CHAPTER VI

THE MURDER OF DR GRADY

The weather prophets declared that it was to be one of the driest and hottest summers on record; and, for once, the prophets seemed in a fair way to be justified. The strain of the long, bright, rainless days began to tell upon Londoners. Two or three terrific thunderstorms shook the nerves of the feeble. Sundry earthquake shocks, though remote from these islands, imparted a sense of apprehension, and concurrently with these stern manifestations of Mother Nature, there were other hints of dread events--suggestive of a moral cataclysm, a war of classes, a volcanic outburst that would rend the bounds of social life.

In this state of disquietude, sensational revivalism moved many neurotic persons to grotesque manifestations in the name of religion. And, on the other hand, it was well known that vice was rampant in every class of society, the eagerness of the pleasure-seekers for some new excitement, however vulgar or debasing, assuming the proportions of a mania.

“Scenes” in Parliament were of almost weekly occurrence, and signs of hysteria became manifest, even in the speech and conduct of men who held office as cabinet-ministers or as judges. Though the Government was tottering to its fall, the Opposition, torn with internal jealousies, was not in a position to take advantage of its opportunities. Difficult problems of international law had arisen, but the Attorney-General, who had for some time been suffering from a mortal disease, was practically unavailable as an adviser, while the second law officer, Sir John Westwood, was said to still be incapacitated by what eminent doctors described as complete “nervous breakdown.”

In the midst of this debilitated condition of political and social life, there was one movement which day by day seemed to gather strength and audacity. The London Emigration League still stood forward to claim attention and collect funds. White-washed, in a sense, by the verdict at the Central Criminal Court, the Leaguers of London, as they were now generally called, published appeals to the charitable, and organised marches and demonstrations, which, without committing actual breaches of the law, made known the ever-increasing numbers of the League, and its strangely cosmopolitan membership.

It was the foreign element in the League that gave rise to special uneasiness at the Home Office and Scotland Yard. Ere long the sense of insecurity already germinating in the public mind was greatly accentuated by a startling discovery, rumoured, though not yet proved, to be connected with the Leaguers’ campaign. This was nothing less than the unmasking by Detective-Inspector Henshaw of a dynamite factory, only seventeen miles from London. In all probability the discovery would never have been made but for a murder of revenge, almost unexampled in its cold and calculated deliberation, and in all respects notable in the annals of criminology. It was a story of the ruthless edict of a secret society within a society, and that society was believed to be none other than the League; it revealed, when the story became fully known, the remorseless execution of a mysterious mandate, which yet again illustrated the truth that, however subtle and well considered the plan of crime, murder, in the end, will out.

The victim of the crime was one Grady, a doctor, who, after spending some years in New York, had come to England and acquired a fifth-rate medical practice in the purlieus of Holborn. His house and surgery were in Red Lion Street, not far from Red Lion Square. Grady was a man of ill-balanced mind, and given to intemperance. For some reason, never fully explained, he quarrelled with his friends. And, justly or unjustly, was suspected of betraying their plans to the police.

The doctor became an object of hatred and fear in the eyes of his former associates, and the inner circle--or “actives,” as they were euphoniously styled--deliberately sentenced him to death. Early in June a man passing under the name of Featherstone took a room in the house facing that in which the ill-fated doctor carried on his miserable practice. Some articles of furniture and other things, including a large packing case, were bought by Featherstone and sent to his lodgings. At about the same time Featherstone, under the name Rolf, became the tenant of a house at Rickmansworth, which was let with a builder’s yard containing sundry sheds and outbuildings. Ostensibly these premises were to be used for the purpose of manufacturing Portland cement. At the end of the garden and yard ran the Grand Junction Canal. Close at hand was the River Colne; and in this way facilities were available to convey chalk and clay from a neighbouring estate to the “factory,” and to send the cement, when manufactured, on barges to London.

Rolf, the “innocent manufacturer,” who was bent on developing this useful industry, advertised for a medical man to attend his workmen in case of illness or accident, and a marked copy of the paper containing the advertisement was sent to Grady. The doctor, compelled, doubtless, by his needy circumstances, swallowed the bait, and without much delay a contract was made with him on “club terms.”

The significance of this was that cement-making is not really a dangerous trade, and that there were many doctors practising nearer to Rickmansworth.

One night, a few weeks later, a man drove up in a cab, presented Rolf’s card to Dr Grady, and said his services were required at the cement works for one of the workmen, who had met with an accident. Grady at once put his instruments together and drove with Rolf’s representative to Baker Street. The unnamed agent then accompanied him by rail to Rickmansworth. In the darkness of the sultry night, he was conducted to his doom. The house of which Rolf was the tenant was approached by a lonely lane on the outskirts of the little town. The two men were seen to enter by the front door, and a labourer who was approaching at no great distance declared that he heard a smothered cry, followed by heavy blows, and then a fall. His statement was not made known until some time had elapsed, as almost immediately after hearing these ominous sounds, he was knocked down and stunned by a motor-car.

Meanwhile the packing-case had been brought from Red Lion Street to Rickmansworth. The day after the crime, it was removed in a wagon. The wagon was seen again later, but in the interval the packing-case had vanished. It was found, empty, on the following day near Northwood. Grady’s clothes were found in a portmanteau in a neighbouring sewer, and the portmanteau was afterwards identified as one that Featherstone--_alias_ Rolf--had bought and taken to his rooms in London. Finally, the naked body of poor Grady was discovered in a backwater of the River Colne. The head of the unfortunate man showed cuts and wounds in quite a dozen different places. He had been brutally and determinedly done to death.

The police now overhauled the house at Rickmansworth, and there found other signs of an awful struggle and a cruel crime. Futile efforts had been made to paint out the blood-stains on the floor.

From the house, the examinations were extended to the sheds and workshops, and though there were signs of removal and attempted concealment, enough remained to show that the place was in truth designed for the manufacture of bombs and other murderous explosives. There were invoices, letters, and receipts imperfectly destroyed by fire, that showed the harmless “cement-maker” to be a buyer of sulphuric acid, mercury, picric acid, saltpetre, and other ingredients of explosive compositions. These and other facts the inquest brought to light, partly owing to the self-importance of a fussy coroner, who disallowed the efforts of the police to keep back certain features of the ghastly story. Meanwhile the murderers, who obviously had command of ample funds, had fled the country.

Sensational journals were not slow to unfold the tale of terror under startling headlines. Something akin to panic seized the country and coerced the Government into action. The Solicitor-General, though out of town, received earnest communications from ministers, and it was afterwards known that he had framed some of the most drastic clauses in the Bill which was forthwith introduced in the House of Commons. This measure obtained a Parliamentary record by passing through both Houses in a single day. It provided legal machinery for the suppression of conspiracies. It was part French and part Irish in its origin, and designed in effect to prevent the illegal manufacture and possession of explosives.

The country, it was pointed out in Parliament, had been lulled into a false sense of security by the absence of dynamite outrages for a considerable time. But not so very far back, in a period of eleven years, there had been no less than sixty-nine crimes and attempted crimes by means of infernal machines, bombs, and other engines intended for the wholesale destruction of life and property. No wonder there were dark and agonised forebodings; for none could feel assured that history was not about to repeat that grim and blood-stained page in England’s capital.