‘What a pity,’ Foxe said artlessly. ‘I have always found flirtation to be the most enjoyable and engaging of pastimes.’
‘To business, Mr Foxe,’ Lucy said, ignoring his last remark. ‘I have told you already that I am in haste. Thank you for your letter. You realise it is the first one you have written to me, though hardly of the kind to be reread and cherished. Maybe that will come. For now, tell me what new things you have discovered since we spoke last. Briefly, sir, for I have one or two matters to share with you.’
Foxe did as he was bidden, giving Lucy a succinct summary of all that was in Mrs Belton’s letter.
‘Do you think there is some criminal activity taking place at that warehouse, as a result of the laxity she recounts?’
‘I am virtually certain of it,’ Foxe replied. ‘That is why I sought out Betty Furniss this morning, the leader of the street children, and arranged that a number of them will keep a close watch on the building tonight. If nothing happens, they will do the same tomorrow and so on until they can report some activity. You will have noted from what I have just told you about Mrs Belton’s letter that she has warned the warehouse employees she will very soon carry out a complete stocktake. After that is completed, she also intends to institute measures to keep track of every bale of cloth. Any thieves will realise at once that they have little time left to take whatever they can. Once the new systems are in place, it will become impossible to take more without it coming to Mrs Belton’s notice immediately.’
‘So, you think they will be especially busy the next few nights and you hope to catch them in the act of theft?’
‘Precisely. If the street children tell me that my suspicions are correct, I will speak urgently with your uncle and obtain a suitable number of constables to arrest all concerned.’
‘Did these thieves kill Johnson, and very possibly the mayor as well? Had those two stumbled on what they were doing and paid the penalty?’
‘That I do not know, though it seems a likely course of events. I can only hope that close questioning will produce a confession. They have nothing to lose, since they will hang for the thefts anyway.’
‘You seem to have all in hand so let us spend no more time on that matter. I will be away from home tomorrow and the next day visiting friends but will look forward to hearing from you the day after.’
‘Of course,’ Foxe said, noting the words “look forward” and hoping it was not merely conventional politeness which made her use them. ‘You said you have news for me.’
‘It will seem very inconsequential after your plans, I fear, but I will tell you anyway. The tea party I attended with my aunt and sister was mostly as dull as I feared. However, at one point two of the ladies asked if anyone knew how Mrs Belton had reacted to her husband’s disappearance. That produced a significant pause and anxious glances directed towards my sister and myself. Clearly something might be said that was deemed unsuitable for young ears. I could have kissed my aunt when she spoke up to say that her two nieces well understood that the world could be a less than perfect place and, if they did not, it was high time they found out. That loosened tongues and soon the gossip was flowing.
‘The gist of the matter was that the Belton’s marriage had been unsatisfactory from the start. It was arranged by their respective fathers and they were dragooned into it. Miss Madley, as she was then, agreed only reluctantly and Mr Robert Belton was said to be unwilling to marry at all. However, he was totally under his father’s thumb and did as he was told. As a result, it was understood there had never been any affection between them, and quite possibly no marital relations either. No children appeared and the two lived separate lives, though carefully keeping up the appearance of being a couple for propriety’s sake. That Mr Belton sought elsewhere what he lacked at home was widely assumed. As for his wife, there were rumours that she had lately taken a lover, though nothing could be proved for certain.’
‘Most interesting,’ Foxe said. ‘We know what Mr Belton sought and where he eventually found it. I wonder if he did so from the start?’
‘One lady said she had heard that Mr Belton had a string of young lovers, though he kept none of them very long. Of late, however, he had been observed to be courting a very different kind of somewhat older woman, though she had no details to share.’
‘Most interesting,’ Foxe observed. ‘Perhaps he recognised he had grown too old and corpulent to attract the young. However, Mrs Belton’s situation is far more intriguing. If she has a lover, that may go a long way towards explaining her lack of interest in finding her husband. I wonder if this unknown lover might even have decided to clear his way by hastening the mayor’s demise?’
‘My own thoughts exactly,’ Lucy said. ‘However, the ladies’ conjectures did not stop there. Mr Madley and his daughter are said to be increasingly eager to gain control of the running of Belton’s, if only to prevent the firm from descending into bankruptcy. Mr Madley, as you may know, was a highly-reputed cloth merchant until he sold his business and retired. You have seen for yourself how capable and determined his daughter is. Several of the ladies claimed the two have long been plotting to find some means of preventing Mr Belton from continuing in control of the business. Mrs Belton, it was said, urged her husband to enter into politics in the hope that it would take up so much of his time that it would leave little for the business. Perhaps then he would appoint a manager but allow her to oversee the business in his place. Her plan failed, of course, and he proved as lazy and ineffective in politics as in everything else.’
‘I wonder she didn’t guess what the outcome would be,’ Foxe said.
‘Several of the ladies present made similar remarks,’ Lucy replied. ‘Yet everything changed during the first months after he was made mayor. He seemed to be throwing himself heart and soul into imposing various hare-brained schemes on the city. When those were blocked, he suddenly directed equal energy to his business. Assuming his intentions in that direction were likely to be just as wild and impractical, father and daughter were said to have become desperate to prevent him from hastening to his doom and taking Belton’s Worsteds with him. Now, of course, it is beginning to look as if all is working out in their favour.’
‘All that is most interesting, Miss Lucy, and I will need to think about it carefully. Now, however—’
‘I have not finished.’
Lucy next explained her concerns about the so-called hoax ransom demand, especially the selecting of Alderman Harris as the recipient of the note. From there she proceeded to pose the question she had asked herself. If the ransom demand was never intended to succeed, why was it sent? At that point she paused for a moment to allow Foxe’s thinking to catch up.
‘To harm Alderman Harris?’ he said.
‘Precisely. If we can discover who might have had the strongest reason to do this, we may well find out who was behind the ransom demand. I propose to speak to my uncle about it as soon as I can. He is surely best placed to understand the quarrels and disagreements amongst the other aldermen.’
‘You have done wonderfully well, Miss Lucy,’ Foxe said warmly, ‘and I congratulate you. You have discovered a most important point that I had missed entirely. Please speak with your uncle as soon as you can. Of course, we don’t know that whoever staged this elaborate charade to humiliate Alderman Harris was anything other than someone seeing an opportunity and grasping it. Even so, we must find out, for there is a great deal here of major importance.
‘That’s what I thought,’ Lucy said.
‘Your information that Mrs Belton and her father were plotting to remove control of Belton’s from the mayor may also prove crucial. It may not only have been the supposed thieves who had a sound reason to dispose of the mayor and his chief clerk. What if that clerk was known to have been counselling his master to refuse all suggestions that he should hand over control?’
‘I am glad you are pleased with what I have accomplished,’ Lucy said, ‘though I could not imagine it would be otherwis
e. Now I must go. Come, Susan. My aunt and sister will be waiting impatiently.’
With those words, she whisked out through the drawing room door and back down the passageway into the shop before Foxe was able to compose himself to bid her farewell in a proper manner.
Lucy’s unexpected visit left Foxe in a curious state of mind for the rest of that day. He kept trying to concentrate on making sense of all the fresh areas of investigation he now had before him. From complaining he had no clear paths to follow to unravel the mystery of the mayor’s disappearance and Johnson’s murder, he now had too many! What’s more, none of them seemed to be clearly related to the others.
These topics should have been more than enough to occupy his mind. Yet, as soon as he tried to settle to his task, he found himself drifting off into enjoyable and usually erotic thoughts of Lucy Halloran and how dearly he would like to be able to spend his time with her. Then he would become angry with himself for his lack of mental discipline. Was he not a mature man who had enjoyed the favours of many women in the past? What was different about Lucy that threw his mind into such a whirl at the mere recollection of her? Was it her beauty, her long, slim neck and lovely shoulders ...? And there he went again.
To try to bring himself back to reality, he turned instead to the question of whether his belief in long-term thefts from Belton’s warehouse would prove to be well founded. How many nights would it be before the thieves came again? How long would the street children have to watch and wait before bringing him the evidence he wanted? At least the weather was mild at present and there was no sign of rain. Surely a night such as the one ahead must be ideal for raiding the warehouse for yet more cloth? Besides, Mrs Belton’s determination to hold a full stocktake as soon as she could must prove a powerful incentive for the thieves to act while it was still possible?
By the time he had eaten his dinner and sat for a while in the drawing room—the room where Lucy had been but a few hours before—the combination of struggles with himself, the repeating periods of high arousal and fierce concentration, had made him so tired that he went to his bed almost an hour earlier than usual.
IN THE SERVANTS’ hall, much of the conversation of the past few days had been about what was ailing the master. He had neither gone to the bordello nor brought home some lovely young actress for almost three weeks.
‘It’s not good for him,’ said Mrs Dobbins, the housekeeper. ‘Much of the time he’s as nervy as a tom cat in a barber’s shop. Does anyone have any notion of what is wrong with him?’
‘He’s developed a strange attitude to the clothes he wears,’ said Alfred, the valet. ‘Most of the time he seems indifferent to what he dresses in. So much so that, if I didn’t take care to see him properly attired, I swear he would wear the same things every day. Then, on a sudden, he rises in the morning and demands his grandest and most fashionable clothes, just to walk about the town or visit Alderman Halloran. I never know where I am with him at present.’
‘I’ve found him odd as well,’ Molly, the housemaid, added. ‘It’s almost as if I have become invisible. He used to chat with me sometimes. Not for any great length of time and not on any matters of importance. Just enough to show he recognised my presence and valued what I do for him. Now I take him his food or bring his letters and the like and he never even speaks.’
‘He hasn’t talked to Charlie for more than a week,’ Florence, the kitchen maid piped up. She had long held a deep affection for the apprentice and easily became angry if she thought he was being treated other than he should be. ‘That can’t be right. I know Charlie’s away with the bookbinder three days in every week, but he’s still Mr Foxe’s apprentice. The master used to talk with him almost every day and involve him in the mysteries he’s always puzzling out. This time—I mean this mystery of the mayor going missing—I don’t think he’s discussed it with Charlie once.’
‘Something’s wrong,’ Mrs Whitbread, the cook, said firmly. ‘The master’s definitely not himself. I think one of us should go and talk with Mistress Tabby. She has known the master since he was a boy. People also credit her with being a Wise Woman, able to see more deeply into things than others can. She ought to know what’s happening to the master, if anyone does.’
Everyone else thought this was an excellent idea and they fell at once to discussing who should go to explain what was bothering them. In the end, Mrs Dobbins was chosen as their representative, as being the one best able to explain the matter clearly and return to share what she had been told.
‘I’ll go tomorrow,’ she declared. ‘The sooner we get to the bottom of this, the more comfortable we shall all feel.’
The next morning, therefore, she set out as she had promised to make the twenty-minute walk to Mistress Tabby’s house by the river. At almost the same time, two disreputable figures arrived and knocked on the kitchen door of Foxe’s house. Florence, who answered the door, was far from welcoming.
‘What do you want?’ she asked sharply. ‘There’s no call for you to keep hanging around the master. Go back to your business with those men who know no better.’
Betty Furniss was well aware of Florence’s deep dislike for her and could make a shrewd guess at the reason. Skinny, flat chested Florence felt the comparison with buxom, voluptuous Betty too keenly, especially if there was any danger of Charlie seeing her. She was not about to be put off, however.
‘Mr Foxe won’t thank you for trying to send me away,’ she said calmly. ‘He asked us children to undertake a task for him, and an important task as well. I’ve now brought Sidney here to explain what he and the other watchers saw. I’m quite willing to wait here, if you’re too bad-mannered to invite me inside, but I’m not leaving until Sidney and I have spoken with Mr Foxe. So, go and tell him we’re here before I box your ears for being such a bitch.’
Florence did indeed leave them waiting on the doorstep, but she was quick enough to find Molly and ask her to tell the master that two of the street children were waiting to speak with him. Then she returned to the kitchen to glower at the two children outside and make sure that was where they stayed.
Molly came back a few moments later, trying not to laugh at Florence’s obvious discomfort.
‘The master says he’ll meet you in the stable as before,’ she said to Betty. ‘He knows you like to see the horse.’
Betty strode off, highly delighted, but could not restrain herself from directing a final barb at Florence. ‘Perhaps your master’s kindness towards us will one day rub off on you,’ she said, ‘if you’re not so wrinkled up with bitterness as to be immune to any good example.’
Foxe came to the stable in a high state of nerves in case the report should be negative. He need not have worried. Betty tore herself away from the mutual nuzzling with the horse to explain that she had brought Sidney with her to give Mr Foxe a report first-hand.
‘He was one of the watchers,’ she explained, ‘so he can tell you exactly what he saw and answer any questions you may have.’
‘Excellent!’ Foxe said. ‘Now, Sidney, tell me everything in detail.’
‘Can I stay and talk to the horse?’ Betty interjected. ‘Please, Mr Foxe. I’ll be ever so quiet.’
‘Of course you may stay,’ Foxe said. ‘Just let Sidney say his piece without interruptions.’
As it turned out, it was Foxe who interrupted, again and again, pressing the lad for details. The gist of his report was simple and straightforward. At some time shortly after the church clocks had struck eleven, a group of men had come to the warehouse, one of them pushing a two-wheeled handcart. How many were there? He had counted six of them. The great wooden doors across the entrance to the warehouse yard were shut, but they went up to a little wicket entrance, whistled and were let inside. Then one leaf of the doors was opened sufficiently to allow the handcart to be pushed inside as well.
Did they have lights? Just some dark lanterns, enough to see their way, but it would not have mattered if they had shown lights. So far as the children could
tell, no one lived along that street. It was lined with workshops, warehouses and similar buildings, all totally deserted so late in the night.
The children had remained outside the yard in the shadows, waiting to see what happened next. Their wait had been a lengthy one. The men were inside the yard for an hour or more by the chiming of the church clocks. During that time, the children could hear sounds of people muttering and cursing, as if they were lifting and carrying heavy things. Eventually, the cart came back through the open door, accompanied by the six men. This time it was laden with what looked like rolls of cloth. Whatever it was, they were clearly heavy, since it took four men, two to each handle, to drag it behind them onto the street. The other two came along behind them and helped the man inside shut the one leaf of the doors again. After that, all six went along the street, three to each side, dragging the cart. What about the seventh man? He must have stayed inside, for they never saw him again.
The men dragged the cart in the direction of Magdalen Street but it did not go that far. Some twenty or thirty yards from the entrance to Belton’s yard the group turned left down a narrow alley, which presumably led to the river. Once again, the children hung back. It would have been too easy to be seen had they followed. Only Sidney crept forward, keeping close to the walls of the buildings and stopping frequently to listen for any sounds of the men returning.
They had been right. The alley did go down to the river and a small wharf where a wherry could be seen, its bulk showing dark against the dim light from the sky reflecting off the water. By creeping as close as he dared, Sidney could see the men were lifting the rolls of cloth off the handcart and passing them to some of their fellows standing up in the hold of the wherry. Once it was clear what they were doing, he decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to wait around any longer. As soon as the men finished their task, one of them might turn around and spot him, since there was no safe place from where he could observe what they were doing. He had therefore crept back to the street and joined the others.
Foxe and the Path into Darkness Page 13