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THE WICKSTEED MURDER

 

 

The Invisible Man seems to have rushed out of Kemp's house in a

state of blind fury. A little child playing near Kemp's gateway was

violently caught up and thrown aside, so that its ankle was broken,

and thereafter for some hours the Invisible Man passed out of human

perceptions. No one knows where he went nor what he did. But one

can imagine him hurrying through the hot June forenoon, up the

hill and on to the open downland behind Port Burdock, raging and

despairing at his intolerable fate, and sheltering at last, heated

and weary, amid the thickets of Hintondean, to piece together again

his shattered schemes against his species. That seems to most

probable refuge for him, for there it was he re-asserted himself in

a grimly tragical manner about two in the afternoon.

 

One wonders what his state of mind may have been during that time,

and what plans he devised. No doubt he was almost ecstatically

exasperated by Kemp's treachery, and though we may be able to

understand the motives that led to that deceit, we may still

imagine and even sympathise a little with the fury the attempted

surprise must have occasioned. Perhaps something of the stunned

astonishment of his Oxford Street experiences may have returned to

him, for he had evidently counted on Kemp's co-operation in his

brutal dream of a terrorised world. At any rate he vanished from

human ken about midday, and no living witness can tell what he did

until about half-past two. It was a fortunate thing, perhaps, for

humanity, but for him it was a fatal inaction.

 

During that time a growing multitude of men scattered over the

countryside were busy. In the morning he had still been simply a

legend, a terror; in the afternoon, by virtue chiefly of Kemp's

drily worded proclamation, he was presented as a tangible

antagonist, to be wounded, captured, or overcome, and the

countryside began organising itself with inconceivable rapidity.

By two o'clock even he might still have removed himself out of

the district by getting aboard a train, but after two that became

impossible. Every passenger train along the lines on a great

parallelogram between Southampton, Manchester, Brighton and Horsham,

travelled with locked doors, and the goods traffic was almost

entirely suspended. And in a great circle of twenty miles round Port

Burdock, men armed with guns and bludgeons were presently setting

out in groups of three and four, with dogs, to beat the roads and

fields.

 

Mounted policemen rode along the country lanes, stopping at every

cottage and warning the people to lock up their houses, and keep

indoors unless they were armed, and all the elementary schools had

broken up by three o'clock, and the children, scared and keeping

together in groups, were hurrying home. Kemp's proclamation--signed

indeed by Adye--was posted over almost the whole district by four or

five o'clock in the afternoon. It gave briefly but clearly all the



conditions of the struggle, the necessity of keeping the Invisible

Man from food and sleep, the necessity for incessant watchfulness

and for a prompt attention to any evidence of his movements. And

so swift and decided was the action of the authorities, so prompt

and universal was the belief in this strange being, that before

nightfall an area of several hundred square miles was in a stringent

state of siege. And before nightfall, too, a thrill of horror

went through the whole watching nervous countryside. Going from

whispering mouth to mouth, swift and certain over the length and

breadth of the country, passed the story of the murder of Mr.

Wicksteed.

 

If our supposition that the Invisible Man's refuge was the

Hintondean thickets, then we must suppose that in the early

afternoon he sallied out again bent upon some project that involved

the use of a weapon. We cannot know what the project was, but the

evidence that he had the iron rod in hand before he met Wicksteed

is to me at least overwhelming.

 

Of course we can know nothing of the details of that encounter.

It occurred on the edge of a gravel pit, not two hundred yards

from Lord Burdock's lodge gate. Everything points to a desperate

struggle--the trampled ground, the numerous wounds Mr. Wicksteed

received, his splintered walking-stick; but why the attack was made,

save in a murderous frenzy, it is impossible to imagine. Indeed the

theory of madness is almost unavoidable. Mr. Wicksteed was a man of

forty-five or forty-six, steward to Lord Burdock, of inoffensive

habits and appearance, the very last person in the world to provoke

such a terrible antagonist. Against him it would seem the Invisible

Man used an iron rod dragged from a broken piece of fence. He

stopped this quiet man, going quietly home to his midday meal,

attacked him, beat down his feeble defences, broke his arm, felled

him, and smashed his head to a jelly.

 

Of course, he must have dragged this rod out of the fencing before

he met his victim--he must have been carrying it ready in his hand.

Only two details beyond what has already been stated seem to bear

on the matter. One is the circumstance that the gravel pit was not

in Mr. Wicksteed's direct path home, but nearly a couple of hundred

yards out of his way. The other is the assertion of a little girl

to the effect that, going to her afternoon school, she saw the

murdered man "trotting" in a peculiar manner across a field towards

the gravel pit. Her pantomime of his action suggests a man pursuing

something on the ground before him and striking at it ever and

again with his walking-stick. She was the last person to see him

alive. He passed out of her sight to his death, the struggle being

hidden from her only by a clump of beech trees and a slight

depression in the ground.

 

Now this, to the present writer's mind at least, lifts the murder

out of the realm of the absolutely wanton. We may imagine that

Griffin had taken the rod as a weapon indeed, but without any

deliberate intention of using it in murder. Wicksteed may then have

come by and noticed this rod inexplicably moving through the air.

Without any thought of the Invisible Man--for Port Burdock is ten

miles away--he may have pursued it. It is quite conceivable that

he may not even have heard of the Invisible Man. One can then

imagine the Invisible Man making off--quietly in order to avoid

discovering his presence in the neighbourhood, and Wicksteed,

excited and curious, pursuing this unaccountably locomotive

object--finally striking at it.

 

No doubt the Invisible Man could easily have distanced his

middle-aged pursuer under ordinary circumstances, but the position

in which Wicksteed's body was found suggests that he had the

ill luck to drive his quarry into a corner between a drift of

stinging nettles and the gravel pit. To those who appreciate the

extraordinary irascibility of the Invisible Man, the rest of the

encounter will be easy to imagine.

 

But this is pure hypothesis. The only undeniable facts--for stories

of children are often unreliable--are the discovery of Wicksteed's

body, done to death, and of the blood-stained iron rod flung among

the nettles. The abandonment of the rod by Griffin, suggests that

in the emotional excitement of the affair, the purpose for which

he took it--if he had a purpose--was abandoned. He was certainly

an intensely egotistical and unfeeling man, but the sight of his

victim, his first victim, bloody and pitiful at his feet, may have

released some long pent fountain of remorse which for a time may

have flooded whatever scheme of action he had contrived.

 

After the murder of Mr. Wicksteed, he would seem to have struck

across the country towards the downland. There is a story of a

voice heard about sunset by a couple of men in a field near Fern

Bottom. It was wailing and laughing, sobbing and groaning, and ever

and again it shouted. It must have been queer hearing. It drove up

across the middle of a clover field and died away towards the

hills.

 

That afternoon the Invisible Man must have learnt something of

the rapid use Kemp had made of his confidences. He must have

found houses locked and secured; he may have loitered about

railway stations and prowled about inns, and no doubt he read the

proclamations and realised something of the nature of the campaign

against him. And as the evening advanced, the fields became dotted

here and there with groups of three or four men, and noisy with the

yelping of dogs. These men-hunters had particular instructions in

the case of an encounter as to the way they should support one

another. But he avoided them all. We may understand something of

his exasperation, and it could have been none the less because

he himself had supplied the information that was being used so

remorselessly against him. For that day at least he lost heart; for

nearly twenty-four hours, save when he turned on Wicksteed, he was

a hunted man. In the night, he must have eaten and slept; for in

the morning he was himself again, active, powerful, angry, and

malignant, prepared for his last great struggle against the world.

 

CHAPTER XXVII

 


Date: 2015-01-02; view: 732


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