Well,” soliloquized Ffoulkes in his chambere, “at least I shall not lose that thousand pounds. But now I’ve got to edge away from Miss Bread-and-Butter-and-Kisses. Ugh!”

  III

  When you have dined at Basso’s, which is the summit of human felicity, you should avoid too sharp a declension to this vale of tears by taking a stroll along the quays to the old quarter on the west of the Bassin. There you will find streets almost worthy to rank with the Fishmarket at Cairo, and decidedly superior to even the best that Hong Kong or Honolulu or New Orleans can produce. In particular, there is an archway called by initiates the Gate of Hell, for it forms an entrance to this highly fascinating and exceedingly disreputable district.

  Under this archway, on the night of the exploit of Sir Richard Ffoulkes, stood a young man, quietly dressed in the English style, though with a trifling tendency to over-indulgence in jewelry.

  He glanced at a watch upon his wrist; ten minutes before midnight. He then took a little bottle from his pocket, after a quick inspection of the vicinity. From the bottle he shook a few grains of powder on the back of his hand, and drew them into his nostrils. Next came a moment’s indecision; then, swinging his cane, he walked briskly out of the archway, and paced up and down a strange little square of green, set there as if somehow hallowed by great memories. After a little while he returned to the archway. This time it was tenanted. A girl stood there. She was dressed in plain black with the extreme of modesty and refinement; but the piquancy and vitality of her face, and the lustre and passion of her eyes, redeemed the picture from banality.

  There was a long look of recognition; the girl reached out both arms. The man took them in his own. For a minute they stood, feeding on each other, prolonging the delicious torture of restraint. Then slowly they drew together, and their mouths met in an abandoned kiss.

  It would have have puzzled them to say how long the embrace lasted; but at its truce they saw that they were not alone. Close to them stood another man, tall, elegant, slim, almost feminine in figure, as he certainly was in the extremity of the fashion which tailored him. Nor was there wanting a touch of rouge and powder on his cheeks. His thin, white hand was lifted to his nostrils, and the lovers perceived that he was taking advantage of the darkness to indulge in cocaine.

  The newcomer spoke in silken tones. “Forgive me,” he said in softest French, “but it gave me pleasure to be near you. I saw monsieur here a few moments ago, and knew that he was one of the elect. And mademoiselle, too? May I have the honor?”

  The girl smiled. “Among friends,” she murmured charmingly, and raised the back of her hand towards him. He saluted it with his lips, and then shook out a generous supply of crystal poison from a snuff-box in amber and emeralds that dated from the great days of Louis XIV.

  The girl turned her eyes full upon him, almost ardently. “I haven’t touched it,” she said, “for ever so long. By the way, excuse me, won’t you, but aren’t we all English?”

  “I am,” said the exquisite. “I’m an actor on a holiday. Won’t you come to my rooms? It’s only a garret, or little better, but I have plenty of the Snow of Heaven, and we could have a wonderful night.” “Let’s go!” said the girl, pressing her lover’s arm. He hesitated a moment. “Three’s company,” urged the other, “when they all understand.”

  “It would be perfect,” chimed the girl, “and it would suit us—in other ways,” she added, darkly. “Yes, the scheme has points,” admitted the younger man: “thanks very much. We’ll come. What’s your name? Mine’s Herbert Aynes. This lady—we’ll call her Mab, if you don’t mind. There’s an injured husband in the offing, you know: that’s one reason why we have to be careful.” ”Certainly, prudence before all things; but I’ve no troubles; call me Francis Ridley.” They linked arms, and strolled gaily along the main street of the quarter, enchanted by the color and the chiaroscuro, by the hoarse cries in all strange tongues that greeted them on every side, even by the weird odors—for when people are lit by love and adventure and cocaine, there is no place of this whole universe which is not sheer delight. Presently, however, they branched off, under Ridley’s direction, and began to climb the steep streets on their right. A minute later they entered an ancient doorway, and after three flights of stairs found Ridley’s dovecote.

  It was a charming room, furnished, as if for a woman, with all bright colors and daintiness. On one side of the room was a divan, smothered in cushions; on the other a hammock of scarlet cords hung from the rafters. Ridley went to the window and closed the shutters. “Madame est chez elle!” he announced gallantly. “What a wonderful place!” laughed the girl. “However did you find it?”

  “Oh, it used to be a house of assignation.”

  “Used to be!”

  And this time all three laughed in unison.

  IV

  The reopening of the courts found Ffoulkes enormously preoccupied. For the past two years several influential newspapers had been accusing Ministers of the Crown of the grossest kind of robbery. They had bought and sold stock, it was alleged, manipulating the prices by using their positions to announce that the government had or had not decided to make contracts with the companies involved, and subsequently denying the rumours when they had taken their profits. The attack had been so persistent that the accused ministers had been forced to desperate measures. They had started a prearranged libel action against a newspaper in Paris for reprinting one of these articles; but people still asked why they did not prosecute one of the sheets that were attacking them in London. Unhappily, not one of these was to be bought: each, carefully sounded, announced its intention to fight; and redoubled its venom.

  It was at last decided to attempt a criminal prosecution of the weakest of its enemies, a paper edited by a man personally unpopular, and to bring every kind of indirect pressure upon the court to secure a conviction.

  Of course the law officers of the Crown were unavailable for the prosecution; and the choice of a leader had fallen, at the last moment, when their own counsel suddenly declined to go on with the case and returned the briefs, upon Ffoulkes.

  He had thus only a month to assimilate what really required six; but if he won, he could be sure of office next time
a Liberal Government was in power.

  So he worked day and night, seeing nobody but the solicitors and witnesses employed on the case.

  He had no news of Flynn but a telegram from Berlin, saying that he would be back in a month, and that there was “nothing to report as yet.” This amused Ffoulkes hugely; it would be great if Flynn failed to bring off his murder. However, he had no time for trifles like murder these days: he had to get a conviction for criminal libel; nothing else mattered.

  But when the case came actually into court he saw it to be hopeless. His opening was masterly: it occupied two days; but on the second day he sent word to his clients during the lunch hour that it was no good to go on, and that he felt forced to take measures previously agreed upon. These were simple; near the conclusion of the speech he managed to blunder into disclosing a flaw in the procedure so obvious that the judge could not possibly overlook it. His lordship interrupted: “I am afraid, Sir Richard, that you have no case. If you will refer to Jones vs. The Looking Glass,4 you will see that it has been expressly laid down that—” An elaborate legal argument followed, but the judge was inexorable. “You must redraw yout plea, Sir Richard. The case is dismissed.”