As luck would have it, the paper had an article on the investigation of Dr. Parkhurst’s murder, under a headline reading MARK TWAIN WITNESSES A MURDER. While the details of the case were reported fairly accurately, most of the article was given over to Mr. Clemens’s presence at the scene of the crime. Much was made of the person detained for questioning (McPhee) being a previous acquaintance of Mr. Clemens. The writer even ventured to speculate whether, given his recent successes as an amateur detective, the murderer had chosen this occasion to “cock a snook at the famous American,” as the reporter put it. Chief Inspector Lestrade was quoted as being confident of a breakthrough at any minute, although there was no hint of what might have inspired that confidence.
I was just mulling over the final paragraphs of the article when Mr. Clemens came strolling in, almost as unobtrusively as one of his lecture-stage entrances. “Oh, good, Wentworth, you’re up,” he said. “All your parts seem to be in working order?”
“As far as I can tell,” I said. “Did you see this article on the murder?”
“Yes, the usual pack of lies,” he said, waving his hand. “Those vultures don’t have any real news, so they jump on the details they figure might sell some papers. And Lestrade’s playing right along with them. He must figure that making a big deal about me trying to solve the case will make him look even better when he arrests somebody, and of course the public will eat it up, their Scotland Yard man versus the foreigner. It’s a rare newspaperman who can resist pandering to local prejudice, and when he does, it’s usually because he’s calculated he can boost circulation by pretending to be impartial when the competition ain’t.”
“Still, you’d think they’d try to get their facts straight,” I said, standing up and tossing the paper onto the table.
“Well, they did get one thing right,” said Mr. Clemens. “I’m getting more and more annoyed that the murderer decided to shoot that fellow right under my nose. It’s a damned insult, and it’s only made me more determined to find the rat who did it.”
“Why, we weren’t even invited to the séance until the day before. The murderer could hardly have contrived anything as elaborate as he appears to have done in that short a time, just to spite you.”
“I reckon you’re right as far as that goes,” said Mr. Clemens. “But here—you haven’t heard my news yet. Sir Denis doesn’t have a phone, but I sent him a telegram and got the answer back in jig time. Take a look.” He handed me a piece of paper, slightly different from the familiar Western Union messages, but recognizably a telegram. I picked it up and read: TODAY SUITS, TAKE NOON TRAIN, WILL MEET YOU AT STATION—DECOURSEY.
“Today? Noon?” I said, surprised.
“Sure enough. The old coot doesn’t waste any time,” said Mr. Clemens. “So if you’re all done with breakfast, we’d better get down to work and see how much we can get done before we have to go out to catch the train. Don’t want to keep an English baronet waiting at the station, do we?”
Somewhat to my surprise, we actually managed to finish a reasonable amount of work before donning our overcoats and calling the carriage around front to take us to Waterloo Station, whence we would take the railroad out to Sir Denis’s country estate in Kent. The train station, like those I knew from my travels in America, was a large building full of bustling crowds and the noise and smell of steam engines.
But while the trains and tracks were familiar enough in design, it was easy enough to tell that we were not in any American train depot. For one thing, there were hardly any Negroes in sight. The porters, the vendors of snacks and reading material, even the shoeshine boys and the old codger pushing a broom, were all white. In fact, most of those I saw were of very similar type—there were very few of the olive skins that bespeak Mediterranean origins, nor of the sturdy, round-faced Dutch and German stock, nor of the tall Scandinavian blonds one sees in Minnesota—and if there were any Creoles or Indians in the place, they were keeping well hidden. I did see one Scotsman, sporting fiery red whiskers and a plaid tam-o’-shanter, but he was the only exotic specimen in the place.
And while there was a remarkable diversity of accents and idioms, they were all British—there were none of the gutturals of a native German, none of the extra vowels that an Italian would have added to the ends of words, let alone any of the more esoteric inflections one might hear in a large American city. Still, as odd as the lingo of New Orleans or Minnesota sounded to my New England ears, purebred Cockney or Oxonian drawl sounded more foreign. And there were voices here that I could barely understand—though enough recognizable English words came through to show that they were really speaking the same language as I—at least, in name. I wondered whether the British had
