Here was an atrocious murder committed in the very heart of civilized London; in the midst of a calmly slumbering household; in a house in which almost every room was occupied; and yet the murderer is suffered to escape, and yet no ray of light from the combined intelligence of Scotland Yard pierces the gloom of the mystery.
The husband of the victim, against whom there is the strongest presumptive evidence, whose own conduct is all-sufficient to condemn him, this wretch is suffered to roam at large over the earth, a modern Cain, without the brand upon his brow by which his fellow-men may know him. Perhaps at this very hour he is haunting our taverns, dining at our restaurants, polluting the innocent atmosphere of our theatres, a guilty creature sitting at a play—nay, even, with the hypocrite’s visage, crossing the hallowed threshold of a church! Where are the police? What are they doing that this scoundrel has not been found? They should be able to recognise him at a glance, even without the brand of Cain. Are there no photographs of the monster, who has been described as good-looking, and who was doubtless vain! Letters pour in to the Morning Shrieker by the bushel, every correspondent suggesting his own particular and original method for catching a murderer.
Strange to say, Jack Chicot, although a fair subject for the camera, has had no passion for seeing what kind of picture the sun can make of him. At any rate, there is no portrait of him, large or small, good, bad, or indifferent, to be found in Cibber Street, where the police naturally came to look for one. Mr. Desrolles, who, throughout the case, shows himself accommodating without being officious, gives a graphic description of his late fellow-lodger; but no verbal picture ever yet conjured up the image of a man, and the detectives leave Cibber Street possessed of the idea of a personage no more like Jack Chicot than Jack Chicot was like the Emperor of China. This imaginary Chicot they hunt assiduously in all the worst parts of London, and often seem on the brink of catching him. They watch him dining at low eating-houses, they see him playing billiards in dubious taverns, they follow him on to penny steamers, and accompany him on railroad journeys, always to find that, although sufficiently disreputable, he is not Jack Chicot.
Working thus conscientiously, it was hard to be girded at by the Morning Shrieker and an army of letter-writers.
Assuredly the evidence against the missing husband was strong enough to weave the rope that should hang him.
A letter to the Times from George Gerard describing the dagger found in the colour-box had attracted the attention of the famous surgeon who set La Chicot’s broken leg, and that gentleman had hurried at once to Cibber Street to examine the wound. He afterwards saw the dagger which, with the rest of the missing man’s effects, was in the custody of the police. He wrote to the Times next day, confirming Gerard’s statement. Such a wound could have been inflicted by just such a dagger, and hardly by any other form of knife or dagger known to civilization. The thin flexible blade was unlike the blade of any other dagger the surgeon had ever seen—the wound corresponded to the form of the blade.
The leader-writers on the popular journals took up the idea. They depicted the whole scene as vividly as if it had been shown to them in a charmed sleep. They gushed as they described the beauty of the wife; they wept as they told of her intemperate habits. The husband they painted in the darkest dyes of iniquity. A man who had battened on his wife’s earnings—a poor creature—a led captain—idle, luxurious, intemperate, since it was doubtless his example which had taught that glorious creature to drink. They painted, in a blaze of lurid light, the scene of the murder. The husband’s midnight return from haunts of vice—the wife’s recriminations—her natural outbreak of jealousy—hot words on both sides. The husband brutalized by drink, stung to fury by the wife’s well-merited reproaches, snatches the dagger from the table where he had lately flung it after a desultory half-hour of labour, and plunges the blade into his wife’s bosom. The leader-writer saw the whole thing, as in a picture. The public read, and at street corners and on the roofs of omnibuses the public talk for the next three weeks was of Jack Chicot’s crime, and the miserable stupidity of the police in not being able to find him.
Between eight and nine o’clock on the night after La Chicot’s funeral an elderly man called upon Mr. Mosheh, a diamond merchant in a small way, who lived in one of the streets near Brunswick Square. The gentleman was respectably clad in a long overcoat, and wore a grey beard which had been allowed to grow with a luxuriance that entirely concealed the lower part of his face. Under his soft felt hat he wore a black velvet skull-cap, below which there appeared no vestige of hair; whereby it might be inferred that the velvet cap was intended to hide the baldness of the skull it covered. Under the rim of the cap, which was drawn low upon the brow, appeared a pair of shaggy grey eyebrows, shadowing prominent eyes. Mr. Mosheh came out of his dining-room, whence the savoury odour of fish fried in purest olive oil followed him like a kind of incense, and found the stranger waiting for him in the front room, which was half parlour, half office.
The diamond merchant had a sharp eye for character, and he saw at a glance that his visitor belonged to the hawk rather than to the pigeon family.