Bela Kiss | Page 4

fixed inside the
windows of his house to keep out thieves during his absence. Then, a
week later, he left Czinkota and joined the colours.
V
Eighteen months passed. He fought in Serbia, and once wrote his friend
Littman from Semendria, on the Serbian shore the Danube, after a great
battle had been fought. Littman, who was over military age, replied but
the letter was returned some four months later with an official
intimation that Kiss had died of wounds in a military hospital near
Belgrade. Then the village gossips of Czinkota knew that the poor
deserted husband, who had led such a lonely life, had given his life for
his country, and his name was later on engraved upon the local war
memorial.

In the meantime, however, a sensational discovery had been made,
quite by accident, of the body of a young woman in an advanced state
of decomposition buried under about six inches of earth in the same
wood of acacias wherein the farmer had seen Bela Kiss walking with a
young woman. Upon the finger of the corpse was a wedding-ring
engraved on the inside by which she was identified with the young wife
of a furrier in a large way of business in Vienna, who had before the
war run away with a middle-aged man, taking with her a quantity of
jewellery and the equivalent of two thousand pounds in money. She
had left her husband and entirely disappeared, after sending a letter to a
friend from Budapest.
Inquiries were at once instituted, of course, and it was found that her
husband had been killed within the first week of the war. Therefore, as
far as the police -- unfortunately a very inefficient service in those days
-- were concerned, they could do no more. But within three months yet
another body was turned up by the plough in the vicinity. The records
of missing persons were inspected, and they found that the unfortunate
woman was named Isabelle Koblitz, a niece of the Minister of
Commerce, who was known to have studied spiritualism, and who had
disappeared from Vienna in July 1913.
The chief of the detective police of Budapest then began further
inquiries. From Berne a report came that a wealthy Swiss lady named
Riniker, living at Lausanne, had been staying at a well-known hotel in
Budapest, from which she had written to her sister in Geneva, but had,
in October 1913, mysteriously disappeared. A description was given of
her, together with the fact that she had a red scar upon her cheek and
that she had a slight deformation of the left leg. Within three days the
Hungarian police established the fact that the body of the lady was that
which had, six months before, been found in a disused well at Solymar,
a little place about twenty miles away, at which the festival of the
Queen of the Roses is celebrated each year.
The police now became much puzzled. Yet they did not connect the
stories of the women who had gazed into the crystal with the discovery
of the bodies of others.

Suddenly an order to commandeer all petrol went forth, and all garages
and private persons were compelled to deliver it over for military
purposes and receive receipts for it, which the Government eventually
paid. At first the commandeering took place only in the big towns, but
after three months a further thorough "comb-out" of petrol was ordered,
and commissioners visited every village, including Czinkota. There
they searched for petrol, whereupon the old woman Kalman recalled
the fact that poor Kiss who had died possessed quite a stock of petrol.
This quickly reached the ears of the commissioner, who went at once to
the dead man's house, broke down the iron bars, and found the big
drums of spirit. From their appearance both the commissioner and a
constable suspected them to be full of smuggled brandy. Indeed, the
constable obtained a tin mug from the kitchen in order to sample the
spirit when they bored a hole. They did so -- and found it to be crude
alcohol.
Further investigation, however, led to a most ghastly discovery. On
cutting open the top of the big drum a quantity of male clothing was
seen. This was removed, and beneath was the nude body of a woman
bound with cord and so well preserved in the spirit that her features
were easily recognisable. Indeed, around her neck was a thin red line,
showing plainly the manner in which she had been murdered namely,
by strangulation with a cord and slip-knot!
And each of the other drums contained the body of a woman, each
showing traces of strangulation. Upon these gruesome facts -- perhaps
the most horrible discovery ever made in the annals of the police