A Gentleman's Murder

by Christopher Huang

  “You lied to the press about Joseph Davis and all those men who’d shot themselves.”

  “I gave my word to let them have their dignity. That’s more important than the truth sometimes, and the War left some men with precious little of it.”

  Eric thought of the ex-servicemen whom Old Faithful had admitted into the club lodgings. Supposedly, it was Aldershott’s idea, but Eric wouldn’t be surprised if Bradshaw had had a hand in it as well.

  That wasn’t the same thing, though. “What if it’s a choice between one man’s dignity and another man’s justice? What then?”

  “What do you think, Peterkin?” Bradshaw poured himself a cup of tea and sat back to sip at it. He looked far too comfortable to be plagued much by any moral dilemmas. “Questions like this are far from exceptional in this world, and I’m surprised that you seem to think they are. That’s another thing your father understood.”

  “My father taught me about honour,” Eric said. “He taught me that a gentleman does what’s right—”

  “No. A gentleman does what he thinks is right. That may not be the same thing at all. He may do what’s right for the wrong reasons, or he may get his hands dirty doing wrong to achieve the right ends. It’s never so simple as any code of honour will have you believe. Yes, I lied about Joseph Davis, and a dozen others besides. But I dare you to look their widows and children in the eye and tell them you think I was wrong.”

  Eric watched Bradshaw, once again thinking of the different masks the man wore. He was beginning to suspect that, if there did exist a sinister side to this personification of Father Christmas, it was not in opposition to the fatherly persona, but an extension of it. Bradshaw would do anything for his men, even if it meant covering up a murder.

  Benson, a conscientious objector, had never been one of Bradshaw’s men.

  “Where were you last Friday night?” Eric asked, turning to simpler topics. “I don’t remember seeing you anywhere about.”

  There was a shift behind Bradshaw’s beard that might have been his mouth curling up in triumph. He was willing to keep playing the game, but there wasn’t much fatherly favour in it now. “As I told the police, I was at a music hall. Brolly’s. Mr. Breuleux will vouch for me, I’m sure.”

  Of course he would. As Bradshaw would vouch for anyone and everyone.

  Eric got up and said, “I know you were lying about Inspector Parker not being at Sotheby Manor, by the way. Benson had a photograph that proved he had been there. If you’d said you didn’t remember, that would be one thing; but you said quite definitely that he hadn’t been there. And I notice you didn’t wonder why I’d think to connect Parker with Sotheby Manor: you knew the question was coming, and you were waiting to feed me the lie. Why? Does someone’s dignity depend on Parker being absent that day?”

  That got through to Bradshaw, and the Father Christmas facade hardened into that of the rarely seen sergeant major. “That’s none of your business, Peterkin. Horatio Parker is a fine man, and I won’t have you besmirching his honour for the sake of some long-forgotten story.”

  “Was he responsible for what happened to Emily Ang?”

  “I can’t answer that!”

  “You seem to be answering for many more people than you’ll admit. Not just Davis and all the men in those ‘accidental’ shootings. I reckon I can understand those. But I wonder where it all ends.” In his mind, Eric flipped through images of the various people connected to the murder. Were there any inconsistencies in their pasts that Bradshaw might have had a hand in? Aldershott? Saxon? Norris?

  Eric stopped on Norris.

  “Norris was supposed to have spent three months in Italy immediately after his election to the board of officers in April,” Eric said. “But that’s not true, is it? There’s a portrait of him in Sotheby Manor dated in May. What’s the story there, Bradshaw? What did you do, and why?”

  But Bradshaw had settled back again, at ease, laugh lines creasing. “Ah, that’s got nothing to do with me. Don’t look so surprised, Peterkin. I can’t be involved in everything that happens in the British Empire, no matter how the gossip builds me up. I believe Norris was renting the old groundskeeper’s cottage from the Bensons. That’s all I know. I expect he simply lied about where he’d been to make it all seem that much more romantic.”

  “But if he was only in Sussex, why would someone else have to cover his duties here for three whole months?”

  “I can’t answer that. Because I do not know.”

  Bradshaw was telling the truth this time, Eric thought. He’d been too agitated about Parker for this new ease of manner to be anything but genuine relief.

  “Will that be all, Peterkin?” Bradshaw asked, getting to his feet to open the door for Eric.

  “For now,” said Eric, going to the door. “This isn’t over yet.”

  “Peterkin.” Facing him, Bradshaw rested a hand on Eric’s shoulder and looked him in the eye. It was a familiar gesture, but not at present a welcome one. “I know it’s hard to let things go, but please, take my advice and give this up. Your father would have understood. I give you my word that no one here had anything to do with the murder, and after all, was Benson worth turning the club on its head? If Emily had been murdered, then he’s at least an accomplice to murder.”

  “And what does that make you?”

  Bradshaw sighed. “One who’s been around for far too long, and who’s seen too many good men come and go.” He gave Eric’s shoulder a friendly squeeze, and there was a sympathetic smile behind the beard; but Eric thought he caught a gleam of something ancient and reptilian in the depths of those eyes.

  Eric closed the door on Bradshaw’s office with a slight sense of regret. He didn’t know if he could really think of fatherly old Bradshaw in quite the same way again.

  It wasn’t until he was halfway down the corridor that he thought of it: Mrs. Benson had never spoken of any business dealings with Norris. She had, however, spoken of renting the old groundskeeper’s cottage to Aldershott. What Aldershott wanted with the groundskeeper’s cottage of a deteriorating country house was a mystery, but Eric had the idea that it must have had something to do with Norris.

  Of course, he could speak to Norris, but Eric thought Aldershott owed him an explanation for more than just a cottage rental.

  THE HOUSE OF WANDS

  THE SCAR ON the lamppost where a bullet had narrowly missed its target the night before was still there. Eric could see no sign of a bullet hole in the tarred wood blocks with which the street was paved, however. Unless the whole thing had been his imagination, one of the houses opposite was going to have a bit of a surprise one day when the owners repointed their brickwork.

  All around him, residential Mayfair that Saturday morning was awake and oblivious with ladies strolling along to pay calls on close acquaintances. The terraced townhouses stretched down the street on either side, some in limestone but most in brick, and all of them patterned with tall mullioned windows in regular rows and columns. Tiny, narrow basement courts separated the houses from the street, with wrought-iron fences to keep one from falling in.

  The memory of the gunshots in the fog seemed more unreal the more he thought about it. The sense of isolation had reminded him of Flanders, and with Flanders had come the memory of gunshots. But Saxon had heard it too, hadn’t he? Eric clung to that thought. If someone else had heard the shots, he couldn’t have imagined them. Could he?

  Meanwhile, the sense of Bradshaw’s hand on his shoulder still lingered, much as Mrs. Benson’s touch on his jaw had, though Eric took something vastly different from it. It was … not unclean, precisely, but similar. Bradshaw didn’t offer his support in expectation of anything, but one still felt bound by the obligations of gratitude; and when the time came, Bradshaw was not above appealing to that obligation. It was, Eric realised, integral to his network of favours owed and rendered, and how he Got Things Done.

  Eric didn’t think he owed Aldershott much. The relationship there was more antagonist
ic, and therefore simpler. One knew exactly where one stood.

  “Morning calls,” that ill-named mainstay of social life among the well heeled, generally took place between three and six in the afternoon; at eleven in the morning, one called only on intimate friends—the ones who didn’t mind a bit of informality. Eric wasn’t so intimate with the Aldershotts as to permit a social call in the actual morning, but the butler recognised him from the previous night’s dinner party and, perhaps assuming Eric to be here on business, admitted him into the study without comment.

  Little had changed in the study since last night, except that he was seeing it now in the bright light of morning, and he had time to really examine his surroundings. The rosewood bookcase, he saw, was full of dry financial material. The taxidermied animals were more fascinating, though the daylight emphasised their lifelessness and gave them a more eerie, unearthly effect. He remembered the Andean condor over the door, and now he was able to identify several others: a glassy-eyed lemur, a pair of beavers, the heads of animals too big to fit into a small urban study whole.

  Eric was still examining the stuffed game when Aldershott walked in. “This had better be good, Peterkin,” Aldershott growled as he shut the door. “Put down that stuffed mongoose.”

  “I couldn’t get a good look at it last night,” Eric said. “I grew up in India, you know. Well, partly, anyway. Did you know—”

  “Peterkin!”

  Eric set down the mongoose. “I wanted to know about Norris’s visit to Italy earlier this year.”

  Aldershott was taken aback. “What’s that got to do with anything? Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Well, I doubt he’d care to tell me the truth, and I fancy you know more about it than you let on. I also fancy he was no closer to Italy than I am right now. He was at Sotheby Manor, wasn’t he?”

  “If you know that—”

  “I want to know why.”

  “You think I have the answer to Norris’s business?”

  “I think you were paying for it. Mrs. Benson said she was renting the groundskeeper’s cottage to you, not to Norris. She also said you were the inspiration behind the plan to turn Sotheby Manor into a rest home for addicts, and I think you were a major investor in that plan. Taken together, it all seems a bit suggestive … Nothing definite, of course, but that’s what I came here for.”

  Aldershott stared at Eric. Slowly, he sat down behind his desk.

  Eric remained standing. He could practically see the wheels turning in Aldershott’s mind. After yesterday’s interview, his questions today must seem like a non sequitur, and Aldershott must be wondering just how much goodwill he could extend now—if only to get rid of Eric—and whether it was worth his while.

  Eric shrugged. “I expect it doesn’t matter. I could ask Mrs. Benson instead; I know she’ll tell me. And if not, someone else will know. It’s just a question of asking around enough.”

  “Wait.”

  Eric waited.

  The muscle in Aldershott’s jaw twitched as he struggled with a decision.

  Eric turned again to exit the study. As his gaze met the dead eyes of a bear, he heard the springs of Aldershott’s chair release, and three words rang out.

  “The soldier’s disease.”

  Eric turned back around to face Aldershott, meeting a gaze that was more exasperation and sadness than anger.

  Aldershott sat down again and said, “You’re not the sort of fellow who shuts up easily, are you? All right. I’ll tell you about Norris’s little holiday, but it doesn’t go further than these four walls, is that understood? Your word.”

  “My word.” Eric took a seat.

  “The soldier’s disease,” Aldershott repeated. “Morphine addiction. That was a relic of the American Civil War, when morphine was new and everyone was using it to treat everything. Countless men wound up dependent on it for years afterwards. We never really thought much of it here in Great Britain, though, did we? Until the middle of the War, you could just walk into Harrods and buy a morphine kit off the shelf. Well, the War certainly opened our eyes to what could happen with morphine. You’ve only to read the newspapers these days to see.”

  “Are you telling me that Norris was suffering from a morphine addiction?”

  Aldershott nodded. “It came to light right after the last elections at the club. I wanted a proper look around the place to know what I was getting into, and there was Norris, in one of the lodging rooms, with all the paraphernalia around him.”

  Aldershott stood and went to the window. It looked out behind the house to a public garden, and a few children were playing there under the watchful eyes of their nannies. The trees swayed in the breeze. Inside, the air was as still as the stuffed heads on the wall.

  “He was just lying there,” Aldershott continued, “staring at the ceiling. He’d used his tie as a tourniquet—I’d always wondered before how he kept ruining his ties—and it was hanging off his elbow onto the floor. My first reaction was to scream at him for the mess, but he didn’t care. He was just … limp, barely breathing, and too far gone to care. I realised I was wasting my breath shouting at him and took action instead. I discarded the empty bottle; everything else I packed up and put away. Then I had him shipped off to Sotheby Manor. Sir Andrew was long gone, but I knew his daughter, and I knew Benson. I knew Norris would be in good hands. And that’s all the fellow needed: someone to tell him no. Look at him now, Peterkin. I don’t know if you had much contact with him before, but he’s a different person.”

  Eric thought of jolly, bright-eyed Norris, and nodded. Eric had never personally met anyone in the grip of a morphine addiction, but Avery had, and Avery described the poor fellow as a horrific crank when he wasn’t limp and lethargic from a fresh dose.

  “I reckon you saved his life,” Eric said, with feeling. Aldershott nodded and turned from the window. Their eyes met, and there was a mutual understanding in them. Eric had had a corporal very much like Norris: Blake, a fun-loving scoundrel who got the whole platoon to laugh. Less than a month before the Armistice, he’d walked out onto the parapet, looked into the dawn, and blown his brains out. Eric often wondered if he could have done anything to prevent it.

  “Norris was my second in command after Wolfe got his promotion to captain,” Aldershott said, returning to his chair. “He was a very different prospect from Wolfe, as you can imagine. Morale went up, even if some of the ordinary standards of regimentation went down.”

  “And you felt responsible for him.” As Eric still felt responsible for his men, scattered though they were. He could easily relate.

  “It’s a very sorry officer who doesn’t feel some sort of responsibility for the men below him, Peterkin. As an officer yourself, I hope you understand that much, at least.”

  “Do you know how he wound up addicted to morphine?”

  “I should think that’s obvious. Norris loves life and laughter. How much of that did you see in the trenches?”

  “I remember that we found ways of carving humour out of the horror,” Eric said. “There were plenty of bright spots in between everything else.”

  “Not enough,” Aldershott growled. “And especially not for Norris. He needed to lose himself completely in something, and eventually he found morphine. I think he began stealing it from the Sotheby Manor dispensary when he was warded there.”

  So it had been going on for years. Eric tried again to imagine Norris with the irritability Avery had described, and decided that an irritable Norris might seem like a more mature, grounded individual than the fun-loving scamp he now was.

  Eric stood up. “Thank you, Aldershott,” he said soberly. “I think I understand poor Norris a little better now.” Norris had escaped Corporal Blake’s fate, at least.

  “Think nothing of it. I hope you understand what I mean when I say the fellow deserves his privacy.” They’d been discussing Norris like a pair of concerned friends, and Aldershott had slipped into that mode with surprising ease. He actually smiled as he stood up
to shake Eric’s hand.

  Eric felt a little bad about demolishing the goodwill that seemed to have arisen between them. But he wasn’t quite done yet. He doubted whether all the goodwill in the world could induce Aldershott to give him the answers he wanted. A shock was needed, and Aldershott, relaxed, was primed to receive it.

  “Oh, just one more thing,” Eric said, turning abruptly from the door. Aldershott’s smile vanished. “What did you do with the photograph and the medical report you took from Benson’s box?”

  Aldershott nearly exploded. “How in hell—”

  “From what Wolfe said, it seems plain someone else got to Benson’s box before he did. I think that someone was you. Easy enough, since you were given the vault combination when you became club president. No, don’t say anything, just listen. You knew exactly which box Benson had because it used to be the box you’d been given as club president. You had the master key, too, so it was easy for you to get into the box. All you had to do was wait. I remembered the lip prints on the brandy glasses in your office, all the cigarettes in the ashtray, and the open transom; someone had been waiting in there after the cleaning staff had gone, and opened the transom to let the stale cigarette smoke air out overnight. This wasn’t the same person who’d broken in, or the ashtray wouldn’t have been upset on the floor. I think you waited there until you thought it late enough that no one would notice, but not so late that you risked running into Wolfe as he fulfilled his part of the bet. I think you crept down to the vault, used the combination you’d been given back in April, opened Benson’s box with your master key, and removed the photograph and medical report from it. Then you left, by the front door, and destroyed the two items.”