автордың кітабын онлайн тегін оқу The Mystery of a Hansom Cab
PRAISE FOR THE MYSTERY OF A HANSOM CAB
‘The novel was a phenomenal success when it was first published in Melbourne in 1886 and it became an international bestseller…It’s easy to see why. The plot sweeps through unexpected twists and turns…and the suspense is maintained to the end…Most appealing…is the wonderful flavour of the 1880s Melbourne, from the gaslit glamour of the Collins Street “block” to the hideous squalor of the slum alleys off Little Bourke Street…A splendidly romantic melodrama, full of period charm, and victorian sentiment…The Mystery of a Hansom Cab is not only a classic but thugely enjoyable as well.’
-West Australian
‘Australia’s original blockbuster is back in print. Written more than 100 years ago, this murder mystery sold hundreds of thousands of copies around the world…It will give you a wonderful sense of Melbourne’s history—you’ll hear the hansoms rattling down Collins Street for weeks afterwards.’
-Herald Sun
‘Full credit to Text Publishing for rescuing Hume’s first and best known book from obscurity, for this is more than just an historical curiosity; it’s a well written and immensely readable detective story.’
-Daily Telegraph
‘It’s an absolute ripper…there’s a grisly murder by an unknown assassin, a plot full of astonishing twists and turns, and a brilliant evocation of 19th-century Melbourne that captures its charm, bustle and rawness.’
-Inside Melbourne
‘In charmingly genteel, high-society Melbourne, murder 1880s-style is stealthily plotted. No phone-tapping or planted bombs, just hand-delivered notes, horse-drawn carts and a deadly dose of chloroform…More readable than ever.’
-Examiner
ALSO BY FERGUS HUME
Madame Midas
The Silent House
The Moth-Woman
The Whispering Lane
The Caravan Mystery
The Last Straw
EDITOR'S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
Thanks are due to Dr Alan Dilnot of the Department of English at Monash University and to the Rare Books staff at the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne.
Contents
COVER
PRAISE FOR THE MYSTERY OF A HANSOM CAB
ALSO BY FERGUS HUME
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
FERGUS HUME’S STARTLING STORY
SIMON CATERSON
The best-selling crime novel of the nineteenth century was not written by Arthur Conan Doyle or Wilkie Collins. That distinction belongs to Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, which appeared in the year before Sherlock Holmes made what was, by comparison, a rather unspectacular debut in A Study in Scarlet.
The Hansom Cab was an overnight sensation when published in Melbourne in 1886, and it rapidly found readers around the world, especially in Britain. As many as 750,000 copies were sold during Hume’s lifetime, nearly half that number within the first six months of publication in London in 1887.
Advertised in its first English edition as ‘a startling and realistic story of Melbourne social life’, The Hansom Cab was a first novel which had been written almost by accident and was self-published. Despite these modest beginnings the book became a huge international success and was translated into eleven languages. In its obituary for Hume in 1932, The Times was to note that ‘everybody read it eagerly and in fact it went all over the world’.
Over the past hundred years Hume’s remarkable achievement has been outshone by the work of his contemporaries and, like other pioneering works, his novel has been eclipsed by subsequent developments in the genre. The Hansom Cab is nevertheless significant historically and, more importantly, it remains highly readable.
Fergusson Wright Hume was an outsider in the city he anatomised. He was born in England to Scottish parents in 1859 and taken in his infancy to New Zealand. He studied law at the University of Otago and was called to the New Zealand Bar in 1885. Rather than go into legal practice, he emigrated to Melbourne and found work as a law clerk while attempting to further his theatrical ambitions.
By his own account, published as the preface to the revised 1896 edition of The Hansom Cab, Hume wanted to make his living writing plays but could find no theatre manager who would even look at his work. Hoping to make his name in another branch of writing, he asked a local bookseller ‘what style of book he sold most of’. The reply was the detective novels of the French writer Emile Gaboriau (1833–73) which feature Monsieur Lecoq, whose murky past, eccentric habits and genius for deduction make him a forerunner of Holmes and countless other fictional sleuths.
Hume set about buying up Gaboriau’s books, studied their method and became ‘determined to write a book of the same class; containing a mystery, a murder, and a description of low life in Melbourne’. His plotting, however, is much tighter than Gaboriau’s somewhat digressive narratives. Hume follows his exemplar mainly in his approach to realistic detail. Diligent in his research, Hume claimed to have ‘passed a great many nights’ in the city’s slums, ‘gathering material’.
The setting for the murder was inspired by a late-night journey taken in a hansom cab, a horse-drawn two-wheeled cabriolet for two passengers with the driver mounted behind and the reins going over the roof. Hume realised that this vehicle was perfectly designed for murder, since the crime could be concealed from the driver, the only potential witness.
Despite his ingenuity Hume found that ‘every one to whom I offered it refused to even look at the manuscript on the ground that no Colonial could write anything worth reading’. Ever practical, he decided to publish the book himself and sold 5000 copies within three weeks in October 1886. By the end of the year a total of 20,000 copies had been printed in a city whose population was at the time less than half a million. Virtually every literate adult in Melbourne must have read the book.
Flushed with the provincial success he had hoped for, Hume decided to accept an offer to sell his copyright by a group of English investors who had formed themselves into The Hansom Cab Publishing Company in order to publish his novel in London. He was paid the paltry sum of £50. As he later explained: ‘The story was written only to attract local attention and no one was more astonished than I when it passed beyond the narrow circles for which it had originally been intended.’
Despite massive sales in Britain, The Hansom Cab Publishing Company went bankrupt in 1889. Rights in the novel eventually passed to the large London publisher Jarrolds, who persuaded Hume to revise the text, which meant cutting out some of the local detail and watering down language considered strong for the time.
Hume’s hero Brian Fitzgerald and heroine Madge Frettlby are by the end of The Hansom Cab keen to leave Melbourne, as was the author himself. After living in the city for barely two years, Hume sailed for Europe in 1888 and never returned. He settled in England and embarked on a prodigious writing career that produced over 130 further novels, as well as many stories and articles before his death in 1932 at his home in the town of Thundersley, Essex.
None of these books approached the popularity and enduring appeal of his first novel and are now all but forgotten. Hume wrote several novels with Australian settings and references but only two made any impression. The most substantial of these is Madame Midas, A Realistic and Sensational Story of Melbourne Mining Life (1888), set mainly in Melbourne and on the Ballarat goldfields. In some ways a more accomplished work than his first novel, it recounts a poisoning case which interests two of the characters who appear in The Hansom Cab, the lawyer Calton and the detective Kilsip. Hume’s other major Australian novel is the underrated Miss Mephistopheles (1890), whose milieu is Melbourne’s theatrical and literary circles and which features a diamond robbery and the murder of a pawnbroker.
The Hansom Cab meanwhile established itself as a classic of its kind. It was so famous that many claimed authorship and Hume was forced to assert the truth of his identity in the 1896 preface. In 1888 a parody by ‘W. Humer Ferguson’ appeared, billed as a ‘bloodcurdling romance’ and entitled The Mystery of a Wheelbarrow, or Gaboriau Gaborooed, an Idealistic Story of a Great and Rising Colony. The identity of the parodist is unknown and the context of the humour largely lost, but, if nothing else, the book is a gauge of the success of Hume’s original.
Hume described himself as a ‘storyteller’ rather than ‘novelist’ in his Who’s Who entry. Although his writing career benefited from the book’s runaway success, he was also in a sense trapped by it. Hume never fulfilled his ambition to write plays, complaining that publishers would not hear of him writing anything but detective stories.
Oddly enough, an adaptation of The Hansom Cab was produced in theatres in Australia and London in the late 1880s. The London production, which Hume co-authored with Arthur Law, ran for five hundred nights. The story was filmed three times in the silent era and a radio version by Michael Hardwick was broadcast by the BBC in 1950 and 1960. In 1961 Barry Pree mounted a new stage adaptation in Melbourne.
The novel’s fame endured until well into this century. In 1954 the Sunday Times listed it as one of the hundred best crime novels of all time. Six years later Everyman’s Dictionary of Literary Biography declared that The Hansom Cab ‘ranks as the most successful detective story of all time’.
In its day The Hansom Cab put Australia on the literary map. The novelist Miles Franklin, writing in 1956, commented that the novel was all many people overseas seemed to know about Australian literature. ‘This old vehicle has renown beyond these shores,’ she wrote, ‘and it still serves visitors caught beyond these shores, who point their ignorance facetiously by confessing that it was the extent of their knowledge that an Australian literature existed till some hazard brought them hither.’
Though never long out of print, The Hansom Cab, with the notable exception of Stephen Knight, has been disregarded by critics. There is no biography of Hume and commentators tend to see the novel as a statistical freak or bibliographical curiosity rather than as one of the pioneering works in its genre.
Of particular interest now is Hume’s vivid evocation of a thriving yet deeply divided Victorian metropolis. The kind of cross-sectional representation of urban reality applied to late 1980s New York by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities was anticipated by Hume a century earler in the Australian city which in its heyday was known as ‘Marvellous Melbourne’.
Like the New York of Wolfe’s ‘Masters of the Universe’, Melbourne in the 1880s was in the grip of an immense economic boom, fuelled by dubious financial speculation and soon to end in disaster. It was a laissez faire prosperity in which fortunes could be made and lost almost instantaneously and defalcation was rife. The Hansom Cab itself became a footnote to the shady dealings of the time when a banker named George Nicholson Taylor, later jailed for fraud, spread the story that his ill-gotten gains were partly the result of a share of profits made from backing its publication.
Hume’s extremes of rich and poor are represented by the Collins Street ‘Block’ and the slums of Little Bourke Street. The streets themselves are a stone’s throw from each other and Hume contrives a plot that brings their separate worlds into collision. This much is foreshadowed in the novel’s epigram, published on the original title page: ‘As marine plants floating on the surface of waves appear distinct growths yet spring unseen from a common centre, so individuals apparently strangers to each other are indissolubly connected by many invisible bonds and sympathies which are known only to themselves.’
In adopting this as his major theme, Hume, like Wilkie Collins and others, touches that very sensitive Victorian nerve in his readers: respectability. The discovery of the killer is a fairly straightforward process of elimination; the incidental revelations about identity and the fragility of social position that are thrown up by the investigation are the true sources of sensation.
This kind of sensitivity may have had particular resonance in a colonial society whose institutions were modelled closely on the European parent, but lacked the same sense of rootedness. Hume’s sheep baron Mark Frettlby, pillar of the exclusive Melbourne Club, has acquired immense wealth in the New World while harbouring a secret which, if revealed, would bring instant social disgrace.
The novel’s phenomenal success in Britain is perhaps explained by the fact that the Englishspeaking world was then more closely knit than might seem the case today. The Hansom Cab appeared in England at a time when wealthy squatters were much in the news and had been featured in the work of Dickens and Trollope. The best known instance in literature of the myth of an antipodean transformation from rags to riches is of course Magwitch in Dickens’s Great Expectations.
The depiction of the horrors of urban poverty was the staple of ‘slum sketches’ regularly printed in contemporary newspapers in both Australia and England and is still the stuff of innumerable current affairs stories. Hume’s realism has the journalistic attention to authentic detail found in Dickens and Balzac.
Characters such as the shrewish landladies and Mother Guttersnipe are drawn with memorable grotesquerie. Similarly, the satire involving Dora Featherweight and her piano tutor Signor Thumpanini is a straightforward poke at bourgeois pretension. Hume himself was an accomplished musician which probably explains why he chose to grind this particular axe.
Where Hume shows signs of greater originality is in his use of documentary material. His first three chapters consist of a dossier. The sense that the reader has opened up a case file enhances the novel’s verisimilitude.
Hume’s depiction of legal proceedings is similarly realistic and indeed sits somewhat incongruously with his more melodramatic domestic scenes. Madge Frettlby and Brian Fitzgerald are suitably idealised, she an heiress with a heart of gold and he the passionate Celtic heart-throb.
This is a novel that is conventionally Victorian and yet surprisingly ahead of its time. Like the hard-boiled crime writers of subsequent generations Hume prefers the back lanes to the drawing-room and shows his detectives as flawed and prone to use unorthodox methods in pursuit of their quarry.
There is even a touch of nascent multiculturalism in the book. Sal Rawlins, the unwitting agent of social subversion and saviour of the hero, is not ashamed to admit that she ‘tooked up with a Chinaman’. Later, she becomes part of the Frettlby household with remarkable ease.
Although he likens Melbourne more than once to London, Hume sees his city as already evolving its own character. He offers this rather laconic prediction for its future:
In spite of the dismal prognostications of Marcus Clarke regarding the future Australian, whom he describes as being ‘a tall, coarse, strong-jawed, greedy, pushing, talented man, excelling in swimming and horsemanship,’ it is more likely that he will be a cultured, indolent individual, with an intense appreciation of the arts and sciences, and a dislike for hard work and utilitarian principles.
Hume’s implied scale of values is democratic as well as cosmopolitan. The detective who finally identifies the murderer is rewarded with an annuity that enables him to carry on private practice, a position he gains through merit rather than the kind of privilege bestowed on a Lord Peter Whimsey.
Over one hundred years later, Melbourne continues to be the place Hume knew. The city is still very conservative yet entrepreneurial. Yesteryear’s speculations are today’s ‘major projects’. The public buildings hastily erected in the boom years were never fully executed— Parliament House, the GPO and Flinders Street Station—while newer additions such as the Crown Casino may never be finished.
The Hansom Cab has clearly worn well, though not all of its original readers would have predicted as much. For his part, the creator of Sherlock Holmes dismissed his rival’s work in a private letter as ‘One of the weakest tales I have read, simply sold by puffing’, but Conan Doyle also owes a considerable literary debt to Gaboriau and was not above using devices similar to those employed by Hume.
Some aspects of The Hansom Cab correspond directly with A Study in Scarlet, notably the rivalry between the detectives engaged officially in the investigation and the use of the hansom cab in the modus operandi of the killer. While there is no direct evidence of borrowing on the part of Doyle, these parallels do at the very least demonstrate that the two writers were separated by much less than the distance that lay between their respective cities.
Conan Doyle and Hume spearheaded different directions in crime fiction. Where Conan Doyle concentrates on the establishing the character of his protagonist, Hume’s detectives Gorby and Kilsip are merely two players within an ensemble of actors in the drama. Hume uses the mystery to anatomise the society in which his characters move.
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab stands in contradiction of the notion that best-sellers burn bright and fade fast. A panoramic depiction of a bustling yet uneasy city, the novel has a central place in Australian literary history. It is also a key text in crime fiction’s formative years.
* * *
Apart from minor corrections to spelling and punctuation, this edition for the first time reproduces the text of the original Melbourne edition printed by Kemp and Boyce in 1886. Other reprints have relied on later versions in which local details are omitted and the language is bowdlerised.
THE MYSTERY OF A HANSOM CAB
CHAPTER ONE
WHAT THE ARGUS SAID
The following report appeared in the Argus newspaper of Saturday, the 28th July, 18— :—
‘Truth is said to be stranger than fiction, and certainly the extraordinary murder which took place in Melbourne on Thursday night, or rather Friday morning, goes a long way towards verifying this saying. A crime has been committed by an unknown assassin, within a short distance of the principal streets of this great city, and is surrounded by an impenetrable mystery. Indeed, from the nature of the crime itself, the place where it was committed, and the fact that the assassin has escaped without leaving a trace behind him, it would seem as though the case itself had been taken bodily out of one of Gaboriau’s novels, and that his famous detective Lecoq only would be able to unravel it. The facts of the case are simply these:—
‘On the twenty-seventh day of July, at the hour of twenty minutes to two o’clock in the morning, a hansom cab drove up to the police station, in Grey Street, St Kilda, and the driver made the startling statement that his cab contained the body of a man whom he had reason to believe had been murdered.
‘Being taken into the presence of the inspector, the cabman, who gave his name as Malcolm Royston, related the following strange story:—
‘At the hour of one o’clock in the morning, he was driving down Collins Street East, when as he was passing the Burke and Wills monument he was hailed by a gentleman standing at the corner by the Scotch Church. He immediately drove up, and saw that the gentleman who hailed him was supporting the deceased, who appeared to be very intoxicated. Both were in evening dress, but the deceased had no overcoat on, while the other wore a short covert coat of a light fawn colour, which was open. As Royston drove up, the gentleman in the light coat said, “Look here cabby, here’s some fellow awfully tight, you’d better take him home!”
‘Royston then asked him if the drunken man was his friend, but this the other denied, saying that he had just picked him up from the footpath, and did not know him from Adam. At this moment the deceased turned his face up to the light of the lamp under which both were standing, and the other seemed to recognise him, for he recoiled a pace, letting the drunken man fall in a heap on the pavement, and gasping out “You!” he turned on his heel, and walked rapidly away down Russell Street in the direction of Bourke Street.
‘Royston was staring after him, and wondering at his strange conduct, when he was recalled to himself by the voice of the deceased, who had struggled to his feet, and was holding on to the lamp-post, swaying to and fro. “I wan’ g’ome,” he said in a thick voice, “St Kilda.” He then tried to get into the cab, but was too drunk to do so, and finally sat down again on the pavement. Seeing this Royston got down, and lifting him up, helped him into the cab with some considerable difficulty. The deceased fell back into the cab, and seemed to drop off to sleep; so, after closing the door, Royston turned to remount his driving-seat, when he found the gentleman in the light coat whom he had seen holding up the deceased, close to his elbow. Royston said, “Oh you’ve come back,” and the other answered, “Yes, I’ve changed my mind, and will see him home.” As he said this he opened the door of the cab, stepped in beside the deceased, and told Royston to drive down to St Kilda. Royston, who was glad that the friend of the deceased had come to look after him, drove as he had been directed, but near the Church of England Grammar School, on the St Kilda Road, the gentleman in the light coat called out to him to stop. He did so, and the gentleman got out of the cab, closing the door after him.
‘“He won’t let me take him home,” he said, “so I’ll just walk back to the city, and you can drive him to St Kilda.”
‘“What street, sir?” asked Royston.
‘“Grey Street, I fancy,” said the other, “but my friend will direct you when you get to the Junction.”
‘“Ain’t he too much on, sir?” said Royston, dubiously.
‘“Oh, no! I think he’ll be able to tell you where he lives—it’s Grey Street or Acland Street I fancy, I don’t know which.”
‘He then opened the door of the cab and looked in, “Goodnight, old man,” he said—the other apparently did not answer, for the gentleman in the light coat, shrugging his shoulders, and muttering “sulky brute,” closed the door again. He then gave Royston half a sovereign, lit a cigarette, and after making a few remarks about the beauty of the night, walked off quickly in the direction of Melbourne. Royston drove down to the Junction, and having stopped there according to his instructions he asked his fare several times where he was to drive him to. Receiving no answer, and thinking that the deceased was too drunk to answer, he got down from his seat, opened the door of the cab, and found the deceased lying back in the corner with a handkerchief across his mouth. He put out his hand with the intention of rousing him, thinking that he had gone to sleep, when on touching him the deceased fell forward, and on examination, to his horror, he found that he was quite dead.
‘Alarmed at what had taken place, and suspecting the gentleman in the light coat, he drove to the police station at St Kilda, and there made the above report. The body of the deceased was taken out of the cab and brought into the station, a doctor being sent for at once. On his arrival, however, he found that life was quite extinct, and also discovered that the handkerchief which was tied lightly over the mouth was saturated with chloroform. He had no hesitation in stating that from the way in which the handkerchief was placed, and the presence of chloroform, that a murder had been committed, and from all appearances the deceased died easily, and without a struggle.
‘The deceased is a slender man, of medium height, with a dark complexion and is dressed in evening dress, which will render identification difficult, as it is a costume which has not any distinctive mark to render it noticeable. There were no papers nor cards found on the deceased from which his name could be discovered, and the clothing was not marked in any way. The handkerchief, however, which was tied across his mouth, was of white silk, and marked in one of the corners with the letters “O. W.” in red silk. The assassin, of course, may have used his own handkerchief to commit the crime, so that if the initials are those of his name they may ultimately lead to his detection. There will be an inquest held on the body of the deceased this morning, when, no doubt, some evidence may be elicited which may solve the mystery.’
In Monday morning’s issue of the Argus the following article appeared with reference to the matter:—
‘The following additional evidence has been obtained which may throw some light on the mysterious murder in a hansom cab of which we gave a full description in Saturday’s issue:—“Another hansom cabman called at the police office and gave a clue which will, no doubt, prove of value to the detectives in their search after the murderer. He states that he was driving up the St Kilda Road on Friday morning about half past one o’clock, when he was hailed by a gentleman in a light coat who stepped into the cab and told him to drive to Powlett Street in East Melbourne. He did so, and after paying him, the gentleman got out at the corner of Wellington Parade and Powlett Street and walked slowly up Powlett Street while the cab drove back to town.”
Here all clue ends, but there can be no doubt in the minds of our readers as to the identity of the man in the light coat who got out of Royston’s cab on the St Kilda Road with the one who entered the other cab and alighted therefrom at Powlett Street. There could have been no struggle, as the cabman Royston would surely have heard the noise had any taken place. The supposition is, therefore, that the deceased was too drunk to make any resistance, and the other, watching his opportunity, placed the handkerchief saturated with chloroform over the mouth of his victim, and after a few ineffectual struggles the latter would relapse into a state of stupor from such inhalation. The man in the light coat, judging from his conduct before getting into the cab, appears to have known the deceased, though from the circumstance of his walking away on recognition and returning again shows that his attitude towards the deceased was not altogether a friendly one.
‘The difficulty is where to start from in the search after the author of what appears to be a deliberate murder, as the deceased seems to be unknown, and his presumed murderer has escaped. But it is impossible that the body can remain long without being identified by someone, as though Melbourne is a large city, yet it is neither Paris or London, where a man can disappear in a crowd and never be heard of again. The first thing to be done is to establish the identity of the deceased, and then, no doubt, a clue will be obtained leading to the detection of the man in the light coat who appears to have been the perpetrator of the crime.
‘It is of the utmost importance that the mystery in which the crime is shrouded should be cleared up, not only in the interests of justice, but also in those of the public—taking place as it did, in a public conveyance, and in the public street. To think that the author of such a crime is at present at large walking in our midst, and perhaps preparing for the committal of another, is enough to shake the strongest nerves. According to James Payne, the well-known novelist, fact is sometimes in the habit of poaching on the domain of fiction, and, curiously enough, this case is a proof of the truth of his saying. In one of Du Boisgobey’s stories, entitled ‘An Omnibus Mystery’, a murder closely resembling this tragedy takes place in an omnibus, but we question if even that author would have been daring enough to have written about a crime being committed in such an unlikely place as a hansom cab. Here is a great chance for some of our detectives to render themselves famous, and we feel sure that they will do their utmost to trace the author of this cowardly and daring murder.’
CHAPTER TWO
THE EVIDENCE AT THE INQUEST
At the inquest held on the body found in the hansom cab the following articles taken from the deceased were placed on the table:—
1. Two pounds ten shillings in gold and silver.
2. The white silk handkerchief which was saturated with chloroform, and was found tied across the mouth of the deceased, marked with the letters O. W. in red silk.
3. A cigarette case of Russian leather, half filled with old Judge cigarettes.
4. A left-hand white glove of kid—rather soiled—with black seams down the back.
Samuel Gorby, of the detective office, was present in order to see if anything might be said by the witnesses likely to point to the cause or to the author of the crime.The first witness called was Malcolm Royston, in whose cab the crime had been committed. He told the same story as had already appeared in the Argus, and the following facts were elicited by the coroner:—
Q. Can you give a description of the gentleman in the light coat who was holding the deceased when you drove up?
A. I did not observe him very closely, as my attention was taken up by the deceased; and, besides, the gentleman in the light coat was in the shadow.
Q. Describe him from what you saw of him.
A. He was fair, I think, because I could see his moustache, rather tall, and in evening dress, with a light coat over it. I could not see his face very plainly, as he wore a soft felt hat, which was pulled down over his eyes.
Q. What kind of hat was it he wore—a wide-awake?
A. Yes. The brim was turned down, and I could only see his mouth and moustache.
Q. What did he say when you asked him if he knew the deceased?
A. He said he didn’t; that he had just picked him up.
Q. And afterwards he seemed to recognise him?
A. Yes. When the deceased looked up he said ‘You!’ and let him fall on to the ground; then he walked away towards Bourke Street.
Q. Did he look back?
A. Not that I saw.
Q. How long were you looking after him?
A. About a minute.
Q. And when did you see him again?
A. After I put the deceased into the cab I turned round and found him at my elbow.
Q. And what did he say?
A. I said ‘Oh! you’ve come back,’ and he said ‘Yes, I’ve changed my mind and will see him home,’ and then he got into the cab and told me to drive to St Kilda.
Q. He spoke then as if he knew the deceased.
A. Yes; I thought that he only recognised him when he looked up, and perhaps having had a row with him walked away, but thought he’d come back.
Q. Did you see him coming back?
A. No; the first I saw of him was at my elbow when I turned.
Q. And when did he get out?
A. Just as I was turning down by the grammar school on the St Kilda Road.
Q. Did you hear any sounds of fighting or struggling in the cab during the drive?
A. No; the road was rather rough, and the noise of the wheels going over the stones would have prevented me hearing anything.
Q. When the gentleman in the light coat got out did he appear disturbed?
A. No; he was perfectly calm.
Q. How could you tell that?
A. Because the moon had risen and I could see plainly.
Q. Did you see his face then?
A. No; his hat was pulled down over it. I only saw as much as I did when he entered the cab in Collins Street.
Q. Were his clothes torn or disarranged in any way?
A. No; the only difference I saw in him was that his coat was buttoned.
Q. And was it open when he got in?
A. No; but it was when he was holding up the deceased.
Q. Then he buttoned it before he came back and got into the cab?
A. Yes. I suppose so.
Q. What did he say when he got out of the cab on the St Kilda Road?
A. He said that the deceased would not let him take him home, and that he would walk back to Melbourne.
Q. And you asked him where you were to drive the deceased to?
A. Yes; and he said that the deceased lived either in Grey Street or Acland Street, St Kilda, but that the deceased would direct me at the Junction.
Q. Did you not think that the deceased was too drunk to direct you?
A. Yes, I did: but his friend said that the sleep and the shaking of the cab would sober him a bit by the time I got to the Junction.
Q. The gentleman in the light coat apparently did not know where the deceased lived?
A. No; he said it was either in Acland Street or Grey Street.
Q. Did you not think that curious?
A. No; I thought he might be a club friend of the deceased.
Q. How long did the man in the light coat talk to you?
A. About five minutes.
Q. And during that time you heard no noise in the cab?
A. No; I thought the deceased had gone to sleep.
Q. And after the man in the light coat said goodnight to the deceased what happened?
A. He lit a cigarette, gave me a half-sovereign, and walked off towards Melbourne.
Q. Did you notice if the gentleman in the light coat had his handkerchief with him?
A. Oh, yes; because he dusted his boots with it. The road was very dusty.
Q. Did you observe any striking peculiarity about him?
A. Well, no; except that he wore a diamond ring.
Q. What was there peculiar about that?
A. He wore it on the forefinger of the right hand, and I never saw it that way before.
Q. When did you notice this?
A. When he was lighting his cigarette.
Q. How often did you call to the deceased when you got to the Junction?
A. Three or four times. I then got down, and found he was quite dead.
Q. How was he lying?
A. He was doubled up in the far corner of the cab; very much in the same position as I left him when I put him in. His head was hanging on one side, and there was a handkerchief across his mouth. When I touched him he fell into the other corner of the cab, and then I found out he was dead. I immediately drove to the St Kilda police station and told the police.
At the conclusion of Royston’s evidence, during which Gorby had been continually taking notes, Robert Chinston was called. He deposed:—
‘I am a duly qualified medical practitioner, residing in Collins Street East. I made a post mortem examination of the body of the deceased on Friday.’
Q. That was within a few hours after his death?
A. Yes; seeing from the position of the handkerchief and the presence of chloroform that he had died through chloroform, and knowing how quickly that poison evaporates I made the examination at once.
Coroner: Go on sir!
Dr Chinston: Externally the body was healthy looking and well nourished. There were no marks of violence. The staining apparent at the back of the legs and trunk was due to post mortem congestion. Internally, the brain was hyperaemic, and there was a considerable amount of congestion, especially apparent in the superficial vessels. There was no brain disease. The lungs were healthy, but slightly congested. On opening the thorax there was a faint spirituous odour discernible. The stomach contained about a pint of completely digested food. The heart was flaccid. The right heart contained a considerable quantity of dark, fluid blood. There was a tendency to fatty degeneration of that organ.
I am of the opinion that the deceased died from the inhalation of some such vapour as chloroform or methylene.
Q. You say there was a tendency to fatty degeneration of the heart? Would that have anything to do with the death of deceased?
A. Not of itself. But chloroform administered while the heart was in such a state would have a decided tendency to accelerate the fatal result. At the same time, I may mention, that the post mortem signs of poisoning by chloroform are mostly negative.
Dr Chinston was then permitted to retire, and Clement Rankin, another hansom cabman, was called. He deposed:—
‘I am a cabman, living in Collingwood, and usually drive a hansom cab. I remember Thursday last. I had driven a party down to St Kilda, and was returning about half past one o’clock. A short distance past the grammar school, I was hailed by a gentleman in a light coat; he was smoking a cigarette, and told me to drive him to Powlett Street, East Melbourne. I did so, and he got out at the corner of Wellington Parade and Powlett Street. He paid me half a sovereign for my fare, and then walked up Powlett Street while I drove back to town.’
Q. What time was it you stopped at Powlett Street?
A. Two o’clock exactly.
Q. How do you know?
A. Because it was a still night, and I heard the Post Office clock strike two o’clock.
Q. Did you notice anything peculiar about the man in the light coat?
A. No! He looked just the same as anyone else. I thought he was some swell of the town out for a lark. His hat was pulled down over his eyes, and I could not see his face.
Q. Did you notice if he wore a ring?
A. Yes! I did. When he was handing me the half-sovereign, I saw he had a diamond ring on the forefinger of his right hand.
Q. He did not say why he was on the St Kilda Road at such an hour?
A. No! He did not.
Clement Rankin was then ordered to stand down, and the coroner then summed up in an address of half an hour’s duration. There was, he pointed out, no doubt that the death of the deceased had resulted not from natural causes, but from the effects of poisoning. Only slight evidence had been obtained up to the present time regarding the circumstances of the case, but the only person who could be accused of committing the crime, was the unknown man who entered the cab with the deceased on Friday morning at the corner of the Scotch Church, near the Burke and Wills monument. It had been proved that the deceased, when he entered the cab, was, to all appearances, in good health, though in a state of intoxication, and the fact that he was found by the cabman Royston, after the man in the light coat had left the cab, with a handkerchief, saturated with chloroform, tied over his mouth, would seem to show that he had died through the inhalation of chloroform, which had been deliberately administered. All the obtainable evidence in the case was circumstantial, but, nevertheless, showed conclusively, that a crime had been committed. Therefore as the circumstances of the case pointed to one conclusion, the jury could not do otherwise than frame a verdict in accordance with that conclusion.
The jury retired at four o’clock, and after an absence of a quarter of an hour, returned with the following verdict: ‘That the deceased, whose name there was no evidence to show, died on the 27th day of July, from the effects of poison, namely, chloroform, feloniously administered by some person unknown; and the jury, on their oaths, say that the said unknown person feloniously, wilfully, and maliciously did murder the said deceased.’
CHAPTER THREE
ONE HUNDRED POUNDS REWARD
V.R.
MURDER
£ 100 REWARD
‘Whereas, on Friday, the 27th day of July, the body of a man, name unknown, was found in a hansom cab. and, whereas, at an inquest held at St Kilda, on the 30th day of July, a verdict of wilful murder, against some person unknown, was brought in by the jury. The deceased is of medium height, with a dark complexion, dark hair, clean shaved, has a mole on the left temple, and was dressed in evening dress. Notice is hereby given that a reward of £100 will be paid by the Government for such information as will lead to the conviction of the murderer, who is presumed to be a man who entered the hansom cab with the deceased at the corner of Collins and Russell streets, on the morning of the 27th day of July.’
