A Gentleman's Murder

by Christopher Huang

  A second emotion joined the fury on Bradshaw’s face. Resolution.

  “Get out. Get out of my office and get out of this building. I brought you in, and I can take you out. Did you know that Aldershott stormed in here yesterday demanding to have you expelled?” Bradshaw swept his newspaper aside to reveal a letter of dismissal, already signed by Aldershott. The Britannia liked to be thorough about its membership records, and this document, once approved by the board, would be clipped to Eric’s original application and the file closed forever. All it wanted was a second signature, which Bradshaw applied now with vicious strokes of his pen, and acknowledgment initials from the rest of the officers.

  Eric stood frozen as Bradshaw waved the document in the air to dry the ink. “I think Saxon and Wolfe are in the dining room,” Bradshaw said. “We can make this official tonight, and you can go home with all ties to your father’s club cut and done with. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  Eric’s mouth felt suddenly dry. The rage that had carried him this far began to ebb. He said, “You need Norris’s initials too.”

  “The purpose of acknowledgment is to say the motion won’t be challenged. Just two out of the remaining three officers are needed for that, and even then it’s more formality than necessity.” Bradshaw strode around Eric, yanked open the door, and marched on out.

  Following Bradshaw, Eric paused in the lobby to glance up the stairs to the painting on the landing of the Arthurian Knights. King Pellinore was still modelled on a Peterkin ancestor, and Sir Palomides was still a reminder that any man could be a knight. Eric’s rage had been dampened. All he could think of was what his father would say.

  Saxon and Wolfe were indeed in the dining room. Saxon was lounging in one corner with his feet up on the next chair, an apple in one hand and a Latin text open in his lap. Wolfe had just sent his dinner back for being overcooked and was waiting to be served again. He came over at Bradshaw’s beckoning, eyes dancing at the prospect of drama. Saxon, engrossed in his book, didn’t notice.

  Wolfe took one look at the dismissal letter and turned to Eric. “My goodness, Peterkin. Ever the charmer, aren’t you? What can you possibly have done to get Bradshaw, of all people, to second a motion of dismissal against you?”

  Eric had too much pride to plead with either man, especially with everyone watching. He adopted a gruff attitude and said, “Do what you have to do, Wolfe. I don’t care anymore.”

  “Don’t you really?” Wolfe took the letter from Bradshaw, looked it over again, then handed it back. “No, I don’t think I will. Spoil my fun? You must be joking.”

  “Are you challenging the motion, Wolfe?” Bradshaw barked.

  “Don’t be a bore, Bradshaw. Sunday evenings weren’t made for official club business. Now, Peterkin, why don’t you join me for dinner? They’ve overcooked the portions, but you’d eat anything, wouldn’t you?” Wolfe grinned at Eric, pulled him close with an arm around the shoulder, and ruffled his hair.

  There was a bang from the entry vestibule as someone slammed open the front doors. Inspector Horatio Parker strode into the Britannia and planted himself in the lobby, feet apart, face grim. He was flanked by a pair of burly constables who took a step forward as Eric and the others emerged from the dining room.

  “Mr. Mortimer Wolfe,” Parker said, “your presence is requested at the Yard. If you please?” Even as he spoke, Parker’s eyes darted to the stairs and to the dining room doorway, where other members were trying and failing to hide their curiosity. Nobody wanted the indignity of being dragged away in handcuffs in front of everyone, but that, Parker intimated, was always an option.

  The constables fell in on either side of Wolfe, who lit a cigarette with exaggerated calm, nodded to Parker, and strode out half a pace ahead of them. He paused at the doors to look back and give Eric and Bradshaw a mocking salute. His eyes rested on Eric. “It appears we’re both hors de combat, eh, Peterkin? I wonder if you’d care to duplicate my exit.”

  Then the doors closed, and they were gone.

  EMILY’S EFFECTS

  A SLOW, WEAK DRIZZLE started just as Eric descended the steps to the Arabica. Looking back, he could see reflections beginning to form on the dark pavement, and the pinprick raindrops glittering around the haloes of the streetlamps. Above, the night sky was a solid charcoal grey, and the moon could not be seen.

  Eric ducked inside the Arabica and shut the door, sealing himself in the too-warm, smoky atmosphere. It was thankfully quiet. Most of the usual Bohemian crowd had gone home to their Sunday roasts, but Avery, of course, was still ensconced in the back booth. Eric nodded to him in greeting and slid into the bench opposite, sideways with his feet up on the seat. He missed the side wings of his Usual Armchair.

  “You look like something the cat would refuse to drag in,” Avery commented. “Has the weekend really been that bad?”

  Eric sighed. He lit up a cigarette. And then he poured out everything that had happened since they last spoke. Avery listened, wide-eyed, and began laying out a new reading around the Knight of Swords. Eric glared at it. Avery meant well, but Eric was growing heartily sick of the Knight of Swords.

  “Parker told me,” Eric said, “that Wolfe spent Thursday night—after Benson’s funeral—at the Green Elephant inn in Chichester. That makes him the only suspect from Benson’s murder to be on hand for the Sotheby Manor fire on Friday morning. I can imagine Wolfe wanting to kill Benson if he were Emily’s secret lover and the father of her child, but I don’t understand what any of that could have to do with Mrs. Benson’s death. And now I’m getting the boot from the club. It’s just a matter of time and paperwork.”

  “Ah, that’s not so bad,” said Avery. “You don’t need those asses at the Britannia. You never have, and you never will. Bloodthirsty thugs in tailcoats! Personally, I’d be flattered by the rejection—”

  Eric practically spat his cigarette across the table. “That’s a damned shameful thing to say, Avery. Good or bad, the Empire still owes a debt to each and every man in the Britannia. That hasn’t changed.” The last inch of ash from his cigarette scattered over the Knight of Swords, and Eric flicked the spent stub aside. “And anyway, this isn’t about them. This is about the Britannia and what it represents. It’s about recognising generations of service to the Empire. It’s about South Africa and Afghanistan and Crimea and Napoleon and 1812 and a dozen other skirmishes people never hear about.” He paused, then continued, more quietly, “And my war. Ypres, the Somme, Gallipoli … there was a Peterkin at every single one of those. And always a Peterkin at the Britannia. Now that ends with me, and for what? I’m no closer to getting justice for anyone!”

  Avery just gave him an incredulous look.

  A shadow fell across the table. “Am I interrupting?”

  Eric looked up to see Mrs. Aldershott standing outside the booth with a large carpetbag in her hands. He’d completely forgotten about their arrangement to meet here tonight. Seeing her reminded him unpleasantly of his last conversation with Aldershott, and everything that had come as a result. Then his eye fell on the carpetbag.

  He hastened out of his seat to let Mrs. Aldershott in, introduced Avery to her, and went to join Avery on his side of the table.

  “So you’re Mrs. Aldershott,” Avery said, gathering up his cards and searching for the Queen of Wands. “You’re not quite what I expected. Would you like a reading?”

  “A reading! Don’t be ridiculous.” She hauled the carpetbag onto the table, landing it right where Avery had just set down the Queen of Wands. “We haven’t the time for games, Mr. Ferrett.”

  Avery reddened. “On second thought,” he murmured, “you might be exactly what I expected.”

  Eric’s world had narrowed to the bag, any clues within it now his sole hope for finding the killer—or killers.

  “Edward kicked up a tremendous fuss when he found out what I was doing,” Mrs. Aldershott said. “He forbade me to leave the house! Can you imagine? I told him we were not living in the Dark Ag
es and he had no business stopping me from going anywhere. I suppose he imagines this sort of thing would offend my delicate feminine sensibilities. What utter rot. I was a nurse, and nurses do not have ‘delicate sensibilities,’ feminine or otherwise. We have them surgically removed the day we get our certification.”

  She snapped open the carpetbag and began extracting its contents. A pair of notebooks tumbled onto the table: cheap, with cardboard covers, such as you might find at any stationer’s anywhere. The first was filled with pages of writing, and the second, considerably more battered and dog-eared, seemed to contain the more practical, day-to-day matters of Emily’s nursing duties. Avery picked up the first while Eric picked up the second, and both began browsing through.

  Eric went right to the last written page of the notebook. This was actually from the nineteenth of July, the day before her disappearance. Emily’s handwriting was neatly rounded and very upright: a mission school hand with no nonsense about it. There was a note there about meeting Saxon at the Hammer and Anvil for tea the next day; she’d fixed a medical appointment for the following week in Horsham; she’d found her lost hypodermic syringe again, and planned to keep it on her person in the future.

  The next page had been torn out.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Aldershott had drawn an old portable camera and a thick envelope out of the bag. Eric raised his brows. Cameras were somewhat cheaper these days, and every Tom, Dick, and Harry seemed to have one to record the more ridiculous moments of their lives. But this model predated the War, and it seemed unlikely that Emily Ang, given her position, should have owned such a thing.

  “It used to be my father’s,” Mrs. Aldershott explained. “He used it to take some really lovely shots of the Hokkien countryside where we lived before coming back to England. He gave it to me, and I gave it to Emily and told her to take pictures of life in England while I was gone, because I would miss it all dreadfully. She was as good as her word, too. The police took and developed all the film still in it when they investigated her disappearance. The pictures are in this envelope.”

  Eric abandoned the notebook in favour of the photographs. They slid smoothly out of the envelope and across the table, like Avery’s Tarot cards in black-and-white. The photographs were almost universally of the patients and staff of the Sotheby Manor war hospital. There were a few of the dispensary, surgery, nursing offices, and patient rooms. There was one of Helen, radiant in a fresh VAD uniform, and Eric felt his heart constrict. She was posing in the dispensary with all her nursing paraphernalia, and looking very proud of herself. He wondered if the setting, emphasising Helen’s occupation as a nurse, had been Emily’s suggestion or Helen’s.

  Eric carefully set this photograph down on top of the envelope, where he could still see it as he shuffled through the others.

  Here was a photograph of Jacob Bradshaw, seated by the bed of a soldier Eric didn’t recognise. Bradshaw’s beard was cut very short, but there was no mistaking the bonhomie radiating out from him. In one upper corner, Eric could see one of the chandeliers from the Sotheby Manor dining room; a desk was right underneath it, and other beds lined the walls. Bradshaw was smiling, but the focus was on how he held the hand of the patient, wrapped protectively in both his own. Emily approved of his visits, Eric thought, and Bradshaw’s smile was as much for her as for the camera.

  There was a series of unrelated photographs before Eric came to one of Patrick Norris, smiling as he leaned against the frame of an upstairs window. Was he already in the grip of his morphine addiction when this photograph was taken? The smile he presented to the camera was bright and joyful. Ivy curled at the edges of the window behind him, framing a panoramic view of Sotheby Manor spread out from wing to wing, a well-tended corner of a well-tended world. One would never have guessed the context of war and recovery from this—it was too much about the rightness of things.

  The photographic paper used had been the cheapest available, but Eric realised that, despite being kept loose in an envelope, the images showed little sign of having been handled. He glanced up at Mrs. Aldershott. She seemed perfectly calm as she watched him, but something Helen had said sprang to mind, that “Some scars aren’t visible.”

  Eric lowered his eyes to the next photograph. This was Mortimer Wolfe sitting up in bed, head held high with hands neatly folded on his lap. He had a corner bed. A wide mullioned window was behind him, and there was another on the adjacent wall: a pleasant situation with a lot of sunlight and a lovely view of the lawn behind the house. But his eyes seemed unusually pale, and his posture seemed stiff. This was more of a posed portrait, something taken only out of obligation. Was there some resentment or bad blood between Emily and Wolfe? Had Wolfe demanded the photograph, since she’d taken everyone else’s? Wolfe’s expression was grim; it had none of the supercilious urbanity with which Eric associated him. Perhaps this was Wolfe the killer.

  The final photograph was of another familiar face: Inspector Horatio Parker, unscarred, sitting in a wicker garden chair out on the lawn. Edward Aldershott and Sir Andrew Sotheby stood behind him, along with a third man whom Eric deduced, from prior appearances among the photographs, to be an attending doctor. The focus was on Parker, who looked back as sternly as he would at an uncooperative suspect. Aldershott, above, was smiling a little smugly, but he was assuredly not the subject of Emily’s photograph. Eric guessed that Parker had been a subject of interest to Emily, but that Aldershott was someone she could well do without.

  Mrs. Aldershott drew a stationery case and large bundle of papers out of the bag next. “Now, here’s her correspondence. I went through it all this morning; there doesn’t seem to be much out of the ordinary. There are my own letters to her, and a couple from Oliver as well. The Army censors have been all over them.”

  Something in Mrs. Aldershott’s voice made Eric look up. She was fingering the last of the letters with a sad, wistful look, no doubt reminiscing about happier times with her sister. Leaving her to her reverie, Eric put the photographs aside and began leafing through the letters.

  Avery, who’d been quietly reading Emily’s notebook all this while, began to chuckle. “I say, Eric, here’s that story you told me about, the one involving Wolfe and the German patrol, that Norris told you over dinner. I don’t think you ever mentioned that Parker was part of it.”

  “What? I didn’t know he was. Let me see it.”

  Aldershott had talked about Norris taking over from Wolfe as his second in command—they were in the same regiment. But Parker’s connection to them was news.

  This notebook was filled with the same mission school handwriting Eric had seen in the other. Eric glanced through the pages and found detailed passages from war stories gathered from the soldiers passing through the hospital. He wondered what her interest in them had been, and for what purpose she had sought to so precisely record them.

  The names that stared back at him on the page Avery marked were all too familiar. The story had been pieced together from accounts told to Emily by Norris, Parker, Aldershott, and Wolfe. According to the preceding note, Bradshaw had told her a rumour that Parker was being considered for the Victoria Cross, but she thought the others deserved just as much recognition for getting him out of no-man’s-land after what he’d done.

  Eric remembered no-man’s-land, and could easily picture the scene: the smoke and the devastated landscape, the mud, the smell of falling ash, of rot, and of something burning. It stretched out in all directions. You could get turned around easy as anything out there, and wind up walking right into the enemy line.

  The story began in the aftermath of a disastrous mission, though it was not so disastrous as it could have been. One soldier stood out head and shoulders above the rest in bravery, breaking up the onslaught with no concern for his own life. That was Sergeant Horatio Parker, and without him, the two companies attempting this stretch of no-man’s-land might never have returned. They’d been beaten back from the ridge that was their objective by a superior defence, but they did
have a few prisoners. Sergeant Parker was among the wounded, with at least three bullets in him, a gash from a bayonet, and a concussion.

  They regrouped in the inadequate shelter of a muddy dip of the landscape, but everyone knew it was death to wait. Captain Aldershott took charge, sending the remnants of the company ahead with the prisoners they’d taken and the other wounded. He was to follow with Lieutenant Norris, supporting Sergeant Parker between them. They were out of ammunition, and the German rounds they’d recovered didn’t fit their personal sidearms. Captain Wolfe armed each of them with a pistol taken from the German prisoners and began leading them back.

  It wasn’t long before the group had lost track of the men they’d sent ahead, and were stumbling through no-man’s-land in what they could only hope was the right direction. Eric could imagine: desolation in every direction that wasn’t obscured by smoke, and a distant shadow that may or may not have been the parapet of the British line. He himself had been lost in no-man’s-land before; he wouldn’t wish the experience on anyone.

  Norris’s account of Wolfe bluffing his way through a German patrol was there, albeit with the understanding that this wasn’t so much a patrol as a detail of men sent to recover survivors from the battlefield. Norris had embellished the story with his version of Wolfe’s bluff. Wolfe’s own version was much longer and tenser, if less amusing.

  Unfortunately, the next encounter did not go quite so well.

  Aldershott, Norris, and Parker didn’t speak German. They were trusting in Wolfe to get them through, and it was getting abundantly clear that it wasn’t working. The three Germans of this recovery detail were moving to surround Wolfe, who began discreetly signalling to the others to leave him and save themselves.

  That was when Norris, the only one with his right hand free, shot one of the Germans in the back. He got another in the head before the first had quite crumpled to the muddy ground. Wolfe tackled the third, eventually overpowering him.