This was all. The Coroner adjourned the inquiry for a week, in the hope that further evidence would be forthcoming. There was a feeling in the court that a very strong suspicion attached to the dead woman’s husband, and that if he did not turn up speedily he would have to be looked for.
George Gerard watched the inquest from a crowded corner of the room, but he held his peace as to that discovery of the dagger in Jack Chicot’s colour-box.
La Chicot was buried two days afterwards, and there was a tremendous crowd at Kensal Green to see the foreign dancing woman laid in her untimely grave. Mr. Smolendo, with his own hands, placed a wreath of white camellias on the coffin. Desrolles stood beside the grave, decently attired in a suit of black, hired for the occasion from a dealer in cast-off clothes, and “looking quite the gentleman,” Mrs. Evitt said to her gossips afterwards. Mrs. Evitt and Mrs. Rawber were both at the funeral; indeed, it may be said that the whole of Cibber Street turned out for the occasion. There had not been such a crowd since the burial of Cardinal Wiseman. All the company from the Prince Frederick was there, besides much more of dramatic and equestrian London.
Poor Mr. Smolendo was in the depth of despair. He had found an all-accomplished lady to take La Chicot’s place in the burlesque; but the public did not believe in the all-accomplished lady—who was old enough to have been La Chicot’s mother—and Mr. Smolendo saw his theatre a desert of empty benches. No matter that his scenery, his ballet, his orchestra, his lime-lights were the best and most costly in London. The public had run after La Chicot, and her unhappy fate cast a gloom over the house, not easily to be dispersed. The tide of fashion rolled away to other theatres; and the bark that carried Mr. Smolendo’s fortunes was left stranded on the shore.
The press was very vehement upon the case of La Chicot. The more popular of the penny dailies went into convulsions of indignation against everybody concerned. They reviled the Coroner; they denounced the surgeon as a simpleton; they insinuated dark things about the landlady; they banded the witnesses as perjurers; but they reserved their most scathing denunciations for the police.
Here was an atrocious murder committed in the very heart of civilised London; in the midst of a calmly slumbering household; in a house in which almost every room was occupied; and yet the murderer is suffered to escape, and yet no ray of light from the combined intelligence of Scotland Yard pierces the gloom of the mystery.
The husband of the victim, against whom there is the strongest presumptive evidence, whose own conduct is all-sufficient to condemn him, this wretch is suffered to roam at large over the earth, a modern Cain, without the brand upon his brow by which his fellow-men may know him. Perhaps at this very hour he is haunting our taverns, dining at our restaurants, polluting the innocent atmosphere of our theatres, a guilty creature sitting at a play—nay, even, with the hypocrite’s visage, crossing the hallowed threshold of a church! Where are the police? What are they doing that this scoundrel has not been found? They should be able to recognise him at a glance, even without the brand of Cain. Are there no photographs of the monster, who has been described as good-looking, and who was doubtless vain? Letters pour in to the Morning Shrieker by the bushel, every correspondent suggesting his own particular and original method for catching a murderer.
Strange to say, Jack Chicot, although a fair subject for the camera, has had no passion for seeing what kind of picture the sun can make of him. At any rate, there is no portrait of him, large or small, good, bad, or indifferent to be found in Cibber Street, where the police naturally came to look for one. Mr. Desrolles, who, throughout the case, shows himself accommodating without being officious, gives a graphic description of his late fellow lodger; but no verbal picture ever yet conjured up the image of a man, and the detectives leave Cibber Street possessed of the idea of a personage no more like Jack Chicot than Jack Chicot was like the Emperor of China. This imaginary Chicot they hunt assiduously in all the worst parts of London, and often seem on the brink of catching him. They watch him dining at low eating-houses, they see him playing billiards in dubious taverns, they follow him on to penny steamers, and accompany him on railroad journeys, always to find that, although sufficiently disreputable, he is not Jack Chicot.
Working thus conscientiously, it was hard to be girded at by the Morning Shrieker, and an army of letter-writers.
Assuredly the evidence against the missing husband was strong enough to weave the rope that should hang him.
A letter to the Times from George Gerard describing the dagger found in the colour box had attracted the attention of the famous surgeon who set La Chicot’s broken leg, and that gentleman had hurried at once to Cibber Street to examine the wound. He afterwards saw the dagger which with the rest of the missing man’s effects, was in the custody of the police. He wrote to the Times next day, confirming Gerard’s statement. Such a wound could have been inflicted by just such a dagger, and hardly
