Chapter I

“Well, it certainly is most amazing!” I said that day, when I had finished reading about it all in the _Daily Telegraph_.

“Yet the most natural thing in the world,” retorted the man in the corner, as soon as he had ordered his lunch. “Crime invariably begets crime. No sooner is a murder, theft, or fraud committed in a novel or striking way, than this method is aped—probably within the next few days—by some other less imaginative scoundrel.

“Take this case, for instance,” he continued, as he slowly began sipping his glass of milk, “which seems to amaze you so much. It was less than a year ago, was it not? that in Paris a man was found dead in a cab, stabbed in a most peculiar way—right through the neck from ear to ear—with, presumably, a long, sharp instrument of the type of an Italian stiletto.

“No one in England took much count of the crime, beyond a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders at the want of safety of the Paris streets, and the incapacity of the French detectives, who not only never discovered the murderer, who had managed to slip out of the cab unperceived, but who did not even succeed in establishing the identity of the victim.

“But this case,” he added, pointing once more to my daily paper, “strikes nearer home. Less than a year has passed, and last week, in the very midst of our much vaunted London streets, a crime of a similar nature has been committed. I do not know if your paper gives full details, but this is what happened: Last Monday evening two gentlemen, both in evening dress and wearing opera hats, hailed a hansom in Shaftesbury Avenue. It was about a quarter past eleven, and the night, if you remember, was a typical November one—dark, drizzly, and foggy. The various theatres in the immediate neighbourhood were disgorging a continuous stream of people after the evening performance.

“The cabman did not take special notice of his fares. They jumped in very quickly, and one of them, through the little trap above, gave him an address in Cromwell Road. He drove there as quickly as the fog would permit him, and pulled up at the number given. One of the gentlemen then handed him a very liberal fare—again through the little trap—and told him to drive his friend on to Westminster Chambers, Victoria Street.

“Cabby noticed that the ‘swell,’ when he got out of the hansom, stopped for a moment to say a few words to his friend, who had remained inside; then he crossed over the road and walked quickly in the direction of the Natural History Museum.

“When the cabman pulled up at Westminster Chambers, he waited for the second fare to get out; the latter seemingly making no movement that way, cabby looked down at him through the trap.

“‘I thought ’e was asleep,’ he explained to the police later on. ‘’E was leaning back in ’is corner, and ’is ’ead was turned towards the window. I gets down and calls to ’im, but ’e don’t move. Then I gets on to the step and give ’im a shake. . . . There!—I’ll say no more. . . . We was near a lamp-post, the mare took a step forward, and the light fell full on the gent’s face. ’E was dead and no mistake. I saw the wound just underneath ’is ear, and “Murder!” I says to myself at once.’

“Cabby lost no time in whistling for the nearest point policeman, then he called the night porter of the Westminster Chambers. The latter looked at the murdered man, and declared that he knew nothing of him; certainly he was not a tenant of the Chambers.

“By the time a couple of policemen arrived upon the scene, quite a crowd had gathered around the cab, in spite of the lateness of the hour and the darkness of the night. The matter was such an important one that one of the constables thought it best at once to jump into the hansom beside the murdered man and to order the cabman to drive to the nearest police station.

“There the cause of death was soon ascertained; the victim of this daring outrage had been stabbed through the neck from ear to ear with a long, sharp instrument, in shape like an antique stiletto, which, I may tell you, was subsequently found under the cushions of the hansom. The murderer must have watched his opportunity, when his victim’s head was turned away from him, and then dealt the blow, just below the left ear, with amazing swiftness and precision.

“Of course the papers were full of it the next day; this was such a lovely opportunity for driving home a moral lesson, of how one crime engenders another, and how—but for that murder in Paris a year ago—we should not now have to deplore a crime committed in the very centre of fashionable London, the detection of which seems likely to completely baffle the police.

“Plenty more in that strain, of course, from which the reading public quickly jumped to the conclusion that the police held absolutely no clue as to the identity of the daring and mysterious miscreant.

“A most usual and natural thing had happened; cabby could only give a very vague description of his other ‘fare,’ of the ‘swell’ who had got out at Cromwell Road, and been lost to sight after having committed so dastardly and so daring a crime.

“This was scarcely to be wondered at, for the night had been very foggy, and the murderer had been careful to pull his opera hat well over his face; thus hiding the whole of his forehead and eyes; moreover, he had always taken the additional precaution of only communicating with the cabman through the little trap-door.

“All cabby had seen of him was a clean-shaven chin. As to the murdered man, it was not until about noon, when the early editions of the evening papers came out with a fuller account of the crime and a description of the victim, that his identity was at last established.

“Then the news spread like wildfire, and the evening papers came out with some of the most sensational headlines it had ever been their good fortune to print. The man who had been so mysteriously murdered in the cab was none other than Mr. Philip Le Cheminant, the nephew and heir-presumptive of the Earl of Tremarn.”