A Gentleman's Murder

by Christopher Huang

  A key turned in the lock of the door. It was Old Faithful. “The inspector will see you now, sir.”

  So soon? “Has he spoken to everyone else already?”

  Old Faithful shook his head. “He spoke to me and to the two attendants who were up last night, but you’re the first of the gentlemen he’s wanted.”

  Jacob Bradshaw had been club secretary for longer than anyone cared to remember, and over the years had impressed the stamp of his personality on his office in a way that Aldershott, president for only half a year, had not. It was comfortable, cosy, and quite overcome with tortoises. They peered out from pictures and prints, and porcelain specimens sat atop stacks of meticulously sorted correspondence.

  Visible through the window was the narrow passage leading to the back door in the utility court behind, and the brick wall of the next building; but sunlight came through it to gleam on the sides of a chipped teapot and a teacup commemorating the coronation of Edward VII in 1902.

  Inspector Parker sat behind Bradshaw’s desk, looking very un-tortoise-like. Another policeman stood in the corner by the window, notebook in hand. Behind him, in a watercolour print from some children’s storybook, a tortoise wobbled down a country lane on a battered blue bicycle. Parker’s expression, by contrast, was grim and businesslike, accentuated by the disfiguring scar on his cheek. He checked a dull brass pocket watch and gestured to Eric to take a seat. Another policeman came in to take Eric’s fingerprints, and then, as Eric struggled to wipe the ink from his fingertips, the inspector began with a few standard questions about Eric himself and his movements over the past twenty-four hours.

  Eric repeated to the inspector the events of the previous night: how Wolfe had proposed the bet to Benson, and how Aldershott had taken it up. He told the inspector what Benson had said about the items in his box contributing towards the righting of a “great wrong,” and what he’d seen of them.

  “One of them was a medical report,” Eric said, with a sideways glance at the policeman taking notes. He wondered how they’d take this. “Your name was on it.”

  Parker’s expression didn’t change. “You don’t say. Can you give any further details?”

  “I saw that it was about a facial wound that wanted stitches,” Eric said. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw the scar twitch, ever so slightly. “There was also a photograph of a nurse having a birthday party, and you were in it.”

  “You think I’m an interested party.”

  The statement was a challenge, and Eric nodded. In his corner, the note-taking policeman had raised his head to look questioningly at the inspector. Parker, meanwhile, remained impassive and expressionless; he might have been carved out of wood for all the human emotion he showed.

  “Can anyone else corroborate your statement?” the inspector asked.

  “One of the attendants, perhaps? Benson had left it to them to put those things away. Whoever served him must surely know. Wolfe said he found only the scissors and the hypodermic kit in the box, not the photograph or the medical report.”

  The inspector nodded. “If what you say is true, Mr. Peterkin, my handling of this case will be mercifully short.” He checked his pocket watch again, then called for another policeman to fetch him the register for the vault boxes.

  It hadn’t occurred to Eric that they had a register for the vault boxes.

  “According to your porter,” the inspector said, “they take careful note of the items received from members when they’re tasked to handle the boxes themselves. If Mr. Benson handed these objects over to be put away for him, there will be a record.” It was only a minute before the policeman returned with the requested vault register.

  The entry for Benson’s box listed only a pair of scissors and a hypodermic kit. There was no mention of either of the items implicating Inspector Parker.

  “But this is all in pencil,” Eric protested. “Someone’s rubbed out the other two things from the list. If you look really closely at the paper—”

  Parker’s face, if anything, grew grimmer. “That’s quite enough, Mr. Peterkin. I don’t know what your game is, but making a false statement to the police—fabricating evidence—is a very serious offence. I could have you charged with perverting the course of justice.”

  “I know what I saw!”

  “I’m sure you do.” Inspector Parker got up and went to open the door. “If that is the extent of your assistance, I believe we’re done. You’re free to go.”

  Was that it? Eric stood and eyed the inspector, uncertain. Somehow, he thought he’d have a much harder time of it, and he wasn’t sure whether he should be relieved or disappointed.

  “What about the others?”

  “They’re not your business,” the inspector said. “When I say you’re free to go, I mean it. Go home, and stay out of our way. If we need you, we’ll know where to find you.”

  He was being summarily dismissed. Far from being a focus of suspicion, he was being cut out altogether.

  Eric hesitated at the threshold, then turned to face the inspector. “I saw you remove something from Benson’s room just now, when you thought no one was watching. It was a photograph of a Chinese woman. Who was she?”

  Surprise registered only fleetingly on Parker’s face, and then it closed off again behind narrowed eyes and lowered brows. Over in his corner, the inspector’s assistant stood with his arms folded, not even bothering to write down the details of this particular interaction. The inspector took a step forward, forcing Eric back against the doorframe. He smelled of strong coffee and stale sweat.

  “Don’t ask stupid questions,” the inspector said, his voice a steely whisper, too low for his assistant to hear. “And stay out of my way.”

  Abruptly, he shifted his position and shoved Eric bodily through the open door. Eric sprawled over the floor of the corridor, and a pair of policemen popped their heads out of the next office—Aldershott’s, where they’d been busy with fingerprint powder and brushes—to see what had happened.

  “Perverting the course of justice,” Parker said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Interference. Wasting police time. Count yourself lucky I don’t arrest you on the spot. Good day, and go home.” Turning, he shouted for someone to fetch him Mortimer Wolfe, then slammed the office door shut.

  THE VIGIL

  “THERE’S NO PLEASING YOU, IS THERE?” Penny Peterkin shook her head in exasperation. “First, you’re miserable because you think the police will suspect you, and now you’re miserable because they don’t. I do wish you’d make up your mind.”

  Eric had taken Parker’s instruction to heart and retreated all the way back to the Peterkin family home in Barchester. This was a long, low-slung structure with the characteristic half-timbering ascribed to Tudor architecture and more gables and dormers than was wise. Ivy and honeysuckle competed for supremacy over its walls and roofs, and a six-foot-high hedge hid it from the road. With Eric now permanently established in London, it was perhaps a little too big for its occupants; but Penny’s passion for horses made it the unofficial meeting place of the local hunt club, and her hunt club friends threatened to blow out the diamond-paned windows with their laughter.

  Eric, sunk into an overstuffed armchair by the fire, just shrugged. “There’s something rotten at the heart of all this. I feel as though I’ve been shut out of it just so people can twist things to their own ends with no one the wiser.”

  “Most people would be pleased as punch to be shut out of a murder inquiry.”

  “Well, I’m not most people.”

  “No. You’re more infuriating.” Penny threw herself into the opposite chair and regarded him with a mixture of sisterly devotion and annoyance. She was younger than him by three years, but taller by half a head, having inherited their father’s powerful build and most of his features. This enabled her to pass for an Anglo-Saxon thoroughbred most of the time, whereas Eric struggled to convince people that he was not, in fact, adopted. Eric often wondered if some of their mutual friends had
accepted him only because they’d unwittingly accepted her first.

  Penny was well respected in the community as a young woman of uncommonly good sense. Both the house and the household finances were well maintained, and she often effected minor repairs on her own; but she always seemed to regress into something much younger when her brother was about. Coming in the gate this evening, Eric had caught her on the roof, wearing an old cast-off pair of their father’s trousers as she replaced the storm-damaged shingles. She seemed quite peeved at having her self-sufficiency found out.

  “Let me see if I understand this,” she said. “Someone got into the Britannia Club, despite it being all locked up for the night, and did a murder. And you think it might have been the police inspector himself, because he’s definitely mixed up in this somehow. Am I right so far?”

  Eric nodded. “Parker removed a photograph from Benson’s room. That’s tampering with the evidence, Penny.”

  “Have you tried speaking to someone at Scotland Yard?”

  “Yes. Parker’s apparently their most hardworking detective; it’s my word against his, and he’s a VC.”

  Eric crossed his arms and glowered into the fire. More thoughtfully, he continued: “Old Faithful and the night attendants vouched for each other. This seems too much of a mess for Wolfe. Norris had no way of getting rid of any bloodied clothing—he was locked in as much as everyone else was locked out. And it seems unusually foolish of Saxon to have come in by the back way and let on that he had his own key if he’d done it.” Eric paused. “I wonder how Wolfe got in.”

  “Eric.”

  “What is it?”

  Penny was staring at him with something bordering on horror. “I know that look on your face. It’s the same look you get when you’re opening Christmas presents. You think this is just a jolly good game.”

  “No, I don’t!”

  “I don’t believe you. Ever since you came back from the War … I think you left a piece of your soul behind after shooting at all those Germans. You’ve no feeling left. Everything’s just a puzzle for your own amusement, and don’t tell me that’s not the real reason you review only murder mysteries these days. There’s a man dead—”

  “Do you think I don’t know that?” Eric snapped.

  Penny studied him for a long minute, then looked away. “I wonder what Daddy would say.”

  There was another minute of silence before Eric replied. “I could ask.”

  Eric turned off his electric torch as he passed through the lychgate into the churchyard of St. Tobias. His father had found the concept of battery-powered anything, torches in particular, immensely fascinating; but now seemed to be a time for darkness.

  The church caught the moonlight with its ancient grey stone. It had stood here since at least two centuries before the Reformation, and it had no plans of ever changing. Tobias, an Old Testament hero, might never have been a proper saint in the usual sense of the word, and the Church of England might have relegated the Book of Tobit to the no-man’s-land of the Apocrypha, but every school-child in the parish knew the story. It was told in the stained-glass windows: Tobias, son of Tobit, journeyed with the angel Raphael, rescued the lovely Sarah from a demon, cured his father’s blindness, and lived happily ever after.

  Eric loved the story. But his father often pointed to its comparatively dull first chapter—Tobias’s father, Tobit, working tirelessly to give decent burials to the destitute dead, people he never knew in life—as the book’s true lesson. “A gentleman does what he does,” he’d said, “not because he’ll win the hand of the princess, or because he has an angel of God in his corner, but because people deserve justice and respect.”

  It was especially quiet in here. Yew trees, that favourite of churchyards everywhere, leaned over the walls with twisted trunks and tightly furled foliage to shade the monuments and resting places gathered below, shielding them from the general flow of village life. In the section reserved for the Peterkin family, many of the monuments had been erected in memory of men lost in foreign lands, enough that they almost equalled the Peterkins who’d actually been buried there.

  Eric’s fingertips brushed over the smooth marble of angel wings as he found his way to the graves he sought. Magdalen Peterkin’s headstone featured a phoenix rather than an angel. It was the only indication that she had been born to an Eastern culture. She’d died young—Eric had been twelve at the time, and his sister only nine—and people, more charitable to her in death than in life, whispered that it had been a sin to uproot her from her homeland and bring her here to the comparatively cold and dismal England.

  Not to Colonel Berkeley Peterkin’s face, though. Never to his face.

  Nights in the country were different from nights in London. One forgot how the lights and noise of the city intruded on one’s consciousness until one got away from it all. Then the silence and darkness were startling in their depth. In the sky, the bright constellations in their slow celestial dance made one stop to stare in awestruck wonder. October meant harvests and plentiful larders, and the smoky scent in the air of burning leaves. It also meant a gathering chill, mist on one’s breath, and the coming death of the year. Eric paused to absorb the stillness, then sat down beside the Colonel’s plain rectangular slab. The damp grass soaked into his trousers, but he didn’t much care about that.

  “Hi, Mum. Hi, Dad. I’ve missed you.”

  There wasn’t a lot of difference between the Chinese devotion to one’s ancestors and the Christian communion of saints, or so Eric often thought. Certainly, it had been his mother’s favourite tenet of Christianity after her conversion, and Eric had an idea that religion in the Peterkin household had got a touch more High Church afterwards as well.

  Moonlight slanted through the trees to pick out the sharp lettering cut into the marble. Magdalen Peterkin’s headstone bore an inscription from John 6:37: Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. The Colonel’s headstone bore only the chapter and verse reference for Matthew 10:39.

  “There’s been a bit of a mess at the club,” Eric began, brushing away a few fallen leaves. “I wonder what you’d make of it.”

  It was easy to talk to the Colonel. It always had been. The old man never interrupted, and he always seemed to understand exactly what you meant. Even as Eric poured out his account of the past two days, he could imagine his father sitting back in his armchair under a shaft of warm sunlight, those famously thick Peterkin brows half shading half-closed eyes. Eric would come to the end of his story, and there’d be a pause as he wondered if his father had in fact fallen asleep. Then the Colonel would suddenly come up with something seemingly beside the point but curiously insightful all the same.

  What would the Colonel say?

  Eric shifted his position to lean back on the cold marble headstone. Gazing up into the stars, he let his mind drift back to his father’s funeral service. That had been two years ago now—1922. Eric remembered a day with too much sun and too little warmth, and the smell of lilies over the strange, sickly sweet odour of embalming work.

  There’d been a surprisingly large crowd in attendance. Penny, supported by a pair of old school friends, had wept discreetly into a handkerchief, keeping her emotions respectably in check. Eric himself hadn’t shed a tear; he’d calmly busied himself with arranging the funeral, dealing with the lawyers, and playing host to the mourners who’d travelled some distance to be there. The undertaker tried to cheat them of seven shillings, and Eric had to have a few firm words with him behind the church.

  Tonight hadn’t been the first time Penny accused Eric of a lack of feeling. But then, as now, as it always had been, it was the only way to stay sane.

  Jacob Bradshaw, the eternal club secretary, had been there, along with the then-officers of the Britannia Club and a strangely emotional Old Faithful. Eric had just come around from behind the church when he met Bradshaw in the shade of a spreading hawthorn by a quiet corner of the churchyard.

  “I’m glad to see you’re holding up
,” Bradshaw said. A cautious smile twitched up behind his Father Christmas beard, gaining confidence as Eric smiled back.

  “Life goes on,” Eric replied. “One has to move forward somehow.”

  Bradshaw nodded and came to the point. “I wanted to talk to you about your membership, Peterkin.” Bradshaw had never called him Peterkin before. He’d always been Eric. Eric swallowed, realising the implications of the change. Bradshaw continued. “You know there have always been Peterkins at the Britannia Club, and your father would have liked you to carry on the tradition.”

  “I’ve been at Oxford,” Eric replied, glancing over at the monuments to the Peterkin cousins who’d fallen in the War. He hadn’t considered what it meant to be the last male representative of the family. “It wasn’t practical while I was still neck-deep in books and lecture notes. Now that I’m done, a club in London would be a very fine thing; but … well, Dad always said he’d sponsor me, and that seems quite out of the question under the circumstances.”

  “Not entirely.” Bradshaw pulled a set of folded documents from his pocket. They were the application forms for membership at the Britannia Club. “Your father signed these before he died, and of course the rest of the board signed them as well—we’re doing things backwards, but it’s your father’s final wish, after all.” He held out a fountain pen. “The only signature missing is yours.”

  Eric took the fountain pen and looked over the forms with just a touch of wonder. He’d always loved visiting the Britannia Club, those times he met with his father in London. There really was no question about it. Eric signed the papers and handed them back, and in that instant, he belonged.

  Bradshaw tucked the papers away with a genial smile. “Your father would be proud of you.”

  Would he really?

  They’d stopped on the outskirts of the Peterkin section of the churchyard. The mourners had moved on, but a pair of gravediggers were carefully filling in the Colonel’s grave. Bradshaw gestured to another gravestone, one of Eric’s ancestors, and said, “There’s old Fitzwilliam Peterkin. He was a founding member of the Britannia Club, you know, and a fine gentleman by all accounts. There’s a painting at the club, in which he sat as a model for one of the figures.”