Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense (64 page)

Sir Beaumont raised his hand back still clutching his walking stick and with an effort controlled his temper.

“I have no need to demand satisfaction from a one-legged deaf Irish son of a bitch,” he said acidly, “most especially when I observe that his wretched body has already been compensated for the nature of his character. Good day!”

Muldaur's barking laughter followed him.

Captain Muldaur turned next to Treviscoe. “If you would pursue your own interests, I beg that you call on me at my lodgings: Number 5, Red Rose Alley, off White Cross Street, the day after tomorrow. We have somewhat to discuss.”

“A
ND DID YOU
accept the invitation?”

“I did,” said Treviscoe, “and went to keep the appointment at the designated hour. It had thundered furiously during the night, and the rain was still considerable that morning …”

T
REVISCOE MADE HIS
way under a recent investment he had made to protect his large and expensive tricorn: a fine black umbrella. They were becoming something of a fad in the city. He addressed the problem of muddy streets by wearing boots as if he were a soldier on campaign. Although they were not fashionable, he did not expect Muldaur to care.

Muldaur's habitation was in the warren of tenements that catered to London's impoverished Irish. The captain's presence there was somewhat incongruous: as a king's officer he was at least nominally a Protestant, and the exclusively Catholic populace would view him with suspicion. But he must have had his reasons.

Murky puddles had collected in holes where the dismal street was missing cobblestones. Some of the displaced stones were scattered around the door to Muldaur's domicile.

A worn and harried woman whose wide and darting eyes reminded Treviscoe of a field mouse watching for an owl answered the door and told him timorously that the captain lived on the second story and that his slave lodged in the attic. The stair was narrow and decrepit. It could not have been an easy climb for a man with a wooden leg.

The door to the room was ajar. He placed his hand on the door, and it swayed gently back.

Muldaur was face up on the floor. His head and open nightshirt were horribly bloody, and his face was swollen almost beyond recognition. Treviscoe knelt and knew from the coldness of the flesh that there would be no pulse. He quickly examined the body.

The most obvious injuries were to his face and arms, but his left leg, the whole one, was bent unnaturally. His chest and abdomen were pale and unmarked except for a fresh, thin bruise across his chest stretching from armpit to armpit. The palms of his hands were raw, red, and chapped, and some of the skin had been scraped away. The knuckles were unmarked. His nightshirt was damp, but the floor around him was dry.

Rain gusted in from the open window, falling short of where the body lay.

Treviscoe went to the window to pull it shut. Hanging from the eave of the roof was a black iron hook from which depended a wooden naval block, but there was no rope reeved through it. It had obviously been installed so that something might be lifted to the window directly from the street.

He pulled the window shut and surveyed the room. He remembered how, at the prizefight, blood had freely spattered the observers. But there were no bloodstains anywhere except in the immediate vicinity of the body, where small pools of blood had dripped off the face. Under the bed he found a cleat, such as were used to belay lines aboard ships, affixed to the floor. He looked back to the window, at the image of the block through the closed window swinging in the wet wind, smeared by the cheap glass and spattering raindrops.

Where was the rope?

“W
HAT SIGNIFICANCE
did you attach to your observations, Mr. Treviscoe?” Sir Richard asked.

“Objection, m'lord!” The crown prosecutor stood. “Of what conceivable relevance can the speculations of Mr. Treviscoe be to the court? May I remind my learned colleague that the jury and the jury alone are the triers of fact.”

“Perhaps the distinguished advocate for the crown has forgotten Mr. Treviscoe's particular profession as an investigator of fraudulent claims against the insurance underwriters of Lloyd's. I am sure it is not necessary to remind the court that many times ere now, and in this very room, his testimony has served the cause of justice, although he has not previously been before Your Lordship. A man's very life is on trial, and to deprive the jury of Mr. Treviscoe's expertise were to flaunt the purpose of this assembly.”

“Just so,” said Lord Mansfield after a considered pause. “You may continue.”

“Mr. Treviscoe?”

“The only conclusion I drew with certainty was that Captain Muldaur had not been murdered in his room, but that his corpus had been transported thither after the commission of the crime. Otherwise blood would have been spattered on the walls or on the bed.”

“But there were no clues as to the identity of the murderer, were there?”

Treviscoe paused. “There were none to identify anyone positively, that is true, but by scientific reasoning some parties could easily be ruled out. His wounds were not consistent with those sustained by fisticuffs. I should say his assailant, or more precisely his assailants, were not boxers.”

“He was beaten senseless. Is not that consistent with being struck repeatedly by a powerful fighter?”

“He was never once struck 'tween belt and shoulder, judging from the entire absence of bruising on his torso save the thin line I mentioned, and he never returned a blow with his own hands, which though obviously distressed were unmarked on the obverse. A man striking back would surely have marked his knuckles. The wounds to his forearms showed he had tried, with a lamentable lack of success, to protect his face. It were a strange boxer who insists on pummeling a man's head when his midriff is exposed.”

“Objection, m'lord! Mr. Treviscoe is pleased to say who the murderer cannot have been solely on the basis of what was
not
done. We are not to imagine, I hope, that should a baker commit murder he should always make of his victim a pie.”

“Your objection is sustained, Mr. Juddson, even if your metaphor exceeds the proper decorum expected in this court,” said Mansfield coldly. “The witness will confine himself to only those positive observations that may be derived from the evidence of his own eyes, and the jury will disregard speculative testimony that the murderer cannot have been a boxer.”

“Very good, m'lord,” said Sir Richard, satisfied, knowing that what is said cannot be unsaid. “Mr. Treviscoe, were there any other clues as the identity, or identities, of Captain Muldaur's assailant or assailants?”

“As noted, not at the scene …” replied Treviscoe, pausing.

Looking directly at the judge, his tentative manner suggesting that he delicately weighed whether or not he might be silenced for exceeding His Lordship's instructions, he continued, “But that is not to say there were no clues. There was his unusual history, and his strange words at the prizefight …”

“H
AVE YOU SEEN
this, Alan?” Gunn waved a broadsheet in Treviscoe's face. “Hero is caught! He has confessed!”

“What do you mean?” Treviscoe put his clay pipe in his mouth and accepted the newspaper. The common room at Lloyd's buzzed with the usual flurry of activity beneath a thick pall of smoke. “‘The Black Spartacus Captured.'”

“He was heard to say, ‘Then my actions have killed him.' That's the end of the mystery, I would say.”

“Confessed?” Treviscoe's forehead furrowed. “I would never've imagined it. But 'tis a strange confession. ‘Then my actions have killed him.' What actions?”

“Murder, surely,” said Gunn.

“My dear Magnus, on infrequent occasions I have observed that people actually choose the words that express most precisely what they mean. Hero certainly did not actually say he had
murdered
the captain; contrariwise, his diction seems to indicate he did not know of the consequences of his actions till he was informed of the crime upon his arrest.”

Gunn frowned. “Well, 'tis clear that Captain Muldaur and Hero quarreled the night of the murder. The landlady, Mrs. O'Reilly, heard Hero shouting from two floors above.”

“What of it? Muldaur was deaf, and his ear trumpet was not in his room when I discovered his body, else I have lost any capacity to effect a thorough search.”

“Do you then perversely insist that Hero is innocent?”

“Innocent? Of murder, perhaps, but of what else I can only guess. There are too many strange little facts in this case, Magnus, for me to be satisfied that the most obvious culprit is the true culprit, although I concur as to the matter appearing—I almost said black, but this is no matter for levity; bleak is mayhap more apposite—for the slave. Consider: why were there no blows to the captain's ribs and abdomen? Is that consistent with being beaten to death by a boxer? I think not, and neither would you think so if it were not convenient to so do. Remember also that Captain Muldaur had other enemies beyond any disputation if his relationship with Sir Beaumont Clevis is to be judged at face value. It would be instructive to know more of his history, to glean who those enemies were. I wish I knew, for example, how he came to lose his right leg, and his deafness seemed unusually pronounced for a man of such hearty middle age.”

“Why, 'tis no mystery there. Both the debilitations followed the explosion of HMS
Leonidas
in Belfast Lough in the year '60.”

“Was that the year the French occupied the castle at Carrickfergus?”

“Aye, the very same. 'Tis not an event generally known, but
Leonidas
, a fourth rate of fifty guns, was dispatched under secret orders to defend Carrickfergus whilst frigates harassed the French commodore, whose name was Thurot, at sea. The officer in command of
Leonidas
's marines was none other than Captain Ragnall Muldaur.

“The ship anchored off the north shore of the Lough to meet the French and do some damage before they could land. But a party of Frenchmen were led overland, and reaching the shore, they launched a boat in the early morning darkness so they might detach the ship from her cable, whereupon she ran hard aground on the morning flood-tide. In the confusion there was a fire belowdecks, and the powder magazine blew, killing near every soul on board. Of three hundred sailors and marines only Muldaur lived to tell the tale, minus his leg and his hearing lost to the blast.”

“You said the French soldiers were led but not by whom.”

“Scuttlebutt said 'twere some paddy Judas paid his thirty pieces out of Commodore Thurot's own pocket.”

Treviscoe's pipe had gone out, but he didn't notice. His concentration was interrupted by the sound of a man clearing his throat.

“In the absence of someone to introduce us formally I must needs introduce myself, Mr. Treviscoe,” the man said in a harsh Ulster accent. He was dressed well but not richly, his sole concession to vanity being silk stockings that showed off his well-rounded calves to good advantage.

“Michael Flynn, solicitor, at your service. I had the honor to represent the late Captain Ragnall Muldaur and have come to inform you as to the provision in his will by which, under the normal turn of events, you would have benefited had circumstances not dictated otherwise.”

“You astonish me, Mr. Flynn,” replied Treviscoe. “What can you mean? I hardly knew the captain.”

“Two days ago Captain Muldaur altered his will to favor you, Mr. Treviscoe, by making you his sole heir. I have the document here. As I understand it, he was moved to this gesture out of gratitude to your father, who had succored him in his recovery after serious injury and sponsored him in a business venture in the Barbados. Alas, the sole remnant of what by his description must have been a once respectable fortune is now manifested solely in the person of his slave Hero, whom the newspapers have pleased to fashion the Black Spartacus. I presume you have heard of the affair, and of how the captain made a gladiator of the poor black and how Hero avenged himself.”

Treviscoe was thunderstruck. “I have no want of a slave.”

“Then 'tis just as well, for your inheritance now amounts to nothing, there being no power on earth that can stand between Hero and the gallows,” said Flynn. “Your slave sits now in Newgate Prison awaiting trial for the murder of his master.”

Treviscoe stood up in agitation.

“My slave! My slave! What ill-sounding words. Am I some Carolina indigo plantationer? But you are wrong in assuming that there is nothing to be done, as Hero has become my personal responsibility. It cannot now suffice merely to be unconvinced of his guilt; instead I must do everything in my power to steer him clear of Tyburn hill. There is no power like the truth, and it has become imperative that it now be wholly discovered. Magnus!”

“Yes, Alan?”

“There was a considerable purse for the fight, was there not?”

“Five hundred pounds.”

“What has become of it?”

“What was it Muldaur said at the contest? That he owed someone and that the debt should be paid. Perhaps he discharged it.”

“The
Malian
's debt, he said. Mark the words, Magnus. I remember them well, though I did not then fully perceive their import. In light of what you have told me about his career, I would scarce imagine that five hundred pounds would cover such a debt as to the
Median
. No, the money went elsewhere, stolen most like by the perpetrators of the murder. It will not stand—but you are better acquainted with the sporting world than I, and I would consider it a personal favor if you were to look into the matter of who put the purse forward and at the same time find out if there were any other wagerers whose loss was, to express it with moderation,
inconveniently
large. I can think of no likelier person with whom to begin, in the absence of more information, than Sir Beaumont. He is not, I believe, our quarry, but he may know who is. The man we seek must be an Irishman, middle-aged, of brutal temperament and mercenary reputation.”