A Gentleman's Murder

by Christopher Huang

  Eric nodded in sympathy. It looked to him as though Martha Aldershott had survived tragedy simply by not having the luxury of dwelling on it when it happened. “When I was at Sotheby Manor,” he said, “there seemed to be some confusion as to whether Emily was a maid or a nurse …”

  “Oh, that.” Mrs. Aldershott made a face and stood up again. “Sir Andrew Sotheby had no right to treat her as he did. I was furious when I realised. I had to read between the lines of Emily’s letters, because she was simply too accepting to complain to me about her situation. But her last letter seemed to hint at some sort of distress … There wasn’t a thing I could do while I was in Flanders, so I wrote to cousin Oliver and had him go look into what was going on. He’d always been fond of Emily, in his own bottled-up way. So he went and he looked and he wrote back that it was exactly as I suspected. But by the time I got back on leave, it was too late. She was gone.” She sighed heavily.

  “So Saxon was there on your behalf?” That explained why he had been poking around in Emily’s file: he’d come to check on her welfare, and part of that involved finding out about Sir Andrew Sotheby’s treatment of her. And if Aldershott was telling the truth, then Emily’s apparent distress must have been over the matter of her unborn child.

  “He was. And it sounds as though he put Sir Andrew Sotheby’s back right up, like a flag on a flagpole. When Oliver gets angry, he doesn’t care what he says. Mind you, Sir Andrew probably deserved it.”

  “If Saxon was fond of Emily,” Eric said, “he’ll probably want to know what happened to her too.” Saxon might still have something to hide, but could he turn out to be an ally after all?

  But Mrs. Aldershott shook her head. “I get the distinct impression that Oliver would rather drop the inquiry altogether. It isn’t like him. He’s never cared about the consequences to himself, as long as he’s done what he thought was right. Norris seemed to agree, but then Norris always struck me as the sort who doesn’t give a fig for yesterday’s storm as long as today is sunny. Mr. Peterkin, for all Oliver’s faults, he’s still my cousin, and I still remember the three of us as children—Oliver, Emily, and myself—tearing about the garden, sharing secrets, discussing our hopes for the future. I don’t like to think of Oliver being … being complicit in whatever happened to Emily. But I expect the truth will out, as they say.”

  Head bowed, Mrs. Aldershott hurried out of the study, leaving Eric to meditate on what he’d learnt.

  So, there was an innocent explanation for Saxon’s presence at Sotheby Manor. Eric had been almost certain that Saxon was his man, but Mrs. Aldershott’s explanation changed all that. On the other hand, there was Aldershott. Eric had not been expecting Aldershott’s reaction, and it convinced him that Aldershott certainly was hiding something with regards to Emily Ang and, subsequently, Benson’s murder. Even as Eric gained confidence in one quarter, he began to lose confidence in another.

  This new revelation about Emily’s unborn child, though. Who could the father be?

  Eric waited a moment or two longer in the study, half expecting either Norris or Saxon, or both of them together, to confront him with a piece of their minds as well. When neither one appeared, Eric finally ventured forth and made his way back to the drawing room.

  Aldershott, freshly buttoned up in a new collar and tie, eyed him balefully from a corner. Otherwise, he was motionless, a grey statue watching over the proceedings but holding itself aloof. The fellow was about as much fun as a barrel of your yearly taxes, in Eric’s opinion.

  Norris was valiantly trying to cheer up the party with a sprightly melody on the piano, and having some marginal success. Eric didn’t recognise the tune, though it felt as though he should.

  Wolfe, whose mind was on the music and not on any past mysteries, said, “That is a fascinating piece of work, but I know I’ve heard it before. Just this morning, in fact. It can’t be original.”

  “Impossible,” said Norris, stopping abruptly and lowering his hands from the keyboard. “I just finished writing it yesterday. Look!” He held up the crumpled sheet music, with all its attendant ink stains and jottings and notes.

  “Well, I think it’s lovely,” said Mrs. Aldershott firmly. “I can’t wait to hear it onstage, with lyrics.”

  That seemed to soothe Norris’s temper. Eric had never seen Norris upset before, but he supposed that Wolfe really did specialise in upsetting people. Norris, for all his happy-go-lucky ways, still had an artist’s sensitivity and a craftsman’s pride.

  Wolfe said, “I can’t wait, either. And I should love to meet the composer.”

  No amount of pleading could induce Norris to play more after that. He shoved his sheet music into his briefcase, barely managed a polite farewell to the Aldershotts, then slammed out of the house.

  Even Mortimer Wolfe’s urbane charm couldn’t salvage the dinner party now—not that he seemed inclined to do so. Given his treatment of Norris, it seemed more likely to Eric that Wolfe was aiming for quite the reverse. When Wolfe made his excuses only a few minutes after Norris’s precipitous departure, Eric politely but quickly followed suit.

  London was cloaked in a thick greenish-yellow fog when Eric stepped out of the Aldershott residence. Mayfair was an affluent neighbourhood, and when Eric had arrived earlier in the evening, the stately facades of the local terraced townhouses had loomed all around him like canyon walls of expensive red brick. None of that was visible now. The houses were barely discernible, dark shapes beyond the haze, and the pungent odour of sulphur hung in the air. It was indeed a pea-souper, one of those oppressive, isolating fogs that reduced your world to just a few feet in any direction.

  Wolfe stood by a lamppost a few houses down, at the corner of a somewhat busier street. He waved Eric over to the island of light around the lamppost, and Eric joined him. The headlamps of a passing motorcar bathed them momentarily in a white glare before disappearing again into the foggy darkness.

  “Couldn’t stand it much longer, could you? Of course not. I don’t know what Aldershott is thinking, gathering all of us so-called suspects together like that. Mutual support indeed! It’s more likely the murderer was sitting right there with us at the table.”

  “Or right here under this lamppost.”

  Wolfe flashed him a look of scorn and said, “You tell me, Peterkin. You seem to be the one who’s been asking all the intelligent questions—surprisingly enough—so tell me what you think.”

  “If, as Mrs. Aldershott says, Emily Ang was her adoptive sister, that connects her to both Aldershott and Saxon, and leaves me wondering about you and Norris. Did you know her?”

  “Only through a haze of morphine. And she was gone by the time I was taken off the stuff.”

  “So you were there when she disappeared! What about Norris?”

  “Malingering his head off to keep himself surrounded with pretty nurses. That man is a menace, Peterkin. I hope you haven’t let him within a hundred yards of your sister.”

  Eric had a suspicion that Wolfe already knew about the previous night’s outing to Brolly’s. This casual assessment of Norris’s popularity with the opposite sex made Eric wonder, though, if Norris might be the father of Emily Ang’s unborn child. For Penny’s sake, he hoped not. It didn’t bear thinking.

  A sturdy, snub-nosed Beardmore rolled out of the fog, cautiously slow in the reduced visibility. Its engine did not sound very healthy, but its slowness made it seem almost ghostly. Eric, mistaking it for a taxicab, raised his hand, but it cruised on by without stopping. There was a loud, explosive crack—a backfire—and in that same instant, Eric was thrown flat on the ground with Wolfe’s full weight pressed on his back.

  Eric didn’t have time to be shocked. He reacted instinctively, bucking sharply to kick himself free, then rolling across the mud into a defensive crouch. The other man, he saw, was now in a similarly defensive posture, but, instead of focusing on Eric, his eyes were scanning the fog for the source of the sound. Which was a backfire from a passing motorcar. Of course. The ot
her man—Wolfe, of course it was Wolfe; who did he imagine it was?—had had his back to the street, and must have missed seeing it. Even now, Wolfe’s expression was stony, savage, quite unlike the cool, supercilious half sneer he normally presented; and somewhere behind the mask, Eric thought he saw a flicker of blind terror.

  Eric straightened up, slowly. “Wolfe,” he said soothingly. “Wolfe! It was only a backfire from a motorcar.”

  Wolfe blinked. He looked at Eric as if seeing him for the first time. Slowly, he stood and brushed himself down. It was plain to Eric that even this action cost him significant effort. Wolfe took a deep breath. He screwed his eyes shut, opened them, and took another deep breath. Then he gave a disapproving glance at Eric’s coat, which was rumpled from their brief scuffle, and drawled, “Honestly, Peterkin. One simply cannot take you anywhere.”

  Eric let Wolfe tweak his coat into shape. He knew a number of the Britannia Club members were jumpy around loud noises, but this was the first time Eric had actually been jumped.

  A taxicab, responding to Wolfe’s summons, sailed up and came to a stop beside them. “Good night, Peterkin,” Wolfe said, climbing inside with every appearance of normality. “I’d wish you good luck in your quest for my peculiar methods of burglary, but I fancy it would be more to my interest to wish you the reverse.” The cab door shut, and Wolfe was gone.

  Eric watched Wolfe’s cab disappear into the fog, then leaned against the lamppost to consider everything he’d learnt this evening. It was enough to make one’s head spin. He really ought to write everything down at the first opportunity.

  This was odd. There was a sort of scar on the side of the lamppost that he was sure hadn’t been there a few minutes ago …

  That hadn’t been a motor backfire.

  Eric dived for the pavement again as another bang echoed off the buildings around him. He swore he saw the fog split like the Red Sea around the path of a bullet.

  Someone was shooting at him.

  Instinct took over. It was the War all over again: caught out alone in no-man’s-land, with bullets whizzing overhead and the wet mud sucking at his prone body. His instincts had saved him then, and they saved him again now. Without realising any of his thought processes, he recognised that the shot had come from the direction of the Aldershott house, and discarded any idea of running back that way. Instead, he scrambled to his feet and dashed around the corner of the intersecting street. He was sure he heard another two shots somewhere behind him, and someone shouting in the darkness. The important thing right now was to get away.

  The Haig Fund poppy, torn loose from Eric’s lapel in the excitement, floated into the gutter and disappeared.

  MAYFAIR IN THE DARK

  IN HIS WORK, Eric often read romantic passages about the London fog, and the way its soft tendrils twined about the lampposts, turning their glare into a soft, glowing halo. One felt alone in the fog, but protected: separated from the world and somehow cocooned against it.

  Or so some writers would have it. Eric had stopped feeling that way after the War, and there was certainly nothing romantic about it when one was being shot at.

  Eric dodged around the corner of a building about two streets down from Aldershott’s home and flattened himself against the wall. The fog had grown thicker. He couldn’t see farther than ten feet in any direction. Far from being insulated against the world, he felt separated from the herd—singled out, alone, and vulnerable to whatever dark entity prowled just beyond the limits of his vision.

  There had been foggy mornings in Flanders, too, Eric recalled, times when the mist rolled across no-man’s-land and hid the enemy from view, reducing one’s world to just the trench one was in and the patch of churned-up mud beyond the wire. One of his NCOs had remarked that Londoners, as used as they were to operating in the fog, must be at a natural advantage here. Rubbish. There was no advantage to the fog then, and there was no advantage to it now.

  Eric took a deep breath and stifled a cough. Those who romanticised the London fog generally forgot that it wasn’t just moisture from the Thames but pollution from a million coal fires across the city. That was what gave the fog its yellow tinge and its sometimes pungent odour. When one wanted to take great gulps of air, having just raced down the street to escape being shot at, the effect could be somewhat unpleasant.

  Was he still being shot at? Was that cordite he smelled, mixed in with the soot and sulphur?

  Eric peered around the corner into the swirling moisture. A shadow loomed in the yellow-green haze … the figure of a man? Yes, there was definitely someone moving towards him, a dark shape with a quick but silent tread.

  Eric remembered the patrols: meeting strangers in the foggy darkness, not knowing if he’d encountered friend or foe. Norris’s story of Wolfe’s great bluff seemed a lot more believable just now, as Eric struggled to see if the figure coming towards him was an innocent pedestrian or someone out to kill him.

  Quietly and cautiously, Eric backed away from the corner until it was just within the bounds of visibility. He ducked behind a nearby pillar box, and waited.

  The figure, slouching forward like a hound on a scent, came to the corner and peered around in all directions. This wasn’t merely a cautious pedestrian; this was someone actively looking for something—or someone. Dipping into a pocket, Eric’s fingers closed around a coin, which he flicked into the opposite direction. It made a light plinking noise as it hit the pavement, and the figure swung around after it, suddenly alert. Eric shrank into the shadow of the pillar box as best he could. It wasn’t adequate cover, but the darkness and the fog were his allies now.

  The figure passed just two feet away from the pillar box. Eric had just enough time to register his identity—Saxon!—before reaching out with one hand to grasp him by the back of his collar and pull him down. The old infantry training came to the fore as, with his other hand, Eric grabbed for Saxon’s right hand and the gun he expected to find there.

  Saxon let out a roar of outrage and swung Eric around against the nearby wall. Eric felt the breath driven out of him by the impact. Saxon tore away from his grasp, and Eric dodged to one side just in time to avoid being skewered by a pen-release knife.

  A knife. Not a gun.

  Eric caught Saxon by the wrist before he could strike out again. The two wrestled for one anxious minute before Eric finally managed to slam Saxon’s hand against the wall. The pen-release fell from Saxon’s grasp and clattered on the pavement. Eric planted the heel of his shoe on the blade and pushed Saxon violently away. Saxon went sprawling. He threw one arm up in a defensive gesture and shouted, “Don’t shoot!”

  Eric stood panting, his lungs filling with the unpleasant sulphurous fog. The cowering figure on the pavement had none of the expected manners of an enemy assailant; whoever the would-be assassin was, it wasn’t Saxon.

  Relaxing, Eric held out a hand. “I’m not going to shoot you, Saxon. Get up.”

  Saxon got to his feet warily, without Eric’s help. His normally rumpled appearance had been rumpled still further by the confrontation, and he looked more like a dockworker poured into a dinner jacket than the lordling he actually was. Eric, still keeping an eye on Saxon, retrieved the pen-release and pushed the slim double-edged blade back into its handle.

  “You were following me,” Eric said matter-of-factly.

  “That’s mine,” Saxon said, holding his hand out for the pen-release. “Give it back.”

  Eric held the weapon away. The engraved monogram, Saxon’s stylised initial, gleamed dully in the lamplight. “Why were you following me?”

  “I heard gunshots.” Saxon paused as though thinking this sufficient explanation. When Eric did not return the pen-release, he went on, “I thought I chased off whoever it was, but I couldn’t be sure. This damned fog … I heard running footsteps, so I followed.” He paused again. “It was you being shot at, wasn’t it?”

  Eric held out the pen-release to Saxon. “I reckon you might have saved my life back there, Saxon, in
which case I apologise for jumping you. But in my defence, I thought you were the one doing the shooting.”

  Saxon tucked the pen-release into his pocket and shrugged. “Don’t make a habit of it, Peterkin.”

  The mud-spattered memories of no-man’s-land had faded, and the fog was beginning to lose some of its sinister edge. That didn’t mean the danger was quite over. Eric looked around and said, with a studied nonchalance, “I’m headed for Piccadilly.”

  Saxon nodded and fell into step beside him. They set off at a brisk pace, then broke into a jog as they rounded the next corner. Nothing needed to be said: they both saw the wisdom in confusing the trail for anyone stalking them.

  “I notice,” Eric said as they paused within (theoretical) sight of Berkeley Square, “you never asked why anyone might be shooting at me.”

  “I bloody well know why you were being shot at, Peterkin. It’s because you were asking questions about Emily Ang. That’s why.”

  Say what you like about Saxon, he was direct. Eric turned to him, curious. “You know something about it?”

  “I know Benson was looking into Emily’s death, and now Benson is dead. You brought Emily up at dinner, and now someone’s trying to kill you. What do you think that suggests, Peterkin?”

  “Someone in that dining room wants to shut me up in the worst way possible.” While it had occurred to Eric earlier that he might be sharing a table with a murderer, he’d thought, at the time, the murderer to be Saxon. The possibilities had expanded since then.