Last Nocturne

by M. J. Trow

  By now, Mrs Rackstraw was on another subject in her head – the butcher’s boy had been unconscionably rude again the day before and the kidneys more gristle than anything else. She would be going round to the shop later, dressed in her signature black and with her second best bonnet at its most terrifying angle in order to give Mr Juniper a piece of her mind and the fright of his life. She ran through the projected conversation in her mind, and Mr Juniper was certainly getting the worst of it, when Maisie spoke. Mrs Rackstraw jumped visibly and turned on Maisie like a rattler.

  ‘Whistling? Who was whistling?’ Whistling went through her head like a knife.

  ‘The man who Master Matthew said he was going to throw paint on.’

  The whole thing had seemed rather spurious to Mrs Rackstraw from the beginning but now she knew that Maisie had the wrong end of the stick. Matthew Grand could strip paint with his whistle, especially when he was in the bath. She had seen his partner in the enquiry business sitting in the morning room with rolled-up cotton wool in his ears when it reached a certain level, so she used her logic.

  ‘So, it was Master James who was going to throw the paint?’ she checked.

  ‘No.’ Maisie didn’t have anything against the Englishman but she hardly heard a word he said when Master Matthew was in the room.

  Mrs Rackstraw stood back and looked at Maisie, six stone of stupidity in a frilly cap and an apron which would go round her twice. The stare she got in return didn’t help with the solution of what would have to remain a puzzle until, perhaps, the police knocked at the door and told her that her employer had been taken into quod for throwing the contents of a paint-pot in a whistler’s face. For now, she had the butcher to look forward to and she couldn’t follow every flitter of the maid’s mind. Sufficient unto the day, as she believed Shakespeare had once said, unless she missed her guess, was the evil thereof.

  Matthew Grand and James Batchelor sat at opposite ends of the breakfast table as they had for over a decade, looking with mild horror at each other’s scrambled egg. Batchelor could no more eat a soft egg than sprout wings and fly around the room. Grand, for his part, didn’t see the point in eating something which resembled, in almost every respect, a lawn tennis ball. But they had had the conversation many times, and on this particular morning, anyway, they had other subjects to discuss. Their enquiry agency was doing well and they were considering taking on a junior, for the legwork. Not that their own legs were in anything other than fine fettle, but Grand was contemplating marriage and his wife-to-be had let it be known that she would not appreciate the undoubted delights of the marriage bed being interrupted in the wee small hours or – Grand had been delighted to hear – the quieter hours of the afternoon, by lowlife wanting someone to find their lost cat. Grand had told her quite categorically that they had risen above those levels now, but she was adamant; he took on help or the marriage was not going to happen in a hurry.

  James Batchelor was not contemplating marriage. Grand’s inamorata, Lady Caroline Wentworth, of, it must be stated, the Worcestershire Wentworths, had provided numerous opportunities by wafting friends of hers – mainly ones with a squint or a rather odd disposition – under his nose, but Batchelor had decided that until he wrote the Great British Novel, any kind of relationship was out of the question. He had tried doing both, but ended up writing either mushy drivel, one hundred thousand words of introspective misery, or pornography, depending on the lady of the moment, so he was being strict with himself.

  ‘Do you have anyone in mind?’ Batchelor asked, reaching for the marmalade.

  ‘Not really,’ Grand admitted. ‘I know it’s been a while, but I wondered if you could ask around in Fleet Street. See if there’s a likely lad who can stick his nose into other people’s business and yet not give offence.’

  ‘Why would you think there would be such a lad in Fleet Street?’ Batchelor said with a wry smile. ‘There’s not a reporter born, old or young, who doesn’t give offence wherever he goes.’

  ‘True. But perhaps if we snaffle one early, before the old cynicism kicks in. Anyway, that’s just something to keep in mind.’

  ‘I thought that Caroline said …’

  ‘She did,’ Grand said, looking round just to make sure she hadn’t crept in under cover of the sound of crunching toast, ‘but there’s no sense in rushing, is there?’

  Batchelor hid a smile. Like Grand, he rather liked the life they led – big changes lay ahead and neither man was dashing to make them happen. ‘Anything else?’

  Grand shuffled through some letters at the side of his plate and drew one out. It was on flimsy, cream-coloured paper and from his end of the table, Batchelor could see it was covered in florid writing, in deep blue ink.

  ‘I’ve had this letter from James McNeill Whistler.’ He looked up expectantly at Grand. Though he was not dragged through art galleries by a determined fiancée as Grand often was, Batchelor knew who that was and nodded for his friend to continue.

  ‘He’s from Massachusetts,’ Grand said, by way of background. ‘His folks know my folks, the usual sort of thing. He was at West Point as well, I understand, though ten years before my time. They still had some paintings by him on the wall in the mess – he has always been a good hand with a brush.’

  ‘Just catching up, is he?’ Batchelor asked, ringing the bell for more coffee. He hoped that this wouldn’t mean another trip across any significant seas – he sometimes felt the floor sway, two years after his last voyage.

  ‘Yes, just to be civil. But he wants us to do some digging for him, into the background of John Ruskin.’ Grand looked up at Batchelor, to see if he knew more about the man than he did.

  Batchelor snorted. ‘We’ll dig for a long time, then,’ he said. ‘Ruskin, in my honest opinion and that of most reporters and people who don’t make being pretentious a hobby, is a total pain in the backside and as weird as a wagonload of monkeys. You heard about his marriage, of course?’

  ‘This isn’t a divorce thing, I don’t think. I confess to finding the handwriting a bit tricky towards the end.’

  ‘No, no, the marriage is long over, annulled. His wife has become Mrs Millais now – she seems to make a habit of marrying painters – but she was Effie Gray when she married Ruskin. Before my time, thirty odd years ago, it must be, but the old-timers at the Telegraph used to talk about it, usually when they’d had a drink or two. Rumour was that when they got married and she undressed, he saw her’ – Batchelor made an all-purpose gesture to his nether regions – ‘and was so shocked he couldn’t touch her. Never did, so the marriage was annulled. Obviously,’ he said, smiling, ‘the old-timers were a bit more direct, but I don’t make a habit of discussing pudenda at the breakfast table.’

  From the hall came a muffled shriek as Mrs Rackstraw left the house for a pleasant hour shouting at Mr Juniper, the pork butcher.

  The men glanced round and then Batchelor continued. ‘That’s not all, of course. There’s lots of rather dubious gossip about Ruskin, if you know who to ask.’

  ‘Well,’ Grand folded the letter into a complex shape and sent it flying down the table. ‘Have a look at that and see if it’s something for us. I have to say, poets and painters and such aren’t really my cup of tea, but as you know so much already, it could be some easy money.’

  Batchelor unfolded the paper and looked at the contents. Then he turned it the other way up, which didn’t help much. ‘His writing is …’ He was stuck for the right word.

  ‘A bit like his art, these days,’ Grand said for him. ‘Back in his West Point days, you could tell what things were and apparently, he was a whizz at maps. But now, well, it’s a bit less comprehensible, to put it mildly. Caroline and I went to the Grosvenor last month and saw one of his. I don’t know much about art, but I do know what I like. And a nice Lady Butler is what I like. Lots of fine, upright chaps from the Limey Army with no chins below their stiff upper lips. Whistler’s stuff is a bit speckly for my taste.’

  ‘The only one I k
now of his is that one of his mother. That isn’t speckly, as I recall it.’

  ‘Well, no. She isn’t a speckly woman. I only met her once, but she seemed a clean old broad. No, this one that seems to have got Ruskin riled up is a Nocturne, though I admit I thought that was music.’ Grand looked around. ‘Did you ring for some more coffee about a day ago?’

  ‘Yes,’ Batchelor told him. ‘But Mrs Rackstraw has gone out. You know how Maisie is. She’ll bring us some tea in a minute. She can never remember how to make coffee. She gets all confused about the beans.’

  ‘Tea will do, I suppose. As long as it comes before dinner. Meanwhile, do your best with that handwriting and I’ll have a look through the paper, see if there are any cases hidden in the small columns.’

  The two men read their respective material, both jotting down the odd note as things came to them. Grand noticed something murky going on in the Cremorne Gardens, then Maisie came in with something hot in a pot which, even after tasting, might have been either tea or coffee. Pencils whispered over paper and all was calm around the post-breakfast table.

  TWO

  The memories came flooding back for James Batchelor as he stepped out of the growler into the nightmare that was Fleet Street. Years ago, as it seemed to him now, he had hurtled along those hardest of pavements, the dome of St Paul’s watching his every move like a giant editor. The night of rain had turned into a morning of spring sunshine and the shopkeepers of the sunny side had winched their awnings down.

  He could already hear the thud and grind of the Telegraph’s great ten-feed printer, a monster of steel and traction six times taller than a man. He brushed aside the shoe-blacks and winced at the discordant Italian hurdy-gurdy man. A black-coated woman from the Christian Mission touched him for a few coppers at more or less the same time as two real coppers – marching at their stately two and a half miles an hour tread – ignored her completely. So, the boys in blue were patrolling in pairs in Fleet Street now; that didn’t surprise Batchelor one jot.

  Inside the double doors of the Telegraph, he paused and took in the smell. Newsprint, ink, cigar smoke, strong tea and the sweating fear of hundreds of hacks, all of them slaving away to meet the Deadline, that most fated of words that every newspaperman repeats as a mantra, day after day. On the wall above the great staircase, the even greater George Augustus Sala frowned down on Batchelor in an orgy of treacly oils, the famous nose only a little smaller than the gilt frame surrounding it.

  A journalist of rather less stature lounged in an anteroom halfway up the curve of the stairs, along a little corridor that Batchelor remembered as leading to a privy.

  ‘Johnny Lawson,’ Batchelor’s grin was wide. The journalist leapt to his feet, whipping the cigar out of his mouth and gripping his visitor’s hand.

  ‘James Batchelor, you old newshound. It’s been a while.’

  ‘It has, it has,’ Batchelor agreed and sat himself down. ‘How’s the old trade?’

  ‘Mad as ever,’ Lawson told him, ‘There’s a kettle here somewhere. Can I offer you some tea?’

  Batchelor looked at the tiny, barely glowing fire and the chipped mug and suddenly longed for Mrs Rackstraw’s finery. ‘A little early for me,’ he smiled.

  ‘Ah,’ Lawson slid open a drawer in his desk, ‘Scotch, then?’ He produced two glasses, both moderately clean, along with the bottle.

  Batchelor winked. ‘Lord Beaconsfield keeping you busy?’ he asked.

  Lawson groaned. ‘International diplomacy’s all very well,’ he said, pouring a pair of sizeable snifters, ‘but there are limits. I’ll be a happy man when this bloody Congress is over and we all forget what a treaty is.’

  ‘You should have voted for Gladstone,’ Batchelor wagged a finger at him.

  ‘Wash your mouth out,’ Lawson said, straight-faced. ‘The day I give my support to old Glad-eye is the day they’ll put me in a box. The Queen – God bless her!’

  ‘The Queen!’ Batchelor toasted and they raised their glasses. ‘Good God, Johnny,’ he rasped, ‘the last time I tasted something like this I was stripping paint with it.’

  Lawson chuckled. ‘You didn’t come all this way just to compliment me on the quality of my whisky,’ he said. ‘To what do I owe the etcetera?’

  ‘Well – and don’t take this the wrong way, pet – I’m looking for a young man.’

  ‘Ah, aren’t we all? Dare I ask the purpose?’

  ‘You know Matthew Grand and I are in the private enquiry business?’

  ‘That’s what you did here, wasn’t it? Back in the day?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘So …?’

  ‘The snooping business is expanding and we need to expand our staff accordingly. We’re’ – Batchelor looked left and right and behind him, checking for eavesdroppers – ‘we’re looking into John Ruskin as we speak.’

  Lawson chuckled. ‘Well, the very best of luck with that,’ he said. ‘The man’s as squeaky clean as they come.’

  ‘But … the stories …’

  ‘Precisely,’ Lawson said. ‘Stories, to ginger up the young and inexperienced lads in the office. Ruskin made one mistake in his life, if you want to call it a mistake, and that was marrying Effie Gray and expecting her to be’ – he waved a generic hand – ‘a little tidier down below than turned out to be the case. And even then, if he had just shrugged and got on with it, no one would know about that, even. I expect it’s this Whistler thing, is it?’

  Batchelor nodded. He had already said too much.

  ‘Well, if you’re being paid by the scandal,’ Lawson said, ‘you’ve backed the wrong horse. Whistler may love his mother, but that’s about the only thing about him that’s fit for mixed company.’

  Batchelor decided it was time to change the subject and waved his arm to the office. ‘I’m not wrong, am I, this did use to be a privy?’

  ‘Convenience, James, please,’ Lawson scolded. ‘This is the Telegraph.’

  ‘Quite. Quite.’

  ‘Yes, it did. Ironically, I now have to go down two flights of stairs for a piss. They call that progress. The young man?’

  ‘Ah, yes. The young man. Grand and I need an amanuensis.’

  ‘Dogsbody.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Must have a brain, though. And a presentable appearance – meeting clients, that sort of thing. Can’t have someone with an eye in the middle of their forehead, knuckles on the ground, like that lad we had … what was his name?’

  Lawson chuckled. ‘I can’t remember. He’s making big money on the Halls now, I believe. Apart from not looking like something out of the zoo, anything physical required? Fisticuffs?’

  ‘Lord, no. I keep Grand for that sort of thing. I was wondering whether you know of anybody. You do know everybody, of course, I realize that.’

  ‘Well,’ Lawson become conspiratorial, ‘as a matter of fact …’

  Batchelor leaned forward too, both men’s elbows on the table. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I may have just the lad. Here in this very office, as we speak.’

  Batchelor withdrew his elbow. ‘Ah, that’s a bit too pat, Johnny.’

  ‘No, no, hear me out. He’s the son of a friend of mine, just come down from Oxford.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Twenty-one, twenty-two. Anybody under thirty these days all look alike to me.’

  ‘Which college?’

  ‘Magdalen, I think.’

  ‘What did he read?’

  ‘Books, probably.’

  ‘I’ll do the jokes, Johnny,’ Batchelor said, straight-faced.

  ‘Literae Humaniores,’ Lawson told him. ‘That’s Greats to you and me.’

  ‘It may be Greats to you, my lad,’ Batchelor sneered, ‘I call it Classics. Latin and Greek and the cultures thereof. Essential, I’d say, for a career in Fleet Street.’

  ‘Yes, well, that’s as maybe. He’s at a bit of a loss to know what to do with himself, vocationally speaking. I suggested a month or two at the Telegraph.’

 
‘And?’

  Lawson grimaced and shook his head. ‘It’s not really working out, to be honest. I can’t give him anything meaningful, send him to Berlin or anything like that. There is a murder on my books at the moment, but with no experience—’

  ‘What murder?’ Batchelor’s ears pricked up.

  ‘In the Cremorne, a couple of nights ago.’

  ‘Oh, yes, The Times had a piece on it.’

  ‘Don’t you come round here admitting you read other establishment’s journals, James Batchelor. This one’s got the Telegraph written all over it.’

  ‘Lady of the night, wasn’t she?’ Batchelor asked.

  ‘She was. Name of … er …’ Lawson shuffled through the mountain of jottings on his desk. ‘Clara Jenkins. Twenty-one.’

  ‘Little young for a park girl,’ Batchelor commented. Both men knew that park girls were at the bottom of the heap. Nobody started out that way.

  ‘Agreed. She used to be at a rather nice establishment in Chelsea – Turks Row. A Mrs Arbuthnot runs it. I gather there was something of a falling out.’

  ‘Disgruntled client?’ Batchelor asked. ‘The murderer, I mean.’

  ‘Probably,’ Lawson said. ‘The book’s odd, though.’

  ‘Book?’

  ‘Found open in the dead girl’s lap. She was sitting on a park bench, just as though she was reading.’

  ‘That is odd,’ Batchelor nodded.

  ‘Yes, particularly so since there was a similar case eighteen months ago.’

  ‘There was?’

  Lawson looked oddly at Batchelor. ‘You do live in this city, do you, James?’

  ‘Ah, no … well, yes, of course I do, but eighteen months ago, Grand and I were pursuing our enquiries in America.’ Batchelor gripped the edge of the table in case a spot of reminiscent seasickness overwhelmed him.

  ‘Ah, the colonies,’ Lawson smiled. ‘How lovely.’

  ‘In what way was the earlier case similar?’

  ‘Er … let me see, now.’ Lawson topped up his glass, but Batchelor held a hand over his; there was only so much paint-stripper a man could take. ‘Unsolved, of course, as I suspect this one will be. It was in the Cremorne, further away from the King’s Road than Miss Jenkins was found.’