“Haf not you heard of der brudal murder in Shorge Street?”
“I have not seen a morning paper.”
“She vhas dot small chop vhere dey sells grocery und odder tings on der left going oop. She vhas a Meester Abney, dey say. Der murderer vhas a beas’ly rogue called Murray; she helped in der shop; she hod been a soldier. Dis morning poor Abney vhas found dead in her bedt mit her troat cut und her skull sphlit.”
“Have they got the murderer?”
“No. Dot vhas der pity. He make clean off mit sixty pound.”
Throughout the day people coming and going talked of this murder. The yarn ran thus:—Mrs. Abney occupied a room next to the murdered man’s; the son, Thomas, a youth of about eighteen, used an apartment at the back of the shop; the servant lay in the attics; the assistant, Murray, lodged out. Neither Mrs. Abney, her son, nor the servant had heard a sound in the night; Murray had broken into the house, passed into Abney’s room, and murdered him; then from a safe, whose key Abney kept under his pillow, he had taken about sixty sovereigns; all so noiselessly, the footfalls of a cat are not stiller. The family slept on, and the murder was not discovered till half-past seven in the morning.
It was known by these damning tokens that Murray was the murderer: first, the knife Abney’s throat had been cut with was Murray’s; after using it he had dropped it behind some paper in the bedroom grate. Next, when he had shifted himself at his lodgings he had buried the clothes in the back garden; a dog belonging to the woman of the house was observed to run into the garden with its nose stooped as though on a trail, and, stopping where the bundle was buried, it began to scratch and howl. The woman called a neighbour; they went to the place with a spade and found Murray’s clothes, covered with bloodstains.
The man himself was off, and the people who from time to time during the day gave me news of this thing told me he was still at large, that the police were in hot pursuit, and there was no hope for him.
That evening I strolled up George Street for a walk, and saw a great crowd at the Abneys’ shop. I stopped to stare with the rest of them. They call this sort of curiosity vulgar and debasing. But crime puts the significance of human emotion, misery, and remorse into stocks and stones. Human passion gives the vitality of romance, tragic or comic, to the most sordid and contemptible aspects of the commonplace. I had passed that grocer’s shop twenty times, and often looked at the house. I looked at it again now, and found the matter-of-fact structure as strange, grotesque, repulsive as a nightmare.