A Gentleman's Murder

by Christopher Huang

  Eric’s eye fell on the bookmarks sticking out of Emily’s file. Pulling them out, he laid them side by side on the desk. They were, in fact, a single sheet of hotel notepaper torn into three long pieces. The address of the Butterworth Arms hotel in Chichester was printed in one corner. Written across the reconstituted notepaper were three separate attempts at beginning a letter. Sir, it began, in an attractive schoolroom cursive. Go to hell! If you think I’m giv—This line was scored out in favour of a more polite opening, which was again scored out in favour of a third attempt: I will return tomorrow as instruc—And here it seemed that the author had given up on writing anything. No doubt they’d realised that if they were “returning tomorrow,” they might as well deliver their message in person.

  There was a date, too: the twentieth of July 1918—the very day before Emily’s disappearance was first noted, and probably the very day she’d actually disappeared.

  “Have you found something?” Mrs. Benson asked, watching Eric curiously.

  “Yes, I think I have.” Eric looked up from the notepaper. “Did your father allow many people access to these files?”

  Mrs. Benson shook her head. Everything here was meant to be confidential.

  “Someone else has been into Emily’s file,” Eric said. He considered the notepaper scraps and began to think out loud. “I doubt if these were left by your father; they’ve been placed to draw attention to Emily’s achievements, which is rather an odd thing for him to do. The fact that it’s hotel notepaper indicates someone who’d been staying at the hotel, which again is rather odd for a man whose own home is only a stone’s throw away. I doubt if Benson left these either; the creases have been pressed flat after years between the pages, so they’re not recent enough. The few lines we do see indicate a person who’s away from his post—not a policeman investigating Emily’s disappearance, then. It must be some stranger, but not someone who found his way here in secret, or he’d have been careful not to leave traces of his passing. It’s someone with enough weight to convince your father to let him into the files—someone he feared or respected … but probably not a friend, or he’d have stayed here instead of at the hotel.”

  Mrs. Benson stared at him. “I can’t think of any such person … and you got all of that from just those scraps of paper?”

  Eric didn’t look up. He was still considering the paper. “This isn’t a finished letter,” he continued. “It’s rubbish, so why is it here? Why wasn’t it crumpled up and dropped into a wastepaper basket at the Butterworth Arms? Perhaps it wasn’t in the writer’s nature to go hunting about for somewhere to toss his rubbish … We’re looking for someone who’s careless about his personal effects. He knows he shouldn’t leave rubbish lying about, so he tucks it into the nearest convenient receptacle—in this case, his pocket. That classic schoolroom handwriting, though … this is someone who’s also paid scrupulous attention to his lessons. A careful intellect with careless habits. Very likely, a member of the upper classes, someone who grew up under the tutelage of a strict governess, with servants to pick up after him.”

  An image came to Eric of Oliver Saxon tucking an apple core into the frame of a nearby painting … Oliver Saxon with a classical Greek text open on his lap, and doodling notes all over it. Eric hadn’t been close enough that night to take note of Saxon’s handwriting, though, and there were probably thousands of other men and women who might fit the profile.

  “Someone,” he mused, “was interested in Emily. Not in her disappearance, or there’d be bookmarks later in her file, but in her professional standing. This suggests that the visit took place before her disappearance became known. And the date on the letter suggests that it might actually have taken place on the day itself. I wonder if the Butterworth Arms still has its register from six years ago.”

  “The Butterworth Arms closed down very soon after the War. The owners lost interest when their son and heir returned from the front only to die from the Spanish flu. I remember it quite well—the funeral was only the day after my father’s.”

  Glatisant, who had been nosing about Eric’s shoes as he sat against the edge of the desk, leapt up now to brace his paws on Eric’s lap and grin up at him. “Oof!” Eric cried in surprise.

  Mrs. Benson laughed. It seemed that the combination of Glatisant’s antics and Eric’s investigations had served to make her forget her grief, at least for a little while. “I think he likes you, Mr. Peterkin. He doesn’t usually take well to strangers.”

  Eric shoved the dog off his lap, leapt off the desk, and hastened to return the files to their cabinets. “Perhaps I’m just not strange enough,” he said. “Stop following me, you daft dog. The Beast Glatisant is meant to be pursued, not to pursue!”

  Glatisant let out a bark and sat grinning with his tongue hanging out like the roguish monster he was. Mrs. Benson said, “Or perhaps you’re just strange enough to be more curiosity than threat. That moustache of yours, now … I doubt I’ve ever seen one that long on an Englishman.”

  Eric’s hand went protectively to his upper lip. “I saw several specimens just like it when I was in Paris to see the Olympic Games,” he protested.

  “Foreigners with foreign moustaches! Respectable Englishmen don’t permit that sort of length on their moustaches, I don’t think. Well, you know what I mean.”

  “I need all the help I can get to pass as a respectable Englishman?”

  Mrs. Benson blushed a bright red, and Eric grinned playfully at her. She replied, “I think we’re simply too accustomed to seeing long moustaches like that on caricatures of Guy Fawkes, who was neither respectable nor English.”

  “Perhaps.” Eric picked up the scraps of notepaper. “You won’t mind if I hold on to these, will you? I think they might be important.”

  “Be my guest.”

  The smile she gave him was genuine, and Eric found himself smiling right back.

  Abashed, Eric stepped away and said, “I think I had better go see what Avery’s got up to.”

  THE VEIL OF VERONICA

  IF ERIC HAD A FAULT, it was his tendency to run off after every interesting object that caught his eye. He’d started out in an earnest attempt to locate his friend, but he was wandering alone in a strange house, rendered stranger by its arrested transition from manor to rest home. And there was the lingering evidence, too, of its history as a war hospital. As Eric went from room to room, he couldn’t help but notice the stains on the floor where things had been spilled, or marks where beds had once been packed, sardine-close, into what might otherwise have been a generous space.

  Here, for instance, was the dining room. It had been a truly grand space once, with three gracious French doors opening onto a wide stone terrace. The floor was an intricate parquet, and the panelling below the rust-red Victorian wallpaper was elaborate. A pair of chandeliers still descended from the plaster medallions in the ceiling, but they were dusty now, and Eric doubted whether they still worked.

  Before the War, there would have been a long table down the middle, covered over with a snow-white tablecloth. Eric imagined the Edwardian gentry trooping in—gentlemen in dinner jackets escorting ladies in evening gowns, in order of precedence as dictated by social etiquette and understood by the lady of the house. Footmen as silent and deferential as the attendants at the Britannia would glide around the table with serving dishes of fragrant meats and soups while the guests made polite conversation about the weather. They’d have stayed the night, because one generally didn’t travel all the way into the country for a single evening, and repeat the whole process the next evening.

  It was still done elsewhere, Eric knew, and often enough; but it was not being done here. The War threw out the table and filled the room with cheap metal beds that scored scratches across the parquetry and chipped the wall panelling. The same gentlemen might have lain in those beds, attended by the same ladies, now in VAD nursing uniforms. The smell of savoury herbs would have been replaced by the sharp tang of disinfectant. Perhaps they still discuss
ed the weather, if only to stay sane.

  The Bensons must have carved out some other part of the house for their domestic use. An apartment upstairs, perhaps. They certainly didn’t use this room for dining now. The chandeliers, hanging a trifle lower than might be comfortable for someone to walk under, were Eric’s only clue that this might have once been the old dining room. Taking a deep breath, one smelled nothing at all.

  Avery would have insisted he felt a ghostly presence, and demanded to hold a séance.

  The passage from the dining room to the west wing of the house had been stripped of decoration, and the floors were bare. Only the windows facing the front drive had been boarded up: the back windows were clear to let in the muted north light. Outside, unpruned yew hedges closed in to scratch the glass with their branches. They were an additional barrier, cutting one off from the sunlight on the open green lawn.

  The air was still and carried a faintly unclean odour, but there was less dust than he’d expected. The passage was still in use but on a reduced scale. He pictured Mrs. Benson rustling down the shadowy corridor to whatever lay at its far end, a stranger in her own ancestral home. If his understanding of country house architecture was correct, this would have been the servants’ territory; even Mrs. Benson’s parents would have been counted outsiders here.

  The old barriers weren’t so much being broken down as allowed to rot away, even as other barriers grew up, unbidden, to take their place.

  Eric’s footsteps echoed into the dead silence and shadows, a stalker following just behind, just outside one’s field of vision. None of the bright sunlight on the lawn seemed to penetrate into the passage. The fine parquetry of the dining room had given way to terracotta tile; to reduce the unsettling echo, Eric found himself tiptoeing as softly as he could between the twin tracks of scratch marks where, once, something heavy had been repeatedly dragged back and forth. The thought of it screeching across the tile set Eric’s teeth on edge.

  The door to the kitchen was locked, but the next door opened into a simple white-tiled room. Here, Eric found the metal frame of a little cot pushed up under one of those inspirational posters of the war: a sailor-suited girl in a rowboat, with the slogan, Every girl pulling for victory. A small battered desk was in the opposite corner, and Eric guessed that this room had barely changed at all since the end of the War. Eric took a peek inside the desk’s lone drawer and found it empty. What could this room have been used for? It looked like the sick bay from his old school: there was Matron’s desk, and there was the cot where one could lie down until one felt well enough to return to one’s lessons. Eric concluded that the nurses must have used it in much the same way, as a place to get a bit of respite from the demands of the hospital. The poster, of course, was to remind them to return to their duty.

  Perhaps, before the War, this had been a serving pantry. In place of the cot and the desk would have been a sideboard with a row of chafing dishes where the food prepared in the kitchen would wait until the guests in the dining room were ready for them. He could picture the kitchen staff bustling out of the kitchen with their dishes to set down, and the footmen from the dining room bustling in to pick them up. And then, during the War, a nurse sitting down to rest while another stood to begin her shift.

  By now, he’d forgotten that he was meant to be searching for Avery at all. Surely Mrs. Benson must have already found Avery in the servants’ hall, telling fortunes to whoever would listen. For the moment, however, there was still too much to see.

  Indeed.

  After the little nurses’ station was a square vestibule with a door to an outside yard and an archway into some sort of storage room. There was also a sturdy oak door directly across from the nurses’ station, and Eric passed through this into a large sun-drenched, whitewashed room crowded with painted canvases. The smell of oil paint and mineral spirits assaulted his nostrils. The room went right up to the rafters, and a cupola skylight allowed diffused sunlight to filter down from above. There were wide mullioned windows on three sides of the room, none of them boarded up. Through the north windows, Eric could see the edge of the back lawn and the wind chasing fallen leaves over it; grassy waves undulated in the bright sunlight beyond the shadow of the roofline, and beyond the lawn were the woods. White curtains shielded the windows on the other two walls, blending the light into a uniform glow that reflected off the white walls and terracotta floor tiles.

  Near the door were an easel, a paint-spattered cabinet, and a divan heaped with soft flannel blankets. Eric’s curiosity was piqued; this room, unlike the others he’d seen so far, clearly saw extended personal use. Someone in this house was an artist, that much was obvious, though Eric didn’t recall noticing if either of the Bensons had the telltale paint scrapes under their fingernails. Then again, the easel was bare; it might have been a while since they’d taken up a brush.

  The divan had been recently used, though. There was a sort of warm muskiness about the blankets, and their arrangement suggested that someone had very recently been wrapped up in them. The strand of dark finger-curled hair caught in the upholstery confirmed Eric’s suspicions: Mrs. Benson had been here. And so had Glatisant, judging by the dog hairs.

  Eric paused. Why would Mrs. Benson be napping here, if she weren’t working on a canvas? Had she, in fact, slept the night here?

  Grief did things to a person, he thought uncomfortably. It had dawned on him that he’d intruded into the lady’s private sanctum, and the right thing to do would be to leave.

  He couldn’t avoid hazarding a glance at the paintings that filled the rest of the room, though, and that nearly undid him.

  Here was a man, a soldier, staring out of the canvas with his head held high. It took half a moment to realise that his right sleeve was empty, and his left hand was a misshapen stump.

  Here was another man, reclining in a chair, sun shining on the prosthetic leg cradled in his half lap. No blankets hid the stump of his left thigh, and behind him were the bright summer-green fields of the English countryside, through which he’d never run again.

  Another man, bare chested and pale, sat with his head bowed. A deep gash in his side, infected, wept pus onto the hands of unseen attendants as they changed his bandages.

  There was a full-figure nude: the shrapnel-twisted torso was a mockery of classical antiquity’s clean, athletic forms, and the face was so badly mangled, you only recognised the bright green eyes staring back into your soul.

  Next was a mustard gas survivor, a vision of melting flesh, red, raw, and gleaming. The face was barely human, and Eric had to look away … but there was nowhere else to look. Everywhere, he saw—immortalised in oils and watercolours, in various stages between study, sketch, and finish—the broken men and open wounds of the War. Impressionistic colours, bloodred and bile yellow, drew the eye and emphasised that which in real life might have only been flat detail.

  Eric remembered them. He remembered them rotting on the parapets, the ones who hadn’t lived. Benson’s killing wound had been comparatively clean, and the mustard scars discreetly hidden under Aldershott’s collar were comparatively mild.

  You knew they existed, of course, these maimed survivors of the War. You remembered the dead and you supposed the survivors were the lucky ones. You saw the ones who came out whole, and you focused on them instead, the majority who could go back to civvy street with little to mark them but a few stories to tell their future grandchildren. The maimed were relegated to a sort of no-man’s-land beyond one’s consciousness, to be conveniently forgotten.

  Looking around here, the situation was taken to the opposite extreme. One might suppose that no one at all had come back whole.

  “You know, this room is supposed to be private.”

  Mrs. Benson stood in the doorway, her black dress a sharp contrast with the bright, colour-filled room. She didn’t seem at all upset by the intrusion, however. Hastily, Eric put down the brushes that he only now realised he’d picked up in the course of examining the room.


  “I was just admiring these paintings,” he said, affecting a light tone to mask his discomfiture. “Are they all your work?”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Benson quietly shut the door behind her and walked forward. She’d relaxed somewhat over the course of their conversation in Benson’s office, and she relaxed further still in the presence of her paintings. The light caught the reds and yellows and reflected colour onto her pale cheeks, even as her gaze went lovingly from painting to painting. She seemed lost in fond memory, and her voice softened. “I’d always had a talent for it, and I’d had a bit of training. I painted a bit during the War, but there wasn’t much time for it then.” Here, she indicated some of the rougher studies and a series of watercolours. “And after the War … there didn’t seem to be much else to do.”

  “Not much else to do! But—”

  “I daresay you had plenty to do. It was different for me. I’d put so much of myself into my VAD work, I felt lost without it. So I took to painting. I looked up some of the men who’d been here, and I visited the hospitals where Father’s friends worked, and I painted what I saw.”

  “You could have picked a cheerier subject, I think.” There was something unquestionably morbid about these paintings. Eric had always chosen to dwell on life—the wholesome life of a home worth fighting for. What possessed anyone to focus instead on this … this unpleasantness?

  “You can’t just look away from someone because his injuries are unpleasant,” Mrs. Benson said gently. Her fingers brushed across the canvas of the mustard gas victim. “Please. Take a look around, and tell me what you think.”

  Eric looked again at the armless, the legless, and the cruelly disfigured. It was somehow easier in the trenches, where your concern was for immediate survival. Seeing these open wounds in the aftermath made the bile rise in his throat. “It’s the price of war, isn’t it?” he said, and swallowed. “People still have to live with the pain and suffering, even now that we have peace.”