That evening, after leaving Hall, I decided that I must gird up my mental loins and get to work on the new complications which Camilla’s story had brought to light. The problem now presented a very different aspect.
Whereas, in the first place, it had seemed as though the available facts were insufficient to make a complete picture, I now felt that there was not enough room in my jigsaw puzzle to fit in all the pieces that I had in my possession. And, at the same time, these facts were singularly lacking in balance or cohesion.
There were, for example, a surprising number of potential murderers—a fair sprinkling of opportunities for them to commit their crimes—but, as far as one could see with the naked eye, no earthly or unearthly motive why anyone should wish to kill three perfectly harmless human beings.
But Camilla had brought out two important points. Money and family relationships were involved—factors which, if properly juggled around and manipulated into place, might easily produce the missing motive. It was to the hunting of this elusive snark that I decided to dedicate myself that evening.
I would begin with William North. He, I felt certain, was the cornerstone of the whole miserable edifice. His crime, tragedy or moment of madness was the focal point about which all things revolved—the fons et orìgo mali from which had sprung these ramifications, past and present. And since I could not study William North in the flesh, I would read up about him in my father’s book, which I could borrow from Stuart. Like the answer to a maiden’s prayer, Somerville accosted me just as I reached the foot of “A” staircase. He was magnificently dressed and bound, so he said, for a quiet game of poker in Jesus.
“Somerville,” I said casually, “there is a little book which I seem to have heard you mention from time to time. I’d like to borrow it from you, if you don’t mind. The name, I believe, is Famous Second Trials. I think it—”
“Sure thing—you bet—okay, gate,” replied Stuart, giving a tolerable imitation of Jerry Colonna’s talkie accent. “It’s bully reading for a quiet Sunday evening at home. By a wise guy called Fenton. Come into my shack.”
He produced a battered copy of my father’s volume and turned over its pages with mock reverence.
“I may have to charge you extra for the illustrations,” he said solemnly. “Here, for example, is the portrait of the artist as an old man—Fenton ipse, complete with wig and robes.”
My father had been portrayed with enormous side-whiskers, large spectacles and flowing garments which were reminiscent of the Winged Victory. His appearance had not been improved by the addition of a large wasp, wart or wen to the extreme tip of an extraordinarily Semitic nose.
“My father,” I remarked drily, “is fifty-two years old. He is clean shaven and looks rather like the late Sir Gerald du Maurier. He never wears a wig, and I know of no wasp in the world that would have the impertinence to sting the end of his nose. Otherwise your resemblance is excellent.”
“Thank you, thank you, Fenton. And how is this for a portrait of Oscar—naughty Mr. Wilde in the act of bursting?” He turned to a picture so horrible that it defies description. “Or, this one of William North, dragging his victim down ‘A’ staircase by her hair?
“These are my jewels.” He paused and lifted his eyes piously heavenward. “Oh, Fenton, Fenton, had I but served my God with half the zeal that I put into these illustrations during lecture hours, I would not have been ploughed in my Mays next month.”
I took the book from his hand. “Thank you, Stuart. You are quite an artist. Now run along to Jesus. I will treat this masterpiece as it deserves.”
He put a restraining arm on my sleeve.
“No, no, my Hilary. The drains are sensitive. They too have their little feelings. And, by the same token, how is the Old Pill?”
“Better, I believe. His attack was not so serious as it looked.”
“Well, he gave you an opportunity to walk your baby back home like a perfect little American knight—without the K. And say, when you are through with that wench, you might—”
But I did not stop for more. With a hurried good night I ran up to my rooms, sported my oak and prepared to spend a profitable hour or two with the only one of my father’s books that I had ever opened.
For some little time I waded through a morass of legal technicalities which were just so much Sanskrit to me. Finally, however, as I read on, a picture of William North began to emerge—a picture which in no way resembled the realistic sketch drawn by Somerville in the margin of the book.
I saw a man who had been tried and condemned to death for a crime which he undoubtedly had committed. I saw him fighting what looked like a losing battle after the case had been sent back for retrial, due to some technical misdirection to the jury.
I saw how his friends had stood by him—how they had sworn to his insanity, his unbalanced genius, his nervous temperament which, at the time of the crime, had been superimposed on a state of definite ill health. I saw the astuteness of his counsel in using the man’s weakness to strengthen his defense.
I saw how it was possible to juggle slightly yet delicately with the impervious bulwark of the English legal system. I saw the shadow of the gallows gradually begin to fade—to be replaced by the walls of the insane asylum. Even the stiff, textbook phraseology could not altogether rob the case of its drama.
So much for North. But now it was not he alone in whom I was interested. My father had thrown into relief other aspects and other personalities. I was struck by the evidence of Dr. Reginald Warren, then a young man who had just received his fellowship at All Saints.
I was amazed at the coolness with which he had declared his own best friend to be temporarily insane and consequently not responsible for his actions. I was interested in the measured testimony of Dr. Martineau Hyssop, Master of All Saints, who, in his own conservative manner, did as much as anyone for his young colleague. I could see Cambridge presenting a united front against the invasion of its sacred precincts by a hideous chimera.
The figure of Mrs. North was hazy, but I studied it with particular care. At the first trial, it seemed, she had been present with her two infants (Camilla’s first public appearance, I reflected bitterly) obviously with a view to gaining for her husband the sympathies of the jury. At the second trial, which took place some months later, she had been absent, as my father put it, “for family reasons.”
On the other side of the picture, however, there was the family of the girl whom North had killed. By a strange coincidence her name had happened to be the same as that of one of the greatest comediennes of her day—and perhaps of all days—Marie Lloyd. This was possibly one of the factors which had made the case of such wide popular appeal. The vindictiveness of the Lloyd family struck me particularly. “Blood for our blood” was written in every line of the testimony they gave. They were, as far as I could see, unbending and implacable.
Such, briefly, were the facts and figures most intimately connected with the North scandal. The rest is common knowledge and as well known, even to the layman, as the retribution which finally overtook such arch-criminals as Crippen, Landru and Smith. But with these three, their misdeeds had terminated decently upon the gallows.
With North, it seemed, the evil he had done lived after him—to break out twenty years later like some malignant cancer in the lives of his children. Where in this tangled history of the past could I find a motive to account for these present tragedies?
The most obvious and immediate conclusion, of course, was that the dead girl’s family might still be harboring against the North clan a spirit of revenge and hatred—an Old Testament vendetta reaching down to the second and third generation. But why?
North had suffered. He had paid for his crime in full. What was there to choose between death on the gallows and the death-in-life of the asylum? And Marie Lloyd had been in her grave for a long, long time. Her parents were probably in their graves, too. At any rate it was certain that they were not up at Cambridge.
Was it reasonable to suppose that they had bequeathed to their children or grandchildren the undying spirit of hatred towards the Norths? Had this fire smouldered for twenty years, to break out at last on “A” staircase? Revenue without profit in a so-called Christian era? Was that a motive to be taken seriously? Surely there is a limit to human vindictiveness.
But Mrs. North? That dim figure conjured up all sorts of sinister possibilities. She suggested innumerable motives. It was a known fact that she had benefited through the death of her son Jules, alias Julius Baumann. Camilla, too, had money of her own. And—here a fantastic notion crossed my mind—Mrs. North had been a barmaid, so often a first step towards becoming a college bedmaker.
Mrs. Bigger had been a barmaid—Mrs. Fancher’s husband owned a public house. Was it possible that Mrs. North had not gone to Canada at all—that she had stayed in Cambridge, nursing her secret schemes against her own flesh and blood? No, the idea was altogether too wild and farfetched. She would have been recognized immediately by Dr. Warren, the Master—anyone who had happened to be present at North’s first trial.
She would have been the first person suspected by those who knew. She was a marked character, a branded sheep. As the murderess of her son and the would-be murderess of her daughter she was out of the question. But as I sat there with the book on my knee, I began to play more and more with the idea of Mrs. North. I turned over the pages and read every reference that was made to her.
Suddenly my eye caught once again that phrase—’’Mrs. North was absent from the second trial for family reasons.” The words fascinated me. It was the only sentence in the whole chapter which seemed to be lacking in the frankness and lucidity which marked my father’s textbook style. I read it over again and again.
Then all at once, there flashed into my mind an idea which was eventually to prove almost my only real contribution to the solution of the case. What were the family reasons which could keep Mrs. North from so important an event as the second trial of her husband?
I could see my father nervously shuffling his feet at the breakfast table when my mother asked him some question which involved either the seamy side of human nature or the biological functions of life. Into the phrasing of his one sentence I read paternal embarrassment and paternal delicacy. In short, Mrs. North must have stayed away because she was expecting another baby!
At last light seemed to be dawning on me in all directions. Immediately my interest shifted from Mrs. North to the problematic person whom I now began to call North Junior in my mind. The son, presumably, of William. North, born, as one might almost say, posthumously to his wife. This son, conceived in shame and despair, gestated during this frightful period of his mother’s life, delivered into a world which rang with his father’s notorious name.
The other North children, adopted as they were immediately after the tragedy, might well have escaped the taint. But North Junior had been born out of the very bowels of the tragedy itself. Anything might reasonably be expected of such a son. The gall and wormwood that had been bred into the very bones must some day come out in the flesh. He, too, was a marked sheep—but branded secretly with the black mark of God rather than of man. He could run with the flock unnoticed.
And apart from his fearful heredity, there would have been other, more material reasons, why North Junior might wish evil to his brother and sister. Supposing he had been adopted by someone less prosperous than the Lathrops or the Baumanns? Or supposing he had followed the devious fortunes of his mother.
Would not the comparative affluence of Jules and Corinne naturally rankle in his twisted mind? Would he not perhaps hope to inherit some share of the personal fortune which had come to them? Legal quirks aside, was he not one of the next of kin—the logical person to share with his mother any money left by his brother or sister on their death?
“On their death”—and why not, therefore, hasten on that death? I could picture North Junior scheming it all out in his brain—that brain which combined the inherited brilliance of a great scholar and the cunning of an ambitious barmaid. “Hasten on their death!” First Jules, his older brother, then Hankin who had seen or heard something that he had not dared to tell. And then Camilla. After that—who knows?—perhaps his mother would fall a victim, unless she were conniving at his crimes and sharing the spoils. Nothing would have seemed impossible to North Junior. I was beginning to visualize him more clearly now.
I could almost see him standing in the room beside me. He was taking corporeal shape before my mind’s eye. He would, I reflected, be about twenty years old. He might be in his first or second year at Cambridge. He would be approximately the same age as, say, Lloyd Comstock, Stuart Somerville, Michael Grayling or either of the two freshmen who had been at the Master’s tea party that day.
Young North was now beginning to obsess me and permeate me completely. I had—I must have met him, talked to him, possibly shaken him by the hand. He was in the college—he was an undergraduate at All Saints like myself. A serpent in the academic garden; a lunatic far more criminal and far more dangerous than his father.
I got up and started to pace the room. I must talk to someone about him, about his mother. I must talk to someone who knew. I should go mad if I didn’t share my suspicions with someone. But who? Michael. No, he might be … Comstock? Oh God! The Master? He was too old and had been sufficiently upset for one day.
Then suddenly I thought of Dr. Warren. I must see him. He knew more about the North family than I did—more about William North than my father—more, probably than any man living.
Breathless with excitement, I ran down to the senior tutor’s rooms. I found him seated at his desk, working. He barely looked up when I entered.
“Dr. Warren, I must speak to you, I must—” I stammered out the purpose of my visit.
The eye without the monocle stared at me stonily. “Mr. Fenton, you are disturbing yourself unduly and you are disturbing me. I do not see any reason why you should take these tragedies to yourself exclusively. You have wasted a great deal of time lately in worrying over things that are being investigated by the proper authorities. And, incidentally, speaking of wasted time, I feel it my duty to remind you—as your tutor—that you will have examinations to pass next month.”
“I wanted to talk to you, sir, as a human being, not as a tutor,” I shouted, flinging respect to the winds. “I am taking things upon myself for a very good reason—because I happen to be in love with Camilla Lathrop—or, if you like it better, with Corinne North, the daughter of the man who was in your rooms, on this staircase, the night Jules North, or Julius Baumann, was murdered. I’m taking things upon myself because I am not prepared to stand idly by and see the girl I hope to marry killed in cold blood.”
My voice had cracked on a shrill squeak. I knew that I was making myself ridiculous, that I was behaving like a second-rate boor, but I didn’t care. Dr. Warren could send me down tomorrow if he wanted to, but tonight I was going to have my say.
Instead of saying it, however, I subsided into the nearest chair. Finally I recovered my breath and glared belligerently at the tutor. There was an expression of surprise rather than anger on his face. Suddenly he rose slowly from his seat and walked across the room towards me.
To my amazement he was holding out his hand. “Fenton,” he said, and for the first time he dropped the ceremonious mister, “I apologize. You undoubtedly have the right to be interested. I did not know that you were even acquainted with Miss Lathrop. Perhaps you will allow me to congratulate you on your excellent taste.”
I shook his proffered hand weakly.
“I apologize, too, sir,” I said, “for bursting in this way. But I had to talk to you. I’ve just been reading my father’s account of the North trial—” Here I explained as briefly as possible some of the results of my evening’s occupation. Dr. Warren listened attentively. Finally he spoke:
“Since you have been so frank with me about your suspicions, Fenton, I will tell you something about Monday night—something which I had hoped would remain a secret between Horrocks and myself. It will clear your mind on one point at least. When I returned to my rooms after Hall that evening I found William North here playing my piano.
“He was, as you doubtless know, one of my closest friends at college. My room was the logical place for him to come to in his emergency. We had a long talk, but I never left him alone the whole evening until—well, it would have been impossible for him to have killed Baumann even if the idea had entered his head. But you can take it from me that such a thought never occurred to him.
“Whatever his faults in the past, he is now as guileless as a child. He only wanted to get into a library. He could not bear being kept so long away from his beloved books. I promised to help him. For one moment I had the absurd idea of letting him see his children first—”
“Did Camilla come to your rooms that night?” I interrupted eagerly. “I thought I saw her on the staircase, but afterwards she disappeared. I followed her. She wasn’t in the court, or the gyp’s pantry or anywhere. So, unless she came in here—I must have been mistaken.”
A slightly puzzled look had come over Dr. Warren’s face. “No,” he said slowly, “she did not come into my rooms that night. My little scheme for having her meet her father never materialized because Grayling came down to say—but you know all that.
“After we had left the Master’s lodge, I drove North up to the house of a friend of mine near Oakham. He has one of the finest sixteenth century libraries in the country. Immediately after the inquest I told Horrocks the whole truth.”
“About his having been here that night and about Camilla?”
Dr. Warren nodded. “Everything,” he said quietly.
This then, I reflected, was the reason for Horrocks’ attendance at the cricket match—the explanation of his cryptic remark to me in the court on the day of Hankin’s murder.
“But Mrs. North, sir? Don’t you know anything about her? Doesn’t she come into this?”
The tutor shook his head. “No Fenton, but the inspector is looking for her. He’s been working every night lately, poor fellow, and he’s not leaving a single stone unturned.”
“She couldn’t be in the college—say, as a bedmaker?” I suggested nervously.
Dr. Warren smiled almost tolerantly. “Your imagination is beginning to run away with you, Fenton,” he said good-humoredly. “People like Mrs. North do not become—er—bedmakers. She was a beautiful woman—a born actress and, I am afraid, a bom courtesan.
“We lost track of her completely after the trial, and we are not sure now whether she is in this country, though there is reason to believe that she is. Your discovery about her third child is—or may be—a valuable contribution. I had completely forgotten the circumstances. It is all so long ago.”
I paused a moment, unwilling to voice the most terrible and, at the same time, the most concrete of my suspicions. “Dr. Warren,” I said hesitatingly, “if young North is here at All Saints, and if he really did this thing—well, the field is very limited—there are only five or six undergraduates who—”
“That,” interposed the tutor quickly, “is also being investigated. But—” he shook his head deprecatingly, “it all seems very unlikely. Somerville’s father is so well-known, a baronet of impeccable standing; Grayling’s is a rector in a small Gloucestershire village; Mr. Comstock, as you know, is a manufacturer of—er—garments; and the Governor of Senegambia!
“There is hardly likely to be anything in the family histoiy of those boys which would not bear the closest scrutiny. But, as you say, it is conceivable that young North may be an undergraduate here. I shall speak to Horrocks tomorrow. I am very glad you came to me. And now—I’m rather busy. If you will excuse me …”
As Dr. Warren accompanied me to the door, he stopped and looked at me for a moment with a curious gleam in his eyes.
“You’ve gone into this matter rather deeply, haven’t you, Fenton?” he said quietly. “You’ve thought about it pretty hard and, if I may be allowed to say so, fairly sanely. You are not your father’s son for nothing. The legal mind, I suppose. Well, it helps, but remember it won’t get you through your examination for the English Tripos next month. Good night.”
But the night was not destined to be a good one—at least not in the conventional sense of the word. For, as I left Dr. Warren’s rooms and began to climb the stairs, I almost collided with the college porter who was puffing his way downwards like a steam engine.
“Oh, Mr. Fenton,” he panted, “there’s a gent at the gates as wants to speak to you urgent. He sez ’e carn’t come up; ’e’s in a nurry, sir—a norful ’urry.”
“But it’s almost ten o’clock. Who on earth can it be?” I asked in surprise.
“A stranger, sir. Clean-shaven, talks with a kinda furrin accent and not so young as ’e was.”
A thousand strange possibilities flashed through my mind as I followed the porter out towards the college gates. Who on earth did I know who was clean shaven and talked with a foreign accent—a middle-aged man? Could it, perhaps, be my father? William North without a beard?
Or was it—was it the unknown person who had spoken to Hankin in the court on the night he was murdered—the sinister figure who had lurked behind the lilac bush awaiting his opportunity to strike? Was some startling adventure—some strange new revelation—in store for me?
I was not kept long in doubt. Under the large lamp that lighted the main entrance to the college stood a tall, thin man, closely wrapped in a fur coat. Even when he turned and faced me, I could not immediately recall where I had seen those sallow features before. Then, suddenly, I remembered. He was the man who had given evidence at Julius Baumann’s inquest—the lawyer who handled his father’s estate. His name—if I recalled it rightly—was Johann Van der Walt.