A Gentleman's Murder

by Christopher Huang

  Aldershott was doing business with Benson? That was news. “I’m here as a private individual,” Eric said, wondering how to turn the conversation around to his questions, now he knew he was also dealing with a grieving widow. “And I would like to offer my condolences, of course.”

  “And to ask a few questions,” Avery broke in. “My esteemed colleague fancies himself a detective, you see; and this, of course, is a mystery.”

  Eric winced. Trust Avery to step in with no tact whatsoever! Mrs. Benson’s brow furrowed, and her expression grew guarded. She put down her teacup and folded her hands primly on her lap. “You’re not with the police, are you? I’ve already spoken to the Scotland Yard man, and I’ve nothing to add.”

  “Ah, the Scotland Yard man.” Here was an opening, and Eric seized it. “You remember him, of course? He was a patient here during the War, I think.”

  “A lot of men were. We were a war hospital—my father’s contribution to the war effort—and we took all the overflow from Graylingwell Hospital in Chichester.” When Eric expressed surprise, she explained, “Graylingwell may be a mental asylum now, but it was the primary military hospital around these parts during the War.”

  Eric nodded. “But you do remember Horatio Parker?”

  Mrs. Benson nodded, albeit reluctantly. “Yes, I remember him. He got the Victoria Cross afterwards, didn’t he? That sort of thing makes one sit up and take notice. I remember him as a bit of a Byronic figure: very intense, very inclined to brood.” She paused in thought, then said, “Mr. Peterkin, I think it’s clear from your questions that you didn’t come here to offer your condolences, as you claim, and that you really do fancy yourself some kind of amateur sleuth. I think this is in very bad taste.”

  “Mrs. Benson—”

  “Did you even know my husband at all?”

  “Before he died, your husband confided something in me. He had a box of four items with him, items that he said were some sort of evidence in a past crime—”

  “Oh, that!” Mrs. Benson huffed in exasperation and got to her feet. Glatisant, displaced from her lap, sat up with an air of curiosity. “Of course he’d confide in you.” Something in her manner changed, and she said, “Four items? What did he tell you, exactly?”

  Eric repeated to her what Benson had said to him in the vault. Then he described in detail the contents of his box: the medical report, the photograph, the surgical scissors, and the hypodermic kit with its identifying monogram. “He told me they were to right a great wrong. Obviously, that’s gone undone, and will likely remain so unless someone takes up the torch again, as it were. Is there anything you could tell me about what this ‘great wrong’ might be?”

  Mrs. Benson considered Eric for a long time, then sat down again and said, “Before my husband married me, he had an obsession with a Chinese maid here, an Emily Ang. Well, Emily up and disappeared one fine day, and Albert was heartbroken. That was six years ago, and I thought he’d got over it. He married me, after all. But then, I don’t know, suddenly he took it into his head that he needed to get to the bottom of her disappearance, as if it weren’t over and done with already, ancient history. Emily ran away, very suddenly, without a word to anyone, and without even stopping to collect her things. I don’t mean to cast aspersions on an entire race of human beings, but I think it’s unrealistic to assume that we, as decent Englishmen and -women, could understand how someone of her background would think. Very likely, it made perfect sense in her mind.” Mrs. Benson paused as both Eric and Avery stared back at her. “You must know how it is,” she added, appealing to Eric.

  “I’m sure I don’t,” Eric said at last, taken aback by this sudden outpouring of information.

  The tears had started up in Mrs. Benson’s eyes. She dashed them away with her handkerchief before taking up her teacup again. “Albert said it was about Emily,” she said, “and that it was something he had to do or he would never be able to sleep again. That’s all I know.”

  “You seemed surprised when I mentioned the number of items in his box.”

  “Obviously he didn’t tell me everything … the sentimental idiot.”

  Her hand trembled ever so slightly, but the rim of a teacup made a convenient mask for her emotions. Perhaps sensing his mistress’s distress, Glatisant tried to climb fully into her lap, and Mrs. Benson nearly spilled her tea pushing him off.

  “It must all be connected,” Avery piped up. “I’ll wager anything that whatever caused this Emily Ang’s disappearance is also the root cause of Benson’s murder. Are we in a Sax Rohmer story, Eric? I don’t want to infiltrate any opium dens in the Limehouse district if I can help it. Such nasty places, opium dens!”

  Mrs. Benson’s knuckle tightened on the handle of her teacup. The glare she shot Avery might have killed him if he weren’t so thoroughly armoured in sheer obliviousness.

  Eric said, “Avery, it occurs to me that the servants must know something about this. Why don’t you go speak to them? Or better yet, give them a Tarot reading; you’ve always said you could learn so much more that way. They might have coffee, too.”

  Avery took the hint. “As you wish, oh great commander.” He finished his tea and, tipping his beret to Mrs. Benson, lurched out of the room.

  Once he was gone, Mrs. Benson said, “I realise he’s your friend, Mr. Peterkin, but Mr. Ferrett strikes me as a rather insufferable sort, and now you’ve set him loose on my household. Not that I don’t appreciate the gesture, of course.”

  “I admit he takes a little getting used to,” Eric replied, “but he means well. I’m sure he’ll be doing his fortune teller act in the kitchen to everyone’s entertainment. He does raise a good point, though: your husband’s recent interest in this missing maid could be relevant to his murder. Did you speak of it to Inspector Parker?”

  Mrs. Benson shook her head. “A woman doesn’t like to think her old rival still has any sort of hold over her husband, Mr. Peterkin. Most women don’t like to think of their old rivals at all, unless it’s to gloat. I fancy it’s much the same with men. Why? Should I have?”

  “I doubt if it would have made much difference,” Eric said. “I saw Parker removing evidence from your husband’s room at the club. I’m sure he’s an interested party, and we’re not likely to get justice for your husband if we depend upon him. I just need to know how he’s an interested party. Was he here when Emily Ang disappeared?”

  “I don’t remember,” Mrs. Benson replied, somewhat shocked. “But … Scotland Yard! If you saw something, why not bring it up with Scotland Yard?”

  “It’s just my word against his, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Your word against his. And he’s a decorated war hero, a Victoria Cross.” After a moment’s thought, she said, “If you want to know anything about Parker’s stay here, it will be in his patient records. I had better show you. And I expect you’ll want to see what we have on Emily, too.”

  Mrs. Benson got up to lead the way. As they drew closer to each other to pass through the door, she stopped and turned to Eric, saying, “Mr. Bradshaw mentioned you to me, you know, when I went up to London after getting the news. They wouldn’t let me see Albert—I expect they thought it’d be too much for my fragile nerves—but Mr. Bradshaw told me about the bet he had with the other members, and how you were acting referee. He told me you were there when they found him.”

  “Yes. Yes, I was.”

  “They told me he’d been stabbed. They wouldn’t say how or where. They just assured me that he must not have suffered. I was a nurse, Mr. Peterkin; I ought to be able to judge for myself if he suffered or not.”

  “He was stabbed in the neck,” Eric told her, albeit reluctantly. He indicated on his own neck where he’d seen the handle of Aldershott’s letter opener protruding.

  “The carotid artery,” Mrs. Benson murmured, touching the spot on Eric’s neck. “If he suffered, it would not have been for long.” She paused. “Did he remind you of the comrades you’d lost in the War, and is that why you’re so in
terested?” There was a strange intensity, a combination of pity and eagerness, in the look she gave him.

  She must be thinking of when Benson was alive, Eric thought. “I respected his courage. Being a stretcher-bearer wasn’t much safer than fighting.”

  Some of the intensity faded from Mrs. Benson’s eyes. That hadn’t been what she meant. She turned away. “Follow me. I’ll show you the office Albert was using.” Passing through into the hall, Mrs. Benson shut the door on the bright light pouring through the windows of the reception room behind them.

  With Glatisant padding along behind, they proceeded through the hall and down one passage to the eastern wing of the house. The rooms here were bare, nearly everything presumably having been moved into storage. Any remaining furniture was cloaked in dust sheets, and only an empty gun cabinet in one room gave evidence to its former use. The past had been swept away. Pencil marks on the walls hinted at a promised future that had yet to manifest itself.

  Mrs. Benson explained: “You’ll have to excuse the mess. My father died of the Spanish flu almost as soon as the War ended. It was a difficult time, and there didn’t seem to be much point in keeping the place up. Such an awfully large place for a woman on her own. The Sothebys have been here for a long time, and it’s a lot of pressure to suddenly discover you might as well be the local Member of Parliament as far as the villagers are concerned. And of course, it turned out there wasn’t quite enough money after all to keep the place running. I couldn’t exactly marry a wealthy American heiress, as many in other families have done.”

  “You married Benson instead.” Eric wondered what the late Sir Andrew Sotheby would have thought of the match.

  “A little under a year ago now. Father wouldn’t have approved, but I’d always been fond of Albert, from the time he first came here with a broken leg and that lost-puppy look in his eyes. He was supposed to be sent back to Flanders after his recovery, but you could see he was too gentle for that sort of thing. And he was making himself so useful around here anyway. Father spoke to someone at the Chichester camp who knew the right people and had Albert permanently reassigned here.”

  Bradshaw, Eric thought.

  “After we were married,” Mrs. Benson continued, “Albert and I occupied just a small portion of the house and managed with just the one maid. But we started on some renovations last month, and Albert took over what used to be Father’s office when this place was a hospital.”

  She opened a door, and Eric found himself looking into a room lined with filing cabinets on one side and bookshelves on the other. The boards had been taken down from the one window, and sunlight spilled over a wide mahogany desk. He had expected the room to be dusty, but it was spotlessly clean. A cushioned basket lay in one corner, and Glatisant went to sit in it, still keeping an eye on Eric.

  Mrs. Benson said, “Turning the house into a military hospital meant turning everything upside down. But … I’d never known the house quite so full of life as when the rooms were filled with convalescing soldiers. Albert and I had the same idea, to go back to that part of its history, not the idle mansion it was before.”

  Eric turned to her in surprise. “A hospital? You were going to turn this place into a hospital again?”

  “Not quite a medical hospital. More of a … a rest home. An asylum for sufferers of addiction. A place for people who need help, but a more gentle sort of help than they’d get at Graylingwell. The air out here on the downs is wonderful, and with the proper staff …” She stopped, and the life drained away. “It’s all moot now that Albert’s gone. I just don’t know what to do.”

  Eric, in the meantime, had begun exploring the room. The bookshelves were full of learned works of medical literature. The desk was bare, and its blotter unblemished; Benson might have chosen to use this room as his study, but it seemed he still conducted most of his work and correspondence elsewhere. The filing cabinets looked more promising. Mrs. Benson indicated the one where her father had kept the hospital’s personnel records. “Anything you might want to know about Emily would be in there,” she said.

  “With the hospital personnel?” Eric remarked. “I thought you said she was a maid.” Emily Ang’s file was the first alphabetically, and Eric pulled it from its drawer. A few scraps of notepaper had been tucked into it as bookmarks, pushed so deep that he almost missed them. Opening to the first of these, Eric realised that Emily Ang had not, in fact, been a household maid but a qualified hospital nurse. “She seems,” he said, “rather overqualified for a maid.”

  It must have been quite the slap to the face, and Eric sympathised. He himself had expected a posting to military intelligence when he first volunteered, only to find that no such position was in store. At least, he reflected, his expectations hadn’t been based on paper qualifications, as Emily Ang’s had.

  “She came to us as a maid,” Mrs. Benson insisted. “She was a lady’s maid to Martha Saxon—you probably know her as Mrs. Edward Aldershott, but this was before her marriage. Martha was a military nurse, and when she was posted to Flanders, she left Emily with us. One does not bring one’s maids and valets into a battlefield, after all.”

  Of course. Mrs. Aldershott had spoken of Emily that night at the club. Had Eric known that the Emily mentioned then was the very centre of the mystery that led to Benson’s murder, he might have begun by speaking with Mrs. Aldershott instead.

  “Even so, the documents here say she was fully qualified as a hospital nurse, trained at Netley Hospital and registered with the Royal British Nurses’ Association.” Netley Hospital was a military institution; as Eric understood it, training there meant Emily Ang was qualified as a military nurse and could have gone to Flanders with Mrs. Aldershott if she so desired.

  Mrs. Benson shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that. Perhaps my father didn’t think she was up to the exacting standards of an English nurse. She did as much nursing work as anyone else, when it came down to that, and she was lodged with the nurses too. She was a nurse in all but name, now I think about it.”

  Or perhaps, Eric thought, your father didn’t fancy seeing his precious daughter take orders from a Chinese upstart.

  Eric thought he knew something about the hierarchy within the nursing profession, and he suspected it could get as sticky as the rank structure in the Army. A woman who was only unofficially a nurse might have a pretty poor lookout among the official ones.

  “You know,” Mrs. Benson added, “I was only unofficially a nurse, too. The military nurses didn’t think much of us VADs when we first started working together. They wouldn’t say it to your face, of course, but I’ve overheard at least one of them describe us as ‘rich girls playing at nurses.’ They warmed to us eventually, but that was a respect we had to earn.”

  Glatisant had come out of his basket and was now nosing about Eric’s shoes, his tail whipping against the side of the cabinet. Eric gave up trying to push him away, and finally sat down on the desk with Emily’s file wide open beside him.

  The only reprimand was for “carelessness” in losing her hypodermic kit a few days before her disappearance, but the kit was her own and hadn’t actually been issued by the hospital. It made Eric think of the kit from Benson’s box, but the monogram there had been an S, not one of Emily’s initials. Aside from that, her service was exemplary. The bookmarks indicated the key points, but Eric was more interested in the end of it.

  She’d had her day off on the twentieth of July 1918, a Saturday; she had been expected to report for work the next day, Sunday, but she never appeared. Sir Andrew had initially assumed truancy, and written a sharply worded note to that effect in her file. When she failed to appear for dinner or tea, a search was made of the hospital and grounds, to no avail. The police were alerted the following day—Monday, the twenty-second of July—but very little came of it. Sir Andrew’s final note in her file was that he’d thought her more reliable than that, but “it just goes to show.”

  Just what it went to show, Eric didn’t know. He suspecte
d he would not have got on at all well with the late Sir Andrew Sotheby. As for the police inquiry, Sir Andrew was of the opinion that, given their reduced manpower due to the War, they had little hope of tracking her down.

  Eric shook his head. The thing he’d come to find was Horatio Parker’s connection to Benson. In the rush of new information, he’d almost forgotten, but here were cabinets full of the hospital’s records for everyone who’d passed through the place during the War. If there were any sort of hint of Parker’s involvement in the disappearance of Emily Ang, it would be here.

  Eric found Parker’s file very quickly. He sat down again on the desk and opened the file in eager anticipation.

  Here were the details of his admission. He’d been at the Graylingwell war hospital for his physical injuries before being transferred here for the remainder of his convalescence. There was a note that he was suffering from shell shock and needed rest.

  But this couldn’t be right. “Horatio Parker was discharged from here on the twelfth of July? A full week before Emily’s disappearance?”

  “If that’s what it says,” Mrs. Benson said, “then that’s what happened. My father was quite meticulous about his records. I think he found his true calling when he opened up the house to the wounded soldiers. They still think quite highly of him both at the Royal West Sussex Hospital and at Graylingwell.”

  That’s torn it, Eric thought, closing Parker’s file. If Parker had left the hospital before Emily’s disappearance, then there was hardly any chance at all that he could have been involved in it. Eric had been so sure that this disappearance was the thing at the bottom of Benson’s murder. It was Emily’s portrait that Parker had removed from his room, after all, and Mrs. Benson had said that the missing objects from Benson’s box were related to her disappearance. It all added up to a concerted effort to stifle the investigation of Emily Ang, and if Parker were not involved …