“City or country, East End or West End, I fancy we are all equally anxious to keep other people's hands out of our pockets,” said David Arden; “and I quite agree with Mr. Longcluse in all he is reported to have said with respect to our police system.”
“But is it so certain that the man was robbed?” said Vivian Darnley.
“Everything he had about him was taken,” said Mr. Longcluse.
“But they pretend to rob men sometimes, when they murder them, only to conceal the real motive,” persisted Vivian Darnley.
“Yes, that's quite true; but then there must be some motive,” said Mr. Longcluse, with something a little supercilious in his smile: “and it isn't easy to conceive a motive for murdering a poor little good-natured letter of lodgings, a person past the time of life when jealousy could have anything to do with it, and a most inoffensive and civil creature. I confess, if I were obliged to seek a motive other than the obvious one, for the crime, I should be utterly puzzled.”
“When I was travelling in Prussia,” said Vivian Darnley, “I saw two people in different prisons—one a woman, the other a middle-aged man—both for murder. They had been found guilty, and had been kept there only to get a confession from them before execution. They won't put culprits to death there, you know, unless they have first admitted their guilt; and one of these had actually confessed. Well, each had borne an unexceptionable character up to the time when suspicion was accidentally aroused, and then it turned out that they had been poisoning and otherwise making away with people, at the rate of two or three a year, for half their lives. Now, don't you see, these masked assassins, having, as it appeared, absolutely no intelligible motive, either of passion or of interest, to commit these murders, could have had no inducement, as the woman had actually confessed, except a sort of lust of murder. I suppose it is a sort of madness, but these people were not otherwise mad; and it is quite possible that the same sort of thing may be going on in other places. People say that the police would have got a clue to the mystery by means of the foreign coin and the bank-notes, if they had not been destroyed.”
“But there are traces of organisation,” said Mr. Longcluse. “In a crowded place like that, such things could hardly be managed without it, and insanity such as you describe is very rare; and you'll hardly get people to believe in a swell-mob of madmen, committing murder in concert simply for the pleasure of homicide. They will all lean to a belief in the coarse but intelligible motive of the highwayman.”
“I saw in the newspapers,” said David Arden, “some evidence of yours, Mr. Longcluse, which seemed rather to indicate a particular man as the murderer.”
“I have my eye upon him,” said Longcluse. “There are suspicious circumstances. The case in a little time may begin to clear; at present the police are only groping.”
“That's satisfactory; and those fellows are paid so handsomely for groping,” said Sir Reginald, opening his eyes suddenly. “I believe that we are the worst-governed and the worst-managed people on earth, and that our merchants and tradespeople are rich simply by flukes—simply by a concurrence of lucky circumstances, with which they have no more to do than Prester John or the Man in the Moon. Take a little claret, Mr. Longcluse, and send it on.”