



Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Mary Meehan and the Online
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                         THE CRIME DOCTOR

                      _By_ ERNEST W. HORNUNG

Author of Raffles, The Amateur Cracksman, The Thousandth Woman, etc.


    _With Illustrations by_
    FREDERIC DORR STEELE

    INDIANAPOLIS
    THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
    PUBLISHERS

    COPYRIGHT 1914
    THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

    PRESS OF
    BRAUNWORTH & CO.
    BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
    BROOKLYN, N. Y.




[Illustration: "It was struck with--this"]




CONTENTS


       I THE PHYSICIAN WHO HEALED HIMSELF         1

      II THE LIFE-PRESERVER                      40

     III A HOPELESS CASE                         77

      IV THE GOLDEN KEY                         118

       V A SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD                  159

      VI ONE POSSESSED                          199

     VII THE DOCTOR'S ASSISTANT                 237

    VIII THE SECOND MURDERER                    272




THE CRIME DOCTOR




I

THE PHYSICIAN WHO HEALED HIMSELF


In the course of his meteoric career as Secretary of State for the Home
Department, the Right Honorable Topham Vinson instituted many reforms
and earned the reformer's whack of praise and blame. His methods were
not those of the permanent staff; and while his notorious courage
endeared him to the young, it was not in so strong a nature to leave
friend or foe lukewarm. An assiduous contempt for tradition fanned the
flame of either faction, besides leading to several of those personal
adventures which were as breath to the Minister's unregenerate nostrils,
but which never came out without exposing him to almost universal
censure. It is matter for thanksgiving that the majority of his
indiscretions were unguessed while he and his held office; for he was
never so unconventional as in pursuance of those enlightened tactics on
which his reputation rests, or in the company of that kindred spirit who
had so much to do with their inception.

It was early in an autumn session that this remarkable pair became
acquainted. Mr. Vinson had been tempted by the mildness of the night to
walk back from Westminster to Portman Square. He had just reached home
when he heard his name cried from some little distance behind him. The
voice tempered hoarse excitement with the restraint due to midnight in a
quiet square; and as Mr. Vinson turned on his door-step, a young man
rushed across the road with a gold chain swinging from his outstretched
hand.

"Your watch, sir, your watch!" he gasped, and displayed a bulbous hunter
with a monogram on one side and the crest of all the Vinsons on the
other.

"Heavens!" cried the Home Secretary, feeling in an empty waistcoat
pocket before he could believe his eyes. "Where on earth did you find
that? I had it on me when I left the House."

"It wasn't a case of findings," said the young man, as he fanned himself
with his opera hat. "I've just taken it from the fellow who took it from
you."

"Who? Where?" demanded the Secretary of State, with unstatesmanlike
excitement.

"Some poor brute in North Audley Street, I think it was."

"That's it! That was where he stopped me, just at the corner of
Grosvenor Square!" exclaimed Vinson. "And I went and gave the old
scoundrel half-a-crown!"

"He probably had your watch while you were looking in your purse."

And the young man dabbed a very good forehead, that glistened in the
light from the open door, with a white silk handkerchief just extracted
from his sleeve.

"But where were you?" asked Topham Vinson, taking in every inch of him.

"I'd just come into the square myself. You had just gone out of it. The
pickpocket was looking to see what he'd got, even while he hurled his
blessings after you."

"And where is he now? Did he slip through your fingers?"

"I'm ashamed to say he did; but your watch didn't!" its owner was
reminded with more spirit. "I could guess whose it was by the crest and
monogram, and I decided to make sure instead of giving chase."

"You did admirably," declared the Home Secretary, in belated
appreciation. "I'm in the papers quite enough without appearing as a mug
out of office hours. Come in, please, and let me thank you with all the
honors possible at this time of night."

And, taking him by the arm, he ushered the savior of his property into a
charming inner hall, where elaborate refreshments stood in readiness on
a side-table, and a bright fire looked as acceptable as the saddlebag
chairs drawn up beside it. A bottle and a pint of reputable champagne
had been left out with the oysters and the caviar; and Mr. Vinson,
explaining that he never allowed anybody to sit up for him, opened the
bottle with the precision of a practised hand, and led the attack on
food and drink with schoolboy gusto and high spirits.

In the meantime there had been some mutual note-taking. The Home
Secretary, whose emphatic personality lent itself to the discreet pencil
of the modern caricaturist, was in appearance exactly as represented in
contemporary cartoons; there was nothing unexpected about him, since his
boyish vivacity was a quality already over-exploited by the Press. His
frankness was something qualified by a gaze of habitual penetration, but
still it was there, and his manner could evidently be grand or
colloquial at will. The surprise was in his surroundings rather than in
the man himself. The perfect union of luxury and taste is none too
common in the professed Sybarite who is that and nothing more; in men of
action and pugnacious politicians it is yet another sign of sheer
capacity. The bits of rich old furniture, the old glass twinkling at
every facet, the brasses blazing in the firelight, the few but fine
prints on the Morris wallpaper, might have won the approval of an art
student, and the creature comforts that of the youngest epicure.

The young man from the street was easily pleased in all such respects;
but indoors he no longer looked quite the young man. He had taken off an
overcoat while his host was opening the champagne, and evening clothes
accentuated a mature gauntness of body and limb. His hair, which was
dark and wiry, was beginning to bleach at the temples; and up above one
ear there was a little disk of downright silver, like a new florin. The
shaven face was pale, eager, and austere. Dark eyes burnt like beacons
under a noble brow, and did not lose in character or intensity by a
distinct though slight strabism. So at least it seemed to Topham Vinson,
who was a really wonderful judge of faces, yet had seldom seen one
harder to sum up.

"I'm sorry you don't smoke," said he, snipping a cigar which he had
extolled in vain. "And that champagne, you know! You haven't touched it,
and you really should."

The other was on his legs that instant. "I never smoke and seldom
drink," he exclaimed; "but I simply can not endure your hospitality,
kind as it is, Mr. Vinson, without being a bit more honest with you than
I've been so far. I didn't lose that pickpocket by accident or because
he was too quick for me. I--I purposely packed him off."

In the depths of his softest chair Mr. Vinson lolled smiling--but not
with his upturned eyes. They were the steel eyes of all his tribe, but
trebly keen, as became its intellectual head and chief.

"The fellow pitched a pathetic yarn?" he conjectured. He had never seen
a more miserable specimen, he was bound to say.

"It wasn't that, Mr. Vinson. I should have let him go in any case--once
I'd recovered what he'd taken--as a matter of principle."

"Principle!" cried the Secretary of State. But he did not modify his
front-bench attitude; it was only the well-known eyebrows that rose.

"The whole thing is," his guest continued, yet more frankly, "that I
happen to hold my own views on crime and its punishment If I might be
permitted to explain them, however briefly, they would at least afford
the only excuse I have to offer for my conduct. If you consider it no
excuse, and if I have put myself within reach of the law, there, sir, is
my card; and here am I, prepared to take the consequences of my act."

The Home Secretary leaned forward and took the card from a sensitive
hand, vibrant as the voice to which he had just been listening, but no
more tremulous. Again he looked up, into a pale face grown paler still,
and dark eyes smoldering with suppressed enthusiasm. It was by no means
his baptism of that sort of fire; but it seemed to Mr. Vinson that here
was a new type of eccentric zealot; and it was only by an effort that he
resumed his House of Commons attitude and his smile.

"I see, Doctor Dollar, that you are a near neighbor of mine--only just
round the corner in Welbeck Street. May I take it that your experience
as a consultant is the basis of the views you mention?"

"My experience as an alienist," said Doctor Dollar, "so far as I can lay
claims to that euphemism."

"And how far is that, doctor?"

"In the sense that all crime is a form of madness."

"Then you would call yourself----"

The broken sentence ended on a note as tactfully remote from the direct
interrogative as practised speech could make it.

"In default of a recognized term," said Doctor Dollar, "which time will
confer as part of a wider recognition, I can only call myself a crime
doctor."

"A branch not yet acknowledged by your profession?"

"Neither by my profession nor by the law, Mr. Vinson; but both have got
to come to it, just as surely as we all accept the other scientific
developments of the day."

"But have you reduced your practise to a science, doctor?"

"I am doing so," said Doctor Dollar, with the restrained confidence
which could not but impress one who knew the value of that quality in
himself and in others. "I have made a start; if it were not so late I
would tell you all about it. You are the Home Secretary of England, the
man of all others whom I could wish to convert to my views. But already
I have kept you up too long. If you would grant me an appointment----"

"Not at all," interrupted Mr. Vinson, as he settled himself even more
comfortably in his chair. "The night is still young--so is my cigar.
Pray say all you care to say, and say it as confidentially as you
please. You interest me, Doctor Dollar; nor can I forget that I am much
indebted to you."

"I don't want to trade on that," returned the doctor, hastily. "But it
is an old dream of mine to tell you, sir, about my work, and how and why
I came to take it up. I was not intended for medicine, you see; my
people are army people, were Border outlaws once upon a time, and
fighting folk ever since. My father was an ensign in the Crimea--Scots
Fusiliers. I joined the Argyll and Sutherlands the year before South
Africa--where, by the way, I remember seeing you with your Yeomen."

"I had eighteen months of it without a headache or a scratch."

"I wish I could say the same, Mr. Vinson. I was shot through the head at
the Modder, ten days after I landed."

"Through the head, did you say?" asked the Home Secretary, lifting his
own some inches.

The doctor touched the silver patch in his dark strong hair. "That's
where the bullet came slinking out; any but a Mauser would have carried
all before it! As it was, it left me with a bit of a squint, as you can
see; otherwise, in a very few weeks, I was as fit as ever--physically."

"Wonderful!"

"Physically and even mentally--from a medical point of view--but not
morally, Mr. Vinson! Something subtle had happened, some pressure
somewhere, some form of local paralysis. And it left me a pretty
low-down type, I can tell you! It was a case of absolute automatism--but
I won't go into particulars now, if you don't mind."

"On no account, my dear doctor!" exclaimed the Secretary of State, with
inadvertent cordiality. "This is all of extraordinary interest. I
believe I can see what's coming. But I want to hear every word you care
to tell me--and not one that you don't."

"It had destroyed my moral sense on just one curious point; but, thank
God, I came to see the cause as well as to suffer unspeakably from the
effect. After that it was a case of killing or curing oneself by hook or
by crook. I decided to try the curing first. And--to cut a long yarn
short--I _was_ cured."

"Easily?"

"No. The slander may come home to roost, but I shall never think much of
the London specialist! I've dropped my two sovereigns and a florin into
too many of their itching palms, beginning with the baronets and knights
and ending up with the unknown adventures. But not a man-Jack of them
was ashamed to pocket his two guineas (in one case three) for politely
telling me I was as mad as a hatter to think of such a thing as really
was the matter with me!"

"And in the end?"

"In the end I struck a fellow with an open mind--but not in England--and
if I said that he literally opened mine it might be an exaggeration, but
that's all. He did go prospecting in my skull--risked his reputation as
against my life--but we both came out on top."

"And you've been your own man ever since?"

Topham Vinson asked the question gravely; it would have taken as keen a
superficial observer as himself to detect much difference in his manner,
in his eyes, in anything about him. Doctor Dollar was not that kind of
observer. To see far one must look high, and to look high is to miss
things under one's nose. It is all a matter of mental trajectory. In the
sheer height of his enthusiasm, the soaring visionary was losing touch
with the hard-headed groundling in the chair.

"I was cured," he answered with tense simplicity. "