Sir,
I have just read in today’s edition of the Diário de Notícias another letter in which Doctor ***, with malevolent insistence, once again suggests that my poor friend A.M.C. was an accessory to the murder of which the doctor has become the self-appointed historian.
I told you in my previous letter that, with the sole aid of my courage and my wits, I intended to put myself at the service of everyone’s curiosity and attempt to penetrate and untangle the grim tale which, for more than a week now, has been appearing daily in the pages of your newspaper and presenting your astonished readers with a mysterious and chilling picture.
Unfortunately, I have learned nothing: all my enquiries, petitions and visits were in vain. The story merely vanishes ever further into the mist surrounding it, and my poor friend A.M.C. is still there, whether in voluntary seclusion or enforced imprisonment I do not know.
Given the impossibility of discovering the truth by tramping the city’s streets, I decided to track it down in the doctor’s own letters. I analysed them, dissected them, word by word, and now, without describing my processes, I present you with my results.
The Mystery of the Sintra Road is an invention, not a literary invention as I had at first thought, but a criminal invention with a specific objective. Here is what I have managed to deduce of the motives behind this invention.
There is no denying that a crime has been committed, that much is clear. One of the accessories to this crime is Doctor ***. Since he has chosen to remain anonymous, I have no hesitation in making this formal accusation. If his name were known, if he had signed his letters, I would only dare to make such a grave affirmation if I had legal proof to back it up.
Yes, Doctor *** is an accessory to a crime. My friend, A.M.C., is an unsuspecting dupe, onto whom the perpetrators are trying to foist any suspicions that may already exist, along with any further evidence that may turn up later. This crime, which has actually been committed, appears before us in the literary clothes of a theatrical mystery. The doctor’s letters are a childish fiction, as we shall soon see.
Is it likely that, in a small city like Lisbon where we are all of us neighbours, close friends and relatives, Doctor ***, who appears to be a man known in society, a frequenter of its salons and its theatres, would not know a single one of those four masked men, who clearly all move in the same social circles, sit on the same sofas, listen to the same music in the same salons and in the same theatres?
A black velvet mask is not enough to disguise an acquaintance. His hair, his walk, his build, his face, his voice, his hands, his manner of dress are quite enough to betray his identity. Has Doctor *** really never seen any of these men before? The men were so elegant, so distinguished, such fine horsemen and linguists, so rich, yet the doctor, a medical man, a man with connections, an habitué of the Teatro São Carlos, had, it seems, never seen them before, and this in a country where all of life is concentrated in the few yards of mud that make up the Chiado! And, it turns out, one of the masked men is a close friend of F.’s, but even though they were sitting knee to knee in the carriage, F. failed to recognise him by his hands, his eyes, his build – even by his silence! Pure farce!
And yet at carnival time, when the least well-known, the least famous of Lisbon youths disguises himself as a Turk, slaps a false beard on his face, covers himself with feathers, dresses up as Mephistopheles, as a ci-devant aristocrat or as a melon, no one in the foyer of the Teatro São Carlos would pass him without saying: ‘There goes so-and-so!’And that’s at night, by lamplight, when we’re distracted and conscious that women are looking at us, not while we’re being ambushed and kidnapped on a road in broad daylight! That’s how well we know each other! What a joke!
And so innocent, so naïve are those masked men, that at a moment of high danger, they go in search of the very man who, given his connections, his profession and his penetrating intelligence, would most easily be able to recognise them. If they feared discovery, why choose him of all people? If they weren’t concerned about being recognised, why wear masks?
Why, then, did it have to be a doctor? In order to verify that the man was dead? Or to help? Or to save him? In that case, what kind of men are they, who, instead of heading posthaste for the nearest pharmacy or doctor’s house, go calmly to their rooms, put on masks and then, at dusk, drive to a heath two leagues away to re-enact an episode worthy of a play by Frédéric Soulié.
Did they perhaps know that the man was already dead? Why then call for a doctor, a witness? And if they weren’t concerned about having a witness, why the masks and the blindfolds? You see, pure theatre!
Consider the doctor’s description of examining the corpse; there is not a single scientific word there. Nothing about it rings true, from the serenity of the man’s features to the dilation of the pupils.
What kind of men are Doctor *** and his friend F.? There they were in a house in a city street, with their hands unbound, and yet they did not lay a finger on the masked men. How could such proud, generous men put up with such humiliating treatment? If they are the honest, principled fellows they claim to be, how could they, by their acceptance of the situation, allow themselves to be made accomplices?
And then there’s A.M.C.! Look how they present him – childish, nervous, timid, imbecilic and meekly obeying orders! – when he is, in fact, a man of great strength of character, courage and sang-froid! How can anyone believe the infantile trick the Doctor used to trip him up?
‘The one thing that puzzles me in all this,’ the doctor said, ‘is that the arsenic left no trace.’ To which, according to the doctor, A.M.C. responded: ‘It was opium.’
What can be said of the brainless naïveté of a man who resorts to such simplistic drivel?
And although her identity is only hinted at, what kind of woman would be involved in such an affair? Why does the masked man want to protect her? What is all this business about the theft of £2,300? Let’s be logical: given that robbery was the main motive for the crime, why, then, would a noble, gentlemanly character like the masked man still feel so protective of a woman who kills in order to steal?
If, on the other hand, he suspects that the motive was passion, how does he explain the robbery?
Besides, if he suspected her of being involved in the death, but was so bound to her that he still wanted to protect her, why didn’t he immediately go and see her? Why didn’t he question her, instead of ambushing strangers on the highway and bringing them to view a corpse?
How contrived this whole story is, how false and artificial and feeble! Those carriages galloping through the streets of Lisbon. Those masked men smoking cigars in the twilight, those novelettish roads where coaches manage to pass without being stopped at the toll-bars and where horsemen in pale capes gallop through the darkness! It’s like a French novel from the days of le ministère Compte Villèle. I am not even going to bother with the letters from F., which explain nothing, reveal nothing and mean nothing – unless it is the need for a murderer and a thief to publish his empty prose in the columns of a respectable newspaper.
Conclusion: Doctor *** was an accomplice to a crime. He’s aware that someone knows his secret, he senses that everything is about to be revealed, he fears the police may become involved, that someone has been indiscreet; that is why he wants to create this cloud of confusion, to put any investigation off the scent, to mislead, obscure, conceal, obfuscate; and, while he spreads bewilderment among the public, he packs his bags and runs away to be a coward in France, having been a murderer here in Portugal!
What my friend A.M.C. is doing in the midst of all this, I have no idea.
I beg you, sir, please purge the pages of your newspaper of these implausible fabrications.
Z.