Faunce related his discoveries, and Major Towgood agreed that at all cost the truth must be kept from the murdered man's mother. In her intervals of consciousness she had repeatedly asked about Faunce and the progress of his inquiry. And there had been hours of delirium in which she thought the fondly-loved son was at her bedside. She had taken a strange doctor for him, and had talked to him as to her son.
No, she must not know while the knowledge could possibly be kept from her. But should she recover, and leave her room, the newspapers would tell her of Bolisco's arrest, and the inquiry before the magistrate at Southampton, where he was to be taken on the following day. And it would not be possible to keep the newspapers from her. For her to recover, and know her son's tragic fate, would mean a broken heart that death alone could cure.
"Perhaps you're right, Faunce. Even my wife would hardly wish the dear old lady to struggle back to life to suffer such a crushing blow. Poor Dick! We always knew that woman would be his ruin. His sin has found him out."
The Rannock murder was the cause célèbre of the next few months. The inquiry before the Southampton magistrate was adjourned from week to week, and the case against James Bolisco gradually developed, till the chain of evidence became as strong as circumstantial evidence well can be. The numbers of the notes paid to the Wandsworth brewer by the landlord of the Game Cock were traced, and proved identical with the numbers in Chater's list. Bolisco was sworn to by the boatman as the man who hired his boat on the date of Colonel Rannock's journey to Southampton, and whom he never saw after the hiring. Bolisco was also identified by the landlord of a humble little inn on the road between Redbridge and Southampton, as having come to his house after midnight, on that same date, in a strange condition, his boots and trousers smothered in river mud, and one of his hands torn and bleeding. He had hurt it with a hammer, he said. He ate a heavy supper, drank half a bottle of brandy, paid his bill before he went to bed, and left next morning before anybody in the house was astir.
Another link in the chain was a life-preserver which a Redbridge boy had picked up in a lane leading from the river to the village street, and on which were found minute splinters of bone, and tufts of human hair, adhering to the heavy leaden knob. Chater pronounced the hair to be of the colour and texture of his master's, while the surgeon, who had given his evidence before the coroner, considered this formidable weapon the kind of instrument calculated to cause the fracture he had described at the inquest.
The victim's watch and tie pin, a valuable ruby, had been pawned by the murderer late in the year, and a West-end pawnbroker swore to Bolisco as the man from whom he received them. Watch and pin were identified by Major Towgood.
Bolisco had carried out his design with a kind of brutal carelessness of consequences which might have seemed more natural in one of Nero's gladiators, a half-tamed savage from Dalmatian forests, than in a son of the London streets. He had presumed upon the consciousness of brute force, and when the inquest was over, and his victim's identity unsuspected, he had considered himself safe for life. He stared at the witnesses in a blank surprise, as one fact after another was marshalled against him, and stood with bent brows, in a sullen apathy, at the end of the proceedings, when he heard himself committed for trial at the next assizes.
In the dock at Winchester, and in the condemned cell at Newgate, he had time to reflect upon his mistakes, and to think how he might have done the thing better.
That was James Bolisco's repentance.