The Lusitania boat specials ran into Euston Station soon after three
o’clock in the afternoon. A small company of reporters, and several
other men whose profession was not disclosed from their appearance, were
on the spot to interview certain of the passengers. A young fellow from
the office of the Evening Comet was, perhaps, the most successful, as,
from the lengthy description which had been telegraphed to him from
Liverpool, he was fortunate enough to accost the only person who had
been seen speaking to the murdered man upon the voyage.
“This is Mr. Coulson, I believe?” the young man said with conviction,
addressing a somewhat stout, gray-headed American, with white moustache,
a Homburg hat, and clothes of distinctly transatlantic cut.
That gentlemen regarded his interlocutor with some surprise but without
unfriendliness.
“That happens to be my name, sir,” he replied. “You have the advantage
of me, though. You are not from my old friends Spencer & Miles, are
you?”
“Spencer & Miles,” the young man repeated thoughtfully.
“Woollen firm in London Wall,” Mr. Coulson added. “I know they wanted to
see me directly I arrived, and they did say something about sending to
the station.”
The young man shook his head, and assumed at the same time his most
engaging manner.
“Why, no, sir!” he admitted. “I have no connection with that firm at
all. The fact is I am on the staff of an evening paper. A friend of
mine in Liverpool--a mutual friend, I believe I may say,” he
explained--“wired me your description. I understand that you were
acquainted with Mr. Hamilton Fynes?”
Mr. Coulson set down his suitcase for a moment, to light a cigar.
“Well, if I did know the poor fellow just to nod to,” he said, “I don’t
see that’s any reason why I should talk about him to you newspaper
fellows. You’d better get hold of his relations, if you can find them.”
“But, my dear Mr. Coulson,” the young man said, “we haven’t any idea
where they are to be found, and in the meantime you can’t imagine what
reports are in circulation.”
“Guess I can figure them out pretty well,” Mr. Coulson remarked with a
smile. “We’ve got an evening press of our own in New York.”
The reporter nodded.
“Well,” he said, “They’d be able to stretch themselves out a bit on
a case like this. You see,” he continued confidentially, “we are up
against something almost unique. Here is an astounding and absolutely
inexplicable murder, committed in a most dastardly fashion by a person
who appears to have vanished from the face of the earth. Not a single
thing is known about the victim except his name. We do not know whether
he came to England on business or pleasure. He may, in short, have been
any one from a millionaire to a newspaper man. Judging from his special
train,” the reporter concluded with a smile, “and the money which was
found upon him, I imagine that he was certainly not the latter.”
Mr. Coulson went on his way toward the exit from the station, puffing
contentedly at his big cigar.
“Well,” he said to his companion, who showed not the slightest
disposition to leave his side, “it don’t seem to me that there’s much
worth repeating about poor Fynes,--much that I knew, at any rate. Still,
if you like to get in a cab with me and ride as far as the Savoy, I’ll
tell you what I can.”
“You are a brick, sir,” the young man declared. “Haven’t you any
luggage, though?”
“I checked what I had through from Liverpool to the hotel,” Mr. Coulson
answered. “I can’t stand being fussed around by all these porters, and
having to go and take pot luck amongst a pile of other people’s baggage.
We’ll just take one of these two-wheeled sardine tins that you people
call hansoms, and get round to the hotel as quick as we can. There are a
few pals of mine generally lunch in the cafe there, and they mayn’t all
have cleared out if we look alive.”
They started a moment or two later. Mr. Coulson leaned forward and,
folding his arms upon the apron of the cab, looked about him with
interest.
“Say,” he remarked, removing his cigar to the corner of his mouth in
order to facilitate conversation, “this old city of yours don’t change
any.”
“Not up in this part, perhaps,” the reporter agreed. “We’ve some fine
new buildings down toward the Strand.”
Mr. Coulson nodded.
“Well,” he said, “I guess you don’t want to be making conversation. You
want to know about Hamilton Fynes. I was just acquainted with him, and
that’s a fact, but I reckon you’ll have to find some one who knows a
good deal more than I do before you’ll get the stuff you want for your
paper.”
“The slightest particulars are of interest to us just now,” the reporter
reminded him.
Mr. Coulson nodded.
“Hamilton Fynes,” he said, “so far as I knew him, was a quiet,
inoffensive sort of creature, who has been drawing a regular salary from
the State for the last fifteen years and saving half of it. He has been
coming over to Europe now and then, and though he was a good, steady
chap enough, he liked his fling when he was over here, and between you
and me, he was the greatest crank I ever struck. I met him in London a
matter of three years ago, and he wanted to go to Paris. There were
two cars running at the regular time, meeting the boat at Dover. Do you
think he would have anything to do with them? Not he! He hired a special
train and went down like a prince.”
“What did he do that for?” the reporter asked.
“Why, because he was a crank, sir,” Mr. Coulson answered confidentially.
“There was no other reason at all. Take this last voyage on the
Lusitania, now. He spoke to me the first day out because he couldn’t
help it, but for pretty well the rest of the journey he either kept
down in his stateroom or, when he came up on deck, he avoided me and
everybody else. When he did talk, his talk was foolish. He was a good
chap at his work, I believe, but he was a crank. Seemed to me sometimes
as though that humdrum life of his had about turned his brain. The
last day out he was fidgeting all the time; kept looking at his watch,
studying the chart, and asking the sailors questions. Said he wanted to
get up in time to take a girl to lunch on Thursday. It was just for that
reason that he scuttled off the boat without a word to any of us, and
rushed up to London.”
“But he had letters, Mr. Coulson,” the reporter reminded him, “from
some one in Washington, to the captain of the steamer and to the
station-master of the London and North Western Railway. It seems rather
odd that he should have provided himself with these, doesn’t it?”
“They were easy enough to get,” Mr. Coulson answered. “He wasn’t a
worrying sort of chap, Fynes wasn’t. He did his work, year in and year
out, and asked no favors. The consequence was that when he asked a queer
one he got it all right. It’s easier to get a pull over there than it is
here, you know.”
“This is all very interesting,” the reporter said, “and I am sure I’m
very much obliged to you, Mr. Coulson. Now can you tell me of anything
in the man’s life or way of living likely to provoke enmity on the part
of any one? This murder was such a cold-blooded affair.”
“There I’m stuck,” Mr. Coulson admitted. “There’s only one thing I can
tell you, and that is that I believe he had a lot more money on him than
the amount mentioned in your newspapers this morning. My own opinion is
that he was murdered for what he’d got. A smart thief would say that a
fellow who takes a special tug off the steamer and a special train
to town was a man worth robbing. How the thing was done I don’t
know--that’s for your police to find out--but I reckon that whoever
killed him did it for his cash.”
The reporter sighed. He was, after all, a little disappointed. Mr.
Coulson was obviously a man of common sense. His words were clearly
pronounced, and his reasoning sound. They had reached the courtyard of
the hotel now, and the reporter began to express his gratitude.
“My first drink on English soil,” Mr. Coulson said, as he handed his
suitcase to the hall-porter, “is always--”
“It’s on me,” the young man declared quickly. “I owe you a good deal
more than drinks, Mr. Coulson.”
“Well, come along, anyway,” the latter remarked. “I guess my room is all
right, porter?”--turning to the man who stood by his side, bag in hand.
“I am Mr. James B. Coulson of New York, and I wrote on ahead. I’ll come
round to the office and register presently.”
They made their way to the American bar. The newspaper man and his
new friend drank together and, skillfully prompted by the former, the
conversation drifted back to the subject of Hamilton Fynes. There was
nothing else to be learned, however, in the way of facts. Mr. Coulson
admitted that he had been a little nettled by his friend’s odd manner
during the voyage, and the strange way he had of keeping to himself.
“But, after all,” he wound up, “Fynes was a crank, when all’s said and
done. We are all cranks, more or less,--all got our weak spot, I mean.
It was secretiveness with our unfortunate friend. He liked to play at
being a big personage in a mysterious sort of way, and the poor chap’s
paid for it,” he added with a sigh.
The reporter left his new-made friend a short time afterwards, and took
a hansom to his office. His newspaper at once issued a special edition,
giving an interview between their representative and Mr. James B.
Coulson, a personal friend of the murdered man. It was, after all,
something of a scoop, for not one of the other passengers had been found
who was in a position to say anything at all about him. The immediate
effect of the interview, however, was to procure for Mr. Coulson a
somewhat bewildering succession of callers. The first to arrive was a
gentleman who introduced himself as Mr. Jacks, and whose card, sent
back at first, was retendered in a sealed envelope with Scotland Yard
scrawled across the back of it. Mr. Coulson, who was in the act of
changing his clothes, interviewed Mr. Jacks in his chamber.
“Mr. Coulson,” the Inspector said, “I am visiting you on behalf of
Scotland Yard. We understand that you had some acquaintance with Mr.
Hamilton Fynes, and we hope that you will answer a few questions for
us.”
Mr. Coulson sat down upon a trunk with his hairbrushes in his hand.
“Well,” he declared, “you detectives do get to know things, don’t you?”
“Nothing so remarkable in that, Mr. Coulson,” Inspector Jacks remarked
pleasantly. “A newspaper man had been before me, I see.”
Mr. Coulson nodded.
“That’s so,” he admitted. “Seems to me I may have been a bit indiscreet
in talking so much to that young reporter. I have just read his account
of my interview, and he’s got it pat, word by word. Now, Mr. Jacks, if
you’ll just invest a halfpenny in that newspaper, you don’t need to ask
me any questions. That young man had a kind of pleasant way with him,
and I told him all I knew.”
“Just so, Mr. Coulson,” the Inspector answered. “At the same time
nothing that you told him throws any light at all upon the circumstances
which led to the poor fellow’s death.”
“That,” Mr. Coulson declared, “is not my fault. What I don’t know I
can’t tell you.”
“You were acquainted with Mr. Fynes some years ago?” the Inspector
asked. “Can you tell me what business he was in then?”
“Same as now, for anything I know,” Mr. Coulson answered. “He was a
clerk in one of the Government offices at Washington.”
“Government offices,” Inspector Jacks repeated. “Have you any idea what
department?”
Mr. Coulson was not sure.
“It may have been the Excise Office,” he remarked thoughtfully. “I did
hear, but I never took any particular notice.”
“Did you ever form any idea as to the nature of his work?” Inspector
Jacks asked.
“Bless you, no!” Mr. Coulson replied, brushing his hair vigorously. “It
never entered into my head to ask him, and I never heard him mention it.
I only know that he was a quiet-living, decent sort of a chap, but, as I
put it to our young friend the newspaper man, he was a crank.”
The Inspector was disappointed. He began to feel that he was wasting his
time.
“Did you know anything of the object of his journey to Europe?” he
asked.
“Nary a thing,” Mr. Coulson declared. “He only came on deck once or
twice, and he had scarcely a civil word even for me. Why, I tell
you, sir,” Mr. Coulson continued, “if he saw me coming along on the
promenade, he’d turn round and go the other way, for fear I’d ask him to
come and have a drink. A c-r-a-n-k, sir! You write it down at that, and
you won’t be far out.”
“He certainly seems to have been a queer lot,” the Inspector declared.
“By the bye,” he continued, “you said something, I believe, about his
having had more money with him than was found upon his person.”
“That’s so,” Mr. Coulson admitted. “I know he deposited a pocketbook
with the purser, and I happened to be standing by when he received it
back. I noticed that he had three or four thousand-dollar bills, and
there didn’t seem to be anything of the sort upon him when he was
found.”
The Inspector made a note of this.
“You believe yourself, then, Mr. Coulson,” he said, closing his
pocketbook, “that the murder was committed for the purpose of robbery?”
“Seems to me it’s common sense,” Mr. Coulson replied. “A man who goes
and takes a special train to London from the docks of a city like
Liverpool--a city filled with the scum of the world, mind you--kind of
gives himself away as a man worth robbing, doesn’t he?”
The Inspector nodded.
“That’s sensible talk, Mr. Coulson,” he acknowledged. “You never heard,
I suppose, of his having had a quarrel with any one?”
“Never in my life,” Mr. Coulson declared. “He wasn’t the sort to make
enemies, any more than he was the sort to make friends.”
The Inspector took up his hat. His manner now was no longer
inquisitorial. With the closing of his notebook a new geniality had
taken the place of his official stiffness.
“You are making a long stay here, Mr. Coulson?” he asked.
“A week or so, maybe,” that gentleman answered. “I am in the machinery
patent line--machinery for the manufacture of woollen goods mostly--and
I have a few appointments in London. Afterwards I am going on to Paris.
You can hear of me at any time either here or at the Grand Hotel, Paris,
but there’s nothing further to be got out of me as regards Mr. Hamilton
Fynes.”
The Inspector was of the same opinion and took his departure. Mr.
Coulson waited for some little time, still sitting on his trunk and
clasping his hairbrushes. Then he moved over to the table on which stood
the telephone instrument and asked for a number. The reply came in a
minute or two in the form of a question.
“It’s Mr. James B. Coulson from New York, landed this afternoon from the
Lusitania,” Mr. Coulson said. “I am at the Savoy Hotel, speaking from my
room--number 443.”
There was a brief silence--then a reply.
“You had better be in the bar smoking-room at seven o’clock. If nothing
happens, don’t leave the hotel this evening.”
Mr. Coulson replaced the receiver and rang off. A page-boy knocked at
the door.
“Young lady downstairs wishes to see you, sir,” he announced.
Mr. Coulson took up the card from the tray.
“Miss Penelope Morse,” he said softly to himself. “Seems to me I’m
rather popular this evening. Say I’ll be down right away, my boy.”
“Very good, sir,” the page answered. “There’s a gentleman with her, sir.
His card’s underneath the lady’s.”
Mr. Coulson examined the tray once more. A gentleman’s visiting card
informed him that his other caller was Sir Charles Somerfield, Bart.
“Bart,” Mr. Coulson remarked thoughtfully. “I’m not quite catching on to
that, but I suppose he goes in with the young lady.”
“They’re both together, sir,” the boy announced.
Mr. Coulson completed his toilet and hurried downstairs