SO MUCH FOR THE EVIDENCE

        It was in my rooms that night that we settled on the evidence which was to be offered next day at the inquest.  They had to come to me because I was on a couch with a twisted ankle and two broken ribs.  P.C. Dorey had found me lying on the cliff’s edge, and after rendering first aid had gone off for help to transport me home.

   “Well,” Le Marinel was saying, “all along I said the Chief would get them by the finger-prints.”  He looked over at me.  “Didn’t I say that on Saturday before you went into the wine shop?  Of course the fellow didn’t suppose that the little island of Guernsey could boast a finger-print expert like Carey.” Carey looked at McNab apologetically.

 “Forgive this outburst of local patriotism,” he said.  “We all know that without your constructive imagination my technical knowledge would not have carried us far.”


    Now this kind of talk was all very well between Le Marinel, Carey and McNab.  They had been together all day, and were in full possession of the facts.  But I had been out of things since Dorey took me home that morning, and knew nothing of the day’s developments.  So I cut into the talk.


   “If there’s a vote to be taken on the question of pre-eminence,” I said, “may I remind you that I am not in possession of all the facts?”


 

From:  John Ferguson, Death Comes To Perigord.  London & Glasgow, William Collins Sons & Co., Ltd., 1931.


John Cale: Evidence (Link)


Center Image:  Airplane trails over Guernsey night.

 

Sleepless In Tuxedo (Death Comes To Perigord 4)

“Well, sir, and what conclusion have you arrived at?” he inquired.  The tone was not supercilious; but it certainly had a touch of kindly condescension that reminded me of a pompous examiner who had put me through it when I was a nervous youth undergoing the first professional in Edinburgh.

         “Homicidal melancholia,” I said, and not at all as I would have said it to an examiner.

         His eyebrows went up.

         “Really – as bad as that?  Why not ephemeral mania?”

        “Because, for one thing, ephemeral mania does not begin with sleep, as his did.”

        “Is that certain?  At all events it ends in deep sleep, and he may be sleeping somewhere now.  Still” – he waved a hand – “I’ll have to consider that possibility. By the way, have you – er—envisaged the probability of its being a case of senile dementia?  He was an old man, you know.”

      “There was no evidence of childish degeneration when I saw him.  His will-power was strong and his physical condition good."

        “And you do not consider that points to some other form of mania?”

        “No, he slept for hours on end.”

         “He certainly did,” Carey intervened.  “All the testimony we’ve had confirms that; but is it important?  You’ve twice mentioned sleep.”

      Whether or no this intrusion was meant for remonstrance by the weary Chief Constable I cannot tell, but Sullivant turned on him.

        “It is of decisive importance – a maniac is entirely sleepless,” he almost snapped back.

From:  John Ferguson, Death Comes To Perigord (Chapter IV:  The Gilt Tennis Ball).  London and Glasgow, William Collins and Sons Co., Ltd., 1931.

“Va t’en.” (Death Comes To Perigord 3)

                         

      



     “Va t’en.”

         The command was hissed rather than spoken. But I had no intention of going before I had done my job, and as soothingly as possible told him so.  For now I felt sure that Le Marinel must have good reason for sending me the urgent message I had received, though to me it looked as if I might have been more usefully employed in examining into his mental rather than physical condition.  And examine him I did, in spite of all his expostulations.  His heart was certainly in a flutter; but that might be set down to his anger just as much to any cardiac weakness, for in other respects he was, for his age, in surprisingly sound condition.  He seemed, in fact, to be, with ordinary care, good enough for many years to come, and I could not see why I had been so urgently pressed by Le Marinel to go out that night.  The thought had puzzled me even before I left Perigord.

        Once I had done with the man I took up the candle from the bed side table with that little flurry of irritation a doctor is apt to experience in such cases.  Short of accident, many a much younger man would go before de Quettville.  The flutter at his heart was nothing.  He probably smoked too much.  All these Channel Islanders smoked too much:  tobacco was so cheap for them.  And my irritation over the needless call was certainly not lessened by contact with such an ill-mannered patient.  He had sunk back the moment I finished, and now reclined with closed eyes, his sharp nose and white night-cap silhouetted grotesquely in black against the bed curtain, the long beard showing like a waterfall.  But he was not asleep.  As I watched him with disfavor an eyelid fluttered and he waved a hand toward the door.

        “Va t’en,” he repeated crossly.

 

Death Comes To Perigord 2

           That he had disliked me at the time of my visit I was well aware; but now I could divine the maniacal fury which lay behind those vigorous heart-pulsations on which I had remarked to Le Marinel.  He then, of course, had regarded me at the one man likely to thwart his homicidal purpose by getting him put under restraint, and from my experience of delusional dementia I was aware of how easily his hatred could be temporarily transferred from the original object of his hate to myself.  

           The workings of a disordered mind are hard to follow, but it is an error to suppose an insane person cannot conceive, and adhere to a purpose.  There is method in madness; and with homicidal lunatics the doctor frequently becomes an object of intense hatred, the first enemy who must be removed before the original murderous intention can be achieved.

From John Ferguson, Death Comes To Perigord (Chapter XI: How We Caught de Quettville).  London and Glasgow, William Collins and Sons, Co., Ltd., 1931.

                

Death Comes To Perigord 1

“You know,” I said as we shook hands, “it’s deuced hard to believe this island of yours is real.”

         Le Marinel, as if to consider this cocked his head to one side, like a thoughtful bird this time.  I had been but one week on the island, having come to look after the practice of a doctor friend, an old fellow student, who needed a change.  The duty so far had been almost a sinecure, although I was, in fact, then meeting the avocat to report on a patient about whose condition he was anxious.

        “You mean,” he said at length, “that it looks the sort of place where nothing happens.”

          This time the side-long glance he gave me was more than ever bird-like.

        “That’s true;  it does look like that; but it’s not what I meant.  What I meant was that for an island in the Channel less than ninety miles from England it has too many incredible differences; it looks in fact almost Oriental.”

        The avocat seemed mystified.

        “Oriental?” he repeated, with a rising inflection.

        “More like a bit of Tunis or Algiers,” I affirmed.

 “Why look, for instance, at this very road, so long and narrow, stretching between those high blank walls, with invisible houses and hidden people behind them, I suppose.  And look at those tall palm trees which seem to be peering over the walls as if stretching their necks, watching for something to happen in this deserted alley.  Look at those shadows too, sharply cut as if by a knife in this brilliant white, un-English sunlight; and look at the colour, is that not Eastern?”

       I indicated the end of the tunnel-like Rue Galette along which we were now walking, for at the far end, framed like a picture by the tall shadowed, one caught a glimpse of an incredibly blue sea, on the horizon of which another island was just discernible, pale as an opal, and ethereal as a mirage of the desert.

From John Ferguson, Death Comes To Perigord (Chapter I:  Night Visit).  London and Glasgow, William Collins and Sons, Co., Ltd., 1931.

All photos depict island of Guernsey.