The Haunted Martyr

by Kenneth Cameron

  Munro laughed. ‘You should have thought of that when you sent the cable. I’ve got a quarter of an hour to spare, thanks to a butcher who’s confessed he’s the one went in the next-door window and stole nine pounds eleven from the till. I’m going to get us each a cup of tea, which I can tell you need, and then you can tell me your tale and I’ll tell you whether my time’s been wasted or not.’ He went off, pivoting his bulk around the corners of desks and between people with the grace of a younger and lighter man. When he put the tea on the desk, Denton was sitting with his head in his hands; Munro said, ‘I put lots of sugar in yours. What you need is sherry and a raw egg, but I don’t have that.’

  ‘I wish you hadn’t mentioned sherry.’

  ‘Actually, you probably are tired. Just got here yesterday, didn’t you? Well, drink your tea. Tea makes the world come right—even CID canteen tea. All right, what’s this about a Birmingham cop who’s involved in something in Italy?’

  Denton told him about the private detective who had shown up in Naples. He described the death of Fra Geraldo, the lack of evidence, Cherry’s finding of the blood on the stairs. Munro was frowning. ‘What?’ Denton said.

  ‘He had a chemical that brought up bloodstains?’

  ‘So he said.’

  ‘Bit fanciful.’

  ‘Not a procedure you use?’

  ‘Not a procedure I ever even heard of. Which doesn’t mean it couldn’t be in use in Brum, but Brum isn’t exactly the centre of new police methods, is it? On the other hand, it’s a big city for chemicals, and somebody could have invented something.’

  ‘He had a bright light, too. I’d looked by gaslight, and not much of that. And before you ask me, yes, the Naples coppers missed it, too—but they had the same light that I did.’

  ‘Bit careless, were they?’

  Denton frowned. ‘They have a different system. A magistrate came in—he’s really the one runs the investigation. I think he’d made up his mind that it was an accident. The magistrate closed the case.’

  ‘“Death by misadventure”.’

  ‘I don’t know the Italian for that.’

  Munro looked into his tea. He said, ‘So an old man who may be cuckoo comes to you and says that ghosts are trying to kill him, and when you go to listen to his tale of woe, he’s dead. The coppers come and say, “Right, he’s dead, he fell downstairs.” Then a private detective comes from Birmingham—Birmingham—and uses a big light and says, “Oho, here’s blood.” Then he works a little magic with his fizz-water and everybody says—what does everybody say?’

  ‘In a nutshell, the blood on the stairs shows that he hit in several places on the way down, so he wasn’t thrown, so it’s an accident.’

  ‘We’ve a couple of crowners would have the hide off me for a conclusion like that.’

  ‘I kept it simple.’

  ‘You kept it stupid. All right, you sent me a cable asking about the detective with the magic holy water, so I gather you’re bothered by him and you want to know if he’s a twister. Eh?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘But a twister for what? What’s his fiddle? Who sent him, anyway?’

  ‘The new Lord Easleigh.’

  ‘Who said so?’

  ‘Maltby. Kid from the consulate. I gave him your name, by the way. Did he ever show up?’

  ‘Practically as he stepped off the train. Actually looks like a not-bad prospect for the next intake. I sent him to Recruitment.’

  ‘I should let him know I’m here. Although he’s a pain in the neck. I suppose he went back to Essex, or Sussex, or whatever it is.’

  ‘Told me he was going on a course in criminal law. Very eager.’

  ‘Hmph. Oh well.’

  ‘Recruitment will know where he is.’ Munro scribbled something on a slip of paper, pushed it over. ‘Give them this.’

  Denton grimaced, winced.

  ‘Where was I? The private detective. You think he’s a con. Why are you suspicious?’

  Denton told him about Spina’s photograph. Munro sat with his big hands clasped around his china mug as if to warm them—or perhaps actually to warm them, for it was cold in the CID room—and his jaw set, staring at Denton. When Denton was done, he said, ‘So now you have a photo of the new Lord What’s-his-name.’

  ‘In Naples.’

  ‘Can you swear it’s him?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘And the detective—he’s there, too, although it may not be him at all?’

  ‘That’s about right.’

  ‘Cripes, Denton, I wish I had your time and money to throw about on trains and travel. Must be nice, being a swell. “Oh, this is a bit curious, I think I’ll take a three-day trip to chat with my old pal Munro about it.”’

  ‘It’s more than curiosity.’

  ‘It’s you being you. You got suspicious the night the old man died, and you don’t let go. I know you. Not that you don’t get results.’ Munro slurped his tea. ‘All right, I agree with you that the magic potion sounds a bit wide. And what’s it supposed to mean if the new Lord Muck-a-muck had his picture taken in Naples?’

  ‘That he was there when the old man died.’

  ‘You know that for a fact? You got a date on the photo? Signed by young Lord Piss-pants—“Here I am in Naples on eleventh December last”?’

  ‘No, the date’s unsure. The photographer said that—’

  ‘You told me what the photographer said. Put that in the witness box, counsel for the defence would have the jury laughing in fifteen seconds. And what’s the rest of it? An overcoat and a horse? No birds carrying sprigs of holly to show it’s Christmas?’

  ‘They don’t have holly in Naples.’

  Munro extended his arms along the desk. ‘Here’s what we do: I’ll ask Brum for more on the detective, what’s his name again?—Cherry. Photo if one can be had, if not try to get them to send somebody to ask ex-sergeant Cherry if he’s been to Naples recently. I’ll also poke around and see if any of CID’s younger sparks know anything about bringing up bloodstains. There’s always the chance it really is a new technique and the old farts like me haven’t heard about it. What I suggest you do is get some sleep.’

  Denton raised his head, looked at Munro with pained eyes. ‘As long as you’re volunteering, there’s something else you can do.’ Munro groaned. ‘There was another fellow who’d have inherited the title, but he was killed a year or so ago. Some sort of accident in the underground. I’d like to be sure it was an accident.’

  Munro groaned again. ‘That’s all you have—“another fellow”, “some sort of accident”?’ He pointed a finger. ‘You find me the name, the date, the place, chapter and verse, and I’ll have a look. Otherwise, now you really are asking me to waste CID’s time.’

  ‘Even if it’s a London crime and not a Naples one?’

  ‘What are you saying? That a lad of fifteen or sixteen kills somebody because he stands in the way of his inheritance, then waits a year, then nips off to Naples and kills the incumbent, then comes back and hires a Birmingham tec to splash some fluid on the stairs for no good reason that I can see? You should go into music hall; you’d get more laughs than Dan Leno.’

  Denton drank the rest of his tea and thought that it might corrode his already abused stomach. He leaned back, sighed, tipped his hat forward to shield his eyes. ‘Know what the Camorra is?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, cripes, a secret society! We had them on the docks five years ago. The Black Hand. Don’t tell me the young milord is one of them, as well.’

  ‘The Naples detective said that the Camorra had reason to hate the old man.’

  ‘That’s fine, and it makes a lot more sense than a kid in London. But why in that case are you here? You should be telling all this to somebody at whatever they call the Yard in Naples.’

  ‘The questura. But I think it would be the magistrate I’d have to talk to. Anyway, the detective didn’t think it looked like the Camorra’s work.’

  Munro pushed hi
s cup away. ‘And your time’s up. You go home and try to pull this together. Get me chapter and verse on the man who died here; I’ll see what hare that starts. Go home, Denton. Get your man to make you a raw egg in sherry.’

  ‘Do I really look that bad?’

  ‘If I was a medico, I’d put you in hospital. I’ll see what else I can pry out of Birmingham. Go home.’

  ‘That’s not as easy as it sounds.’ He got directions to Recruitment, showed Munro’s note, got a London address for Maltby. He wondered why he was doing it: the thought of seeing Maltby just then caused physical pain. On the other hand, Maltby had seen a lot more of Cherry.

  Nonetheless, he made it home, and after eating a breakfast of eggs and bacon and fried bread—he hadn’t been able to face food earlier, and sherry sounded revolting—he went out to the British Museum. The walk was barely long enough to give him needed air, but it and three headache powders made life tolerable; soon, he was seated at a table in the reading room, poring over an index to The Times. Realising at last that he couldn’t go blindly flailing about looking for accidents in the underground, he got a copy of Debrett’s and dug out the name of the now dead heir. Harold Northcote, an elder cousin to the current peer.

  Northcote, Harold, produced a brief obituary, and that only because he had been the presumptive heir to a title. He had been in his late thirties, as early a child as the eventual heir had been a late one, a clerk in the Foreign Office, son of the second daughter of the fourth earl. At least the obituary gave an approximate date of death. From that, Denton was able to move to the actual newspapers. He found in one of them what he wanted.

  TRAGIC EVENT IN HAMMERSMITH

  Underground Death

  An Heir to the Title of Easleigh Falls under Train

  Trains beyond Hammersmith on the Hammersmith and City Line were stopped this afternoon at twenty minutes after two when a man fell to his death from the westbound platform of Hammersmith station. The unfortunate victim, Harold Northcote of Fulham Park, was seen to approach the platform’s edge as a train became visible in the tunnel that gave entry to the station. ‘He was there one moment and then he was gone the next,’ said an eyewitness to the tragedy.

  Mr Northcote, a Junior Clerk in the office of the Foreign Secretary, was a nephew of Lord Easleigh and his presumptive heir. He is succeeded by his mother, his father, and four sisters.

  The directors of the Hammersmith and City Line insist that all safety measures were rigorously enforced. An investigation is to be anticipated.

  He copied out the article and posted it to Munro on his way home. There, he found a telegram from Janet:

  RUTH DIED LATE MORNING STOP ARRANGEMENTS PRIVATE STOP MUCH TO DO STOP JANET

  He wondered what ‘arrangements private’ meant. That he was not to involve himself? But he had a lingering affection for Ruth Castle. And he was Janet’s lover. Of course he would involve himself.

  CHAPTER

  22

  The funeral, perhaps oddly, was to be late in the morning of the next day at Old St Pancras. He learned of it only from Atkins, who had got it from the Cohans. No notice appeared in the newspapers. Denton wondered how the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Mrs Castle’s loyal clients would learn of it. The answer was, of course, that they would not. Janet didn’t want them to know. Would anybody at all appear at the church? Well, he would, and he supposed that Fred Oldaston would, and, if Janet had been in touch with them, many of the women who had worked for Ruth and aged into respectability and often marriage. His late friend Sir Hector Hench-Rose would have gone, had he known of it—or would he? He had been a regular patron, but he had also had a very upright, in fact narrow-minded, wife.

  He had sent Maltby a note to say that he was in London for a few days. He didn’t care whether he got a reply. Maybe the young man had found, once in London, that he was glad to be rid of him. At any rate, he thought he’d done the right thing; if Maltby let the ball drop, that was his affair.

  He also sent a telegram to the new Lord Easleigh, asking if he might call on him. Easleigh’s case was different from Maltby’s: if he didn’t reply, Denton would think something was up.

  Despite his hangover, Denton had thought seriously of going to Birmingham. Spina’s photograph nagged at him. If the blurred face was really Cherry’s, and the photographer was anywhere near right about the date, then Cherry had been a good deal less than forthcoming—at best. And if the other face was really that of the new Lord Easleigh, then something was very wrong. He supposed that Cherry and the young milord could have been in Naples sometime in the autumn quite innocently, but if so, why hadn’t Cherry mentioned it? On the contrary, he’d been almost a caricature of the first-time visitor, hopeless in the language, puzzled by the food.

  Of course, it was likely that the blurred face wasn’t Cherry’s at all, and if the other one could be proven to belong to the new Lord Easleigh, was he therefore culpable? He might argue that he was free to travel if he liked, that he had had a distant cousin in Fra Geraldo and had wanted to see him. If Fra Geraldo’s diary didn’t mention him—and it did not, Denton knew—neither did it mention any other details of his life; the diary was a record of contrition, not trivial events. A visit from a distant nephew could have gone unmentioned, could have involved nothing but a mutually embarrassing few minutes in the cold entry of the Palazzo Minerva.

  If Denton went to Birmingham, he told himself, he could confront Joseph Cherry and make sure he was the man who had turned up in Naples. If he was, Denton could ask him about the photograph. Birmingham was only a few hours away by train; he could go up and back in a day. But it was too late that day, and the next was the funeral. Maybe the day after. Or maybe by then Munro would have more information for him.

  The truth was, the toxic effect of alcohol had left him unfit for much of anything. He rarely drank too much any more; when he did, he remembered why he had stopped. Hangovers of a certain intensity were worse than the symptoms of the influenza. What he really wanted to do after he left Munro was go back to bed.

  And so he did.

  He woke about five in the afternoon. He felt better, still a little light headed but no longer as if he might lurch if he tried to walk. He got up, pulled on an ancient dressing gown over his trousers and shirt and went downstairs. Atkins was straightening things in the sitting room. He looked up as Denton came down the stairs, raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

  ‘I overdid it,’ Denton said.

  ‘Effects of travel, I’m sure.’

  ‘I’m going to the funeral tomorrow. Do I have clothes?’

  ‘Same outfit you wore for Sir Hector’s. You only wore it the once.’

  ‘Lay it out, will you? Make sure it’s pressed and all that.’ Denton fell into his armchair. ‘Any sign of Mrs Striker at her house?’

  ‘Nor hide nor hair.’

  ‘I suppose she’s staying on at Westerley Street. Lot to do. I should send flowers.’

  Atkins, who had been bent over with a whisk broom, straightened and said, ‘I think maybe you ought to consider that gentlemen aren’t welcome at this occasion, General.’

  ‘Gentlemen were her speciality.’

  ‘All the same, pardon me, they ain’t Mrs Striker’s, and she’s paying the fiddler. I’d go easy, if I was you.’

  ‘Approach the church with caution, prepared to flee?’

  ‘You know her better than I do.’

  Denton lay back and closed his eyes. Atkins went on whisking, then ran a carpet sweeper, muttering something about the dirt people made when they’d only been in the house twenty-four hours. Denton opened one eye.

  ‘Sit a minute.’

  ‘Now what’ve I done?’

  ‘I want to tell you about the death in Naples. You help me to think.’

  ‘You always tell me my ideas are rubbish.’

  ‘That’s how you help me.’

  Uncomplimentary as that was, it seemed to satisfy Atkins. Telling him what had happened, trying to put in everything i
n order, Denton found himself seeing it more clearly himself. Atkins was naturally conservative, and at first he pooh-poohed the notion of a murder. Later, told about the chapel and the ledger, he said that Fra Geraldo sounded like a rum old loony but not one worth murdering. He dismissed out of hand the photograph that seemed to show the young Lord Easleigh: Denton was seeing things. His conclusion, after an hour’s talk, was that Denton should let sleeping dogs lie, and with that he went off to make what he called ‘a proper tea’, meaning his idea of a three-course meal.

  Later, a knock on the door produced a hand-delivered note from the new Lord Easleigh: he would be delighted to see Mr Denton tomorrow afternoon and looked forward to meeting a man about whom he had heard so much good from his private detective, Mr Cherry.

  When Atkins came up with a loaded tea tray, Rupert panting behind him, he brought with him a load of questions. As he set up two folding tables and laid out food, he shot them at Denton like somewhat sarcastic bullets.

  ‘Now, this new Lord Hoo-ha, you say you see his face in a photo, you’re off on a wild hare to London because you think you’ve proof he was in Naples. What’s the point?’

  ‘He came to Naples and killed the old man.’

  ‘Oh, of course—he wants to be the Gay Lord Quex and can’t wait another year or two.’

  ‘He’s seventeen. That age wants things right now. Can’t wait.’

  ‘My hat! He’d be daft to risk it when he’s got a sure thing not too far away.’

  ‘Ever tried telling that to a seventeen-year-old who has some girl ready to fall on her back for him?’

  ‘Oh, ha-ha, I don’t see the relevance of that. Don’t try to come over me with tricky arguments.’

  Atkins, the pot and cups and dishes he had brought with him set out, went back the length of the room and opened a door opposite the Dresden stove—the dumb-waiter. He hauled on the cable, inhaled, and came back with a single large tray with half a dozen dishes on a white cloth. He began to put those on flat surfaces around Denton. ‘Tinned smoked trout, courtesy of the late Sir Hector, bless him. Boiled eggs, had them made up in the icebox, devilled them with a bit of curry. Cinnamon toast—leave the cloth on to keep the heat in, if you please. Bread and butter, very thick, very well buttered. Pickled cockles, not everybody’s cup of tea, but mine. Sliced ham. Eccles cake. Bit of Scottish shortbread, comes in a tin from the Army and Navy—not too bad. Gooseberry conserve. Hepburn’s Best Military Chutney. Pound cake with—where is it? Aha, in the gravy boat, couldn’t find anything else—custard. Jam tart.’ He looked severe. ‘That’s all there is!’