A Gentleman's Murder

by Christopher Huang

  All the anxiety and tension that had disappeared with the first body’s reveal snapped back like a rubber band and nearly bowled Eric off his feet, and he had to clutch at the table to maintain his balance.

  Helen Benson was nearly colourless in death. The bobbed, finger-curled hair was even more incongruous on the table than with the Edwardian crepe dress. Bobbed hair belonged on the heads of women in the prime of life—flappers celebrating their vitality, career women building their own futures, fashionable matrons with their fingers on the pulse of the present—not on the dead. Eric had seen his share of dead people before, but most of those had been soldiers in the War. They had been men who knew what they faced, not the women who were meant to survive them.

  Eric’s thoughts went, inexplicably, to Glatisant. Who would pursue the Beast now?

  He became aware that Inspector Parker was speaking to him. “I’m sorry, what?” said Eric.

  “I asked, where were you early yesterday morning?”

  “At the British Museum,” Eric found himself saying automatically. “The Newspaper Reading Room. I’d asked—” Had that been only yesterday? It felt like ages ago. The last time he’d seen Mrs. Benson had been a day earlier, and that felt like only this morning. “Who was this other man? Were they found together?”

  “That other man passed from natural causes this afternoon. He’s nothing to do with Mrs. Benson. You’re a smart man, Mr. Peterkin. You were expecting to see Mrs. Benson as soon as you realised where we were. I had to take that expectation away, to see what your real reaction would be.”

  Eric glared. “Damn you, Parker. That was a dirty trick.”

  Parker just shrugged. “We do what we have to do.”

  “You asked me about yesterday morning,” Eric said, focusing on any sort of activity rather than the body in front of him. “Was that when … this … happened?”

  “There was a fire.” Parker was watching Eric carefully. “It looks like the result of a lit cigarette meeting a spill of turpentine.”

  All those paintings, Eric thought. All that canvas covered in oils. Mrs. Benson didn’t appear to have suffered any visible burns, but paint fumes could be noxious. “I see. I got the impression that she’d been sleeping in her studio.”

  “You think the fire took place in the studio.”

  Eric looked up sharply. “You said there was a turpentine spill.”

  “I didn’t say the spill was in the studio. It was in the office.”

  “Stop playing with me,” Eric snapped. “Tell it to me straight. What the hell happened?”

  Parker continued to watch him, his face grim. The stark lighting of the morgue made him seem a decade older. “The dog alerted the house to the fire,” he said. “The office door was locked, but a pair of workmen, there for the renovations, broke it down before the fire spread too far.”

  He stopped, waiting for Eric to respond.

  Eric said, “You want me to guess if it might be suicide, don’t you? No, I don’t believe it for an instant. When last we spoke, she was determined to continue the work she and Benson had started on the house. They had plans to turn it into a rest home for addicts.”

  Eric remembered again that moment in the lychgate, how her pale, Madonna-like face had stood out from the shadows as she gazed at him. He’d stepped back from her. Why had he done that?

  “Yes. The two of you seemed quite intimate, as I recall. I understand you met only very recently?”

  “Monday.” Eric didn’t care to elaborate. He forced himself to look at the body again. He saw no signs of burnt flesh, but then a sheet was drawn up over most of her, and all he could see was a dim silhouette. It made him think of Emily Ang, buried in a shallow grave with only a linen sheet for a shroud. “You say the door was locked. Was there any chance it was locked from the outside? Did Mrs. Benson have her keys on her?”

  “No, she didn’t.” The inspector made a note in his notebook. “What do you think happened?”

  “How should I know? I don’t know anything about the scene: how she was found, how she died—”

  “It was smoke inhalation, eventually. The medical examiner thinks she may have been drugged, and is conducting tests to confirm his suspicions. The maid says she brought the full tea service to Mrs. Benson in the office only an hour before. It suggests a visitor, and the maid certainly thinks so, though she saw no one else.”

  “What do you know?” Eric demanded. “Do you have a suspect?”

  The inspector raised an eyebrow meaningfully at Eric.

  “I told you, I was at the British Museum. It wasn’t me; it could be anybody.” Eric fastened on that one thought to calm and steady himself. “How did this person get by the servants, then? He couldn’t have rung the doorbell and hoped for the right person to answer. He must have crept in. If neither Mrs. Benson nor Glatisant raised the alarm on meeting him, that means someone familiar with the household. He’d have to know where to find the turpentine, too.”

  Someone was going to pay for this. Eric set his jaw as his rage settled into a steady simmer. Parker pulled the sheet back over Mrs. Benson’s—Helen’s—face, and pulled Eric away.

  Nothing had changed in the corridors of the hospital, but all Eric could think of was that Helen had found herself in hospital work—much as her father had—and that the projected Sotheby Manor rest home would now be let go. The silent night-shift nurses reminded him of her in the way they rustled down the deserted corridors, and he wondered if the grimly glaring matron had been a friend.

  As the police motorcar started its way back to the station, Eric said, “Who is Mr. Eeshahn?”

  Parker turned to look at him, eyes glittering with interest. “Where did you hear that name, Mr. Peterkin?”

  “That policeman, Constable Fletcher, mentioned it as his mates were dragging me in. Who is Mr. Eeshahn? What’s his connection to all this?”

  Parker said nothing.

  “Answer me, damn you!”

  Parker shot him a glare, and Eric could only seethe.

  Eric fumed the rest of the way back to the police station, where Parker led him silently through the corridors to another dank, colourless room. It was getting late in the evening now, and few people were about. The silent constable who’d accompanied them to the hospital stationed himself by the door as the inspector led Eric to a table.

  A collection of soot-blackened objects was neatly arranged over it.

  “Look at these things, Mr. Peterkin. Is there anything you can say about any of it?”

  “Mr. Eeshahn—”

  “Look at the table!” The inspector’s voice was a harsh bark.

  Eric snarled, but turned to examine the objects on the table. “This is the detritus from the fire, I’m guessing? I see the broken teacups. That looks like a piece of the ceiling light. I notice a lot of burnt paper.”

  “Half the cabinets were pulled open,” the inspector said, “and their contents dumped into the middle of the room to make a bonfire.”

  Eric moved in for a closer look.

  “That’s the hypodermic kit from Benson’s box,” he said, pointing to the warped and blackened remains of a rectangular tin. Elsewhere, the metallic parts of the hypodermic needle were identifiable, once one knew what to look for. “It looks like someone tried to tear the thing apart before throwing it on the fire. You can still see the monogram on the lid. It’s the same stylised S as on the handle of the pen-release knife Saxon carries about.”

  “Oliver Saxon, eh? Interesting.”

  As the inspector calmly jotted down his notes, Eric swung around to face him. “All right. I’ve played your game, Inspector. I’ve come and I’ve looked, and I’ve identified the evidence. Now tell me, who is Mr. Eeshahn?”

  The inspector snapped his notebook shut and gave Eric a cool, almost triumphant look. “According to the maid, Mr. Eeshahn was the operator of an opium den in Limehouse who was preying on a certain family friend of the Bensons. Albert Benson went to London to sort the fellow out, and was k
illed as a result.”

  What he really meant to say, Eric realised, was that Benson’s murder had nothing to do with Emily Ang, after all.

  “Let me tell you a theory, Mr. Peterkin. The theory is this: You know exactly who Mr. Eeshahn is. You’re one of his agents. You were attracted to Mrs. Benson. Whether because you were ordered to or because you wanted his wife, you engineered Benson’s murder at your club. Then you set about insinuating yourself into Mrs. Benson’s life. Mr. Eeshahn took exception to that, and had her killed to send you a message. Now, you’re playing dumb with me because you want to gauge just how much I know about your boss.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Not to mention insulting. Eric struggled to rein in his temper. “Why would I have anything to do with this Mr. Eeshahn?”

  “A link between you and a Limehouse opium den?” The inspector shrugged. “I should think it’s obvious.”

  The press was filled with horror stories about drug addiction, which they linked to the Chinese communities of Limehouse and the old association between the Chinese and opium. The reins on Eric’s temper snapped.

  Eric seized the inspector by the lapels and slammed him against the wall. “How dare you,” he snarled. “How dare you! You assume, just because I … I’ll have you know I’m as English as you are! My mother was a saint, and I won’t have you slandering her or her people—”

  Eric would have said more, but strong hands fastened on his arms and shoulders and pulled him away.

  Inspector Parker straightened his jacket and trench coat. “Take him away,” he told the two constables holding Eric down. “A night in the cells should cool his head and teach him a lesson about assaulting police officers.”

  As the constables began to drag Eric away, Parker flashed him a look that was almost apologetic. “I did tell you,” he said, “to stay out of my way.”

  A KNIGHT IN HIS CUPS

  ERIC EMERGED FROM the Chichester police station at dawn, Sunday morning, and blinked in the sunlight. He was stiff from a night on an uncomfortable cell bench, and he was sure he needed a good, long bath to wash the smell away. After the dark and dingy police cell, the world seemed impossibly bright, the colours garish.

  Helen Benson was dead. He’d had all night to think about that, but it didn’t make things any better. All he could focus on was the intensity of her gaze and the touch of her hand. She was supposed to have been safe—what had she ever done to put herself in danger? The unfairness of it all set his blood boiling, and the rage sparked by Inspector Parker’s baseless insinuations simmered in the back of his consciousness.

  The anger resolved itself into a name: Eeshahn, the next link in the chain.

  Parker hadn’t named the “family friend” on whom this Eeshahn character was preying, but it wasn’t much of a leap to guess that it was Norris. He’d have to speak to Norris, Eric decided. Then he’d hunt down this Mr. Eeshahn and get some answers.

  Norris, however, wasn’t at the Britannia when Eric finally got back to London. “I don’t know where he’s been, sir,” Old Faithful told him. “I haven’t seen him since Friday afternoon.”

  Friday afternoon? “You mean, since before Aldershott’s dinner party?”

  “That’s right, sir. He came in, went to get dressed, and then left. I knew he’d got the same invitation from Aldershott as you and Lieutenant Saxon. When he didn’t ring to be let in, I thought maybe he’d decided to spend the night with a lady friend. He does that sometimes. But he did show up to that dinner, didn’t he?”

  “He did.” Eric felt a sense of dread creeping around his vitals, and it had nothing to do with the idea that Norris might have a “lady friend” while he was ostensibly pursuing Penny. “Has anyone been in his room since?”

  “The cleaning staff, sir.”

  “Bother the cleaning staff. I need a look around in there.”

  Old Faithful didn’t ask any questions. He took Eric up to the lodging room occupied by Norris and let him in.

  It was only a little tidier than when Eric last saw it. The cleaning staff had swept and dusted and made the bed, and anything Norris might have dropped onto the floor had been picked up, folded, and put aside. The mess of papers on the armchair hadn’t been touched—Norris wouldn’t appreciate his work being shuffled around. Likewise the mess on the chest of drawers.

  There had to be a clue somewhere as to what might have happened to Norris. He remembered the gunshots in the fog as he left the Aldershotts’. What if Norris had been a victim? But surely the news would have been all over the Britannia by now if he had.

  “I’m going to have to check his chest of drawers,” Eric said, determination outweighing his sense of propriety.

  Old Faithful just nodded.

  Eric didn’t have to look far. In the top drawer, tossed in with a mess of collars and cravats, was an empty medicine bottle, clearly labelled. Morphine.

  Despite Aldershott’s best efforts, Norris had fallen back into his old habits.

  Eric carefully closed the drawer without touching the bottle. He’d come to find out about Mr. Eeshahn from Norris, but now it looked as though he’d have to find Mr. Eeshahn himself. All he had was the rather vague notion of an opium den in Limehouse, and there had to be dozens of those. But it would have to be enough.

  London’s Chinese community was gathered along the streets of Limehouse Causeway and Pennyfields. Anyone who’d read one of the popular “yellow peril” thrillers knew what to expect: long shadows and dark alleys, red paper lanterns casting a ruddy glow through the smoke, and fog rolling across one’s feet as one stalked past the yawning mouths of shops selling inexplicable oddities. There’d be the pungent scent of exotic spices and the murmur of foreign tongues, inscrutable Oriental gentlemen with their hands tucked into silk sleeves, and now and again the glimpse of a mysterious cat-eyed beauty. And behind all this, gambling, opium, and sin.

  Eric remembered with some irony what Avery had said when they’d first interviewed Mrs. Benson: Were they in a Sax Rohmer adventure, and would they then have to infiltrate any Limehouse opium dens? Avery’s words had proven prophetic, because if Eric wanted to find Patrick Norris and the mysterious Mr. Eeshahn, it looked as though he might have to do just that.

  Eric had no doubt that Parker and his men must have done a thorough canvass of the neighbourhood already, looking for Mr. Eeshahn. Obviously, they hadn’t found him. Eric, of course, knew that for once he had an advantage over them.

  So here he was on a Sunday afternoon, dressed in what was assuredly not his Sunday best. Armed with a photograph of Patrick Norris and a stout walking stick, he was fully prepared to look Depravity in the eye.

  Depravity, however, was not living up to expectations.

  In the noonday sun, the colours of Limehouse Causeway were bleak and tired. The doors were scratched and the brickwork was dirty with soot, but this was hardly exceptional. Eric tried to picture the scene after nightfall, and only saw the same dreary brick one might expect anywhere else in the East End. There were, of course, the shopfronts with Chinese names over their doors, but these were fewer than he had expected; they stood side by side with establishments catering to foreign sailors coming off the freighters of the nearby docks. Eric had worried that even his shabbiest coat might mark him as an outsider, English as it was, but most of the Chinese men he saw were wearing similarly English coats. Eric wasn’t sure if he should be relieved or disappointed.

  A little guiltily, Eric realised that he knew nothing about this world. All he knew of it was his mother. Magdalen Peterkin had been fond of jade and shades of red, and would have nothing to do with gold of less than twenty-four-carat purity. Aside from this, she dressed in European fashions and she encouraged English affectations in her children. The lullabies she knew were Chinese, though, and Eric remembered songs with syllables like water running over cobbles. He’d joined in, once, when Penny was an infant lying peacefully in the nursery cradle: Eric and his mother sharing in the song that soon became less about getting Pen
ny to sleep and more about connecting with generations stretching back to the days of Genghis Khan. He must have understood the words then, but no longer.

  It was a different world, and Eric was a stranger. The squalor and poverty were a far cry from the affluence of Mayfair or St. James, and there was none of the dangerous romance promised by the likes of Sax Rohmer. Instead, Eric sensed a sort of curtain-twitching grasp for respectability that sometimes infected poor neighbourhoods. It was a poverty that tended towards law and order because, in the absence of money and power, pride was everything.

  Tracking down Mr. Eeshahn meant finding the opium dens of this disconcertingly everyday neighbourhood. To that end, Eric was on the lookout for anything approaching the expected “yellow peril” image. One of these shops had to be hiding an opium den.

  Things began to look up again once he stepped inside one of the shops. The decorations, though sparse, were more what he expected: hanging scrolls and an abundance of red. He could smell ginger and spices, and the acrid odour of joss sticks. But the very word opium was sufficient to have him chased out by a red-faced proprietor insisting that he ran a respectable business—not that Eric understood a word.

  The next shopkeeper only rolled his eyes and shook his head. When Eric was forced to admit that he spoke no Chinese, the shopkeeper’s patience ended and Eric was coldly shown the door.

  The rest of the shops were closed on account of its being Sunday. Eric was going to have to try a different angle, or come back tomorrow.

  “Penny for the Guy, sir?”

  The Guy in the little barrow was made of paper, and its insides rustled with crumpled newspaper. Its face was gaily painted, with too-red cheeks and a toothy smile.

  On impulse, Eric dropped sixpence into the barrow. The children gasped, thanked him profusely in Chinese, then ran off before he could change his mind. Eric watched them go, and thought to himself: This wasn’t a different world at all. It was still England, and the children still loved their fireworks.

  He didn’t think he had much hope of finding an opium den around here. Perhaps he might have more luck looking for people directly. He’d brought Norris’s photograph for that reason, and he had that name, Eeshahn.