The Haunted Martyr

by Kenneth Cameron

  Denton was studying the face, trying to find the black-and-white image in Spina’s photograph. Was it really the same? Maybe, from a certain angle…

  ‘This is my friend, Mr Maltby. He’s on leave from the Naples consulate. I thought you might like to chat with him, too. He made the arrangements for you, I think—’ Denton was moving them into the flat, Easleigh backing away from him as if being pushed by an invisible wave that Denton threw up in front of himself.

  ‘Oh, yes—ah—yes…’ Easleigh managed to free himself by turning around and striding ahead into a sitting room. ‘I’ve just moved in. Not finished—rather a mess, in fact. I’m thinking of having a cosy corner over there…’ His voice trailed off. He was gesturing towards a corner where several pasteboard boxes were piled.

  Otherwise, the sitting room was crowded with new-looking furniture of the heavy, machine-carved sort that filled middle-class houses all over England. Denton was thinking again that Easleigh was very young, also that he was not very lordly. His accent was the same as Cherry’s, indubitably Brum; he was a too-young, middle-class kid snatched from the jaws of respectability by the accident of inheritance.

  ‘An Oriental cosy corner,’ the very young man said. He now seemed to see Maltby for the first time and, after staring at him for a second or two, shot out a hand. ‘I’m Easleigh.’ His earlier nervousness was somewhat damped. ‘Thanks for taking care of things in Naples.’

  Maltby shook his hand, muttered something about it’s being his job.

  ‘Still, good of you. Awful good.’ He reddened. ‘Awfully good.’ He looked around the room as if somebody with more experience and better manners might be there to tell him what to do next. ‘Shall we sit down?’ He seemed uncertain where, although the room had chairs for at least a dozen.

  ‘Yes, please. Good.’

  They all sat. Denton took his time looking around. ‘Very pleasant room.’ In fact he thought it was one of the ugliest places he’d ever been in. He saw a fireplace, three doors stained almost black, a blizzard of framed photographs and chromos that almost managed to hide the chintz-patterned red and brown wallpaper, and a melodeon that rose up one wall like a siege engine. ‘Do you play?’ Denton said.

  ‘What? Oh, that. No.’ Easleigh was very red again. ‘But I mean to learn.’ After a silence, he said to Maltby, ‘You like music?’

  Maltby looked at Denton as if asking permission to speak and muttered, ‘Not so much.’

  Easleigh crossed, uncrossed and recrossed his legs the other way. ‘Me neither.’ Again, he looked around. ‘I suppose I could offer you some sherry…’

  Denton had been wondering how long the young man could go on thinking of things to say. The answer seemed to be that he couldn’t go on much longer: his silences were getting thicker. This suited Denton; on the other hand, he’d have to come to business before Easleigh got silent for so long that he threw them out. Or would he never have the courage to do that? Denton said, ‘Perhaps you’d like to ask us about your cousin.’

  Easleigh looked dumbstruck.

  ‘The fifth Lord Easleigh. Your predecessor.’

  ‘Oh. Um. Ye-e-e-s, well…’

  A silence fell. From another room, a thud came, as if a shoe had been dropped. Easleigh jerked and said too loudly, ‘The moving man! Still moving me in. Clumsy fellows.’

  Denton waited for another thud but nothing came. He said, ‘Mr Maltby could tell you about the investigator you sent to Naples, for example.’

  Easleigh, mouth open, stared at him. ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘You hired him.’

  ‘Yes.’ He jerked upright again and said, as if suddenly in a hurry, ‘I hired him in Birmingham before I moved down here. He came very highly recommended, a former member of the Brum police. First-class fellow. Up-to-date methods. I thought it wise to have my own investigation done because of the reputation of the Naples police.’ The last sentence seemed to come from something long memorised, like the phrases mouthed by a politician after too long on the stump.

  ‘We admired his work. Didn’t we, Maltby.’

  ‘Everybody did. First-rate.’

  Easleigh tried to smile. He seemed relieved but stayed bright red. ‘Yes, first-rate.’ He cleared his throat. ‘He set your mind at rest, then, Mr Denton.’

  ‘My mind?’

  ‘You expressed doubts. Mr Maltby said so in his report, which was sent to me.’

  ‘Oh, those doubts. Yes, of course. Set at rest, yes, of course.’

  ‘Oh, good. Good.’ Easleigh managed to smile. He looked at a hideous ormolu clock that sat on the mantel like a toad. ‘I have to go out by and by…’

  ‘Yes, and we must be going soon. Soon.’ Denton smiled at him. Easleigh’s eyes swivelled away and swung here and there as if they had slipped their moorings. ‘Anything else we can tell you?’

  ‘No… No…’ Easleigh uncrossed his legs and, after another look at the clock, planted his feet as if he meant to stand.

  ‘Have you ever been to Naples yourself, Lord Easleigh?’

  ‘Me? No!’ Easleigh lay back in his chair, then slumped and looked from Denton to Maltby and back.

  ‘I thought you might have been. Having a relative there.’

  ‘I was in school!’

  ‘On holiday, I meant.’

  ‘No! We didn’t know him at all. He never wrote. Out of touch. No, I’ve never been out of England. Hardly out of Brum. Ever.’

  ‘But Mr Cherry had been there before?’

  ‘Cherry?’

  ‘The investigator.’

  ‘Why would you think a thing like that?’

  ‘I thought you might have hired him because of prior experience.’

  ‘I didn’t. I mean, I did, but in England. No, he’d never been there. He told me. He said it was an awful place. He couldn’t wait to get back. Why would you ever think he’d been down there at all?’

  Denton took Spina’s photograph from an inner pocket of his suit jacket and offered it to the young man. ‘This photograph seems to show both you and Mr Cherry in Naples. We know it’s Naples because of the castle in the background—rather a landmark. You probably remember having it taken.’

  The young man’s voice became a shriek. ‘I don’t! I was never there!’ A terrible look took hold of his face, haunted and fearful. He turned his head a fraction, and Denton suddenly had a dizzying sense of recognition, as if a moment from a dream had flashed on his consciousness. This was not dream, however, but memory: a young man in near-darkness, that same turn of the head and, although the face was obscured, somehow the same expression. Where had it been? And then he remembered: the first night he had gone to Fra Geraldo’s, the night that he had found the old man’s body, he had stopped in the darkness of a vico to ask directions, and he had been aware of somebody young in the shadows.

  And then another memory emerged more sluggishly, like some amphibian hauling itself from the ooze. He had asked directions from a man while the young one waited. He had thought the man was somebody from the street. And of course the man had in fact been Cherry.

  Shaken, Denton said huskily, ‘I’m afraid you were there. I saw you. And you saw me.’

  ‘No, I didn’t—I didn’t—!’ The boy began to weep.

  Denton raised his voice. ‘And you saw me, too, Mr Cherry!’

  Maltby looked utterly flummoxed. Easleigh’s half-stifled sobs went on. A footstep sounded from beyond one of the doors and then the door opened, and Cherry came in. He was smiling hugely. He was wearing a valet’s clothes—alpaca jacket, dark waistcoat, grey trousers—and he was carrying a tray covered with a white cloth and several dishes.

  ‘Here we are, then, here we are! I was out. Did you offer the gentlemen sherry, my lord? Sherry—did you?’

  The boy snuffled back his tears, nodded.

  ‘And what did they say? I don’t see any sherry glasses put out. Did you gentlemen want sherry?’

  Maltby managed to say no and then burst out with, ‘You’re not a detective at all!’
/>
  ‘Oh, but I am, sir. The same Joe Cherry, ex of the Brum police, been a private tec these several years. When His Lordship here ascended to the title, as it were, his father thought it best to get him some protection, so I was taken on. The role of val-it suits, you see—a kind of disguise. But I couldn’t introduce myself that way in Naples, could I—how’d it have seemed if I’d said, “I’m His Lordship’s val-it, come to investigate the poor old man’s death?”’

  He smiled at them. Denton said, ‘You’re a sham, Cherry. You’re no more a detective than I am. Your fluid for finding bloodstains was a dodge—it wouldn’t find bloodstains in a slaughterhouse.’

  Cherry was standing by a hideous sideboard; he had opened a drawer and was taking out small rectangles of white cloth. ‘I thought you gentlemen would need serviettes.’ He looked up and smiled. ‘Why ever would you think that solution, which you saw show up bloodstains with your own eyes, wasn’t what I said it was?’

  Maltby jumped in ahead of Denton. ‘Donati had it analysed! It’s water and vinegar and stuff.’

  Denton said, ‘I saw you the night you two killed the old man.’

  The boy shrieked, ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘The two of you threw him down the stairs! But he was already dead, wasn’t he, Cherry? Or should I say Signore diToledano?’

  Cherry’s smile lost its force but lingered. ‘You made that up, about seeing us. We was never there.’

  ‘I’ve a photograph that shows both of you.’

  ‘For certain, sir? Absolute identification? I don’t think that can be. Well, I know it can’t be, don’t I, because we wasn’t there.’ His smile reasserted itself.

  ‘It’s the photo next to His Lordship. You’re welcome to look at it.’ Denton reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and took out one of the photographs of the chapel. ‘That’s you, too. As a kid. I’ve got a witness who can identify you in that one. Michele wasn’t the only one of the choirboys still around. And the photographer will identify you in the other one, and that will place you in Naples at the right time.’

  ‘Cock and bull. One of your romances, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr Denton.’

  ‘This boy won’t last half an hour in a police room, Cherry. They’ll break him like a cheap toothpick.’

  Cherry finished what he had been transferring from the drawer to the tray. He looked at the new Lord Easleigh. He nodded once, apparently to himself. His right hand, which had been doing something in the drawer, came out with a shiny revolver. He said, ‘You’re fly, Mr Denton—cuter than I thought.’ He jerked a hand towards the boy, the gesture suddenly violent and rude. ‘Denton’s got a gun in his side pocket. Get it!’

  ‘He won’t live to tell the tale if he tries,’ Denton said.

  ‘You move so much as a pinky and I’ll shoot your thick friend.’ Cherry-diToledano pointed the pistol at Maltby and took a step towards him. ‘I mean it.’

  ‘A shot will bring half of London.’

  ‘My arse. You could shoot off six-pounders in here and nobody’d twig. It’s live and let live in this poof alley.’ His voice became harsh. ‘Get the gun!’ he shouted at the boy, and Denton saw who the real master was.

  Easleigh sidled towards him as if Denton were a dog that might bite. Denton looked at Maltby, who was looking into the barrel of Cherry’s pistol. Cherry could hardly miss at that distance; Denton would then have time to charge at him, he thought, but the derringer would be deep in his pocket and might snag on the lining. Cherry might even have time to shoot Maltby and then get one shot at Denton; the idea didn’t dismay him, especially because he thought that Cherry’s pistol was a cheap .22 calibre of the kind made for cyclists. They were turned out by the thousands in Belgium, larded with fake engraving, probably less accurate than his derringer at anything more than five feet. Denton didn’t fancy getting shot, however, even with a .22, although he knew from his experience in the American West that one shot from a .22 wouldn’t put a big man. Although it would hurt like hell.

  ‘Get his pistol!’ Cherry shouted again, and he took another half-step towards Maltby; he was now in a good spot to shoot Maltby in an eye.

  Denton raised his right arm and allowed the boy’s trembling hand to slide into his jacket pocket. A few seconds later, he felt the weight of the derringer leave his side.

  ‘Give it me,’ Cherry growled.

  Instead, Easleigh looked at the thing in his shaking fingers. He held it in both hands, then laboriously pulled back both hammers. Denton heard the click. He said, ‘There’s no safety on that thing; be careful.’

  ‘Shut your mouth,’ Cherry said. ‘I’m sick of you.’

  ‘How did you kill him? You broke his neck, didn’t you?’

  ‘The both of us, yes.’

  ‘I didn’t!’ the boy cried.

  Cherry laughed. ‘You held him while I twisted, boy; to the law, you might as well of done it all yourself. Give me that gun.’

  ‘But you killed Harold Northcote by yourself,’ Denton said.

  ‘Cousin Harry?’ the boy squealed. ‘He didn’t!’

  ‘I think he did.’ He looked at the older man. ‘You pushed him in front of the underground train, didn’t you?’

  Cherry shook his head. ‘Fly, very fly. You should of stayed out of it, Denton. Now it’ll cost you and your chick your last breath.’

  The boy was agitated. ‘You never said anything about Cousin Harry,’ he cried. He looked at Denton. ‘Harry was killed in the underground.’

  ‘And then Cherry came to you and said you could be the new Lord Easleigh with just one more push.’

  Cherry laughed again. ‘Me, was it! Yes, I come to him, but he was the one would do anything to get out of Brum! He was the one that said it wasn’t fair for an old fart to go on living while he wanted to live!’

  ‘I didn’t—I didn’t—’

  ‘You did, you sad little squit. You’d have sold your soul for ten quid if anybody’d offered.’ He looked at Denton. ‘He even had half a scheme for topping Mum and Dad, only he hadn’t the spunk. If I hadn’t dropped into his life, he’d still be rubbing himself up in the jakes and drinking his ma’s eau de colo-nee for his idea of a spree.’ He turned his head towards the boy. ‘You’re a useless little nit, ain’t you, my lord?’

  ‘You ruined my life,’ the boy moaned.

  ‘Yes, I did, and good on me! Because now I’m getting some of my own back for what was done to me. For my use, you’ll do just as well as him. I’ve been a long time about it, but I’ve got Lord Easleigh by the balls, and you’re going to lick my tool and let me up your arse just the way he did me.’ His eyes shifted to Denton. ‘And you ain’t going to stop me, Texas Jack.’

  Denton heard a roar of outrage and saw Maltby charge. Cherry’s gun went off; then a howl of pain and another gunshot came at almost the same time and both Maltby and Cherry were down, and the thick, acrid smoke of black powder spread in the room. Easleigh was standing with the derringer stuck out in front of him, his eyes wide, smoke lingering at the end of one of the short barrels.

  Denton leaped across the room and kicked Cherry, who was down on his right elbow and forearm, blood staining his white shirt high up near the right side of his neck. He went down on his back and tried to raise the little pistol; Denton whacked it aside with his left hand, then twisted it from his fingers as another shot from it ripped into a wall.

  Denton turned to Maltby, who was sitting with his back against a chair. He had spread his right hand over his chest as if he were about to take an oath. His eyes met Denton’s. He looked surprised and insulted. The bullet had hit him somewhere up near the collarbone.

  The young Lord Easleigh screamed, ‘He ruined my life.’

  Denton looked up. The young man still had the derringer. He was pointing it at Cherry, and as Denton watched, he took a step to move closer, raising the derringer as he moved. Unlike the .22, the derringer fired a big slug of metal, and another bullet from it might kill Cherry.

  Denton wanted Ch
erry to live. He said, rising, ‘Don’t do it, boy.’

  ‘He’s trash. He’s a criminal.’ He raised the little gun.

  Denton moved almost between them, the .22 visible but not pointing at him. ‘Don’t do it. If you do, I’ll have to shoot you. Leave him for the police.’

  ‘No! No—he’s evil, he’s bad. I’m going to hang because of him. Because of him!’

  ‘No. You’re young—a good lawyer—’ He stepped right between them. If Easleigh fired now, he’d hit Denton. Denton held out his hand. ‘Give me the gun.’

  The boy stared at him. His face was contorted with fear and with something that might have been triumph. He almost whispered, ‘There’s nothing left.’ He raised his voice again to a cry of pain. ‘He ruined my life!’ He put the muzzle against his chest, and Denton was not fast enough to stop him from pulling the trigger. He touched the wrist as the gun went off; the boy’s hand slammed against his fingers, and black smoke billowed back as if it had been exhaled from the falling body, and then Easleigh was on his back. Denton leaned forward. Easleigh went into sudden convulsions. His legs kicked; his back arched. Blood spurted from his chest, then fell to swelling right above his heart. Denton heard the boy’s feet thumping on the floor.

  ‘Help! Help!’ Denton had his head out a window. ‘Police! There’s been a shooting!’ He looked down through the bare branches of a tree. An elderly man with a dog was looking up at him angrily. ‘Get a policeman! There’s been a shooting!’

  ‘In the Albany?’

  ‘Please—a policeman. And a doctor. A man’s dying.’ Farther off, a young man was running towards them. A window came up across the lane. Denton shouted again, ‘Police! A shooting!’ and the elderly man tried to hurry in one direction as the younger one sprinted off in another.

  Denton looked down at Maltby. Cold air poured in through the open window. Maltby looked up at him with that same affronted expression he so often wore. He took his hand away from his wound and looked at the blood on it, then up at Denton again.

  ‘This is my best suit.’

  The noise in the CID room was muted because the hour was late. The shootings at the Albany had engaged, even amused, the detectives for part of the afternoon; now, most of them had gone off to a last duty or the pub or home. Munro, who looked as if he wanted to be heading home himself and who should have been, was still at his desk, Denton opposite him.