A Gentleman's Murder

by Christopher Huang

  Eric could smell the cordite from Norris’s gun. He wondered about the face behind it. Had Norris been white with shock? Triumphant? Cocky? Had he simply been anxious to get moving again?

  Parker had completely lost consciousness by now. They had to make haste. The British line became much more clearly discernible just as rifle fire began behind them. Wolfe scrambled over the parapet and helped to lift Parker in, and then Aldershott and Norris tumbled over to join him.

  “That’s how Parker got his Victoria Cross,” Mrs. Aldershott said, her voice breaking through Eric’s visions of barbed wire and sandbags. She’d been watching him read, and she knew the story. “That’s also the first thing I learned about Edward, before I ever met him. He was the only one to come out of that unscathed, and he set the recommendation process in motion as soon as he had pen and paper to write it down. Norris was shot as he came over the parapet, and Wolfe collapsed on top of him. I don’t know what the others did with their German pistols, but Edward has his mounted in his study like another trophy. You must have seen it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me Parker was in your husband’s regiment?”

  Mrs. Aldershott looked at him in surprise. “I thought you knew.”

  On the table, the photograph of Horatio Parker stared back up at them. At the time the picture had been taken, the recommendation for his Victoria Cross was probably winging its way up the ladder from the regiment’s commanding officer to the king. Aldershott’s expression suggested that he knew exactly where it stood, but Parker himself, all unwitting, just stared at the camera, his expression wooden. Thinking back now to the dinner party, Eric understood that when Aldershott described Parker as “one of us,” he hadn’t simply meant that Parker was an ex-serviceman like them; he was referring to their shared experiences in the same regiment, and this one in particular.

  Why hadn’t anyone mentioned their connection to Parker? Could it really be that it had simply never come up in conversation? The alternative was that they were trying to keep Parker at arm’s length. Could something have happened after this to estrange him from the rest?

  Or perhaps they were hoping for special treatment, and didn’t want anyone to realise the potential conflict of interest.

  Frowning, Eric spread the photographs out again on the table. He stared at them for a minute. Then he gathered up the photographs and stared at them some more.

  “I know that look,” Avery said. “You’ve thought of something. You know who killed all those people, don’t you?”

  “No, not yet, not exactly, but I have an idea.” Eric paused to shuffle through the photographs a third time. “Mrs. Aldershott, would it be all right if I held on to these four photographs? And this notebook, too?” He was tempted to ask for Helen’s photograph as well, but perhaps it was better not to.

  “Certainly. Just be careful not to damage them.”

  “This is all part of your great plan, isn’t it?” asked Avery, watching avidly. “What’s your next step?”

  Eric smiled. He was, in fact, looking forward to reading the rest of Emily’s collection of war stories. “I’ll need to talk to Wolfe,” he said at last. “And I’ll need to talk to Parker. And I’ll also need to talk to Saxon, who was the last person to see Emily alive … but I don’t know if he’ll want to speak to me.” Saxon had made it quite clear on their last meeting that he did not want Eric pursuing the matter any further.

  “Oh, is Oliver being contrary?” Mrs. Aldershott’s lips twitched up into a determined smile. Somewhere, a recalcitrant patient was about to take his medicine. “Leave him to me. It’s too late now to know where to find him, but first thing in the morning, we’ll beard him in his office, and I’ll teach him the meaning of gratitude.”

  Eric stood to help Mrs. Aldershott return Emily’s belongings to the carpetbag. He said, “Gratitude? What do you mean?”

  “I mean that it was your father who got him out of trouble when he came a hair’s breadth away from a court martial. Didn’t you know? Oliver spent the War breaking code for military intelligence, and bless him, he thought nothing of taking his work home to puzzle over in bed. All that top secret material lying around, and someone discovered that he also kept the key to his flat under his doormat. He claims he’d lose it otherwise.”

  Mrs. Aldershott snapped the carpetbag shut, shook Eric briskly by the hand, and departed.

  THE KING OF COINS

  “WE WERE THE POOR RELATIONS,” Mrs. Aldershott told Eric as they made their way in the Peterkin Vauxhall the next morning to the grim industrial neighbourhood where Saxon’s Hard Cider had its London office. “My particular branch of the family tree was quite prepared to fade away and be forgotten; we’d half forgotten that we were related to an earl already. I mean to say, it is generally not acceptable for the cousin of an earl to sully her hands with a career as a military nurse. The cousin of an earl should spend her life in idleness and, in the event of a war, join the VAD.” Sarcasm dripped from her voice as she said this.

  The warehouse was a soot-blackened brick building with wide, dirty windows, a corrugated tin roof, and nothing to recommend it architecturally. Lorries trundled into a walled work yard, laden down with crates of hard cider from the distillery in Somerset. More lorries trundled out again to take the cider, by land or by sea, to public houses across the country and some outside of it. A faded wooden sign over the door bore the name “Saxon’s Hard Cider” in the same decorative script that graced the individual bottles.

  The door to the administrative side, Eric noticed, had a combination lock instead of the more usual lock-and-key system.

  Saxon’s office looked out over the crowded warehouse. His desk was enormous, with a glass top somewhere underneath messy stacks of papers and a green blotter heavily stained with apple juice and ink. A cabinet in a corner contained bottles of cider, probably more for show than for use; a cabinet in the opposite corner contained various alternative specimens of alcohol and a pitcher of lemonade. Saxon himself was standing at his window with a half-eaten apple in one hand, and his brow darkened when he realised his cousin Mrs. Aldershott had brought Eric with her on the visit.

  “Martha,” he said, not taking his eyes from Eric, “what is the meaning of this?”

  “Mr. Peterkin has some questions, Oliver, and you need to answer them.”

  “The hell I will!”

  “The hell you won’t!”

  Eric suddenly had a mental image of Oliver Saxon and Mrs. Aldershott as children, the latter dragging the former along by the ear. It really looked as if that scene would play out again with them as adults. Saxon moved to put his desk between himself and his cousin, then growled at Eric, “Make it quick, Peterkin. As you can see, I’m a busy man. And put that bottle down.”

  Eric had been examining a display bottle commemorating the coronation of George V while waiting for the cousins to conclude their spat. Getting down to business, he said, “The day you met Emily in Chichester, Saxon, you drove her back to Sotheby Manor. I need to know exactly what happened afterwards.”

  “I drove her back, dropped her off, and drove back to London. I’ve already told you this.”

  “And we need to finish that conversation, Saxon. You told me that you’d had to go back to Sotheby Manor to retrieve a briefcase you’d left behind. That didn’t happen to contain sensitive MI1b work, did it?”

  Saxon’s expression grew more sullen. “So what if it did?”

  “I know some of it, but what else did you talk about? Did you meet anyone on the way back? Did you, perhaps, have cause to use that pen-release of yours on someone?”

  “Tell him, Oliver.” Mrs. Aldershott stood by the side of the desk, glaring down at Saxon.

  Saxon looked mutinous.

  “You’d just had tea at the Hammer and Anvil,” Eric prompted. “You were talking about—”

  “No!” Saxon shot a look of alarm at Mrs. Aldershott, who wasn’t so dense as to miss it.

  “What?” she said, looking from Saxon to Eri
c and back. “What aren’t you telling me, Oliver?”

  Saxon, sinking sullenly into his seat, mumbled something inaudible. Another prod from Mrs. Aldershott set him off: “She was pregnant, Martha. That’s what we wound up discussing over tea, and what we fought about before making our way back. She was all set to … to get rid of it, and I told her not to even think about it.”

  Mrs. Aldershott sat down, more from surprise than shock. “So that was why she seemed so distressed in her last letter. Oh, Emily!” She stopped for a full minute to collect herself. “Oliver, why didn’t you tell me? My feminine nerves, I suppose! I’ve been covered in someone else’s blood while shells went off all around me, and you worry about my nerves! I can’t believe …” She shook her head, her normal briskness returning. “Of course, we’d all have stood by her. That should go without saying. But if that’s how you put it to her, I’m not surprised you fought. Did she tell you who the father was?”

  Saxon shook his head. “I thought it was Benson. I don’t know.”

  “It wasn’t you, was it?”

  “Martha!” Saxon looked both pained and scandalised.

  “I know how much you liked her, and that’s all I’m saying.”

  Eric cleared his throat. “Saxon, you were telling me about your return to Sotheby Manor with Emily.”

  Saxon glared, evidently holding Eric entirely responsible for his situation with his cousin. “Yes,” he said with bad grace. “We didn’t say much on the motor back. I was angry, and I wanted to cool off; and she needed to think. I remember escorting her to the side entrance. We talked about it again, with cooler heads this time. Emily was afraid of what would happen to her if she kept the child, and I assured her that the family would stand by her—I’d see to that. And I’d see to it that the cad who did this to her would pay for what he’d done.”

  Saxon clenched his jaw with remembered determination, and Mrs. Aldershott nodded. Eric almost felt sorry for anyone unlucky enough to be caught between the two of them.

  “And that,” Saxon continued, “was when Horatio Parker jumped out at us. He had my briefcase, and he accused us both of being German spies.”

  “Oliver!” Mrs. Aldershott exclaimed. “I never heard any of this!”

  “What was there to tell? The man was clearly delusional. He had this mad look in his eyes, and he was baring his teeth at us like a dog. Emily was terrified. He called us spies, traitors, saboteurs … other words I wouldn’t repeat in private, never mind in mixed company. When he started swinging a fireplace poker at us, I pushed Emily back and … and defended her.” Saxon nodded, taking some grim pleasure in the memory. “We struggled, and I got the better of him in the end. We put him in the bed in the next room. Emily gave him a sedative and said she’d sit up with him until he could be moved back to his own bed.”

  “You cut him with your pen-release, didn’t you?” Eric said. “That’s how he got his scar. The photographs show that he came to Sotheby Manor without a scar, but the medical report Benson had suggests he did have one when he left.”

  “You knew that already, or you wouldn’t have suggested it earlier. Fine. Yes. It was only a scratch, and Emily didn’t think he’d need stitches. But he attacked me first. Getting him with the knife was what put him out, really. Shock, I expect. The last I saw of them, they were in that little room beside the vestibule, and she was patching him up with bandages.”

  “And you left her there?” Mrs. Aldershott’s eyes were narrowed as she stalked to the side of the desk.

  “He seemed peaceful,” Saxon said obstinately.

  “You left her alone with her killer!”

  “She threw me out!” It was almost a shout, and Saxon had half risen from his seat. He looked at Eric. “I told you I should have offered to marry her. That was only half the truth: I did offer. I asked her there in the vestibule—I said I’d raise her child as my own. She thanked me very nicely, but she’d have none of it. She looked annoyed when I insisted. Annoyed! And then she told me to leave. She actually pushed me out the door and shut it in my face. All I could do was bang on it and … I don’t know what I said. All sorts of things. I must have repeated the offer, or I must have demanded to know who the other man was. Maybe I did both. But the door stayed shut and there was nothing for it then but to turn around and go back to London like a beaten dog with my tail between my legs.”

  Mrs. Aldershott stared at him.

  Saxon buried his head in his hands. “When I found out she’d gone, I never bothered to look for her because I thought she’d run off with … whoever it was. I assumed she didn’t want to be found, and I respected that. It wasn’t until Benson came to me about the Bruton Wood skeleton that I even thought things might have turned out differently after I left that day.”

  Mrs. Aldershott must surely have wanted to know what he meant by the Bruton Wood skeleton, but she went around the desk instead to kneel beside the chair and put her arm around him. Saxon melted into the embrace for a moment, then extricated himself, stood up, and went to look out the window. His pride would allow no tears to be shed. Mrs. Aldershott, wordlessly, went to stand at the window, watching him.

  “You’d think,” Saxon said softly, “she’d want to be rescued.”

  “She was her own woman,” Mrs. Aldershott replied gently. “She might have needed help, but she didn’t need rescuing.”

  “This isn’t the world I signed up for, Martha. None of this is.”

  On the warehouse floor, workers scurried to organise the shipments of cider. They came and went at Saxon’s direction, crates stacked in enigmatic patterns.

  Eric let them be. His thoughts returned to the little room at Sotheby Manor with the cot and the desk. He imagined Emily Ang there, putting bandages on Parker. Would Parker have willingly submitted to that, if he’d just accused her of espionage? Eric didn’t think so. Perhaps he really had succumbed to the sedative by the time Saxon left … or perhaps he was in shock and only appeared peaceful. Eric imagined Parker starting to his feet in a blind rage, seizing Emily and swinging her around at the metal bedstead. There was the crunch of bone on metal, and she slipped to the floor, dead.

  And then what? Might Parker have been fired up with enough passion to overcome the effects of the sedative he’d just taken? He’d have to be. The accepted history was that Benson buried the body in Bruton Wood. This meant that Parker had had to enlist Benson’s help and transport the body there. In Eric’s envisioning, the red rage cleared from Parker’s eyes as he realised what he’d done. He sat down on the bed with blood still pouring down the side of his face, his expression turning from horror to determination. He looked around the scene, analysing it with a policeman’s eye, noting the details that would have to be changed to effect a proper misdirection. Then he got up, pressed a bandage to his face, and went to find the people he needed. After what he’d done in Flanders, there were at least three men in the hospital who would lay down their lives for him.

  It wasn’t badly imagined, but Eric shook his head. He said to Saxon, “Did you explain to Parker about your military intelligence work?”

  “I might have said something about it before I left. I don’t quite remember.” Saxon frowned in thought. “He accused me of being a German spy. I’d have told him I was nothing of the sort and to sod off. I might have told him exactly what I was, but I don’t remember.”

  “He must have seen all the cryptic work you had in your briefcase.”

  “And understood it?” Saxon turned from the window to face Eric and shrugged. “Maybe he did. Most of it was in German, which might be enough for some, but I think a trained policeman would want to be sure. What does it matter now?”

  Eric thought he was beginning to see his way to a narrative without any holes. “Saxon,” he said, “I’m going to want a little get-together with all the officers of the club—”

  Saxon looked at him incredulously. “You do remember we’re having you booted, don’t you?”

  “Oliver!” Mrs. Aldershott cried.
“You’ve got to challenge the motion!”

  “It’s too late for that, Martha.”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it!”

  But Eric put out a restraining hand. “Don’t worry about me, Mrs. Aldershott. In fact, this might actually work to our advantage.” He lifted his chin to face Saxon. “I want a chance to defend myself before the board makes their decision.”

  “You mean you want to beg.” Saxon was unimpressed. “No Peterkin has begged for anything before, not even his life, or so I’ve been told. But I suppose there’s a first time for everything.”

  “Oh,” said Eric with a smile, “I don’t plan to be the one doing the begging.”

  RECOVERY

  LAMBETH, ON THE south side of the Thames, was a working-class neighbourhood much like Limehouse. Dr. Filgrave, with whom Eric had left Norris the night before, had an unremarkable though well-kept house in one of the more prosperous corners. The brick might be blackened from the factory soot, but the curtains in the windows were spotless. All around, housewives bustled about with the shopping and housework, while their children stayed out of their way. Here and there, an upstairs curtain twitched as elderly matrons watched the street with better care than a squad of policemen.

  Eric stood a long while on Filgrave’s doorstep, his eyes on the activity as a possible scenario for the crime played out in his mind. In it, Benson, wanting to find out more about Aldershott’s doings, crept out of his room to break into the office. Norris heard him and followed him down. They met in the office, where Norris pocketed the letter opener as the nearest thing at hand, placated Benson with his natural charm, and lured him over to the vault. They were surprised to find the vault door open, and when Benson turned to see what damage Wolfe had done, Norris plunged the letter opener into his neck. Blood sprayed across the floor and the words decorum est as Benson crumpled.

  Eric tore his mind away. No refuge: he pictured Saxon instead. Saxon slowed his motor as he reached Wexford Crossing, shame turning to fury on his face, then wrenched the wheel around and raced back to the manor. He marched back to the west wing entry, gravel scattering from under his shoes, to find the door still locked. His fury doubled; he fetched a crowbar, or some other tool from his motorcar, and waited for Emily to finish her chores and head back to the cottage where she’d been billeted. The moment she emerged, he lashed out at her. The crowbar met her skull with strangely little sound, and she fell, her body sliding across the gravel. With no witnesses, Saxon quickly gathered her up and carried her back to his motorcar to take her to a suitable hiding spot in Bruton Wood.