The Dr Benjamin Bones Omnibus

by Emma Jameson

  Lady Juliet looked stricken. “Oh, Ben. You didn’t have to tell me that.”

  “Yes, I did.” He opened the car door. “Let’s see what the Great Detective has to say for himself.”

  Fire With Fire

  “Good morning, Dr. Bones,” Special Constable Gaston said. For a man who’d spent the night away from home and been forced to wear yesterday’s garb, he looked remarkably sharp. Portentous as his pronouncements were, and unfounded as his conclusions could be, he was always the dignified old soldier, suited up and ready for action. “Good morning, your ladyship,” he added stiffly. “Why are you here?”

  Ben pretended not to hear the question. “I still have several questions about Bobby’s death, so I’ll be returning to Fitchley Park next. How is Mrs. Archer?”

  “As hardened as Pharaoh.”

  “Has she confessed?” Lady Juliet asked.

  “No. She hasn’t even got out of bed. Still has the covers pulled up over her head.” Gaston shook his head. “Didn’t stop her from banging on about her boys, saying Agatha won’t be able to handle them because they’re so wild. I said if they’re wee rapscallions, it’s down to how she raised them, isn’t it? Should’ve put the fear of God into those boys when she had the chance.”

  “In bed?” Ben repeated. “I don’t understand. Has her shingles flared up?”

  “You’re the one carrying the black bag. You tell me.” Gaston eyed him suspiciously. “But that’s not the only reason you’ve come, is it? You’re here to second-guess my detective work.”

  “I have no intention of second-guessing you,” Ben lied. “I only want to help. If Mrs. Archer claims to be unwell, I should examine her. You said she hasn’t confessed. It’s worth noting that people confide all sorts of things to their physician.”

  “Examine her, interview her, it’s all the same to me,” Gaston said. “I reckon you’ll have a quarter hour or so before Plymouth CID arrives to take her into custody.”

  “But how can they involve themselves so soon?” Lady Juliet asked.

  “What did you give them?” Ben asked. “Physical evidence? A witness?”

  Gaston widened his eyes and pursed his lips.

  “Don’t try to look knowing,” Lady Juliet snapped. “To look knowing, one must, in fact, know something. You look like a netted fish trying to work out where the water went.”

  “I detected,” Gaston said with dignity. “When questioned as to why she came to Barking in the middle of the day, Mrs. Archer said she’d been round to see the rector and spent the better part of the morning with him. I checked with Father Rummage, and he said, on the contrary, he hadn’t seen her in several days. Moreover, during that visit, she made shocking remarks. In light of her husband’s murder, those statements, which I cannot repeat, indicate premeditation. Therefore, I rang Plymouth CID. They agreed I’d sewn up the case,” he said, chest puffing, “and Mrs. Archer should be transferred to Plymouth for remand.”

  “If speaking ill of an estranged spouse is enough to put one behind bars, I shan’t be at large much longer,” Lady Juliet said. “Helen’s outspoken and irascible, everyone knows that. Let me speak to her, woman to woman. Perhaps I can—”

  “Certainly not,” Gaston cut in. “Professionals with a clear duty to the accused must never be refused. Meddling civilians, on the other hand, threaten an investigation’s integrity.”

  “Thus sayeth Dirk Diamond!” Lady Juliet cried, pointing a finger in his face. “You’re enrolled in Private Dick Academy.”

  “Loose lips sink ships,” Gaston said, again attempting to look knowing. “Speaking of that, milady, I hear Mr. Bolivar’s returned. Take it from a man who was happily married for twenty years—don’t nag him. Nothing good ever came from nagging.”

  “We’re wasting time,” Ben said. “I propose a division of labor. I’ll examine Mrs. Archer, then drive up to Fitchley Park and interview the staff. Lady Juliet, would you be so kind as to call on Father Rummage at the rectory? I’d like to see those crime scene photos, if he’s developed them.” He felt like a phony, bandying about law enforcement terms like “crime scene,” but neither of Dirk Diamond’s mail-order students looked amused.

  “Certainly, Dr. Bones,” Lady Juliet said crisply. “If the pictures are ready, I’ll bring them with me to Fitchley Park,” she continued, setting out toward St. Gwinnodock’s. “Please let Helen know that she’s in my prayers, Dr. Bones.”

  “I will.” Starting toward the roundhouse, he was surprised to find Gaston dogging his heels. “I do plan to medically examine her, Special Constable.”

  “Oh, aye. I’ll take notes.”

  “She won’t fancy disrobing with you present.”

  Gaston coughed. “Will that be necessary?”

  “Perhaps. Shingles is a serious disease.”

  “Is it?” Gaston asked. “Just a bit of redness, really. I thought she was an attention-seeker. You know what they say: ‘Always ill and sickly, more likely to live than die quickly.’ But have it your way, Doc. I’ll be out here, taking the air.”

  Like a child impatient for the ice cream trolley, Gaston positioned himself at the top of a hill, giving himself an excellent view of the lane by which Plymouth CID would arrive.

  The roundhouse doorway was low enough to make Ben duck his head. The occurrence was both a pleasant novelty and a testament to the building’s medieval origins. After Lady Juliet’s “oubliette” remark, he expected bare stone walls and arrow slits, but it seemed that postcard-ready Barking was incapable of ugliness, even in the local lockup. The floor was inlaid with black and white marble. The walls, lemon-yellow, bore photographs celebrating the village. Ben recognized Fitchley Park with its staff assembled out front; St. Gwinnodock’s on a snowy day; a village fête, complete with maypole.

  Father Rummage’s work, Ben thought.

  He studied the image of Fitchley Park. Lord Maggart wasn’t in evidence. The staff was lined up in two rows, with Lady Maggart off to one side. She stood beside a handsome younger man in a tartan coat, a hand on his forearm. It was an odd pose for mistress and servant. Was this the gamekeeper who’d been discharged after Lord Maggart’s outburst?

  Otherwise, the photo was typical of its sort. The staff looked straight at the lens, unsmiling, except for a tall woman in a black dress who looked at her feet.

  That must be the housekeeper, Mrs. Grundy.

  Surely she’d recovered enough to speak to him. Would she choose to be helpful if he asked her about a possible liaison between Bobby and one of the maids? In the photo, they were all young and attractive, which was typical. In great houses, pretty faces were often considered part of the décor.

  “If you fancy a print, we sell them in the gift shop,” someone said cheerfully. Ben jumped.

  The speaker was a wizened little woman with a mound of snow-white hair on her head. Her dress, scarf, and shoes were lavender; her earrings were chips of jet. Seventy-five years ago, when lifelong mourning for women was common, widows of long standing sometimes shifted from unrelieved black to pale purple. If not for her twentieth century hemline, this tiny woman could have been transplanted whole from 1860.

  “I’m Mrs. Richwine,” she said, smiling. “Chair of the Roundhouse Society. Are you here to see our guest?”

  “I’m sorry. Did you say gift shop?”

  She indicated a row of wall shelves. “The Cow Hole, as the roundhouse is known, is popular with day-trippers and locals alike. Today, we have on offer pastels, framed and unframed. We also have canvas, brushes, and boxes of watercolors, ideal for capturing the English countryside. I would offer the usual complimentary tour, but at the moment, we have a guest.” She indicated the back third of the roundhouse, which was hidden behind a red velvet curtain.

  “I’ve actually come to see Mrs. Archer,” Ben said. “Is she, er, behind the curtain?”

  “Yes. We’ve never had a female guest,” Mrs. Richwine whispered. “Modesty must be preserved.”

  She led Ben around the curtain, w
here he discovered two things. First, Helen Archer really was still in her cot with the covers pulled over her head. Second, the red velvet curtain was the only thing standing between Helen and an escape attempt.

  “We consider Barking a welcoming place,” Mrs. Richwine said happily. “As you see, this cell has no window. It used to be enclosed by a great studded door with a slot in the middle.” She shook her head. “This is much lighter and airier.”

  “The Cow Hole operates on the, er, honor system?” Ben asked.

  “Oh, no, dear. I lock the front door at night, and when I pop home for tea.”

  “Who’s there?” Helen asked from under the blanket.

  “It’s Dr. Bones, Mrs. Archer. I heard you were unwell.” He approached the cot. At second glance, he saw it wasn’t precisely a blanket Helen had taken refuge under. It was a pink counterpane, edged in red ribbon. Ben would have bet five pounds it came from Mrs. Richwine’s linen closet.

  “Go away,” Helen said.

  “I understand Plymouth CID will be here soon,” Ben said. “Please allow me to examine you before they arrive. Even if you’re charged with murder, you still deserve the best of care.”

  Under the counterpane, Helen rolled toward the wall. Had she uncovered her face, she might have been cheered by a framed rendition of Fitchley Park, painted in watercolors and signed by the artist.

  “I still have that plate of scones, Helen, dear,” Mrs. Richwine said. “Won’t you reconsider? It will be a long ride to Plymouth.”

  “May I have a moment alone with my patient?” Ben asked.

  “Of course. I’ll take a turn in the garden. The roundhouse roses took honorable mention in the spring fête, you know,” Mrs. Richwine said. “Have a look before you go.”

  “Bloody Barking,” Helen muttered under the counterpane, as the click of Mrs. Richwine’s heels signaled her departure. “Some people think highly of themselves.”

  “Oh, yes. A proper stay in Birdswing’s constabulary, locked behind bars with a moth-eaten blanket and a bucket,” Ben said archly, noting the porcelain chamber pot under Helen’s bed, “would be far preferable to allowing Mrs. Richwine to kill you with kindness. Unfortunately, Caleb and Micah blew up the constabulary on Bonfire Night, if you’ll remember. I shudder to think what they’ll get up to now, with their father dead and their mum fitted up for murder.”

  “Maybe I weren’t fitted up,” Helen said dully. “I hated Bobby. I told you so myself, when you thought maybe I done in Penny. You looked at me and saw a murderer. Maybe you were right.”

  “I didn’t see a murderer,” Ben said truthfully. “I saw a devoted mother with a restaurant to run, a missing husband, and two, er, spirited lads. I hope Mrs. Cobblepot is up to the challenge. Even so, I imagine they’ll be Borstal boys by this time next year.”

  That did the trick. Borstal schools, managed by officials from His Majesty’s Prison Service, had been established to reeducate juvenile offenders and quickly gained a sinister reputation. The notion of keeping wayward boys away from adult convicts made perfect sense, but inside such “schools,” proper oversight was rare or nonexistent. Inmates were hard-pressed to survive the merciless hierarchy, with nascent psychopaths on top, hardened young malcontents in the middle, and first-time offenders at the very bottom.

  “Borstal boys!” Helen threw off the covers and sat up. “What a terrible thing to say.”

  Ben stared at her lacerated, blood-stained face. “Good God. Who did this to you?”

  Helen crossed her arms, equally lacerated, and looked at the floor. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  Ben knew a bit of Helen’s history. By all accounts, when she married Bobby, she’d been a lovely girl. They’d enjoyed a brief honeymoon, but then the twins came. Bobby had resumed his tomcat ways, which led to living apart. In the midst of her personal misery, or perhaps because of it, Helen had developed shingles. As a result, her nose was scarred, her right eye was blind and shrunken, and the right half of her face was afflicted with persistent neuralgia. It extended across her scalp, which meant that years after the initial flareup, even brushing her hair on that side remained excruciating. Ben had expected all that. But now her cheeks, forehead, and throat were marked with at least two dozen red, ragged cuts and scratches. Some were scabbed over; others were open and oozing. There was no pattern to the shallow wounds, but all were the approximate width of a fingernail.

  “May I see your hands?” he asked, striving for a neutral tone.

  She extended them reluctantly. Most of the fingernails were torn to the quick. There was dried blood under the rest.

  Ben opened his black bag. His hands worked without input from his brain, gathering treatment materials: antiseptic, cotton wool, aspirin, forceps, and a packet of Mersutures, in case the lacerations proved deeper than they looked. As a medical student, he’d been urged to develop an iron-clad routine, an order in which he acted, inflexibly, no matter how trivial or grievous the complaint.

  Perhaps because he was silent and methodical, Helen allowed him to clean and disinfect her self-inflicted wounds. Stitches proved unnecessary, and bandages would have been impractical, so Ben decided all he could do was hope she healed without too much scarring.

  “You didn’t have these wounds yesterday,” Ben said, “and Gaston doesn’t know about them. If he did, he would have told me. This happened last night.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you do this to yourself?”

  “Because I’m haunted.”

  “What?”

  Unbuttoning her sweater and pushing up her dress sleeve, Helen revealed a mass of scars above the elbow. Some were a few weeks old; others were puckered and faint, dating from childhood.

  “In my family I was the only girl,” she said in a low, uninflected voice. “Me against six brothers and my old dad, who never worked a day if he could help it. Maybe if I’d had a sister, we could have looked after one another. But I didn’t.”

  Rolling down a stocking, she revealed more self-inflicted scars on her thigh. “One day, I cut myself by accident, and the pain cleared my head. Like magic. Such a pure sensation. Cleansing.” She pulled the stocking back into place. “I loved watching the blood well up. When my thoughts turned black, when I felt like throwing myself off a cliff, I made a cut and let the pain out.

  “My mum noticed,” she continued, shrugging her sweater back into place. “It took the best part of a year, but one day she looked my way and saw me, if you know what I mean. I couldn’t tell her the truth, so I said I was haunted. Mum was superstitious. Believed in ghosts that slap and scrape folks in their beds.” She laughed bitterly. “She could believe a ghost would punish me, but she couldn’t believe anything else I said went on in our house. To her it was like stigmata—but from the other place, and for the other reason. Marks to signify wickedness.”

  Ben bit his lip. He almost wished she had another fresh wound or glaring symptom for him to treat. Anything to occupy his hands while he cast about for something to say.

  “I did stop for a time,” Helen said. “When Bobby was courting me. Best year of my life. Then we married, and it all went to the devil, and I needed that pain again.”

  “Neuralgia isn’t enough?”

  “Who are you to judge me?”

  “I’m not judging you. I only want to understand. Most people are terrified of pain,” Ben said. “They’ll do anything to make it stop. Even die.”

  “My shingles is a different kind of pain. Forced upon me. So much is forced upon me. Father Rummage says when our souls are heavy, we need cleansing, exculpatory pain. That’s how he sees it. How I see it is, I fight fire with fire. When the world hurts me, I can take control. All I need is a razor or a fingernail.”

  Something from Ben’s medical school training returned to him: a paper about Eastern European women who stabbed themselves with needles. He also remembered the true story of a Roman citizen who’d been pilloried for mutilating himself, yet refused to stop, even under threat of additional
public shaming.

  This is compulsive behavior. Trying to convince her it’s illogical misses the point, he thought. Helen’s clever enough to run a business and provide for herself and the boys, but this is beyond logic. It’s a drive inside that tells her she must do it.

  He took Helen’s hand. She started to pull away, then took a deep breath and endured his touch.

  Ben said, “All I want is to help, no matter what the truth is. Did you kill Bobby?”

  “No. I told you once before,” Helen said. “Thinking and doing are different things. If I had the raw nerve to take a life, I’d have done in your Penny, wouldn’t I? Maybe that would have saved my marriage.”

  “All right. When did you see Bobby last?”

  “Friday. He turned up at the restaurant while I was doing the books. Humming to himself, the bloody mongrel. Told me he needed a divorce.”

  Ben recalled their first meeting, when Helen had said emphatically that no one in her family had ever been divorced, and she refused to be the first. “How did you answer?”

  “I said, never.”

  “I understand,” he said gently. “I really do. But you and Bobby lived apart for years. What practical difference would it make?”

  “None.” She pulled away. “I always knew one day he’d ask and mean it. I thought I was prepared, that I’d been prepared for years, but when he said the words, it felt like death.”

  “How did he take your refusal?”

  “He offered me money. Then he tried to be tough. Said he’d paint me as an adulteress. That got my dander up, you can ask my neighbors. They heard me call him everything but an Englishman. Cheeky beggar just laughed. Said he’d come back when I had a chance to think it through and went off whistling.”

  Ben studied Helen’s brutally scratched face and the equally brutal set of her mouth. Something in her tale reminded him of Lady Juliet and Ethan, and that reminded him of how he’d driven the bounder out of his house.